In honor of International Women’s Day, we publish this translation by Ben Klein of a historic document of the socialist women’s movement. What follows is a report on the Second International Socialist Congress of Women that was held in Copenhagen in 1910. The report was originally published in Clara Zetkin’s Die Gleicheit, the fortnightly magazine of the SPD’s women’s movement. To support Ben’s work translating similar documents become a patron of Marxism Translated.
The Second International Socialist Congress of Women in Copenhagen (1910)
First published in Die Gleichheit, 25 (1910), pp. 387-390
The significance of the Second International Conference of Women Socialists should not be judged by its depiction in the press. There it was overshadowed by the larger, more significant event that proceeded it – the International Socialist Congress – to such an extent that the essential features and significance of the women’s conference could not be clearly outlined. Its importance and its achievements, however, will undoubtedly find expression in the activity of the women comrades of all countries who sent their representatives to the meeting. And this is what matters. If we examine the outcome of the proceedings in Copenhagen from this perspective, then the female comrades ought to be satisfied with it. The conference broadened and strengthened the relations between the socialist women of the various countries and here and there increased the common understanding of the central features of the movement. For some it shed clear light on the fundamental socialist attitude on many an important question, while for others it led to new fruitful suggestions for practice. So it was that nobody went home from the meetings empty-handed, and those who had things to offer in one respect benefited in the other. The appreciative and uplifting awareness of this interaction can only help to strengthen the bonds which unite the female comrades of all countries in their will to work as uniformly as possible in the service of the shared great goal of socialism.
If the necessity of international coordination between socialist women had not yet been established, then the Copenhagen Conference did so not only by its sizeable attendance, which speaks of a vividly felt need for such discussions but also, and above all, by the course of the negotiations themselves. Delegates were present from seventeen different nations and it is both understandable and extremely gratifying that the Danish and Swedish women comrades sent a particularly strong delegation. We may hope that from now on the women comrades in the Scandinavian countries, whose work exhibits both so much freshness and a deep yet controlled enthusiasm, will have established close contact with the Socialist Women’s International. The same is true of the American women comrades, but it will take time for an organized socialist women’s movement to develop in the Romance-speaking countries that will seek connections with the sister movements abroad.
There are many signs that our hopes for this are certainly justified. The trade association of seamstresses and shopfitters in Lisbon wanted to express its solidarity with the comrades at the congress and its desire for constant contact with them, so it gave comrade [Clara] Zetkin a mandate. In the Italian Socialist Party, there is a growing recognition that the women of the working people must be trained in socialism and united in an organization. A discussion of the woman question at the forthcoming party congress is to set in motion the related systematic work and draw up guidelines for it. The Executive Committee of our fraternal party in Italy, therefore, sent comrade [Angelika] Balabanoff to the conference as a delegate and conveyed its heartfelt congratulations for the work of the congress, which unfortunately arrived too late to be read out. The same happened to two other letters: one from comrade Tillmann, who wrote on behalf of the National Association of Socialist Women in Belgium, and another from a recently founded socialist women’s group in Lille (North France). We are convinced that the beginnings of the unified activity of the female comrades in the Romance countries will be fostered by these international links. The next International Socialist Women’s Conference will therefore no longer exhibit the gaps and shortcomings that we are so painfully aware of at the moment.
Angelika Balabanoff, Italian delegate to the Second International Socialist Women’s Congress
During the discussions on the means of making international relations between the women comrades of all countries more regular and firmer, there were many proposals and suggestions for things that already exist, such as the international exchange of socialist women’s publications, the submission of correspondence to a central office for further dissemination and so on. Of course, such proposals came from women comrades who had only recently, or almost never, come into contact with the International Secretariat. Much more ambitious was the proposal of our female comrades from the Netherlands to establish an international women’s journal that would not only provide information about the state of the socialist women’s movement in the individual countries but would also deal with emerging problems of the woman question from a socialist point of view, taking into account everything that relates to that question. The comrades justified this demand in particular with reference to the urgent need to train women comrades in the fundamentals and to the inadequate treatment of the various aspects of the woman question in the socialist press. The Dutch comrades withdrew the motion after comrade [Luise] Zietz had convincingly shown both the practical impossibility of its realization and that this need should be addressed in another way. Through their correspondence, she said, the comrades of the different countries should bring their desire for a theoretical discussion of individual questions to the attention of the international secretary, who would then see to it that they were dealt with in Die Gleichheit. Comrade Zietz rightly pointed out that the articles in question would be useful not only to female comrades abroad but also to newly recruited women. Her suggestion met with general approval, since – as was stressed by all sides – Die Gleichheit has certainly proved its worth as a central agency and publication for international correspondence.
Without doubt, the highlight of the conference was the discussion on female suffrage. Once again, it became apparent how, as soon as major questions of principle are fought over, the debates acquire inner substance, strength, and momentum. And that was the case here too. Those comrades present who were familiar with the situation and knew that a not inconsiderable number of leading English female comrades – despite all of the resolutions passed by the trade union and party congresses in their own country and the International Socialist Congress in 1907 – unfortunately were fighting alongside bourgeois women’s rights activists for a restricted women’s suffrage; for those comrades familiar with this situation, it was clear from the outset that the discussions would revolve not around the question of the means but the goal itself. And so it came to pass. The well-represented English comrades, who belong to the Independent Labour Party and the Fabian Society, warmly advocated that the passage that characterized the restricted right of women to vote in a sharp and principled manner should be deleted from the resolution proclaiming the struggle for universal suffrage for all adults. This characterization, they argued, was an indirect condemnation of the attitude of those comrades who had initially supported the demand for a restricted right to vote for women in England.
The comrades Murphy, Butcher, Philipps and others tried in vain to justify this position. Their reasoning is well-known: the nature and the effects of a restricted suffrage are not as bad as they appear in principle, they said; it could of course not the be the overall goal of the struggle for the political emancipation of the female sex, but represented an important in that direction; in England they had to take what could be achieved at this moment in time and so on. The fact that this reasoning was repeated on several occasions did not exactly bolster its cogency. Nor did it become more convincing by the fact that it was combined with a glorification of the good hearts and minds of the bourgeois ladies, as well as of the advantages that could be gained from working hand-in-hand with women’s rightism/feminism [Frauenrechtlerei]: in short, this reasoning lacked a correct understanding of the significance of class contradictions.
It also completely undermined the impact of the speech by Mrs. Charlotte Despard, one of the most passionate and energetic leaders of the Suffragettes, in which she defended a restricted franchise for women. To be sure, all delegates were unanimous in holding this distinguished old woman, and the civic virtues she has practiced, in the highest esteem. However, the overwhelming majority of them were just as united in regretting that such great, beautiful qualities were being wasted on such a petty and unfortunate matter as restricted female suffrage. The delegates responded with a virtually unanimous, unflinching ‘no” to the proposal to advocate universal suffrage without a corresponding denunciation of restricted female suffrage. The resolution was adopted with 10 votes against, which were cast by a section of the English delegation. Led by comrade Montefiore, the commendable champion of suffrage for all adults, a minority of that delegation sharply criticized the tactic of compromise. The debate that preceded the vote was a vivid demonstration of how fruitful the Stuttgart conference had been, and how much clarity and consolidation the international socialist women’s movement owes to its work. It was a pleasure to listen to the speeches by comrades Twining and May Wood-Simons from the United States, comrades Dahlström and Gustafson from Sweden, comrade Gjöstein from Norway, comrade Kollontai from Russia, comrades Zietz and Popp from Germany and Austria respectively, comrades Montefiore, Grundy and Burrows from England. In each speech there was the same basic tone but no tiring repetition, because in each address the clear grasp of principles was supported by valuable factual material which outlined the character and the effects of restricted female suffrage and the role of class antagonisms in the world of women [Frauenwelt]. The statements made by our American comrades deserve special mention in this context. They outlined a splendid refutation of the fondly told fairy tale of the sisterhood of the female sex, of the fairy tale of the bourgeois women’s movement showing sympathy for proletarian interests wherever that movement is in bloom and its political demands have been fulfilled. It should be noted that the German comrades’ resolution on the question of women’s suffrage was improved by two amendments from the Austrian comrades. They prevent any misunderstanding of our demand by expressly calling for women’s suffrage in the individual federal states or Crown lands, and call for the right of women to stand for all legislative and administrative bodies. The proposals on how to develop the most uniform practical work possible for the introduction of women’s suffrage found unanimous approval. Now it is up to the female comrades of all countries to put the resolutions into practice. This particularly applies to the decision to deploy a new means of agitation in the form of ‘Women’s Day’: we use this means without any illusions. We know that it does not mean the world for the conquest of political rights for women, but we also have a firm will to give it the practical scope that a well-prepared Women’s Day can have and must eventually gain.
The Women’s Conference was not spared the loss of concentration and freshness which, as experience shows, tends to follow major debates of matters of principle at all conferences. We regret that the treatment of the questions of social childcare and schools suffered as a result. The discussion of these issues also suffered from other factors, such as the lack of time and the discussion of a matter that had not been foreseen, namely the prohibition of night work for women. As a result, maternity and child care could not be dealt with in the breadth or depth that the range of the conditions and demands for reform deserved. Comrade Duncker, who spoke to the resolution of the German women comrades, gave a concise but incisive presentation on this subject, which, together with the speech of comrades Nielsen (Denmark) and Pärsinnei (Finland), highlighted just how many factual insights we would have gained from further discussion. The debate concluded with the adoption of a resolution from the German comrades and a motion from England, which outlined the general principle that society is obliged to care for mother and child. In our opinion, this does not settle this important question once and for all for the female comrades from the various countries. Some of its aspects will need to be dealt with on another occasion; we are thinking in particular of the important social measures to benefit school-age children that are not being provided for. The conference also referred two motions from our Finnish comrades on the position of mothers who have given birth out of wedlock and the punishment for infanticide to the next conference.
The fact that a socialist women’s conference could be called upon to oppose banning night work for women was a painful surprise to some comrades. This demand was passionately supported by the large majority of Danish and Swedish delegates and is characteristic of the fact that the movement in these countries has not shed either the influence of feminist views nor the narrow ties of an egotistical guild-professional evaluation of things. It was the feminist platitude of the “woman’s right to work”, of the mechanical “equality of the sexes”, it was considerations that only took into account the circumstances of the small group of women typesetters that led to the demand: “No ban on night work for women”. Unfortunately, the majority of Swedish female comrades has already made it difficult for the Social Democratic Party there to advocate this urgently needed reform by organizing a protest action. In Denmark, the Social Democratic Party is similarly in the embarrassing position that a considerable number of women comrades are still fighting against the ban on female night work. In light of this situation, a confrontation on this contentious question, which is no longer an issue at all for the women comrades in any other country, became inevitable. At the eleventh hour, female comrades from Denmark put forward a motion opposing the ban on night work for women, which, according to the conference decision, had to be dealt with together with social welfare for mother and child. The protest against the ban came in particular from the Danish comrade Frone, a Social Democratic city councillor in Copenhagen, who spoke with emphatically and spiritedly and had the strong support of the great majority of Danish and Swedish delegates. Comrade Vang (Copenhagen) responded to this protest with a declaration in which she, as a member of the Social Democratic Party’s Executive Committee, briefly explained the opposite point of view held by the Danish Social Democrats and the minority of Danish delegates to the Women’s Conference. Comrade Hanna, the representative of the Women Workers’ Commission of the German trade unions, spoke convincingly against the motion. In the vote, all the nations represented came out against the motion, with the exception of the Danish and Swedish delegations, in which, however, there was also a minority against it. We hope that these discussions will help to support the educational work being conducted by this minority and lead the entirety of the Danish and Swedish women comrades to demand a ban on night work for women.
The Danish comrades had tabled a second motion to summon the social democratic parties of all countries to support vigorously the legal prohibition of domestic work [Heimarbeit]. However, they withdrew it after the German delegation had responded with a counter-motion calling for its legal regulation and restructuring. Two proposals from the League for the Interests of Working Women in England were approved in principle by the conference. One spoke in favor of state insurance for widows, the other in favor of measures to benefit unemployed women. The very different degrees of internal and external development of the women’s movement in the individual countries was expressed through numerous motions that demanded what has long existed and has become a matter of course, wherever female comrades are well organized with a clear awareness of their aims in their ranks. In order to promote the movement’s progress in those countries where this is not yet the case, the conference approved several such proposals in principle. They relate to agitation among the female proletariat, the training of female comrades, affiliations to the party and the trade unions, moral and material support for social democratic women’s publications and so on. Of greater importance was a resolution from the female comrades in Austria – moved effectively by comrade Freundlich – which sought to make the artificial rise in the price of the proletarian life the point of departure for systematic agitation that can enlighten women about the essence of the capitalist social order and lead them into joining the political organizations, the trade unions and the consumer associations in which the spirit of the modern workers’ movement is vibrant.
Two other conference decisions deserve special mention. Before starting its business, the conference agreed by acclamation a resolution tabled and moved by comrade Zetkin, which denounced Russian tsarism’s attack on Finland’s political freedom and expressed the deepest sympathy for the struggle of the Finnish people for their rights. Likewise, by acclamation, the conference agreed to the resolution from the German and Austrian delegations and the Socialist Women’s Bureau in England, which reminded the socialist women of all countries of their special task in the struggle against militarism and war: to educate the youth in socialist ideas and, through incessant agitation amongst the female proletariat, to strengthen the awareness of the power which women enjoy due to their role in economic life and which they can – and must – assert. With this resolution, the conference dealt with motions from Sweden and England that were in line with comrade Ihrer’s splendid remarks on the need to place the maintenance of peace on the conference agenda.
In conclusion, it should be noted that the conference was delighted to receive a letter from August Bebel, which we will publish elsewhere in this publication. The stormy applause with which the delegates met the letter and the proposal to send him the conference’s best of thanks and warmest wishes, was testament to the deep admiration which the female comrades of all countries have for this great champion of the rights of the female sex and of the liberation of the working class.
The International Women’s Secretariat will continue to exist in its current form. Comrade Zetkin was unanimously re-elected as its International Secretary. The Third International Women’s Conference will take place after the next International Socialist Congress, which will take place in 1913 in Vienna. In the future, a working committee of comrades from different countries will participate in the preparation and organization of the conferences, so that a preliminary meeting can be held in good time to make the arrangements for fruitful discussions. This decision, which the experience of the first two conferences has shown to be a practical necessity, is very much to be welcomed. Implementing it means avoiding the disturbances and grievances that made themselves uncomfortably felt at the second international conference. It will also relieve the secretary of additional organizational work, which is absolutely necessary. It would be easy to say a great deal about this deficiency, with which the conference was confronted and which all international meetings are likely to face and which, on top of everything else, occurs during the particularly difficult conditions of organizing the women’s conference. But it strikes us as more important to demonstrate the valuable work that has been done in Copenhagen. It will stimulate the further work of the female comrades in all countries, make it more uniform, clearer, and make it an increasingly valuable part of the proletarian struggle for emancipation. Our deepest thanks must go to the Danish comrades, as well as the political and trade union organizations behind them, who made the conference in Copenhagen both possible and successful, and who ensured that the hours of effort and work were enriched by infinitely amiable and warm hospitality, is due to our Danish comrades and the political and trade union organizations behind them. The young socialist women’s international has only one slogan: ‘Forwards!’
Amelia Davenport and Renato Flores argue that social media cannot be ignored despite its negative effects on modern culture. Instead, the left needs its own approach to social media that takes into account the values encoded into tech platforms.
Technology Frustration and Cyberattack by Nalisda. Sourced from here.
The Social Dilemma is an impressive film on how social media is affecting the way we relate to each other. Combining docudrama and interviews with former social media platform workers, the film is a mashup of the fictionalized story of a social media addict, who becomes radicalized through anti-establishment “fake news” (with no obvious left or right bent), and ends up arrested at a demonstration, and the real stories of Europeans traveling to Syria and Iraq to enlist in ISIS and white Americans joining white supremacist organizations. The film blames the present-day political radicalization on careful design choices in social media platforms which keep us hooked to the apps, and make us vulnerable to this sort of manipulation. However, like many standard left-liberal documentaries (think Michael Moore), the film presents the overview of a significant issue and suggests mild reforms to solve it while ignoring the elephant in the room: capitalism. By focusing on the neuroscience of social media addiction and how apps are designed to maximize engagement, the documentary brushes over the role market imperatives have in structuring and shaping technology to maximize profit1, and ignores the way economic factors are responsible for destroying the social fabric of communities.
Critiques of ever-increasing alienation due to the trajectory of bourgeois mass society stretch from the beginning of the communist movement through the work of critics like Theodor Adorno, Thorstein Veblen, and Guy Debord. As Marx said in The Communist Manifesto:
The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. […] In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation. The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage laborers.
The capitalist process of creative destruction is not a new thing, nor are the feelings of alienation from society. One only has to remember that Mark Fisher’s portrait of a broken society in Capitalist Realism was written in 2009, before smartphones were as extensively used as today.
Richard Seymour critiques The Social Dilemma in a review aptly titled “No, Social Media Isn’t Destroying Civilization.” As Seymour points out, The Social Dilemma repeatedly fails to address capitalism and instead focuses on an epiphenomenon: the role of social media in the increasing amounts of people radicalized through the internet. It ignores the role of US imperialism, much more important than the internet in creating ISIS. The documentary’s failings are even starker with racism—social media did not create white supremacy. Racism is as American as apple pie. Even if white supremacists find each other on social media, the wide-spread economic ruin of the Rust Belt and decline in the living standards of the white petty bourgeoisie after NAFTA has more to do with Trump’s election than Facebook ads and groups.
This does not mean that we should ignore the problems of social media. In his review, Seymour rightly tackles the gaps and the catastrophist outlook of the documentary, but undersells the ways social media is actually affecting our society. Seymour is not in an easy position: he balances on a tightrope between acknowledging the massive power of social media and denying that it is uniquely responsible for the current moment. But ultimately he ends up overcorrecting against the documentary’s pessimistic assessment of social media. Seymour is correct that the neuroscience of the documentary about the way social media has addicted us is too simplistic and neuro-reductionist, but he does not sufficiently acknowledge that Facebook and friends have managed to addict us in a way that is unhealthy, and operate to maximize the profit advertisers can obtain from our interactions. They spend enormous sums on behavioral research for that purpose. We can always imagine better AI algorithms that will work for our benefit and mental wellbeing; under capitalism, this can at best be apps that help our mental health and overall wellbeing2as long as we do not threaten, or even talk about the C-word.
To elucidate this, we can contrast Facebook with programs oriented for the corporate world for which you are paying for the software. These are qualitatively different from those whose business model is maximizing engagement. For example, Microsoft Teams incorporates features to encourage wellbeing and an “adequate” work-life balance by adding meditation to your schedule. It is not hard to imagine how a benign corporate social media that prioritizes wellbeing will end up being nothing other than self-help apps encouraging us to do yoga and to eat healthy while hiding the destructive role of capitalism.3 Indeed, most of these apps are already available in your app store, with a price tag. While capitalism still drives immiseration regardless of our technological platforms, some technologies remain decidedly worse than others in their social effects.
Seymour ends his review with the question: “where is the communist program for the social industry?” Not only is this question hard to answer (and attempts at such, like nationalization of the data centers, have already been proposed4), but it is a higher-order question than what is needed right now. We are far from being able to affect those decisions. It is a bit like deciding how you’re going to spend lottery winnings on a ticket you just purchased. What activists must be asking right now is “what is the social industry, or even social media, strategy of our organizing?” because it is clear that social media drastically affects the way we understand organizing, the way we develop trust in our organizing, or even who gets the largest platform in an organizational debate. We must reckon with the fact that whether we want it or not, social media plays a disproportionate role in our organizing. Parties currently relate to this either by ignoring it, or by enforcing strict social media discipline5, and these cannot be good answers to the dilemma.
Whereas individuals can choose to unplug, our organizing will never be able to fully escape social media. We can decide to not partake, but that doesn’t stop others. The time to come to terms with this harsh reality is long overdue. We are no longer living in the times of the Bolsheviks: the difficulties of getting the message out is not just censorship, but also our signal being drowned in the noise of the hot take economy. It is easier to generate attention by calling Holocaust victims “Karens” than it is by writing lengthy critiques of the concept of race. And a second difficulty appears: are we on social media for the “social” part or for the “media” part? How much of our ego goes into making sure that it is our take that is liked, retweeted and shared, rather than the other person’s or groups’ takes? Even with the best of intentions, it is difficult to not feel good from social validation and watching our follower count or page likes go up.
The Platform and the Party
Turning back to the immediate implications of social media for communist organizing one question stands out: “should a party impose a social media discipline on their members?” It is easy to agree that some discipline is necessary: racism, sexism and any other form of discrimination should get you expelled. Likewise, an informal intervention may be needed if a comrade is having a Twitter meltdown. But the question of precisely how much intra- and inter-organization debate should be allowed on social media is not an easy one to answer. Sometimes debates happen on Facebook groups or on Twitter because there is no other platform to have them. These are responses to organizational failures and the feeling of a lack of democracy. In this case, this is a symptom of an organizational disease, and should not be seen as a lack of discipline so much as an uncontrolled explosion due to inadequate communication channels. But other times, party members simply are not happy when a party decides against them and then take to social media to protest this, or even to sabotage the decision. For instance, the infamous letter calling for DSA members to phonebank for Biden despite the National Convention and the National Political Committee of DSA deciding against a Biden endorsement. In this case the unaccountability and uncontrollability of social media following comes to the forefront.
Social media appears to flatten power structures, but what it really does is mask them. DSA-adjacent celebrities, such as AOC, have over ten times the amount of Twitter followers than the organization itself. This sets a clear boundary for accountability. Indeed, platform abuse was what caused the introduction of “democratic centralism”6 in the German Socialist Party of yesteryear. Democratic centralism entailed that the votes, and even the speeches members of parliament gave, had to be decided on by the party as a whole. This was a means to ensure that the party controls their elected officials, rather than the opposite. The current structure of DSA prevents this accountability through democratic centralism from happening. The only event which can take place is a public repudiation, similar to the Chicago DSA’s disavowal of their elected alderman Andre Vazquez for voting for a right-wing city budget. While a positive development, it is very unclear that this has a medium- or long-term influence that is larger than the revoking of an endorsement for re-election by a similarly-sized NGO. The current individualistic electoral system is not well suited for these kinds of collective discipline. Vazquez cannot be expelled from a parliamentary fraction or removed from his seat.
Aside from politician-celebrities, social media influences our organizing in undesirable ways. Even if a large social media base does not account for a large popular base, there are still real-life ripples every time a social media celebrity decides to make others hear their opinion. Charismatic people, or even just conventionally attractive people end up having large platforms to disseminate their thoughts about what is to be done, often causing wastes of time and resources. An example of someone who has a large Twitter following due to her charisma and past involvement in politics is Briahna Joy Gray, the former advisor to the Sanders campaign. Gray, among other media celebrities launched a #ForceTheVote campaign, which attempted to pressure progressive Democratic legislators to withhold their vote for Pelosi as House Speaker unless she would accept bringing Medicare for All to a floor vote. The campaign went nowhere despite producing vigorous debates online for a few days; it lacked a real popular base beyond social media presence. Online platforms do not often translate to on-the-ground organizing and power.
The Medium is the Message
Founding father of Media Studies Marshall McLuhan argued that to understand communication, rather than focusing on particular content being transmitted, we should focus on the medium through which it occurs. He summarized this succinctly with the catch-phrase “the medium is the message.” For McLuhan, “media” is not simply audio-visual transmissions like newspapers, television or radio and communication goes beyond language. All technologies are media in McLuhan’s account because at their root they serve to extend some capacity of humanity to effect change in the environment and/or receive sensory stimulation:
“Any invention or technology is an extension or self-amputation of our physical bodies, and such extension also demands new ratios or new equilibriums among the other organs and extensions of the body.”7
For instance, the transition from rail to highways as modes of transportation had profound impacts on the structure of cities, logistics networks, and broader human activities like recreation independent of what any given train or car was doing on its network. And it’s not just our social structures, but our bodies that adjust to the stimulation of our technologies. The blue light from electronic screens disrupts sleep patterns, while the consumption of convenience food is linked to heart disease and other health risks, and on a more profound level, as the Greek philosopher Plato bemoaned, our transition to written language led to a loss of our ability to remember nearly as much information as oral cultures. Moreover, every message, be it linguistic or economic, is itself a medium. A car and a train themselves are media transmitting passengers to their destinations who themselves, in the exercise of their social roles for business or pleasure, transmit messages to their destinations. Likewise, a historical television program transmits the message of a script that transmits a lesson of history which itself serves to transmit a particular moral or emotional sentiment to the general public. Media are like nested matryoshka dolls.
From Mcluhan’s ‘The Medium is the Massage”
This especially applies to social media platforms. Off the bat, Twitter messages have a maximum of 280 characters, are evaluated by the likes of a public network, and are very rapid to send. This has a profound impact on the way the medium structures social engagement through it. Most debates will be primarily performed through rapid hits, searching the approval of the public rather than making a convincing argument. In that respect, Facebook provides a marginally better platform for debate, with unlimited length messages—and slightly more secluded commentary, but we are still judged by a large public, in real-time, and performing the debate for the audience. Moreover, Facebook comes with its own drawbacks because of the way its system of invite-only or join-request-based groups work, which create isolated bubbles often characterized by not only group-think but bizarre power dynamics and moderator cliques. What Facebook cares about is that you are engaged; being engaged because you are angry, depressed and seeking validation, or fulfilling yourself through meaningful engagement all look exactly the same to their algorithms. The same way treating disease rather than the symptoms can be seen as unprofitable for medical companies, as long as the tools of social media are dominated by the profit motive, they will maximize the profit of the company, and not necessarily the welfare of the users. Because these platforms condition what sort of media content is enacted through them, they will inevitably shape our habits of thought outside their domain. Thinking about intellectual content in the form of “takes” positions all viewpoints in relation to clout seeking and personal validation and it is increasingly common to see this terminology replace the notion of a political “line” outside decrepit sects.
Tinder might be a clearer example. What is Tinder’s service, or Tinder’s product? If Tinder were optimized to find us an adequate life companion, or at least someone to walk with us for a bit, people would use Tinder for one or two weeks, and then log off, depleting the user base. This would hurt the company. It is in Tinder’s interest to keep us logged on, replying to messages and matches, so we keep on paying our account, keep on watching the ads, and keep on giving away our data. So then, from a financial perspective it makes sense for Tinder to produce matches who provide only temporary relief from loneliness, instead of finding someone who would make us leave the app maybe not forever, but at least for a while.
On Tinder, at least one knows what they hope to get. What do we hope to get from social media aside from social-ness? With social isolation especially exacerbated in the age of a pandemic, the social media giants seek to capitalize on this. Facebook naturally tends to show people who think like us, to maximize interactions. This is where Seymour’s critique of The Social Dilemma, which focuses mainly on the power of capital, is incomplete. Social media does produce dopamine and other chemicals which give us a psychological addiction and keep us on the platform. Even avoiding vulgar materialism, it would be foolish to deny the fact that our central nervous system structures how we engage with reality. It’s not just a neutral medium. Psychedelic drugs, workplace stress, physical health, and meditation practices attest to this in their own ways. But through increased technical understanding of the regularities in the material cognitive processes in our brains, and the ability to artificially process and filter information through computers, our central nervous system itself has been extended. As McLuhan says,
The electric media are the telegraph, radio, films, telephone, computer and television, all of which have not only extended a single sense or function as the old mechanical media did—i.e., the wheel as an extension of the foot, clothing as an extension of the skin, the phonetic alphabet as an extension of the eye—but have enhanced and externalized our entire central nervous systems, thus transforming all aspects of our social and psychic existence.8
Our smartphones filter spam calls, our thermostats adjust the temperature, and the weather channel tells you to prepare for snow next week. In some ways, this development of an extended, collective, electronic nervous system has cost the broad masses its antiquated faculties of self-reliance and the same concern for privacy that historically dominated the highly literate specialists and the bourgeoisie. But is this such a loss?
McLuhan notes that this new electronic way of living is much more suited to formerly marginalized cultures with strong memories and legacies of tribal existence, not the white bourgeoisie and upper-stratum of workers who financed it. Communities that had to maintain strong ties and forms of resilience in the face of colonial genocide, or forged through the hardship of the proletarian condition, are more aligned with technological logics that emphasize contextual awareness, socialness, and generalized rather than specialized knowledge. Where yesterday’s actuaries and skilled craftsmen are dinosaurs in the face of automation, a day laborer who runs several independent side hustles is more likely to have the flexibility needed to survive in an economy whose rate of change is constantly accelerating. But it isn’t the street-smart entrepreneur who is most resilient, but those who can develop strong community networks of mutual support and solidarity. The hierarchical and individualist culture of the machine age is unsuited to the conditions of life that our technologies have created when it takes Venmo micro-donations from one’s social circle to meet the rent, and a tenant union to keep the rent from rising higher. In the spirit of socialist architect and futurist Buckminster Fuller, McLuhan remarked, “There are no passengers on spaceship earth. We are all crew.”
Singing Sea Shanties on Neurath’s Boat
The present socialization methods are a contrast to those that dominated the past, but a close comparison can help us bridge the gap and develop our program. Recently on Tiktok, hundreds of videos have been uploaded of people joining in the singing of sea shanties. Passionate yet wholesome, the shared activity shines out like a beacon amid the darkness of plague and civil discord. Sparked by a viral video of a postal worker singing the song “Wellerman,” whose name’s meaning has been lost to history, a glimpse of what a healthier culture might look like flashes on our screens. But unlike earlier viral videos, this one involves widespread social participation. With Tiktok’s duet feature, people can join in song across the gaps social distancing demands.
The social context which produced sea shanties could hardly appear farther from our own: an age of heroic and well-sinewed men setting off on daring struggles with the elements and Nature in pursuit of fortune. It is an era characterized by images of widows staring longingly from the shore, great storms, and drink-sodden invalids telling tall tales to any who would listen. A time when men had no choice but to risk their lives so that their children might eat.
But is that time actually so different from our own? For all our attempts to smooth out the difficulties of life through technology, anxieties and uncertainty still beset us. Today, every time you go to work, buy a coffee, or visit with a friend, you take a calculated risk that a chain of events may result in killing you, a grandparent, or a partner. But even absent the plague, we simply tune out the 3,700 auto fatalities a day as we commute to work. “It won’t be me,” we tell ourselves, if we think about it at all. We live our lives in the face of tornadoes, floods, landslides, and other man-accelerated disasters because we must. Are the meatpackers who face a roughly 25% injury rate any less brave than the whalers or herring fishermen of old? Are retail workers who live in fear of assault by customers or mass shootings?
And yet, as much as things have remained the same, what has changed is the increased atomization and alienation of people from one another. The pandemic has only cast existing trends in sharper relief. Where the whalers had camaraderie and brotherhood, today we have parasocial relationships with twitter celebrities and podcasters. The bourgeois culture our schools and institutions force us into is incompatible with the real demands of the new techno-economic reality we face. And this has real implications for social struggle to improve conditions. As Max Dewes put it in a recent article for Organizing.work:
But all of the knowledge in the world can’t change the fact that the single hardest part of any campaign is talking to your coworkers. Almost every shortcut and miscalibration in organizing pivots around the universal truth that most workers would rather personally and publicly challenge Sundar Pichai or the President of the United States than ask Meng from accounting to have an emotional conversation about his issues at work, and pitch him on acting collectively on the job.
Where a crew of sailors might turn mutinous and maroon their tyrant captain on a rocky outcropping, today we are anxious not to hurt the feelings of our employers. Where discipline on a ship was enforced with the lash, and in the factory with the boss’s cane, today we live in enlightened times where a supervisor’s well-timed tantrum does the trick.
There was a time when the class line was more clear. Organized workers could exert discipline of their own. Scabs feared for their lives, and employers knew that driving the workers too hard would have direct consequences. But the police and national guard were always available to crack heads if workers stepped too far out of line. Organized workers had a culture apart from and subordinated to the dominant bourgeois culture of the men of letters and it played out in a low-grade struggle that involved violence in both directions.
Binding workers together and reinforcing a shared collectivity was a culture distinct from bourgeois high society and from the mass culture that united the classes. Songs sung to keep the pace at work, at the bar, and in the union hall created a shared language that reinforced an identity opposed to the boss. The Industrial Workers of the World’s Little Red Songbook acted like a passport to a world of shared meaning for those who were tired of lies told from the pulpits of corrupt preachers and in the pages of the newspapers. Visual art, poetry, novels, and plays written to advance working-class values could be found across the world and across nations. Works like Takiji Kobayashi’s Kanikosen (The Crab Cannery Ship), Robert Tressell’s The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists, Daniel Alomía Robles’ El cóndor pasa (The Condor Passes), and Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children expressed the political subjectivity of the oppressed.
But not all working-class culture was political in character. Much dealt with the tragedies and sorrows of the lived reality of the times like many blues and country songs, spoke of imagined better futures, or recorded memories outside the official histories of polite society. This is where sea shanties largely sat. Singing them was a means for workers in maritime communities to enact their identities and participate in something far beyond themselves. The act of shared singing provided shared structure and narrative to the otherwise disconnected and traumatic experiences of lives on the periphery of society. The singing created a reality where sense could be made of the uncertainty of life. Is it any wonder people today have rediscovered the medium?
In his discussion of human knowledge and the nature of scientific knowledge, Austrian philosopher of science, Otto Neurath, used the metaphor of a boat to explain progress:
We are like sailors who on the open sea must reconstruct their ship but are never able to start afresh from the bottom. Where a beam is taken away a new one must at once be put there, and for this the rest of the ship is used as support. In this way, by using the old beams and driftwood the ship can be shaped entirely anew, but only by gradual reconstruction.9
Standing on existing scientific knowledge as a platform, researchers could replace parts of the general body of theory as they were shown inadequate or incompatible with current understanding. But the reconstruction necessarily takes as elements ideas and notions from the past, even as it seemingly discards the outdated.
This is also true with culture. There is no absolute foundation upon which a new culture can be constructed; it will necessarily be made from elements of the old. But as the ways of living and narrative structures created by capitalist mass cultural institutions like individualism, blind faith in the salvific power of scientific progress, and the civic institutions of western democracy are increasingly recognized as rotten to the core, they will be organically replaced by whatever is at hand. Even as we have to isolate through the plague, we also have to come together to survive the growing challenges and threats ecological and economic changes pose to all but the most privileged. Collective forms of cultural expression like sea shanties are a spontaneous expression of this. Socialist political art and media are a conscious attempt to address it. Both can play a mutual reinforcing role.
Even as revolutionaries focus on building direct power against the bosses in organizational and strategic terms, time and resources have to be set aside for the culture that creates political subjectivity. Whether it’s something fun like sea shanties, rap music, video game tournaments, fiction reading circles, or shared meals and recipe swapping, we have to do more than just give it space. This does not mean creating a prescriptive or top-down model of culture that excludes any “problematic” elements. Such a project is impossible beyond its undesirability. But we don’t have to be passive or tail organic cultural development either. If there’s something that needs to be said or a social need unfulfilled, revolutionaries can make conscious interventions. Our revolutionary forebears were not austere killjoys. Part and parcel with revolutions were the creation of traditions like the Soviet Haggadah, a set of prayers created by communist Jews in Russia, songs like “The East is Red” sung during the Chinese Cultural Revolution, and many others.
The Social Dilemma‘s tepid reformism is a dead-end for communists, as is pretending these platforms are neutral and play no role in shaping messages. Taking note from McLuhan, we can’t simply take the existing social media and feed in communist politics and working-class culture. But that does not mean we can’t or shouldn’t engage with it. What is important is first recognizing how the technical frameworks shape the message and then adjusting our engagement accordingly. We must note that how our organizations structure their interaction with social media is more important than any particular content they post. Instead of planning and coordinating our organizations through Facebook, Google Apps, and Zoom, we can look to other platforms such as those developed by Common Knowledge. We can develop user-friendly protocols for operational security that minimize electronic records altogether or use burner flip phones and text messages, and we can develop robust policies for the behavior of organizational officers on public social media. The bourgeoisie is not all-powerful, and while their engineers do design their platforms for maximizing profit, the dynamics of social media in the real world are too complex for them to ever fully control. But the same goes for our movement too.
The traditions of dead generations may weigh like a nightmare on the brains of the living, but it’s a dream workers can take control of and remake according to our own purposes. The power to do so is in your hands!
This is a reprint of the mission statement of Marxist Unity Slate, a set of proposals for the 2021 DSA convention with the aim of fostering democratic discipline and principled election campaigns, as well as uniting Marxists in DSA around a vision of a mass socialist party. The proposals can be read and signed here.
State of the Left
While it’s hard to envision the working class coming to power any time soon, the state of the US Left is relatively strong today and there is reason for optimism. The US Left prior to the growth of DSA was a constellation of dogmatic microsects organized under militarized bureaucratic centralism, based on an ahistoric caricature of early Bolshevik history. Its replacement by DSA is a positive development. Recently blooming to over 90,000 members, DSA has made an historic achievement for socialists in the United States. While we should be hesitant to overstate our victories (90,000 people is only a small minority of the 330 million or so US residents), there have been relatively few points in our history where the organized socialist movement was as influential as it is today.
However, there is a significant gap between a force strong enough to influence the culture in a general way, and the ability of that force to win a majority of the population, i.e. the working class, to its program. Beyond that, the organized socialist movement must implement that program by seizing political power and abolishing the old order. We must not only match the accomplishments of our comrade predecessors in the Knights of Labor, Socialist Party, IWW, Communist Party, SDS, etc., but surpass them and succeed where they failed: build a mass working-class party capable of casting off the shackles of the juridical rule of the capitalist class, overturn its slaver Constitution, and institute the complete sovereignty of the only class capable of delivering true democracy: the proletariat. Simply put, we have a long way to go.
It’s Party Time
The primary obstacle facing the working class in accomplishing this goal is the absence of a political party. Ideally, we need a democratic member-based organization with a coherent political platform that can field candidates in legislative elections, exert discipline over these candidates, and act as a coherent, independent opposition. We believe that DSA can and must become this party. Kicking the can down the road on this will only see us squander the current historical conjuncture where class struggle and awareness are sharply on the rise. DSA members across the country are steeped in activism, whether on the streets, in their unions, or otherwise, yet there is no agreed-upon political vision that can serve as a united basis for action. Without an agreed-upon end-goal and strategy for accomplishing it, our efforts can at best result in a few diffuse oases in the desert of capitalism. If the working class is to win the class war, we must gather our forces and devise a plan before going into battle. There is significant debate within DSA on the party question, and most recognize the need for, at some point, some sort of workers’ party. But what kind of party would this be and when and how will it come about? These questions are more ambiguous.
A party is nothing more than an organized political movement. And DSA can become an organized, independent political movement—right now. No other force will step up to do it. We can’t wait for organized labor. For the most part, unions are under the political control of the Democrats. To revive the labor movement and win rank and file union members to our cause, socialists must champion a visible political alternative to the leadership of bourgeois parties. That is a socialist party.
Rather than a Labor Party built by a future merger with Justice Democrats, Our Revolution, Movement for a Peoples Party, or other left-progressive groups, we believe the party must emerge from an explicitly socialist organization. Many of these left-progressives can and likely will join this party, but it must be under the condition of accepting our socialist aims, rather than us accepting a ‘kinder, gentler’ capitalism as the limits of our political vision. There are two fundamental actions DSA can take to become this party.
Program
First, DSA should adopt a Marxist minimum-maximum program. The maximum section would be a short elaboration of the free society we envision for humanity, a future without exploitation, oppression, and all other nasty and brutish cornerstones of the prehistory of the human race: in a word, communism. The minimum section would include our immediate demands. Taken one-by-one, some of these may be achievable reforms under the current Constitutional regime (for example, Medicare for All, cancellation of personal debt, etc.). Winning one or the other of these would build the confidence and experience of the working class while giving us a foothold to grow our strength further. But taken all together, the implementation of our minimum program would spark a qualitative rupture with the current order and require the convening of a constituent assembly to replace the US Constitution, as well as the dissolution of the standing army and national security state. It would institute the democratic republic of the working class, or what Marx called the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Being able to carry out this full minimum program must be our basic condition for taking any responsibility for government, even at the level of a single department, in order to ensure that when we come to power the proletariat comes to power along with us. Until DSA’s platform is accepted by a majority of the population, our electoral efforts should be focused on gaining a foothold within legislatures as principled opposition to the liberal-constitutional order: this means no horse-trading for committee appointments, joining coalitions as junior partners, or accepting the whip or discipline of the capitalist parties. These are things candidates could do even if they ran under the ballot line of a capitalist party, although we believe the time to prioritize independent campaigns has come.
Luckily, DSA is currently working on a National Platform that might resemble a Marxist minimum-maximum program to be adopted at the 2021 convention: this would be a massive step forward for DSA, and the US Left as a whole. We will enthusiastically participate in the platform drafting process, advocating for a solid minimum program to the best of our ability. But no matter what platform reaches the convention floor, we want it to have teeth. Our three convention proposals are an effort to infuse DSA’s new platform with power and meaning—even when the text includes things we disagree with.
Democratic Discipline
Secondly, elected DSA leadership must have political influence, and even disciplinary mechanisms, over the politicians we elect. One of these mechanisms is the platform itself. The other mechanism would be the representatives’ political responsibility to DSA. In the past, mass socialist parties have kept their elected representatives on the ball in a number of ways. They would be openly critiqued in the party media, and party leaders would write their speeches. More than anything, once elected socialist politicians would form a subset of the party usually called a “parliamentary fraction” (or in our case, a legislative fraction). They would regularly meet with party leadership to discuss how to best carry out the program, act as a unified bloc, and in the best of circumstances produce a radical opposition to the rule of the capitalist class. Any representatives we get elected must constitute themselves as radical oppositionists and tribunes of the people in the legislature, constantly agitating for the platform.
The term ‘democratic centralism’ rightly makes many socialists squeamish, its use over the course of the 20th century came to describe the organizational model of dogmatic bureaucratic sects with insulated leaderships, where openly organizing factions and communication between branches was banned. All centralism, no democracy. Prior to the Russian Civil War, however, the principle was consistent with genuine internal party democracy. A massive working-class alternative culture erupted in Europe prior to World War I, partly due to the success of radical oppositionists in legislatures. The proximity of elected socialists to the bourgeois halls of power can certainly be a compromising influence, as is well known in the case of World War I, where deputies chose patriotism in hopes of winning elections over a principled working-class internationalism. But this is not the inherent outcome of a socialist legislative fraction- we shouldn’t forget that August Bebel and Wilhelm Liebknicht, members of the same German socialist party infamous for backing World War I, had decades prior risked everything, even against the advice of Marx and Engels, to oppose the Franco-Prussian War.
Our Slate
Our slate hopes to build support for these two ideas within DSA: first that the political platform is what unites us in our long-term vision for socialism, and second that we use our platform as a way to hold elected DSA members accountable to the socialist movement first and foremost. Our amendment to the DSA constitution, Defining the Role of DSA’s National Political Platform makes acceptance of the national political platform the basis for membership in DSA. Our first resolution, Tribunes of the People and Democratic Discipline would make DSA’s national endorsement of candidates contingent on a series of conditions to make the candidate accountable to DSA. Our last resolution, A Socialist Slate for the House offers an executable strategy for a coordinated DSA campaign to build a principled socialist fraction in the House of Representatives. We hope to receive your support for this slate at this year’s Convention.
If we want the working class to rule society, we should focus on quality over quantity in electoral victories. We can go further than building a broad Labor Party: instead, we should forge a mass Socialist Party with a Marxist program. We must elect members to Congress to agitate for our program, and struggle to gain a foothold as a principled opposition—an organized beachhead from where we can build a true majority of support and take real power. Marxist Unity believes our slate is a small step to help DSA achieve that goal.
Cliff Connolly critiques CounterPower’s vision of the “party of autonomy” and offers an alternative vision of the mass party.
In Praise of Communism by Ronald Paris, sourced from here.
The US left is at a critical juncture where the structure and focus of our organizations will soon be decided. On the one hand, we positively have ongoing processes of cohesion in play with DSA chapters collaborating on writing a national platform and far-flung sects coming together under the banner of Marxist Center. On the other hand, we have many comrades across ideological lines who still echo opposition to the idea of a tightly structured national organization. Central to this contradiction is the question of the party: should socialists strive to build an independent political party, and if so, what should that look like? CounterPower has put forth one possible answer in their article Create Two, Three, Many Parties of Autonomy!They are dedicated organizers and we should all be glad to have them in our midst. However, their strategy of eschewing the mass party model and encouraging the spontaneous formation of multiple “parties of autonomy”, and counting on these disparate groups to unite into an “area of the party”, is unworkable in the long term.
Their argument for the many parties strategy rests on a number of errors—historical misrepresentation (no, CPUSA was not a party of autonomy), uncritical acceptance of failed models (Autonomia Operaia gives us more negative lessons than positive ones), an over-reliance on spontaneity (movements have to be built intentionally), an aversion to leadership (no, it doesn’t automatically create unaccountable bureaucracy), and a confusion of terms (putting anarchist and Marxist vocab words together does not solve the contradictions between them). We will explore each of these points in greater detail. There is also an implicit assumption of false dichotomies built into the many parties line—either we build parties of autonomy or slip into sectarianism, either parties of autonomy or dogmatism, either parties of autonomy or top-down bureaucracy. There is a kernel of truth present here; we certainly don’t want a dictatorship of paid staffers. However, parties of autonomy are not a solution to this problem — in some ways, they would exacerbate the problem.
This was initially written in response to CounterPower’s original essay in 2019, but has since been amended to include dialogue with the updated version published in 2020. The differences between the two are significant and raise new concerns about the many parties model. The most interesting addition in the update concerns the role of cadre — highlytrained organizers dedicated full-time to party activity. While we agree wholeheartedly on the necessity of these professional revolutionaries, there is a difference of emphasis that merits debate. This issue will be explored in greater detail below.
That CounterPower started this conversation on the party question is a gift to the whole of the US left—it must be addressed for our organizations to move forward. While many of us vehemently disagree with their conclusions, we should be grateful for their company. After examining each piece of their argument for the many parties model and taking note of its shortcomings, we will investigate a viable alternative—a mass party of organizers built on the principles of struggle, pluralism, and democratic discipline.
Historical Clarification
There are a number of historical errors throughout CounterPower’s article. By this we are not referring to a difference of opinion about a certain historical figure’s thought process or the motivations behind a particular decision, but rather factual inaccuracies. This in itself does not mean the thesis of the article is automatically false, but it does betray a dependency on unfounded assumptions. First, there is the assertion that the Russian soviets arose organically without being built by socialists, at which point the Bolsheviks joined them and worked harmoniously with other autonomous parties in this “area of the party” to link the soviets to other sites of struggle. Second, there is the quotation from Mao Zedong’s 1957 Hundred Flowers speech, which CounterPower uses to bolster their argument for parties of autonomy. Finally, we are led to believe that both the FAI and the Alabama chapter of the Communist Party USA are exemplars of the many parties model.
We will begin with the relationship between the Bolsheviks and the soviets. Here is CounterPower’s characterization:
“The organized interventions of a revolutionary party thus take place ‘in the middle,’ as mediations between the micropolitical and macropolitical. This has been a distinguishing feature of successful revolutionary parties, as in the example of the Russian Revolution of 1917, when clusters of Bolshevik party activists concentrated in workplaces, recognizing that the participatory councils (soviets) emerging from grassroots proletarian struggles embodied the nucleus of an alternative social system. Thus the party’s organization at the point of production enabled revolutionaries first to link workplace struggles against exploitation with the struggle against imperialism, and then to link the emergent councils with the insurrectionary struggle to establish a system of territorial counterpower”.
On the contrary, it is of utmost importance to recognize that the soviets, factory committees, and militias that formed the backbone of the Russian revolution were built intentionally by socialists. While different factions in the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party eventually split into separate organizations as the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, both groups were instrumental in the creation of these mass organizations. They did not emerge organically from economic struggles with bosses and feudal landlords like some of the trade unions and peasant associations, but instead were the product of a socialist intervention in economic struggles which emphasized the need for political organization. This strategy, commonly referred to as the “merger formula”, was theorized by Marx and Engels, popularized by the German socialist party leader Karl Kautsky, and accepted by Russian socialists of all stripes (most notably Lenin).1
The Bolsheviks did not merely help workers build their fighting organizations. They also competed with political rivals for leadership in them. Beyond their efforts that we would call “base-building” today, the Bolsheviks also invested significant resources into propaganda efforts and electoral contests. The struggle for elected majorities in the soviets in 1917 was pursued in tandem with a strategy of running campaigns for municipal offices and the Constituent Assembly (the bourgeois parliament of the Provisional Government), and it worked. The Bolshevik candidates for the assembly were able to publicly oppose the policies of the Provisional Government, while the elected deputies in the soviets were able to win over the working class to the task of seizing political power. These electoral efforts were instrumental in establishing a democratic mandate for the October Revolution.2 Consider these words from leading Bolshevik (and later leading opposition member purged by Stalin) Alexander Shliapnikov, in 1920:
The Russian Communist Party (RKP), as the history of the preceding years indicates, is the only revolutionary party of the Working Class, leading class war and civil war in the name of Communism. The R.K.P. unifying the more conscious and decisive part of the Proletariat around the Revolutionary Communist Program of action and drawing to the Communist banner the more leading elements of the rural poor, must concentrate all higher leadership of communist construction and the general direction of policy of the country.
Clearly, the Bolsheviks did not consider themselves a “party of autonomy” working side by side with the Menshevik reformists in a broad “area of the party”. Nor did they simply fuse with organic economic struggles in the trade unions. The reality couldn’t be further from CounterPower’s insinuations: the Bolsheviks were a party of political organizers who started as a minority and slowly won over sections of the working class through diligent mass work and bitter struggle with the other parties of the day. By engaging in this process, they eventually took on a mass character and became capable of leading social revolution. The lesson to learn from the Bolsheviks is this: we must win political hegemony in whatever independent organs of proletarian power that we help build, using every available means, including running opposition candidates in bourgeois elections to expose broader sections of the class to our ideas.
Now we will consider Mao’s echoing of the old Chinese proverb “Let a hundred flowers blossom, let a hundred schools of thought contend.” This line of poetry is used by CounterPower to demonstrate the need for dozens of independent communist grouplets to form and collaborate on the task of social revolution. They attribute the quote to Mao, but is this how he used it? The short answer is no. It comes from a speech he gave in March 1957 at the Chinese Communist Party’s National Conference on Propaganda Work. It is true that he called for a hundred schools of thought to contend, but this was in the context of winning unaligned intellectuals over to the party’s socialist ideals. He gave a thoughtful and nuanced analysis of how the party could accept criticism from the broader population without sacrificing their legitimacy as the ruling organization of the country:
Ours is a great Party, a glorious Party, a correct Party. This must be affirmed as a fact. But we still have shortcomings, and this, too, must be affirmed as a fact…Will it undermine our Party’s prestige if we criticize our own subjectivism, bureaucracy and sectarianism? I think not. On the contrary, it will serve to enhance the Party’s prestige. This was borne out by the rectification movement during the anti-Japanese war. It enhanced the prestige of our Party, of our Party comrades and our veteran cadres, and it also enabled the new cadres to make great progress. Which of the two was afraid of criticism, the Communist Party or the Kuomintang? The Kuomintang. It prohibited criticism, but that did not save it from final defeat. The Communist Party does not fear criticism because we are Marxists, the truth is on our side, and the basic masses, the workers and peasants, are on our side.
Clearly, in March 1957 Mao was concerned with building a mass party, not opening space for a loose collaboration between multiple parties aimed at building socialism. Unfortunately, the Chinese Communist Party was underprepared for the criticism they would soon face and reversed the Hundred Flowers Campaign. By July of that same year, the Anti-Rightist Campaign brought a series of purges underway, which got so out of control that Mao had to restrain his subordinates from excess killing. Perhaps Chinese conditions in 1957 were different enough from American conditions in 2020 that this was acceptable, or perhaps Mao the statesman should not be looked to for inspiration as much as Mao the general or Mao the revolutionary. It is beyond the purview of this article to answer that question. What is certain CounterPower draws the wrong lesson out of Mao’s 1957 speech.
Demonstration from the Hundred Flowers Movement
After quoting Mao, CounterPower moves on to claim that the Iberian Anarchist Federation (FAI) is in practice a party of autonomy working within the “area of the party” of Spain’s National Confederation of Labour (CNT). Although the idea of “parties of autonomy” was not formulated until forty years after FAI’s founding, there may be a kernel of truth to this claim. For example, if FAI formed a loose coalition with CNT organizers and worked with them on shared projects, this argument could make sense. The reality, however, is that FAI is essentially a hard-line anarchist faction within CNT that has consistently fought for political hegemony within the broader organization and even purged ideological rivals like Ángel Pestaña. Perhaps they were right to do so; it is outside the scope of this article to pass judgment on the internal political conflicts of the CNT.
Despite CounterPower’s framing of the FAI as an independent anarcho-communist organization with an “organic link” to the CNT, they are an explicitly anarchist faction struggling to dominate the politics of the Spanish labor movement. They act as a pressure group within the confederation to make CNT adhere to what they perceive as purely anarchist theory and praxis without deviation. This is not a “symbiotic relationship”, it is realpolitik under a black flag. Roberto Bordiga’s window dressing cannot give us a clear understanding of Spanish labor politics; historians like José Peirats and Paul Preston would be better suited to aid this investigation.
In the updated version of their essay, CounterPower cites the Alabama chapter of CPUSA as a historical example that serves to “elucidate the role and function of a party of autonomy”. This could not be further from the truth. Similar to the FAI, the party of autonomy model would not even be theorized until fifty years after the Alabama chapter’s founding. CPUSA was a mass party with local chapters all over the country for at least the first half of the twentieth century. The Alabama chapter in particular was the result of discussions on “the Negro question” at the Sixth World Congress of the Communist International, after which the Central Committee of CPUSA chose Birmingham as a headquarters for its foothold in the South.3 Its success in organizing rural and urban communities in the deep south of the 1920s is proof that the mass party model can be adapted to regional conditions and accountable to local rank and file members. Describing this centralized party model as a “party of autonomy” is categorically false.
Spontaneity vs. Base-Building
Now that the historical context of CounterPower’s narrative has been clarified, we should examine the contradiction between their ideological commitment to spontaneity theory on the one hand, and their practical commitment to base-building on the other. Does the working class organically form explicitly political fighting organizations, or is a socialist intervention required for this to occur? This is a never-ending debate between Marxists and anarchists, despite the pile of evidence pointing to the latter. Some would argue that this debate is pointless at the present moment, and these differences are best put aside until the workers’ movement has grown. We would reply: “First, comradely debate in no way hampers unity of action. We can continue base-building efforts while disagreeing on political questions, and it is only through debate that we might one day get on the same page. Second, simply by engaging in the act of base-building with us, you are agreeing with our point in practice while denying it in theory.” How is this possible?
Our comrades in CounterPower are the perfect example. They admit the masses will not come to accept communist ideas on their own:
From strike committees to workers’ councils, tenant unions to neighborhood assemblies, the disparate forms of organized autonomy that arise in the midst of a protracted revolutionary struggle will not automatically fuse with communist politics to create a cohesive system of counterpower.
Yet they don’t address where these councils and unions come from. The reader gets the sense that these organizations simply pop up during times of crisis, as workers get frustrated with bourgeois politics and independently come to the conclusion that they need to organize against their boss or landlord. This may be true in a minority of cases, but most proletarian fighting organizations come from the same source as the Russian soviets: dedicated socialist base-builders. Who built Amazonians United? Who built Autonomous Tenant Union Network? Who built UE, ILWU, and the original CIO? In every case, the answer is: workers and intellectuals who read Marx, became socialists, and decided to organize.
Our responsibilities go beyond just founding these mass organizations; we have to compete for hegemony within them as well. If we neglect this crucial aspect of organizing due to a fetishization of the autonomy of the masses, reformists and even reactionaries will gladly fill the gap. In the case of something like workers’ councils, we cannot have any illusions that they provide anything beyond a means of representation for political tendencies within the movement. This is precisely why the Bolsheviks competed so vigorously with the reformist Mensheviks and populist Social Revolutionaries for elected majorities in the soviets. In fact, the Bolsheviks only adopted their famous slogan “All Power to the Soviets” after they had secured elected majorities in them.4We only need to look at the difference between the Soviet Republics established in Russia and the brutally crushed Soviet Republic of Bavaria to understand the limitations of the model. Without influence from committed revolutionaries, mass organizations can be rallied to the banner of class-collaboration (as the Russian soviets were before Bolshevik intervention) or adventurism (as in the case of Bavaria).5
CounterPower’s overestimation of proletarian spontaneity has practical consequences for its members. In his recent article In Defense of Revolution and the Insurrectionary Commune, Atlee McFellin analyzed the November 2020 election and drew parallels between it and the situation which produced the Paris Commune. Fearing that elections may never take place again, McFellin argued against any participation in electoral efforts (including, but not limited to the creation of a political party independent from the Democrats). What was proposed instead? “Self-defense forces, solidarity kitchens, and everything else that is required to repel fascist assaults”. In other words, anything but a class-independent party capable of coordinating the struggle for socialism across different political, economic, and social fronts. Rather than face the reality of the radical left’s current irrelevance in national politics and the labor movement, and chart a course to resolve this, comrade McFellin called for the construction of insurrectionary communes as a response to the consolidation of ruling class interests under Joe Biden. Whether the working class has the spontaneous energy necessary for this task remains to be seen; if it does, we would be ill-advised to hold our breath in anticipation but should wince at the inevitable brutal consequences if such adventurism bears fruit.
While in theory, CounterPower glosses over the role of communists in building workers’ organizations, in practice they are engaged in precisely this work. Rather than relying on the spontaneous initiative of the masses, they actively build tenant and labor unions, political education circles, and other necessary vehicles of class struggle. In fact, they do it remarkably well. This is what makes the claim that communists must “fuse with grassroots organizations” after they appear rather than actively building them in the first place so bizarre. Ultimately, our task as communists is to build mass organizations of class struggle, and then rally the most active participants within them to a mass communist party. By uniting in one party, we can direct the efforts of thousands of organizers according to a commonly agreed upon plan, which is an absolute necessity for the workers’ movement to grow.
The Role of Cadre
The discussion of cadre organizers is given new attention in CounterPower’s update to their original essay. It mostly focuses on the role these committed party members play in shaping revolutionary strategy and connecting it to active proletarian struggles. As seen in my Cosmonaut article Revolutionary Discipline and Sobriety, those of us who favor the mass party model are in complete agreement with CounterPower on the importance of cadre:
Any collective project, whether a revolutionary labor union or a church’s food pantry, will expect a higher degree of involvement from its core organizers than from its regular members. Not everyone has the time or the technical skills needed to bottom-line such endeavors, and those who do have a responsibility to step up to the plate. These small groups, or cadre, are the powerhouse of the class. Taking direction from the masses they live and labor with, cadre members should focus their lives on facilitating the self-emancipation of the proletariat.
CounterPower rightly points out that these dedicated full-timers are a prerequisite for the development of robust internal political education, external agitation, and consistent recruitment to mass work projects. Key to the every-day functioning of these cadre groups is the organizational center to which they are accountable (and preferably subject to democratic discipline by the whole membership of the organization). While the mass party shares the party of autonomy’s commitment to a common political platform and program, the main difference between the two models is one of scope. Whereas the “area of the party” is composed of diffuse autonomous organizations with separate and often contradictory programs, the local chapters of the mass party work together on a common, democratically agreed-upon plan. As the experience of the Alabama chapter of CPUSA shows, this does not mean the plan cannot be adapted to meet local concerns.
CPUSA demo in the south
In fact, the mass party model historically proves more capable of achieving its aims than any other method of party organization, whether it is compared to the bourgeois fund-raising parties that dominate US politics or the Italian autonomist model revived by CounterPower. This will be elaborated below in our examination of the Autonomia Operaia movement. For now, suffice it to say that while we agree with our autonomist comrades on the importance of cadre, the mass party model is best suited to coordinate their efforts.
Precision of Terms
Further complicating the problems of CounterPower’s revolutionary strategy is an incoherent collection of opaque and often contradictory terms. Few throughout history have tried to synthesize the theories of the Bolsheviks, Rosa Luxemburg, Bordiga, and Malatesta, mostly because it makes no sense to do so. This blend of anarchist shibboleths (affinity groups, autonomy fetishism, Bookchin references) and communist vocabulary (party cadre, collective discipline, professional revolutionaries) is neither an oversight nor the product of genuine cross-ideological left unity. CounterPower is a Marxist organization with a niche ideology informed mainly by the experience of the Italian Autonomia Operaia movement. The fact that they mask this behind an appeal to every possible leftist tendency is frankly dishonest, and makes their writing difficult to follow. Since all these ideas have been presented to us as complementary and harmonious, we must investigate the contradictions between them in order to get a clearer picture.
First, we should consider their framing of the ideas of Luxemburg:
In contrast to a bourgeois party, Rosa Luxemburg identified that a revolutionary party of autonomy ‘is not a party that wants to rise to power over the mass of workers or through them.’ Rather, it ‘is only the most conscious, purposeful part of the proletariat, which points the entire broad mass of the working class toward its historical tasks at every step”
The primary issue with this framing is that Rosa Luxemburg did not write or speak about “a revolutionary party of autonomy” at any point in her political career. She was a member of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) for most of her life before its left-wing split into the USPD and then Spartacist League (later renamed the Communist Party of Germany, or KPD). Both organizations were mass parties who explicitly intended to lead the working class to overthrow the existing political order and form a new proletarian government in Germany, headed by elected party officials. Her point about the party being an instrument that puts the working class in power was perfectly in line with the existing Marxist orthodoxy. Consider this quote from the SPD’s leading theorist Karl Kautsky for comparison:
The socialists no longer have the task of freely inventing a new society but rather uncovering its elements in existing society. No more do they have to bring salvation from its misery to the proletariat from above, but rather they have to support its class struggle through increasing its insight and promoting its economic and political organizations and in so doing bring about as quickly as possible the day when the proletariat will be able to save itself. The task of Social Democracy is to make the class struggle of the proletariat aware of its aim and capable of choosing the best means to attain this aim.6
Luxemburg and Kautsky both demonstrate the function of the mass party: cohering the most militant and forward-thinking section of the working class into one organization and giving it the tools to win political power. If the party is not “outside or above the revolutionary process”, as CounterPower puts it, then it is coming to power through class leadership. “Providing the boldest elements in decision-making organs” is just a milder way of phrasing “winning political hegemony in the movement.” While it is right to be skeptical of potential opportunists and wary of inadvertently creating an unaccountable bureaucracy, CounterPower overcorrects by trying to avoid the question of leadership altogether. No amount of out-of-context quotes from historical revolutionaries can paper over that deficiency.
After painting an anarchist portrait of Rosa Luxemburg, CounterPower then calls upon the theoretical authority of actual anarchist Errico Malatesta:
We anarchists can all say that we are of the same party, if by the word ‘party’ we mean all who are on the same side, that is, who share the same general aspirations and who, in one way or another, struggle for the same ends against common adversaries and enemies. But this does not mean it is possible—or even desirable—for all of us to be gathered into one specific association. There are too many differences of environment and conditions of struggle; too many possible ways of action to choose among, and also too many differences of temperament and personal incompatibilities for a General Union, if taken seriously, not to become, instead of a means for coordinating and reviewing the efforts of all, an obstacle to individual activity and perhaps also a cause of more bitter internal strife.7
This is a markedly different approach to organization from the mass party model of Kautsky, Luxemburg, Lenin, et al. It is certainly more in line with the autonomists’ “area of the party” theory, but are the assumptions it is based on sound? The experience of the Bolshevik party securing state power and defending the proletariat from white terror, the Communist Party of Vietnam’s triumph over colonialism, the continued resistance to neoliberal imperialism in Cuba, and other achievements of the mass party model seem to indicate otherwise. Petty personal disputes and geographic distance are no excuse to abandon unified efforts to build socialism. If we take a scientific approach and compare the results of party-building trials throughout history to the results of those like Malatesta who deny the party’s role, the pattern is self-evident.
Lessons of History
CounterPower’s essay does an excellent job of considering the experiences of a vast number of different historical communist groups. Unfortunately, they do so without an ounce of reflection or criticism. They ask us to look at rival groups with opposing political strategies and conclude that both were right, regardless of whether either group actually achieved its aims. They mention the experience of many parties and movements—the KAPD in Germany, Autonomia Operaia in Italy, the MIR in Chile, the FMLN-FDR in El Salvador, the URNG in Guatemala, the HBDH in Turkey and Kurdistan, and more. We’re given the impression that each of these groups consciously agreed with the autonomists’ many parties model, and that each of these groups were successful enough to teach us mainly positive lessons to emulate. Upon closer inspection, it turns out this is not at all the case. For the sake of brevity, we will look at three examples.
Let us begin with the Communist Workers’ Party of Germany (KAPD). This party could be accurately described as a sect based on its low membership, extreme sectarianism, and history of splits. Its complicated lineage is as follows—its members began in the SPD, then split into the ISD, which then joined the USPD, which then split into the KPD, and then finally split from there into the left-communist KAPD. It functionally existed for about two years before splitting again into separate factions. It was quite literally a split of a split of a split that ended up splitting. It had around 43,000 members at its height in 1921, which was minuscule compared to the hundreds of thousands of workers in the mass parties (and that number immediately declined after the factional split in 1922).
The roots of the KAPD’s separation from the KPD lie in the events of the Ruhr Uprising. In 1920, a right-wing coalition of military officers and monarchists attempted to overthrow the bourgeois-democratic government of Germany. In response, the government called for a general strike, which the workers’ parties heeded. In the Ruhr valley, these parties took the strike a step further by forming Red Army units and engaging right-wing forces in open combat. However, these socialist militias were divided between three different parties and could not coordinate their efforts as well as their enemies who had the benefit of a clear leadership structure. The uprising was ultimately crushed when the bourgeois government made a deal with the right-wing putsch leaders and sent their forces to slaughter the workers of the Ruhr.
What lessons did the left-communists learn from this? From their perspective, KPD leaders had given up on the struggle by agreeing to disband Red Army units after the fighting looked to be in the enemy’s favor. Because of this, a split was necessary so the workers could be led by the true communist militants that would see things through to the end. In other words, the already divided proletariat needed a fourth party to further complicate the coordination of future actions. Two years later, this fourth party would then split into two factions. Lenin had this to say about the KAPD:
Let the ‘Lefts’ put themselves to a practical test on a national and international scale. Let them try to prepare for (and then implement) the dictatorship of the proletariat, without a rigorously centralised party with iron discipline, without the ability to become masters of every sphere, every branch, and every variety of political and cultural work. Practical experience will soon teach them.8
Unfortunately, Lenin was overly optimistic. Rather than having time to learn from their mistakes, the divided forces of the working class were brutally crushed by the united forces of the right. The Nazis rose to power, and fascism reigned until the Soviets took Berlin in 1945. This does not mean there is nothing we can learn from the KAPD—quite the opposite is true. There may be some diamonds in the rough, but most of the lessons we can learn from the left-communists of Germany are examples of what not to do. Fortunately, in the updated version of their essay, CounterPower scrubbed any mention of the KAPD. Whether this was due to a genuine reassessment of their example or simple editorial limitations, the new version is much stronger without the ill-fated German sectarians.
Despite their positive appraisal of the KAPD, CounterPower is not a left-communist sect. They are autonomists, and in order to understand their answer to the party question we must take stock of their movement forebears. Autonomia Operaia was a workers’ movement in Italy during the period known as the “Years of Lead”. This period lasted from the late 1960s to the late 1980s, and was marked by violent clashes between right and left-wing paramilitary forces. It is worth noting that much of this violence was either planned, supplied, or encouraged by the CIA and its “Operation Gladio”, although that is not relevant to our discussion here. Autonomia Operaia was mainly active from ‘76 to ‘78, and was made up of many smaller socialist groups including Potere Operaio, Gruppo Gramsci, and Lotta Continua. Each group was strongly opposed to unifying into one party, preferring instead to maintain their autonomy and pursue different tactics to work towards their shared goal of social revolution.
Autonomia Operaia demo
In the end, this worked out in much the same way as it did for the sectarians in Germany decades earlier. Thousands of militants were arrested, hundreds fled the country, many were killed, and most of those who remained dissolved into terrorist groups like the Red Brigades and parliamentary parties like Democrazia Proletaria. Neither the autonomist terrorists nor the autonomist politicians were able to move beyond the failures of the earlier autonomist movement. In retrospect, the autonomists ended up replicating the sect form (albeit with some anarchist-influenced language) and suffered the familiar consequences of this organizing technique. It is worth noting that after misappropriating numerous mass parties (the Alabama chapter of CPUSA, the Bolsheviks, Rosa Luxemburg’s KPD) as successful examples of the “parties of autonomy” model, CounterPower leaves out any mention of Autonomia Operaia in the updated version of its essay. This is somewhat understandable as the movement collapsed within two years and failed to achieve its aims, but it is still dishonest. If failures are glossed over rather than rigorously examined, we are doomed to walk blindly into past mistakes. In this regard, CounterPower’s update to their essay does more to obfuscate the party question than answer it.
That said, Autonomia Operaia activists had valid criticisms of the Communist Party of Italy and could have created an alternative to lead the proletariat to victory. This is the positive lesson we can learn from them: when the “official” communist party of the nation abandons its principles, it can sometimes be worthwhile to build an alternative organization. However, they chose instead to create a loose collective of semi-aligned communist clusters which failed to coordinate their actions and create meaningful change. Had they taken on the arduous task of debating long-term strategy and forging programmatic unity, things may have turned out differently. This is the primary lesson we should learn from the Italian autonomists: a proletarian victory requires structure, democratic discipline, and unity of action.
Although not directly influenced by Autonomia’s answer to the party question, the FMLN-FDR of El Salvador could be theorized as an example of an “area of the party”. As CounterPower pointed out in their essay, this network was composed of five revolutionary parties and a number of mass organizations and civil society institutions who worked together in loose cooperation towards revolution. It ultimately failed, and CounterPower makes two interesting claims about its dissolution: that the failure was due primarily to the popular front reformism of the PCS (one of the five member parties) and that its downfall does not tarnish its status as a positive example of the area of the party in action. These claims do not fare well under the spotlight of historical scrutiny, particularly when shined on the brutal internecine violence that destroyed any semblance of unity within the movement by 1983.
CounterPower’s assessment of the FMLN identifies the PCS (Communist Party of El Salvador) as the weakest link in the chain, and the FPL (Farabundo Martí Liberation People’s Forces) as the strongest. In many ways, this is true, as the popular front strategy of the official communist parties has consistently ended in disaster the world over and the FPL was the most powerful and trusted party in El Salvador for a time. However, this is not the whole picture. Genuine political disagreements were often buried or papered over to maintain an artificial unity, and the ensuing tension was bound to boil over. While our autonomist comrades say the FMLN established a harmonious “mechanism of communication, coordination, and cooperation among the various politico-military organizations”, the reality is far grimmer. In its disagreement with other parties advocating negotiations with the Salvadoran government, the FPL resorted to gruesome assassinations to enforce its will on the rest of the FMLN. In April of 1983, FPL cadre Rogelio Bazzaglia murdered pro-negotiation leader Ana Maria with an ice pick, stabbing her 83 times. Although there was an attempt to blame the CIA or another party within FMLN, when presented concrete evidence of Bazzaglia’s guilt, FPL leader Salvador Cayetano Carpio promptly wrote a suicide note and shot himself in the head. With its most trusted leaders either disgraced, dead, or both, the FMLN lost steam after many members left the network in disgust. Along with this exodus of valuable cadre went all the legitimacy of the anti-negotiation faction, and so by 1989 even successful military offensives could do nothing more than bring the Salvadoran government to the negotiation table.9 The revolutionary potential of the FMLN died with Ana Maria, and her murder demonstrates how the “area of the party” approach only ends up recreating the problems of the sect form.
The Marxist Center
The US communist movement is essentially home to three different camps regarding the party question. Those who wish to see the movement divided into bureaucratic sects (with the belief that their particular sect is the One True Party) are on the right. Those who wish to see the movement divided into loosely aligned autonomist sects (with the beliefs outlined in CounterPower’s writing) are on the left. Those of us in the center are advocating a qualitative break with the sect form: the foundation of a mass party of organizers. This idea is often associated with a number of inaccurate claims—for instance, we are frequently lumped in with those who wish to replicate the worst aspects of the DSA model, where anyone can join the organization at any time for any reason without even committing to Marxist politics. We are also often accused of wanting to create a dogmatic bureaucracy of staunch Marxist-Leninists who will run the party as they see fit without input from membership. Neither of these claims are true.
In fact, what we desire is a party made and run by the masses themselves. Years of labor-intensive organizing will be necessary to make this happen, as the masses cannot be reached and welcomed into the socialist movement any other way. Tenant and workplace unions, unemployed councils, harm reduction efforts, solidarity networks, and other forms of “mass organizations” (in addition to independent electoral efforts) must be formed and rallied around a common political pole. In order for this pole to exist in the first place, the organizers engaged in mass work must debate and discuss until they articulate and agree on a comprehensive political program. In order for these debates and discussions to produce a clear program, the organizers have to see themselves as part of a common organization aimed at a shared goal. When each of these elements fall into place, something completely unique to the US left will be born: a mass party committed to praxis, programmatic unity, and democratic discipline.
By praxis, we understand a long-term commitment to building, growing, and maintaining the kinds of mass organizations detailed above. By programmatic unity, we mean collective acceptance of a comprehensive set of answers to long-term strategic questions, forged in an extended process of comradely debate and compromise. Ideally, this would take the form of a minimum-maximum program like those laid out and critiqued by Marx, Engels, and others in the first two Internationals.10 The minimum demands are structural reforms that communicate to the working class exactly how our efforts will improve their lives and empower them at the political level. Demands like guaranteed healthcare and housing, eliminating the Electoral College, Senate, and Supreme Court, disbanding the police and forming workers’ militias, ensuring union representation, and more would bring supporters into the fold and give us access to valuable comrades and organizers. They are chosen in such a way that when every demand is met, the proletariat has seized political power from the bourgeoisie and becomes the governing class of society.
With this done, the new workers’ government can focus on fulfilling the maximum demands, epitomized as communism, which would eradicate the last vestiges of capitalism and transition to a socialist mode of production. Establishing unity on long-term questions of strategy is far superior to enforcing a “party-line” on day-to-day issues and theoretical minutiae. It allows us to collaborate and exert the greatest possible combined strength of the working class in its diverse struggles without splitting over short-term tactical disagreements like “should we partner with this NGO on this tenant organizing project?” or subcultural arguments like “who was in the wrong at Kronstadt?” It also does not require agreement on “tendency” labels (such as Marxist-Leninist, anarchist, left-communist, etc). As our organizations grow, the need for a commonly accepted program will only increase. Finally, by democratic discipline, we refer to the old axiom “diversity of opinion, unity of action”.
These three principles are absolutely essential for the functioning of an effective and battle-ready proletarian party. As we have seen, the organizational forms of sectarians and autonomists (like the KAPD and Autonomia Operaia respectively) crumble under pressure whereas mass parties regularly weather brutal repression. No better example of this can be found in US history than that of the Alabama chapter of the CPUSA:
The fact is, the CP and its auxiliaries in Alabama did have a considerable following, some of whom devoured Marxist literature and dreamed of a socialist world. But to be a Communist, an ILD member, or an SCU militant was to face the possibility of imprisonment, beatings, kidnapping, and even death. And yet the Party survived, and at times thrived, in this thoroughly racist, racially divided, and repressive social world.11
While other cases of this phenomenon (the Russian Communist Party, the Chinese Communist Party, and others) have been historically prone to corruption, preventative measures can be taken to ensure the party retains its mass character even after smashing the state and beginning socialist reconstruction. The most immediate step in this process is the collaborative drafting of and universal agreement on a party-wide Code of Conduct. This will facilitate the development of a comradely culture that balances rigorous critique and debate with an environment of pluralism and interpersonal care. In addition to understanding how to have a one-on-one organizing conversation, we should also strive to be well-versed in skills like listening, openly sharing feelings, assuming good faith in arguments, making sincere apologies, and offering support to comrades struggling with personal issues. None of these can be learned by accident in the alienated social spaces created by capitalism, so we must make a deliberate effort to establish these norms in our organization.
Another would be taking seriously the moral dimensions of Fidelismo’s contribution to Marxism. In stark contrast with both Stalin’s iron fist and Allende’s naive pacifism, Fidel Castro’s leadership of the Cuban revolution combined violent insurrection against the state with peaceful political maneuvering in the revolutionary movement. Over the course of protracted struggle on both fronts, the July 26th Movement was able to defeat the state militarily and construct a democratic mandate for political hegemony. Because Fidel and his comrades took the ethical implications of revolutionary struggle seriously, they were able to achieve victory without recourse to war crimes against the enemy or lethal violence against political competitors within the movement.12 This commitment to moral conduct during violent struggle did not stop them from winning the war. In fact, it allowed them to win the peace. This strategy allowed Cuba to begin building socialism after national liberation without the deadly internecine conflicts that plagued other revolutionary movements (notably including the FMLN). It is crucial that we embrace this legacy by constructing an ethic of revolution for our time. More steps beyond these will of course be necessary, and their exact nature will become clear as we work towards the realization of a comradely culture together.
Perhaps the strongest indicator of the need for a mass party is the fact that the most advanced sections of the US labor movement are already calling for the establishment of a workers’ party. In its recent pamphlet Them and Us Unionism, United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE) wrote:
Throughout our history, UE has held that workers need our own political party. In the 1990s, UE worked with a number of other unions to found the Labor Party, under the slogan ‘The Bosses Have Two Parties, We Need One of Our Own.’ Although the Labor Party experiment was ultimately unsuccessful, UE members and locals have been active in numerous other efforts to promote independent, pro-worker alternatives to the two major parties.13
Other labor unions like ILWU and the Teamsters have produced leading organizers who share UE’s commitment to independent worker politics. People like Clarence Thomas, who helped organize the Juneteenth port shutdown on the West Coast earlier this year in solidarity with the George Floyd uprising, Chris Silvera, who chairs the National Black Caucus in the Teamsters, and many more can be found among them. These influential voices of the labor movement have united in Labor and Community for an Independent Party, stating:
We must build democratically run coalitions that bring together the stakeholders in labor and the communities of the oppressed, so that they have a decisive say in formulating their demands and mapping out a strategy. Most important, we need to put an end to the monopoly of political power by the Democrats and Republicans. The labor movement and the leaders of the Latino and Black struggles need to break with their reliance on the Democratic Party and build their own mass-based independent working-class political party.
While it is certainly possible that these efforts could lead to the establishment of a reformist labor party, it is precisely this possibility that behooves us to get involved. Any union that recognizes the need for independent proletarian political action outside the shop floor can be considered “advanced” compared to business unions aligned with the Democratic Party, and relationships with them should be built as part of a communist intervention in the labor movement. As Marxists, we have a duty not only to organize our class but to bring theoretical clarity to its most active champions. If we continue building strong proletarian fighting organizations and elaborate our vision in a comprehensive program, we will be positioned to guide labor and community leaders of all stripes to the creation of a truly communist political party.
Ultimately, the disparate sects within Marxist Center and the local chapters of the DSA must form tighter bonds and consider internal reforms that would allow us to build the party our class requires. In doing so, we should seek to unite as many far-flung collectives and mass work projects as we can in order to become a true threat to bourgeois hegemony. While staying divided in a loose federation may seem like a viable model to some, history shows that it is not. The autonomists and anarchists in our ranks are dedicated organizers doing valuable work, and we should be grateful for that. However, we would be doing ourselves and them a disservice if we did not offer a comradely critique of their organizational models.
Taylor B continues the debate on political subjectivity, revolutionary strategy and the party-form, responding to Donald Parkinson’s Without a Party, We Have Nothing.
The Civil Rights movement: a political sequence without the party.
When replying to criticism, I think it is best to put all of one’s cards on the table. In August of last year, millions were in the streets and two Marxist caucuses in DSA were discussing how to advance the emancipatory struggle. In my view, the problem with this discussion was the way in which something called a “worker’s party” was posed as an obvious answer to the “movementism” around the world that seems incapable of destroying the current order that can be broadly characterized by vicious capitalist exploitation, ecological destruction, and mass depoliticization.
Far from this discussion producing any concrete proposal for a party, the most insightful contribution seemed to come from one Red Star comrade who expressed caution in approaching the party: that we should not confuse electoral proceduralism for how to organize in a way that helps bring working class people into confrontation with the capitalist class. Rather than focus on what the party should look like in the abstract, we should organize the base of the worker’s party and promote revolutionary political education. Out of this organizing, an actual party strategy would emerge.1
I could not help but ask questions that had not been posed. If the most sensible way to go about building a party is to break with liberal political conceptions and organize and educate others to build a form of organization that we cannot define in advance, then why insist on the idea for a party at all? When millions are pouring into the streets to protest police violence and defend Black lives, is the notion of a “worker’s” party–a term that seems completely foreign to what seems to have been the largest popular mobilization in history–adequate to the moment? Is what seems to be an orthodox Marxist position on the centrality of the party to the communist movement actually an obstacle to a clear assessment of our moment? Why is it that a real movement against the present state of things always seems to be located in the future? And why does insisting on the party, even when it seems to raise many more questions than answers, automatically appear as a concrete answer to the “movementism” that we all agree must be overcome?
So I wrote an essay that tried to grapple with some of these questions.2 I argued against imposing historical organizational forms on present movements, but more importantly, I attempted to think about politics in a way that could explain the complexity of the current movements by evaluating them on their own terms. This led to some adventurous and controversial statements: that in addition to the party-form creating problems for emancipatory movements, the resurgent “socialist” movement seems to be dominated by those who have no interest in abolishing the capitalist mode of production; that certain elements of a “spontaneous” anti-racist movement seem to have a better instinct for opposing the police and the state than those who are interested in Lenin. Ultimately, I suggested that the radical elements of these movements need to find ways to organize together: I pointed to an example of the Juneteenth demonstration in Oakland that was organized by two DSA chapters and the ILWU that seemed to show these movements already doing so. And I posed more questions to suggest more concrete organizing directions that we could take up going forward.
While I was able to have some helpful and clarifying discussions with comrades inside and outside of DSA–some seem to feel that I have not made a sufficient, concrete proposal for how to advance our movement without reference to the party–Donald Parkinson has so far presented the most impassioned criticisms.3 As he writes at the end of his reply: “One thing is for sure – without a party, we have nothing. Because without a party, there is no ‘we’.”
I think we must point out the contradiction in this line that makes it impossible for it to be a clear prescription. I do not think this is a simple error on Parkinson’s part, but a constitutive contradiction that is consistent with the current party discourse. In order to say that “we” have no “we,” Parkinson presupposes a “we.” In other words, to produce a collective subject, there must be a foundational subject that Parkinson does not, and would seem he cannot, account for.
Let’s read Parkinson’s claim more closely. I believe we are caught between two ways of interpreting it. First, taking this statement at its word, we are left with a claim that reduces all of the real organization of “assemblies, affinity groups, and even new nonprofits as initiatives from activists,” along with organizations like Cosmonaut, Red Star, and the whole of DSA, to the situation of powerless, atomized individuals. The lack of a party formed through an articulated common program puts us in a kind of solipsism.
Second, if we strip away the rhetoric, we get a claim that without a party, there is no emancipatory subject. In other words, there is no collective agent that is capable of opposing and overturning the existing society. While this second interpretation does not reduce existing organizations to atomized individuals, it deems it insufficient for emancipatory politics. The various existing groups and organizations fail to constitute a real opposition to the existing order because–and this is where Parkinson advances a very particular notion of the party based on a particular reading of Marx, Katusky, and Lenin–only a party with a common, articulated program has that power. Thus, for Parkinson, the party is an invariant model of politics, rather than a historical one. Short of this particular version of the party that Parkinson advocates, all our various collective efforts amount to nothing.4
I think the second interpretation is the more productive starting point, though I find it difficult to completely ignore the first. I see both agreement and disagreement with Parkinson. We both seem to agree that the construction of a political subject – which is composed of individual militants and yet goes beyond them – is a requirement for emancipatory politics. We both seem to agree that communism is an emancipatory politics and that any politics that falls short of communism will always be inadequate. While Parkinson has not stated this himself, I believe we both agree that there is no universal organized referent for emancipatory politics currently in existence. The question, as always, is what must be done about this.
While Parkinson seems to have aligned himself with Red Star against my position, I do not think Parkinson’s position on the party is necessarily one that Red Star and Emerge would automatically agree with. Why? Because while Red Star and Emerge were having an exploratory conversation, Parkinson seems to already have a set idea of the party being a “state within a state,” etc. I think this strengthens my argument that the party is a term that creates more problems than it solves: without a clear formulation, the party appears as an empty signifier. With a clear, articulated formulation, the party may produce more fragmentation than consolidation. This last point seems to be supported by the fact that an endless number of small groups of militants have not only proclaimed the need for, but also formed parties, and we have moved no closer to emancipation.
This brings us to the disagreement between Parkinson and myself. Parkinson believes the problem of the subject–the lack of a collective organization with the capacity to oppose and overturn the existing society–is resolved solely through the party-form. Meanwhile, I have argued that the party-form is an obstacle to the formation of the subject in our current moment. My position is ultimately untenable. Why? Because this position cannot effectively respond to all the different things people mean when talking about the party.5 So to reformulate my position, I reject Parkinson’s concept of the party as an invariant model of politics. I reject other suggestions that the Soviet or Chinese party-states are emancipatory models that we must reproduce or emulate. To those engaging in exploratory discussions of the party, I would simply question what utility a term like ‘the party’ has if you do not have a fixed idea in mind for what you are building. Doesn’t invoking the party and attempting to take inspiration from past organizations like CPUSA simply invite confusion that we then have to continually caution against, as one Red Star comrade pointed out? Doesn’t the party end up being a future idea for overturning capitalist society, rather than a concrete step in the current moment?
If we know there is all sorts of historical baggage that comes with discussing the party, is it actually controversial to try and think of an alternative to theorizing politics and its organization? It is certainly true that if something isn’t broken, you shouldn’t fix it. But isn’t it clear that something is wrong with the party as a concept, since, despite all of our agreement that we need a revolutionary organization of workers to overthrow the few who would kill us before ever allowing us to decide for ourselves how we should live, that there is no revolutionary party or masses anywhere to be found? And shouldn’t we have an answer to this question that does not depend on a few intellectuals making claims about the development of working people’s consciousness?
Now I will attempt to clarify certain aspects of my position, and also advance some new arguments based on the discussions around my original article. I will respond to Parkinson’s alleged refutation of Sylvain Lazarus, a theorist whose dense but crucial insights should be more widely read and formed a fundamental element of my argument. Finally, I will argue the recent emergence of the Partisan project, a joint publication between San Francisco’s Red Star, NYC’s Emerge, Portland’s Red Caucus, and the Communist Caucus, should be seen as an extremely encouraging step toward the formation of a consolidated Marxist bloc with DSA that can serve as an important site of discussion, study, and experimentation to advance the emancipatory struggle of communism.
Beginnings
According to Parkinson’s summary of my argument in the second and third paragraphs of his response, one of my fundamental claims is that the DSA and the George Floyd uprising are evidence that politics has been “born.” I believe this point indicates a certain misunderstanding: I did not use the terms “birth” or “born” a single time in my “Beginnings” piece. Meanwhile, the term I used 23 times if we include the very first word of my title–beginnings–does not occur at all in Parkinson’s response. Even the less specialized term “beginning”–which combined with “beginnings” occurs 48 times in my essay does not appear at all in Parkinson’s response.
I assume the swapping of these terms is not in reference to something I am unaware of that is important to Parkinsons’ argument, such as a particular dispute in Comintern history, a passage from Pannekoek’s diary, etc.I assume that if Parkinson found my notion of “beginnings” unhelpful or wrong, then he would have demonstrated this through a critique of the concept. But that did not happen. Instead, we have two occurrences of the phrase “birth of politics” in consecutive paragraphs in Parkinson’s reply. We have the claims that I was “heralding a new creative process that will break from all the old muck of the past and create new forms of organization” and insisting that we “declare our fidelity to the spontaneous energies of the event, to see where it goes and what it creates rather than trying to impose our own ideas upon it.”
My point was just the opposite. As someone who is a member of DSA and participated in demonstrations, I attempted to combat idealism and pose questions from within these movements to pursue an emancipatory politics. If this was not apparent to Parkinson, I believe it is because he produces a binary of tailing spontaneity and applying a pre-existing model. This binary suggests that Parkinson, despite his insistence that Marxists should join DSA and sympathy with combatting racist police violence, does not necessarily see himself as part of these movements. Thus, his criticism comes from the outside, and so must my intervention. But this is not my position in regard to these movements, nor am I thinking from within the same binary. I am instead proposing that there is a need for organization and prescription that does not occur “spontaneously,” but also does not consist in the application of a pre-existing model. I am suggesting that members of DSA and those who took to the streets must take it upon ourselves to organize in a better way to oppose the existing, global capitalist order.
I called Occupy, Ferguson, DSA’s growth by way of the Sanders’ campaigns, and the George Floyd uprising “beginnings” because these are real formations that break the pattern of “depoliticized atomization,” to use Salar Mohandesi’s phrase, yet have not produced a political sequence.6 They are not nothing, but they fall short of politics. In contrast, the metaphor of birth and whatever its variations – stillborn, miscarraige, premature, etc. – has entirely different connotations. This gendered and strangely graphic kind of metaphoric language does not grasp the dynamism and lack of definitive origins of the formations I discussed. Even when I claimed that Sanders was in part responsible for setting off a beginning, I tried to show that what was key was not Sanders, but all the thinking that emerged in response to Sanders that disrupted depoliticized atomization.
The basis of my intervention was to say that if these beginnings are to produce political subjectivity, then they must overcome the internal and external forces that seek to neutralize them. I attempted to assess the real conditions of these movements–the balance of emancipatory potential and real neutralizing forces within and outside them–precisely to identify lines that we must fight and organize along so that effective ideas and practices can be produced from within, and thus transform, these formations. That is why I have criticized liberals who say we need to reform the police and run progressive politicians, along with the socialists who reduce riots to emotional outbursts and sometimes fall into a kind of idealist thinking that says we just have to do what the Bolsheviks did. If I did not distance myself from ultra-left positions that say sabotaging trains and looting Targets is the path to emancipation, it is only because I do not take these positions seriously and see very few people advancing them.
The language of beginnings, then, is distinct and fundamental to my approach. By suggesting that the DSA and the uprisings are beginnings, I intended to show that real breaks occurred in the thought of people. How else do we account for people suddenly going from a state of atomized depoliticization to spending an inordinate amount of time on Zoom calls discussing bylaws, or braving crowded streets in a pandemic to demand the end to police killings? Thus, a beginning must break with the neutralizing order. But on its own, this break is not sufficient to constitute an emancipatory sequence due to complex and varied forces of neutralization that maintain the current order. In other words, a foothold is necessary to free climb a mountain; but a foothold does not eliminate the problem of gravity.
So in the schema I produced in the “Beginnings” article, there are two breaks. There is the break from neutralization to beginnings, and the break from beginnings to politics. Since politics is rare and sequential, a new subjective invention that begins and ends, then my claim is that beginnings must be common and chaotic. Beginnings spark, die out, and spark again. Beginnings fundamentally have something to do with the ever-present potential for politics that occurs in the thought of people who are exploited and oppressed that sometimes leads them to organize themselves with others to fight those who dominate them. Unfortunately, it is the categorical limit of beginnings to almost always fail.
Beginning Again
While it seems true that beginnings can be neutralized in the ways I discussed in my article, it seems unlikely that I can maintain the position that neutralization precedes beginnings. The question of going from nothing to something is ultimately a metaphysical or theological question and does not interest me much. Clearly the world, short of emancipation and parties, is not nothing; I don’t believe anyone is claiming otherwise. But we still must be able to account for what occurs between emancipatory sequences. I have proposed beginnings. But then how do we account for beginnings?
To try and resolve the problem of beginnings, I will introduce an idea that I have derived from one of Alain Badiou’s incomparable diagrams. This is the notion of an ordering regime. The ordering regime is the something that precedes a beginning. And the ordering regime is what exists at the close of an emancipatory sequence. To maintain order, to keep everyone in their given places, it must engage in dynamic processes of neutralization. I think that is sufficient for now.
I believe there are four questions that must be addressed to continue clarifying this debate.
First, why is it necessary to talk about this conceptual dynamic between beginnings and neutralization, which appear to speak generically about politics in terms which aren’t contained in the Marxist canon? Why not just talk about class struggle? It is necessary because political sequences are rare, and they do not always have to do with class struggle. The rarity of emancipatory sequences, the rarity of politics, emerges in subjective thought. It is through an event that is irreducible to the present regime or order, or ordering regime, that the subjective thought of politics has the potential to erupt into thought. Sometimes this produces a sustained emancipatory sequence. Ordering regimes attempt to neutralize this movement; this sometimes forces a major re-ordering. The complicated dynamics of the ruling class, itself the condensation of many bourgeois interests, is one general historical example of an ordering regime. Fundamentally, politics is about people breaking from the places assigned to them by an ordering regime. It is in this sense that we can understand Badiou, when thinking in reference to the situation in 1968, he asks:
What would a political practice that was not willing to keep everyone in their place look like?…What inspired us was the conviction that we had to do away with places. That is what is meant, in the most general sense, by the word ‘communism’: an egalitarian society which, acting under its own impetus, brings down walls and barriers; a polyvalent society, with variable trajectories, both at work and in our lives. But ‘communism’ also means forms of political organization that are not modelled on spatial hierarchies.7
Second, what is emancipatory politics? Emancipatory politics is the name of the rare, subjective thought in the minds of people that prescribes the correct forms of organization to destroy “the places” of a given ordering regime in a movement toward the absolutely free and egalitarian association of all people. The common name for universal emancipatory politics is communism: it is the real movement against the present state of things. We might say that emancipation is not a state of affairs to be realized, but a project without end predicated on subjective thought: it fundamentally has something to do with the power to decide.
Third, why are emancipatory sequences rare? Politics must begin in thought as a relation of real circumstances. I want to be explicit here: I am not talking about thought in idealist terms. I am thinking of thought in the same way Lenin uses theory in his famous statement that without revolutionary theory, there is no revolutionary movement. My point is to detach thought from theory. Theory is essentially a systematized way of thinking. Thought must be fundamental to the existence of theory, though without the supposed guarantees of a particular revolutionary theory. If we understand “emancipation” to have a broader meaning than particular Marxists theories of revolution–with emancipation serving as a common category to think sequences as different as the Hatian Revolution and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution–then “thought” is the broader common category that links Marxist theories with the different but still correct ideas of the Haitian Revolution.
How can we support this claim? We can say that while Marxist theory has been proven correct time and again in guiding emancipatory movements, it is not the only thought to have done so. As I have indicated, thought does not come with the same guarantees as scientific socialism. Nevertheless, correct prescriptions–ideas that are confirmed correct through their material and practical consequences–begins in thought.
This brings us to the point about rarity. Real circumstances are always exceptional: each circumstance consists of an uneven balance of forces that are produced through an accumulation of historical contradictions. The formation of emancipatory politics is rare because it is incredibly difficult to produce the correct thoughts and unique forms of organization that are adequate to contest the present ordering regime in the exceptional, overdetermined moment. In other words, politics must begin in thought but can only be realized through correct prescriptions. In this sense, emancipatory politics both begins in thought and is fundamentally material.
The reason why I have suggested that thought is central to politics is because thought is already something that is always happening in the minds of all people, regardless of their understanding of the world. Thought is a fundamental category of subjectivity and human agency. The question for those of us involved in the struggle for emancipation is which thought, and at which sites, does a lasting subjectivization emerge that can topple the given and exceptional ordering regime? The particular sites of politics–the places where thought occurs–are what must be discovered so we can alter our current forms of organization to produce the rare, emancipatory sequence.
Fourth, if politics is rare, are we to believe that history is a series of disconnected moments with no continuity between them? Is each beginning or emancipatory sequence always forced to start from scratch? I will admit that the question of history is made extremely complicated by the frameworks of Badiou and Lazarus which I have drawn on. But I will also say that history has always been a complicated question in Marxism, already evident in the longstanding debate about Marx’s relation to Hegel, Marx’s letters on Russia, the debate between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks, the question of “stagism,” the debate over the Stalinist “theory of the productive forces,” etc.
Instead of attempting to resolve the problem of history in Marxism, I will address the questions I have posed related to history with reference to an axiom of Marx and Engels: that history always progresses by its bad side. For Althusser, the bad side is the side from which people do not expect history to progress. I understand this to mean that the past does not transmit an accumulation of “lessons” that lead us to a final victory, but an accumulation of contradictions that form the exceptional circumstances of the present moment. This moment is managed by the given ordering regime. And it is also a condition of the real which, through an event, erupts within subjective thought in interiority.
From the framework of emancipatory sequences, what is continuous is the problem of the exceptional present, and thus, new ideas that can prescribe correct practices to overcome it. As Lazarus writes in a forthcoming translation of a 1981 text: “one must continue to find the rupture.”8
With a more limited understanding of continuity, we might say that different degrees of continuity between emancipatory sequences is possible at times. But greater continuity does not guarantee that solving the problem of the present will be any easier. For example, one might argue, as Parkinson does, that there was a continuity between Marx and Lenin via Kautsky and the SPD. But even with this degree of continuity, it was by no means obvious or guaranteed that Marxism could be adapted to the Russian context. It was the discontinuity and difference–that which was new in Lenin’s thought–that made Lenin’s contributions to Marxism possible and significant. We might go so far as to say that, for Lenin, Marxism itself was one dimension of the problem of the present.
Marx, Lenin, and the Party
Now Parkinson has vigorously contested my usage of Lazarus to argue that Marx and Lenin had differences on the question of the party. I will get to that. But to continue with my discussion of continuity and discontinuity, I must again assert that Lenin’s thought contains new ideas that cannot be found in Marx. We will bracket the question of whether or not Lenin invented these ideas: we will simply compare the ideas of Marx and Lenin. To avoid saying anything controversial, I will reassert the difference between Marx and Lenin with reference to Rossana Rossanda’s 1970 classic, “Class and Party.”
As Rossanda explains, “what separates Marx from Lenin (who, far from filling in Marx’s outlines, oriented himself in a different direction) is that the organization is never considered by Marx as anything but an essentially practical matter, a flexible and changing instrument, an expression of the real subject of the revolution, namely the proletariat.”9
To fully appreciate the difference between Marx and Lenin, we need to focus on Marx for a moment. Marx sees a “direct” relationship between the proletariat and the party of the proletariat. In fact, “the terms are almost interchangeable. For between the class as such and its political being, there is only a practical difference, in the sense that the second is the contingent form of the first.”10
What is the mechanism that produces this organized, “practical difference”? For Rossanda, Marx sees the class struggle with its “material roots in the mechanism of the system itself.” We can refer back to Marx’s famous letter to Weydemyer to support Rossanda’s reading. Interestingly, when reviewing Marx’s letter we immediately see him address the question of originality.
And now as to myself, no credit is due to me for discovering the existence of classes in modern society or the struggle between them. Long before me bourgeois historians had described the historical development of this class struggle and bourgeois economists, the economic economy of the classes.
First, I think we can immediately see the question of originality is more complicated than Parkinson makes it out to be. Marx plainly states that his discovery is not the historical development of the class struggle, but something more specific. Fortunately, Marx gives us a clear description:
What I did that was new was to prove: (1) that the existence of classes is only bound up with particular historical phases in the development of production (historische Entwicklungsphasen der Production), (2) that the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat, (3) that this dictatorship itself only constitutes the transition to the abolition of all classes and to a classless society.11
In other words, what was new in Marx’s work was showing how the class struggle does not simply relate to historical development, but “historical phases in the development of production.” This discovery produces a particular emancipatory prescription. As Rossanda rightly says, for Marx, the category of revolution is thus the “process which is intended to transcend the system.” Revolution is “a social activity which creates, over time, the political forms which the class needs and which constitutes its organization–namely the party.” Despite the apparent interchability of the terms “party” and “proletariat,” we see that for Marx “this is only so in the sense that the former is the political form of the latter, and constitutes its transitory mode of being, with the historical imperfections of concrete political institutions; while the proletariat remains the permanent historical subject, rooted in the material conditions of the capitalist system.”12
To return to Lazarus, we should note that Rossanda employs Lenin’s periodization of Marxism as found in his “The Historical Destiny of the Doctrine of Karl Marx” essay. Lazarus, Rossanda, and Lenin all agree that 1848 to 1871 was a specific phase or sequence that centers on Marx’s thought. For Lazarus, this phase is called the “classist mode” of politics, with Marx being its main theorist. We should be clear that Lazarus is using the term “classist” in a particular way. Rather than referring to discrimination based on class, he is referring to the idea that there are historical laws which determine the existence of classes in society and the struggle between them – exactly what Marx said in the letter to Weydemeyer that he had inherited from the bourgeois historians.
For Lazarus, a mode is “the relationship of a politics to its thought.”13 Rather than this mode beginning with the 1848 revolutions as Lenin claims, Lazarus expands this beginning to include the publication of the Communist Manifesto. Again, I believe both Lenin and Lazarus would agree that this period can be characterized as one in which “Marx’s doctrine by no means dominated. It was only one of the very numerous groups or trends of socialism.”14 While Marx’s thought proved to be a subjective, emancipatory thought that, to use Lenin’s words, “gained a complete victory and began to spread” after 1871, Lazarus argues that this is the moment when the sites of Marx’s thought lapsed and the whole classist mode became exhausted. Why? Because the Paris Commune revealed the limits of the thesis of Marx’s merger of “the prescriptive and the descriptive,” the merger of “history and politics” that takes the name “historical consciousness.”15 Nevertheless, it is clear that Marxism did continue to grow and spread as Lenin claimed.
Lenin and Lazarus’s periodization diverges in an interesting way. For Lenin, there is a second period from 1872-1904 that is characterized by the “absence of revolutions” and “the theoretical victory of Marxism” that “compelled its enemies to disguise themselves as Marxists. Liberalism, rotten within, tried to revive itself in the form of socialist opportunism.”16 Then there is a third period from 1905 to Lenin’s textual present of 1913 when “a new source of great world storms opened up in Asia. The Russian revolution was followed by revolutions in Turkey, Persia and China. It is in this era of storms and their ‘repercussions’ in Europe that we are now living.”17
I think it is striking that the dates of Lenin and Lazarus’ periodizations align so closely. While Lenin points to the Russian Revolution of 1905 as a second revolutionary era in Marxism, Lazarus argues that the Bolshevik mode begins in 1902 with Lenin’s publication of What Is to Be Done? (WITBD). Again, Parkinson has challenged this point and I will take it up later.
The point I want to make is that the end of the “classist mode,” or first period of Marxism, seems to contain an insight into Marxism in general. Until 1871, Marxism was not a victorious doctrine: it was the thought of Marx. Famously, Marx never claimed to be a Marxist and it is a somewhat common view to see Engels as the real creator of Marxism. But then, as we know, Engels has been criticized heavily for some of his formulations. This is to say that the first Marxist is by no means a prophet, but begins a critical discussion of Marx’s work. In this sense, it would seem that it is impossible to view Marxism as a singular, cohesive set of ideas: Marxism is always contested. I would suggest that the “doctrine of Karl Marx” that became victorious is not so much Marxism, but the emergence of multiple Marxist tendencies: of Marxisms.
This would seem to be reflected in Lenin’s second and third periods. After 1871 we can see two tendencies develop, though not necessarily in a clean fork from Marx’s work. On the one hand, there was the mechanical tendency that came to be advanced by Kautsky and Bernstein in the Social Democratic Party of Germany. In this sense, we see that while Luxemburg was correct in her famous criticism of Bernstein, this mechanical tendency did have its roots in a particular understanding of politics that is unique to Marx: the merger of history and the politics. The problem ultimately was that Bernstein had failed to see that the realization of communism as a result of historical phases in the development of production had already been exhausted. On the other hand, due to the “backward” Russian situation, Lenin would be forced to find another way.
To put things very simply, Lenin’s other way would take the name Leninism. And Leninism would correctly oppose other non-Marxist and Marxist tendencies, with the proof of its correctness culminating in October 1917. But the Lenin of 1913 could not have known he was to become a great thinker of emancipation or that his 1902 intervention–WITBD–could be seen as the basis of a distinct mode of politics. Yet it is telling that Lenin dates 1905 as a key moment for the second revolutionary period in Marxism with reference to the 1905 “dress rehearsal.” While the 1905 revolution was not successful, it produced a new, revolutionary form of organization: the soviet. Combined with the party, the soviet put the question of revolution back on the table: a new emancipatory sequence had begun.
Let’s return to Marx so we can see more clearly what’s new in Lenin. According to Lazarus, a key thesis of the classist mode is: “where there are proletarians, there are Communists.” As Rossanda shows, for Marx, “the proletariat in struggle does not produce an institution distinct from its immediate being”: if “one does not find a theory of the party in Marx, the reason is that, in his theory of revolution, there is neither need nor room for it.”18 Thus, from Marx to Lenin we see a recasting of the dialectic “in which the subject is the proletariat and the object society produced by the relations of capitalist production, thus moves towards a dialectic between class and vanguard, in which the former has the capacity of an ‘objective quantity,’ while the latter, the party, being the subject, is the locus of ‘revolutionary initiative.’”19 I would like to emphasize what is at stake in this shift: a fundamentally different conception of the emancipatory subject.
Why was Lenin’s break with Marx necessary? It is the same reason that for Lenin, Marxism was one dimension of the problem of the present. “Lenin’s horizon was delimited by two major facts: first of all, capitalism has entered in the imperialist phase, and its crisis reveals itself more complex than had been foreseen.”20 Beyond this, “Lenin, throughout his life, had to face the growing resistance of the system, and a capacity for action of the working class much inferior from 1848 to the Paris Commune.”21 Ultimately, “the capitalist and imperialism system was defeated in areas which, according to the Marxian schema, were not ‘ripe’ for communism.”22 In other words, for Lenin:
the confrontation must be prepared: the more society lacks ‘maturity,’ the more important it is that a vanguard should provoke the telescoping of objective conditions with the intolerability of exploitation and a revolutionary explosion, by giving the exploited and the oppressed the consciousness of their real condition, by wrenching them out of ignorance and resignation, by indicating to them a method, a strategy and the possibility or revolt–by making them revolutionaries.23
It would seem Rossanda is once again in agreement with Lazarus. For Lazarus, “the basis of Lenin’s thinking and of the Bolshevik mode of politics is the following statement: Proletarian politics is subject to condition…that it is subject to condition indicates that politics is expressive neither of social conditions nor…of history as Marx conceived of it.”24 Lazarus develops this point further, noting that “Lenin does not go so far as to abandon the connection between class and history but he makes it conditional on consciousness.”25 Lenin’s break nonetheless leads us to an inversion of a classically Marxian understanding of antagonism:
one cannot argue that it is antagonism that constitutes consciousness–it appears instead to be one of its propositions, the end product of a process subject to condition. Therefore, it is not antagonism that produces consciousness but consciousness that declares it…Consciousness is not so much a historical space as a political and prescriptive space.26
Now that we have seen what is new in Lenin, we are in a position to conclude this section with a turn toward our own exceptional present with the question of continuity and discontinuity in mind. To put what I have said in a slightly different way: since the circumstances of the present are always exceptional, the question of emancipation must always begin with a new, unbalanced equation. A limited notion of continuity may supply us with some notion of a constant, but it is what’s discontinuous, the formation of the new answer to the new equation, that we must always solve ourselves.
Let’s try to push this mathematical metaphor further. We might say beginnings are what occur on scratch paper until a solution is produced; it is the arrival at the answer that transforms what was a messy scrap into the site of an ingenious breakthrough. It is that site of the breakthrough that has the potential to support the lasting formation of the subject, which is composed by militants it at the same time exceeds. There are no guarantees, only a wager that can be made in correspondence with the upsurge of the masses, or to use Lenin’s term, stikhiinost.27
On what basis can we claim this site is necessarily the party? Even if we could say with certainty that the categories and sites of historical modes of politics will occur in the form of something called a party, then what are we left with if not another undefined variable? The matter is much more difficult than simply having an undefined variable, since this is precisely what we started with. Abstract reference to the party produces a figure that only gives the appearance of definition: what we are left with is a shadow cast on the whole situation that we confuse with the real.
To put it another way: at best, the party discussion amounts to a confusing and overwrought insistence on organizing to produce an emancipatory subject and the sites that give it consistency. But it does not say any more than this. In this scenario, insistence on the party does not give us any clues about which subjective thoughts, at which particular sites, could produce correct prescriptions to advance the emancipatory struggle in our exceptional moment. At its worst, the party discussion reduces the question of subjectivization to ideal organizational structures, procedures, and administration to build “states within states” and other unappealing creations. This amounts to a schematic application of blueprints from the past and, unsurprisingly, consistently fails to generate any support beyond the dozen people who were inspired by a particular episode in the history of the international communist movement.
Beyond the best and worst scenarios, I think there are additional dangers. Since our current socialist movement has only the faintest understanding of what capitalism is and that it must be abolished, mechanical calls for things like “democratic centralism” could very well become the means to reelecting progressive Democrats to save and manage capitalism in a crumbling two-party system. Why? Because if the subjective, emancipatory character is not a question we are concerned with–if politics is not in command–then the vicious existing order of exploitation and exclusion stands and depoliticized proceduralism reigns.
The Method of Saturation
We now have to make an abrupt turn to Sylvain Lazarus’s notion of “modes of politics.” Parkinson believes Lars Lih’s work on Lenin refutes Lazarus’s periodization of emancipatory sequences. Parkinson makes two claims: first, that Lazarus’s method provides no explanatory value because “the only thing that Lazarus’s narrative explains is why he thinks we need to abandon all the past concepts of Marxist politics and come up with something completely novel.” And second, that “the narrative Lazarus paints is simply not true. Lenin was not breaking with the political practice or conceptions of Marx and Engels in What Is To Be Done? and wasn’t making any kind of original argument.”
Let’s begin with the first claim: that Lazarus is simply projecting his pre-formed conclusions back onto history to discard all Marxist categories, and therefore his analysis has no value. As I have said, it was my intention to provoke a discussion by turning to Lazarus; I am glad to have the opportunity to discuss him further. While I do have reservations about his work, I think there is tremendous value in thinking through it.
It is telling that in Parkinson’s 336 word summary of Lazarus’s argument as found in “Lenin and the Party, 1902–November 1917,” the name of Lazarus’s method–saturation–is nowhere to be found. I believe Parkinson’s frustration with and suspicion of Lazarus’s analysis is symptomatic of the fact that he does not engage at all with Lazarus’s method. This is an obvious problem if you are going to refute an argument, but by no means do I think Parkinson is to blame. To be fair, the word “saturation” appears only once in Lazarus’s “Lenin and the Party” essay to which Parkinson refers. Had Parkinson read Lazarus’s “Can Politics be Thought in Interiority?,” often considered an introductory text, he may have run into similar troubles: the term only appears once in there too around the middle.28 Nevertheless, I am sure Parkinson pored over Lazarus’s “Lenin and the Party” text looking for its weakness and revised his summary of Lazarus’s argument extensively. Clearly, we need more opportunities for greater collective study to work through complicated issues, and in this regard Parkinson’s efforts are salutary. However, for efforts to be fruitful, they have to go beyond rejoinders to isolated points and actually engage with the underlying questions and categories of the text.
It is true that in his text on Lenin Lazarus dismisses “the category of revolution.” For Lazarus, “this dismissal is a complex business, for the closure by itself does not break historicism.”29 This point raises more questions than answers. What does Lazarus mean by “historicism”? Where is Lazarus’s argument ultimately taking us? Are we going to be forced to accept Lazarus’s dismissal of revolution?
Let’s work backward, taking the last question first. I do not think dismissing the category of revolution is necessary. It is sufficient to reject a static conception of revolution, and instead evaluate the concept in relation to the various circumstances in which it appears. Since Lazarus is attempting to make a very particular point about “the category of revolution,” I do not think engaging in a discussion of his method equates to full endorsement. In my opinion, the dismissal of the category of revolution is a highly controversial, though nonetheless interesting, idea to think through.
To give some idea of where Lazarus’s argument takes us, Lazarus will reject a purist framework that says we should reject the Bolshevik mode because it was intrinsically authoritarian and doomed to failure. For Lazarus:
the method of saturation consists in the re-examination, from within a closed mode, of the exact nature of protocols and processes of subjectivization that it proposed. We are then in a better position to identify what the statements of subjectivization were and the ever singular reason for their precariousness. The thesis of the cessation of a subjective category and that of the precariousness of politics (which goes hand in hand with the rarity of politics) are not supplanted by a thesis with regard to failure and a lack of subjectivization.30
Perhaps this passage gives us a sense of what Lazarus means by “closure.” Nevertheless, we can see clearly that the method of saturation has something to do with a “re-examination” to better understand the protocols, processes, prescriptions, and statements of subjectivization that compose a mode of politics. We see clearly that subjective categories are “precarious,” and that this precarity has something to do with its rarity. We see that the cessation of a subjective category does not authorize one to make the accusation of failure.
We must ask what Lazarus means by “historicism.” After a discussion of the Bolshevik mode–which I gave an account of in my “Beginnings” piece–we are left with Lazarus’s claim that “the lapsing of the party form, in its political efficacy, was thus complete after November 1917,” and “from this moment on we enter a historicist problematic of politics in which the key word becomes revolution.” So we see that “historicism” is a problematic, or theoretical framework, of politics that comes after the closure of the Bolshevik mode. The Bolshevik mode was a real emancipatory sequence whose sites were the party and the soviet. The party “lapsed,” which is to say that it was no longer a site of emancipatory politics, after its fusion with the state in November 1917, thus subordinating the soviets to its directions.31 Following this lapse, the term “revolution” is symptomatic of, or indicates, the “historicist problematic of politics.”
We have two questions now: why is the term revolution symptomatic of a historicist problematic of politics? And still, what is the historicist problematic of politics?
We have to pay close attention to what Lazarus means by revolution. “The term revolution is not a generic term denoting an insurrection against the established order, or a change in the structures of a state—and a state of things. It is on the contrary a singular term.” It is a “singular noun” that “constitutes the central category of acting consciousness” that belongs to what Lazarus calls the “revolutionary mode, the political sequence of the French Revolution.”32
So we see the problem clearly. For Lazarus, “revolution” is a singular term that belongs to a particular sequence that occurred from 1792-94 that had its own main theorist (Saint-Just) and sites of politics (the Jacobin Convention, the sans culottes, and the revolutionary army).33
For Lazarus, the issue with retaining the term “revolution” is that it was exhausted in 1794 with the closure of the French Revolution, what he calls the “revolutionary” mode of politics. In order to understand the specificity of this emancipatory sequence and how it came to an end, he interprets “revolution” as a category that is located within it and cannot simply be generalized to any political situation. What is at stake here is that a “historicist problematic of politics” does not conceive of singular conceptions of subjectivity as a relation of the real circumstances in which they emerge. If “revolution” is understood as a singular category of political thinking, then it is because the term has to do with the moment in which revolution bears “political capacity.”34 Otherwise, the term has been “captured” at its most fundamental level by the “historicist” notion that “marks out the state as the sole and essential issue at stake in politics.”35 In other words, if the category of revolution is captured by historicism, then revolution cannot pertain to a subjective decision that is thought in thought. The category of revolution, removed from singular context, thus becomes a category of a de-subjectivized statism. In this case, the category of revolution is deprived of its emancipatory power.
Let’s try to put all this more simply. If we agree that emancipation is our goal, we have to then confront the question of the emancipatory political subject – that is, what allows us to identify a politics that cannot be reduced to the objective conditions of the existing reality. We have to engage in the difficult task of identifying particular subjective occurrences as a thought of politics that relates to its objective circumstances but can also go beyond them and put the ordering regime into question. Otherwise, our thinking is dominated by “circulating” political ideas – that is, categories that were formed within specific situations which are generalized and circulated to entirely different situations. These circulating notions prevent us from understanding how categories specific to a historical mode of politics have been exhausted and are no longer appropriate to the current moment. In effect, we remain “captured” by the present state of things and unable to advance the subjective thoughts of our circumstances that are required to struggle for universal emancipation.
Now that we have discussed and defined the “historicist problematic of politics,” I believe we are in a position to see why Parkinson’s claim that Lazarus’s method contains no value and that it seeks to do away with all Marxist categories indicates a serious misunderstanding. While Lazarus may be interpreted as “breaking” with Marxism, the larger point is that he breaks with all other formalized disciplines, including social science and history, to construct his theory of politics. This move is interesting because even though he speaks of “dismissal,” he by no means suggests we discard Marx, Lenin, or Mao. His argument is that disciplines like history and social science have already done this since becoming captured by the historicist problematic. In other words, Lazarus argues that social science and history have significantly contributed to the “destitution and criminalization of the ‘revolutions’ of the twentieth century.” This criminalization of the revolutionary thought and practice of Marx, Lenin, and Mao becomes the basis for the “contemporary parliamentary” regime. This regime consists of “competitive capitalism, commodities, and money presented as voluntary choices of our freedom,” leaving us with “the collapse of thought, reduced to microeconomics and the philosophy of John Rawls, or rendered coextensive with the political philosophy of the rights of man in a senile appropriation of Kant.”36 As Lazarus further explains:
The fall of the Soviet Union and socialism has fully confirmed the good historicist conscience of parliamentarianism in its rightful place and considerably reinforced its arrogance, its violence, and its legitimacy, allowing it to treat any reservation and criticism, worse still any other project, as crazy and criminal.37
So we see that for Lazarus, the dismissal of revolution is not an attack on Marxism or emancipation. Rather, the act of dismissal is the basis for Lazarus’ radical critique of the disciplines of social science and history that have foreclosed on the possibility of organizing human life in any way beyond the depravity of our existing society. In other words, Lazarus does not proclaim the end of history or revolution: his point is that social science and history have already done this. Rather than argue for a renewal of social science or history, he attempts to overturn them completely to think about the possibility of emancipatory politics.
Let’s return to the passage that I began with about the dismissal of the category of revolution, this time in full:
This dismissal is a complex business, for the closure by itself does not break historicism. What is involved is in no way closing a previous stage and moving on to the following one (which is the case with historicism), but rather maintaining that any closure requires the re-examination of the era whose closure is to be pronounced. This is what I call saturation, a method that traces the subjective spaces of the categories of the sequence to be closed.38
Here we see the lone occurrence of “saturation” in the Lazarus essay that Parkinson focused on. As Lazarus clearly indicates, this word represents his very method, and is clearly fundamental to his analysis in which there are historical modes of politics.
As I have already suggested, saturation is defined as a method that attempts to understand the singular forms of subjectivity: “the exact nature of protocols and processes of subjectivization that is proposed.”39 To “prevent us from turning modes into subjective abstractions,” the subjective category is taken into account with its historical moment, thus giving us the historical modes of politics.40 The historical moment is essentially defined by Lazarus’s “category of historicity” which “renders the question of the state.”41 We see that the “closure” of these sequences, of identifying the moments in which the sites of this subjectivity breaks down, by no means gives us permission to “move on to the following one,” as this “moving on” is precisely what characterizes the historicist problematic which deprives the occurrence of subjectivity its power. In other words, Lazarus rejects a stagism that might put Marx, Lenin, and Mao into a particular kind of order, with one supplanting the next. For Lazarus, historical modes of thought have to be taken in their singularity.
Lazarus’s method of saturation means putting the instances of subjectivity in their correct place to be kept alive as relations of their moment so they can be “re-examined.” Thus, it is the method of saturation that, by way of this re-examining of “subjective spaces,” allows us to identify “the singularity of the politics at work” in a particular sequence. By putting the category of revolution in its correct place in the revolutionary mode and removing “from October the description of revolution,” Lenin and the Bolshevik mode are given back “its originality and its unprecedented political power—that of being the invention of modern politics.”42
So here we see that Lazarus’s method of saturation produces a schema of emancipatory sequences through careful study of singular subjectivity. This includes the re-examination of Marx, Lenin, and Mao within their particular spaces. Clearly, a re-examination of Marx, Lenin, and Mao cannot mean doing away with them. What is interesting to me is how this method opens the door to thinking about emancipatory formations that exist outside the historically contingent boundaries of the communist movement. It is in this sense that I agree very strongly with Mohandesi’s invocation of Althusser: that “it is not a matter of ‘expanding’ the existing politics, but of knowing how to listen to politics where it happens.”43
This is why I think Asad Haider is correct to argue that the Civil Rights Movement was an emancipatory sequence.44 As Marxists, I believe we need a theory that can account for events like the Montgomery bus boycott and sequences like the Civil Rights Movement in their own terms. Rather than continue to evaluate the degree of development of people’s consciousness in relation to a particular emancipatory thought, I think we should consider Lazarus’ founding axiom: people think.
Take the Montgomery bus boycott as just one example. Segregation on busses was both a particular form of oppression that was essentially a universal experience for Black people living in Montgomery. While Rosa Parks’s refusal to give up her seat was an event of rupture, she was by no means the first to engage in this act of refusal. What was the result? Roughly 40% of a city boycotted a primary mode of transportation for nine months. Their boycott put significant pressure on municipal revenues. The refusal of public transit disrupted white households to such an extent that white women who were not sympathetic to the boycott would pick up the Black women who worked in their homes and lie to their husbands about doing so. Those with cars participated in the organizing of ride-sharing programs to help the boycotters get around.45 All of this incredible organization happened, yet the notion of a political party is nowhere to be found. But there were clearly thought and correct prescriptions. There was clearly something we might call discipline or fidelity, some kind of active principle that drove people to such incredible lengths to oppose the existing society. How do we begin to account for this? We say that people think.
Refuting Refutation
However, even if we bracket the question of method, we have to address an empirical objection. Parkinson goes further than stating that Lazarus’s overall approach has no value. He claims it is categorically false. With reference to Lars Lih’s Lenin Rediscovered, Parkinson maintains that Lenin “wasn’t making any kind of original argument” in WITBD. The text apparently shows “an impressive exercise in aggressive unoriginality.”
Before we can address this criticism, we should first clarify that for Lazarus, WITBD marks the beginning of the Bolshevik mode: it is the beginning of a sequence that runs “from 1902 to October 1917. It was closed by the victory of the insurrection, the creation of the Soviet state, and the renaming of the Bolsheviks as the Communist Party in 1918.”46 By identifying the lapsing of the Bolshevik sites and seeing the successful insurrection as part of the closure of the Bolshevik mode, we separate the contradictions of socialist construction from the singular power of Lenin’s thought. For Lazarus, WITBD is the privileged text because “it bears on politics, its conditions and its thought”: “I think it is absolutely essential to separate radically the texts before the seizure of power from those of the period of the exercise of power.”47 If this is too radical a claim, then we can at least accept that despite the fact that we can find Lenin’s work in his Collected Works, this “by no way means that one can decide a priori that the theses in these thousands of texts are internally homogeneous and coherent. The existence of such a work does not mean continuity, homogeneity, unity.”48 In other words, if we understand the Bolshevik mode as a sequence that is guided by the subjective thought of Lenin over time, then we must see that Lenin’s thought must be heterogeneous. It would follow then that whatever relationship Lenin has to Marx and Kautsky – certainly two people that were significant influences on him – we cannot characterize this influence as static and unchanging.
Now to Parkinson’s criticism on the question of “originality.” If we take Parkinson literally–that Lenin “wasn’t making any kind of original argument”–then we have an extreme position that can be met with what might seem to be a counter-intuitive fact: that repetition is difference.
How can we illustrate this? We can say that even if the totality of Lenin’s political expression had been submitting quotations from the Collected Works of Marx and Engels in the original German to his opponents without any additional commentary–even if Lenin had randomly drawn pages of Marx’s actual manuscripts from a hat and nailed them to the doors of his rivals–this would still be in some sense “original,” though certainly bizarre and likely ineffective. Why? At the most immediate level, because simply selecting quotations from works which were frequently unfinished or abandoned to the “gnawing criticism of the mice,” which responded to changing historical circumstances and constantly went through developments and changes in their theoretical frameworks, would already represent a specific and contentious interpretation, and this interpretation would be an intervention into a scenario which was totally different from the one in which the works were originally written. But it is also because it is impossible to do the same thing twice.49 It is for this reason that we do not refer to the immortal science of Marxism-Marxism. But even if we did, the placement of the second Marxism would stillindicate a difference through its repetition. Indeed, the name “Marxism-Leninism” obviously indicates that “Leninism” is something separate from “Marxism,” thus requiring a hyphen to connect them.
To be fair to Parkinson, we might ask what else his statement could mean beyond a literal interpretation. While I have already shown that Parkinson has neglected to engage with the questions that Lazarus’s method sets out to address, I believe we can read Parkinson’s statements symptomatically to understand what seems to be at stake. I recognize that to this point I have used the term “symptomatic” a few times and should clarify what I mean in the current context. Here I am referring to Althusser’s method of reading that “divulges the undivulged event in the text.”50 Thus, I will attempt to analyze what is happening beneath the text.
Let’s take this statement from Parkinson for example: “What Lazarus is doing is projecting a radical break into history so as to justify that another radical break is necessary.” It would seem Parkinson has been forced into a situation where he must deny discontinuity and difference between Marx and Lenin. This seems to be confirmed by the fact that while the term “continuity” appears five times in his reply, the term “discontinuity” does not appear at all. Instead, we get five uses of the term “novelty.” What is particularly interesting about Parkinson’s usage of “novelty” is that while it is used once to mean the opposite of continuity (his assertion that history is a “flux of novelty and continuity”), novelty is primarily used to accuse Lazarus, and my usage of him, as falling into the fallacy of an “appeal to novelty.” Beyond the suppression of the term discontinuity, the term “difference” does not appear at all in Parkinson’s piece and the term “different” appears once. It is worth noting that Parkinson’s essay is 4,393 words long.
So we see that a symptomatic reading shows that discontinuity and difference is suppressed in Parkinson’s text. Our symptomatic reading of Parkinson’s thesis that Lenin “wasn’t making any kind of original argument” in WITBD produces another tension. We might express this additional tension in the form of a question: to what degree can one person’s thought be continuous with another’s through the reality of difference – historical and geographical difference, and even simply the difference between political actors? To answer this question requires locating what is divergent between the two thoughts. In other words, what does one think that the other does not? While it is certainly possible that Lazarus and myself have posed this question in a Saint-Justian register (“In a time of innovation, anything that is not new is pernicious”), I do not think investigating this question is in any way fallacious. Certainly Lazarus’s reading is challenging to those who are set in their commitments. But then I do not know what the point of study and discussion is if we assume we already have the answer.
So let’s put Parkinson’s literal thesis aside and adopt the question that we have constructed from his text about continuity and difference. Rather than simply read Parkinson against himself, we’ll see if we can support Lazarus’s claims with the arguments Parkinson has made to refute him.
Let’s begin with Lih. While Lih stresses that Lenin’s text is very much in-line with Erfurtian convention, he also clearly states that the fifth and final chapter of WITBD centers on Lenin’s original idea: that a unified Russian party can be constructed through “the nation-wide underground newspaper.” Lest I be accused of misinterpretation I will quote two passages from Lih’s Lenin Rediscovered in their entirety:
The newspaper plan was Lenin’s baby – his own original idea, one that he had laboured long and hard to bring to fruition. His ambitious dream that a nation-wide underground newspaper could galvanise Russian Social Democracy into effective and unified action is here supported with a great deal of ingenuity.51
As Liadov argues, the distinctive dilemma facing Russian Social Democracy was that separate underground organisations that had grown up locally with roots in the local worker milieu had to somehow come together to create central institutions. Lenin’s plan is an ingenious strategy for getting from A to B: from a series of independent local committees to a set of central institutions with enough legitimacy to provide genuine co-ordination (Lenin has this situation in mind when he talks about constructing the Party ‘from all directions’).52
While a national underground newspaper is less exciting than protracted people’s war in the countryside, it nevertheless proved effective and correct. I take this to be a clear indication of Lenin’s singular role in producing the party, which along with the soviet, the organizational form that was “discovered” starting from the 1905 revolution and was absolutely central for Lenin’s conception of politics in 1917, can be understood to be the sites of the Bolshevik mode of politics. By no means was the creation of the all-Russian newspaper an obvious strategy for building the party. This is precisely why Lenin poses the question as the heading of section B of this decisive chapter: “Can a newspaper be a collective organiser?” In Lih’s commentary on this section, he shows that Lenin faced stiff resistance to this idea from Nadezhdin despite their shared goals:
Both Lenin and Nadezhdin want to organise and lead the assault on the autocracy, both of them feel there is vast revolutionary potential in the narod, and both feel that local organisations are the weak links at present. Nadezhdin’s proposed scenario is: the local praktiki organise the people, the narod, for an assault on the autocracy. The activity ‘cultivates [vospitat]’ strong local organisations which are then in a position to unify the Party. But, argues Nedezhdin, an all-Russian newspaper is not much use for the crucial step of organising the narod, because of its inevitable distance from concrete local issues and its ‘writerism.’ In contrast, Lenin’s proposed scenario is: use an all-Russian newspaper to cultivate the local organisations and let these newly prepared leader/guides go out and organise the narod.53
Now that we can see there is an empirically verifiable new idea in WITBD that was essential to the formation of the party, we are brought to yet another decisive point. This point requires that we contest what may seem like a more modest thesis: that there is no meaningful difference between the political thought of Marx and Lenin. This more reasonable thesis is defeated if we seriously consider an argument that Parkinson himself presents. In reference to Marx and Lenin, Parkinson argues that “the break never really happened in the first place. Marx himself fought to form the workers’ party in his own time and struggled within it for programmatic clarity. His own life was an example of the merger formula in practice. Kautsky merely systematized it and Lenin applied it to Russian conditions.”
What is on the surface level an argument for continuity actually relies on identifying discontinuities. If there is no meaningful difference between Marx and Lenin in their political thought, if there is no break, then how could we put Marx, Kautsky, and Lenin into a series of neat successions? Marx lived the merger formula. Kautsky systematized it. Lenin applied it. These are three distinct moments, three different orientations towards the party in entirely different circumstances, and a continuity can only be identified through these differences.
In addition to this point about continuity and difference, we are left with a puzzling question: How can Marx and Lenin have no meaningful difference if Lenin’s politics is inconceivable without Kautsky’s systemization of Marx? Here we see a striking problem for Parkinson: if there is an argument that Lenin did not break with Marx on the question of politics in a decisive way, then this is precisely an argument that a Neo-Kautskyan position would not allow us to make. If Kautsky is a central figure in the development of Marxism, then Lenin must have a meaningful divergence in his thought from Marx since Lenin’s thought is dependent on Kautsky’s systemization of Marx. But if Marx and Lenin do not have a meaningful difference in their thought, this would only be because Kautsky’s thought was irrelevant to Lenin’s development. Thus, a precondition to refuting Lazarus’s claim that there is a break between Marx and Lenin is a rejection of Kautsky. Given that Parkinson and Cosmonaut seem committed to a neo-Erfurtain project, a rejection of Kautsky to show that Marx and Lenin have no meaningful difference in their thought would be a very strange position to take up.
Partisan Conclusions
I would like to close with a concrete proposal. This proposal is the product of reading Lazarus and re-examining Lenin and the Bolshevik mode of politics. I believe this proposal is both guided by Lenin’s subjective practices while also resistant to a mechanical imposition of historical forms of organization.
At a recent CPGB event, I was very heartened to see Parkinson advocate for Marxists to join DSA. I agree with Cosmonaut’s mission statement that we need more lively discussions and study outside of the academy. I believe that DSA is currently the best site for continued discussion, study, and experimentation for the Marxist left in the US. I say this knowing full well the organization’s limitations. While DSA can be a difficult place for a number of reasons, I do not think it can be abandoned.
The recent announcement of the Partisan project, a joint publication between San Francisco’s Red Star, NYC’s Emerge, Portland’s Red Caucus, and the Communist Caucus, is immensely encouraging. I welcome the creation of this publication as a step toward the formation of a consolidated Marxist bloc within DSA through which greater study, discussion, and collaboration within the organization can be pursued and relationships with organizations abroad can be deepend. While the caucus paradigm has been important to organizing and developing different tendencies, I believe the caucuses engaging in the Partisan project are correct to be working together more closely. I suggest this work be taken further so we can overcome the various points of unity within DSA that actually limit the degree to which our forces can be consolidated to combat liberals and wreckers within the organization. It seems to me that the notion of partisanship could be a particularly effective organizing principle in forming such a Marxist bloc. I am thinking here of Gavin Walker’s assertion that “the party means to choose a side, to uphold the concept of antagonism, to emphasize that antagonism cannot be avoided without denying the basic politicality of social life.”54
A diversity of views consolidated around core partisan commitments can be the basis for greater collective study, discussion, and experimentation. The Partisan project seems like the best existing vehicle to drive this consolidation, since it is already a formalized partnership between different tendencies. Crucially, it is still a new project that is presumably still figuring out its direction.
While I am unaffiliated with these caucuses and Partisan, I do want to make a recommendation. I propose that Partisan invite other national and local Marxist caucuses, as well as other Marxists and left publications inside and outside of DSA, including comrades abroad, to join the Partisan project. This could be initiated with scheduling an open meeting on Zoom. This open meeting could be called by the Partisan editorial collective to discuss recent articles that have been published in the Partisan journal and beyond with the goal of meeting regularly to develop and explore collective lines of inquiry and practical experimentation. All of this seems in line with the current language of the Partisan project.55
To be more prescriptive, I would suggest that this project concern itself with subjectivization, rather than “building the party.” In my opinion, the party makes it harder to see the tasks before us; the party locates the forms of organization we need now in the future. Without trying to be exhaustive, I believe we should be less concerned with programs and discipline, and more interested in formulating shared partisan commitments that are capable of supporting a diversity of views while fiercely opposing neutralizing tendencies that seek to collaborate with Democrats and generally maintain mass depoliticization. We should emphasize our current need for the collective study necessary to ask each other better questions, rather than attempt to educate others with inadequate answers. In my opinion, we should give up the notion of “leadership” and instead develop positions of partisanship. This includes combatting the liberal establishment’s call for unity–already the apparent motor of the Biden administration–and insist on division from within the sites where people think.
Extending the Partisan tendency would allow us to construct an organization of militants from within our existing 90k member organization of “official socialist organizers.” To do this without reference to the party would allow us to pursue the collective subjectivization required to construct and advance an emancipatory politics at a distance from the state. While confronting the state will be inevitable, we are currently not in any way equipped to do so. This includes sending our forces “behind enemy lines” to hold elected office or using the publicity of elections to build an organization. Nevermind the fact that an emancipatory politics cannot be reconciled with managing capitalist exploitation and ecological collapse, the prerequisite to utilizing the spectacle of elections and other political institutions, the prerequisite to entering the structure of so-called representative democracy, is a committed core of militants. This is something we simply do not have, but it is something we can create. To suggest otherwise–to say that we do not need a committed core or that one currently exists–is to argue that opportunism is a substitute for politics and that politics must be synonymous with power. Similarly, if our problem is fragmentation, then a growth in membership exacerbates this problem rather than solves it. Ultimately, we must stop attempting to validate our movement through electoral success and paper membership. We must construct our politics on our own terms. It is the fact that these terms cannot be reconciled with the existing order that makes them politics.
As I believe Parkinson said during his discussion with the CPGB, right now we do not need to go to the masses. This is counter-intuitive but it is true. The immediate task is consolidating our forces to determine our commitments so we can give people something new to think about: the thought of politics. And this politics will only be something worth thinking about if it says that everyone has the capacity to think and self-govern. That everyone has the capacity to decide and that we will come together as equals to do what we are constantly denied. We will make a decision.
Advancing the Partisan tendency in the present by consolidating a Marxist bloc seems the best available path to producing an emancipatory movement. It is an insistence on what is partisan, on what divides, that makes possible the collective decision to end capitalist exploitation, ecological armageddon, and mass depoliticization. We cannot wait for liberals to agree with us. We cannot wait for the streets to fill or for a sufficient number of socialists to take office. We cannot wait for exploratory discussions to produce a pre-party organization and for the pre-party organization to produce the party and for the party to develop a revolutionary consciousness in the masses so we can be in the correct position in a revolutionary situation to engage in the art of insurrection. We must organize now. We must consolidate now. We must advance our position from the premises already in existence. This begins with collectively posing the question of the subject in the present, rather than calling for a future party.
Amelia Davenport interviews philosopher of science and historian of cybernetics Andrew Pickering.
We live in a society without a future. Fewer people than ever believe in the lies pushed by corporate and government leaders of eternal growth and prosperity for all; it can’t be achieved on the basis of our current social structures. Even as we go to work and engage with our civil institutions, people increasingly simply do not believe in them. Apocalypse movies and books are incredibly popular. For instance, the television show The Walking Dead has reached 10 seasons and has two recent spin-off shows. We have impending climate disaster, stagnant wages, and the rise of what Marianne Williamson rightly calls “dark psychic forces,” in the form of movements like QAnon. For many, modernity has failed. We can keep on our current path, doubling down on its failures the way Margret Thatcher did with her neoliberal policies, out of blind faith that we just need to do more. We can put our faith in liberal democracy, technological innovation, bread and butter labor struggles, or struggles for representation within the system. Or, we can look to a different future; one where our current technology and philosophy merges with the best of the past, to produce a worthwhile synthesis.
To talk about this other future, and its implications for those of us who want a different world than the one we have, I (virtually) sat down with sociologist, historian, and philosopher Andrew Pickering. Andrew worked to excavate this other future in his book The Cybernetic Brain, while also contributing to the philosophy of science in The Mangle of Practice and Constructing Quarks. His historical and philosophical work covers the development and application of what he calls a “nonmodern” ontology. This framework is concerned with looking at how things in the world act in the world rather than the more prevalent focus on “enframing” things through fixed categories. This nonmodern ontology is the basis of cybernetics and a different kind of science (as proposed by Stephen Wolfram) than the one which dominates our academic, corporate, and military institutions.
Cybernetics, historically and contemporarily, has a place in all three of the above areas, but the original project was largely dismembered by the early 2000s. Although cybernetics’ origins in the military struggle against Nazi Germany and its role in the development of the Internet are relatively well known, less is known about its relationship to other important areas like ecology, eastern philosophy, and socialist construction. Pickering’s work is an invaluable contribution to a much broader discussion on organizational science and other ways of knowing beyond the paradigms we live under which have reached their limits.
Can you introduce yourself for our readers please?
I work in the history of science and technology, usually with a philosophical edge. My first book was Constructing Quarks, a history of particle physics; my latest is about cybernetics, The Cybernetic Brain. I feel like I’ve gone from one extreme to the other. Most of my career was in sociology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, but I came home to England in 2007 and now I’m an emeritus professor at Exeter University.
In The Cybernetic Brain, you describe cybernetics as having a sort of amateur character, but rather than a flaw, it seems to be a source of strength. Can you speak to that?
Disciplines shape the direction of travel. One reason for the grimness of American cybernetics was the urge to be ‘scientific’ (maths, logic, etc). I described the British cyberneticians as amateurs in the sense that there was no institutional apparatus holding them to account—so they could shoot off in all sorts of different directions, and sometimes it worked. More scope for imagination.
So you argue the imperatives the academy places on research limits the potential creativity in science? How might a young engineer or scientist interested in grappling with real social problems carve out a space to work on them?
There’s no magical answer, you just have to care. I could add that the amateurism of cybernetics was also a sociological problem. There were no jobs or obvious sources of funding for the second-generation cyberneticians. That’s one very mundane reason for the increasing marginalisation of cybernetics over the years.
What does it mean for cybernetics to be “counter-cultural”?
Modernity is basically dualist, implicitly or explicitly assuming that people and things are different in kind and need to be understood differently. Cybernetics is non-dualist, concerned with couplings between heterogeneous entities likeiike people and things. This is not just about ideas, but plays out in different practices. As documented in Cybernetic Brain, the affinities between cybernetics and the 60s counterculture were obvious: antipsychiatry, the Anti-University, explorations of consciousness, experimentation in personal and social relations, dynamic artworks.
Do you see any affinities between cybernetics and Non-European non-dualist philosophies? Certain strains of Hinduism, Buddhism and Nahua thought perhaps? Any direct influences?
Likewise what parallels and differences do you see between cybernetics and 19th/20th century holistic philosophies like Marxism or Kropotkin’s evolutionary anarchism? Do you buy claims that Marxist theorist Alexander Bogdanov influenced General Systems Theory with his Tektology?
The East: yes, sure, very many connections, though I only discovered many of them as I was finishing Cybernetic Brain. Eastern philosophy and spirituality is non-dualist leading to an obvious resonance with cybernetics (see above). Biographically, Stafford Beer was interested in India as a schoolboy and taught Tantric yoga in his later life. Grey Walter ’was a member of the Society for Psychical Research, very interested in altered states and strange performances. Ross Ashby declared himself a spiritualist and a time-worshipper. I think Gordon Pask was attracted to the doctrine of Universal Mind. Gregory Bateson worked with Alan Watts, one of the great popularisers of Buddhism in the west.The cybernetic worldview actually strikes me as Taoist.
I’ve always loved the Marx quote: ‘production creates a subject for the object as well as an object for the subject’—a beautiful expression of the non-dualist, non-modern coupling of people and things that cybernetics circled around. Beer had a lot of sympathy for Marx, but beyond that it’s hard to find much Marxist influence in cybernetics, or, indeed, any trace of Kropotkin or Bogdanov.
Why do you think cybernetics fractured into so many disciplines (control theory, bionics, Operational Research, etc)? Do you think it can create a second life outside official institutions?
In 1948, Norbert Wiener defined cybernetics as a kind of amalgam that included brain science, feedback engineering, information theory and digital computing. These were more or less held together in a series of interdisciplinary meetings (the Macy conferences, the Ratio Club, the Namur conferences), but later fell apart, reverting back to cybernetic vectors in individual disciplines. Cybernetics does still have a life outside the usual institutions. I run across traces of it in all sorts of places and, conversely, all sorts of people contact me about it.
I should emphasize that when I say ‘cybernetics’ I’m thinking about the branch of it that interests me especially, namely cybernetics as it developed in Britain in the work of Ross Ashby, Grey Walter, Stafford Beer, Gregory Bateson, and Gordon Pask.
Are there any particularly interesting projects or areas of research in cybernetics you know about?
Well, two areas interest me especially, both discussed further below. I’m just finishing a book on cybernetic approaches—though they don’t call themselves that—to the environment, approaches that seek to act with rather than on nature, to get along in the world rather than dominating it. The second area is cybernetic art, which I regard as a kind of ontological pedagogy, helping people to experienceexperfence the world as cybernetics understands it. (I got the idea of ontological pedagogy from Brian Eno, also mentioned below, though he’d never use that phrase.)
What kind of prospects do the organizational cybernetics of Stafford Beer have in future socialist experiments? Would you consider his project successful (insofar as it was cut short by the Pinochet Coup)?
A great thing about Stafford Beer was that his interest in democracy was not just a lofty aspiration but centered on forms of social organization. His Viable System Model and Syntegration are practical diagrams of how to organize collective decision-making in a minimally or non-hierarchical fashion. There are endless books and articles on why democracy is so great and why we need more of it, but very little, apart from Beer, on how to bring it down to earth. Project Cybersyn in Chile was a funny sort of success, inasmuch as (1) it encouraged Beer and others to think through further the politics of the Viable System Model; (2) it created a nucleus of organizational cyberneticians still active and influential today; and (3) of course, people are still interested in it, 50 years later. In practice, it hardly got started.
Can you explain the gist of the Viable System Model and Syntegration for our readers?
Beer thought that organizations needed to be ‘viable,’ meaning able to adapt to unforeseen changes. He therefore modelled his understanding of organization on the most adaptive system he could think of: the human brain and central nervous system. In the trademark version of the VSM, he divided the organization into five levels running from the board of directors to production units, and he insisted that couplings between levels should have a two-way give-and-take quality, not the top-down hierarchy of conventional organizations. He regarded the overall form of the VSM as the most democratic an organization could be while still remaining a single entity. Syntegration is a protocol for structuring non-hierarchic decision-making. Participants are assigned to the edges of a notional geometric figure (usually an icosahedron), with discussions alternating between the vertices at the ends of each edge. In this way arguments can echo around the figure in a decentred fashion. Beer thought of this as a sort of perfect democracy.
Against models of the mind that create a dichotomy between knowledge and lived reality, you say “knowledge is in the domain of practice”, what kind of implications does that have for you?
We’re brought up to think that knowledge comes first and somehow runs the show. I think knowledge is at most just a part of getting along in the world and is continually mangled in that process. One implication is that we can never know what will work til we’ve tried it.
What do you think of the value of AI like AlphaGo that is developed in a black box way? There is no real representation that we can extract. Its trained by trial and error with sample adversaries.
I think all knowledge is developed in a ‘black box way’ (see previous question). On the other hand, the basic function of neural nets is pattern recognition and I don’t think pattern recognition is a good model for human knowledge. We don’t walk around just pointing to things and saying ‘cat,’ ‘dog.’
Do you think developments in AI will have implications for socialists in terms of both what they’re up against and potential tools they can use?
Mainstream AI reinforces a very thin model of people as disembodied knowers, and modernity depends on this. Cybernetics began as brain science, but assumes a much denser and more interesting version of what people are like, which offers a basis for an important critique of and deviations from capital (see above on counter-culture).
So while AI attenuates people, when applied beyond narrow technical scopes, as it attempts to control behavior, cybernetics may prove to be a framework for escaping that kind of domination?
Oh yes! The subtitle of Cybernetic Brain is Sketches of Another Future. As I just said, the rational and logical brain is central to neoliberalism and the government of modernity, while the performative brain of cybernetics hangs together with all sorts of weird and wonderful nonmodern projects, as discussed in the book.
Do you see any potential for cybernetics in architecture and urban design in the future? Gordon Pask seems to have made a mark on the field.
Yes, of course. Pask was one of the leaders in thinking about adaptive architecture from the 1960s onwards, and is now a patron saint for some of the most interesting work in art and architecture.
What might a “Paskian” home or office building look like?
The key thing about cybernetic architecture would be that it is somehow reconfigurable in response to the actions of the people inhabiting and using it. I used to imagine waking up in the morning and trying to find out where the kitchen had gone. Pask’s prototypical contribution to architecture was the design of the Fun Palace, a big public building in London, conceived but not built in the early 1960s. The Fun Palace was a big shed with lots of moveable parts. Sometimes it would arrange itself to suit whatever people wanted to do (sports, education, politics, etc). Sometimes it would act to differently, to encourage people to find new things to do, new ways to be. The Pompidou Centre in Paris was modelled on the Fun Palace, but the dynamic elements were stripped away.
In what ways can cybernetics, ecology, and agriculture inform one another? Permaculture seems to have some shared principles with cybernetics despite generally being seen as “low tech”. Do you think there’s a possibility of a fusion between the approaches?
Gregory Bateson was one of the first to think cybernetically about ecology and the environment. His argument was that we need to think differently—non-dualistically—about the world we live in. I am more interested in practice—I think we need to act differently. From that angle, permaculture is quite cybernetic but not very exciting. I’ve been writing recently about a form of ‘natural farming’ developed in Japan by Masanobu Fukuoka, which, in effect, choreographs the agency of farmers, soil, plants, organisms in growing crops.
What are the key highlights of Fukuoka’s approach?
Wu wei—the Taoist concept of not-doing. What first struck me was the absence of plowing (and flooding in growing rice), but also not using chemicals as insecticides or fertilizers, not weeding, etc. Instead, the farmer times his or her actions to fit in with the shi of the situation, the propensity of things.
Can you explain what Hylozoism is? What kind of consequences do you think the concept has for changing our society’s relationship to the world?
Hylozoism (as I use the word, at least) is taking seriously the endless liveliness of the world. We live in a place we will never fully understand and that will always surprise us. We are not the center of creation; we are not in control; we are caught up in the flow of becoming. If we really grasped that we would be very different people and act very differently—modernity would be over.
Heinz von Foerster claimed that the basis of cybernetics is synthesis in contrast to modern Science’s basis in analysis. Would you agree with that characterization?
Kind of. A hallmark of conventional sciences like physics is ‘analysis’—breaking the world down into its smallest parts and understanding phenomena as built from the bottom-up. Cybernetics is not like that. Some cybernetic understandings instead emphasize ‘synthesis’—the idea that phenomena arise from systems or networks of interconnected parts. That’s how Gregory Bateson thought about the environment. On the other hand, the system aspect is much less salient in other cybernetic projects—Gordon Pask’s Fun Palace, for example.
I think it’s worth mentioning the time dimension of the contrast. Conventional sciences imagine the world to be built from fixed, unchanging entities (quarks, black holes, etc). Cybernetics—the branch of cybernetics that interests me—instead understands the world as a place of continual change in time, emergence, becoming.
Cybernetics is often seen as techno-fetishist but Norbert Wiener, Stafford Beer, and others were very critical of blind faith in technology. Why do you think there is this misperception and why do you think the founders of cybernetics were so skeptical of the power of technological development to solve social problems?
I’m not sure it is entirely a misperception. As I said at the start, many different threads are entangled in the history of cybernetics, including the sort of control engineering that is central to the automation of production, as well as the military devices Norbert Wiener worked on in World War II. That military connection is a sort of original sin for many people. Wiener himself refused to work for the military after WWII and warned of the dangers of automation, but I find it hard to think of any other examples. Beer had a rather uncritical vision of the ‘automatic factory’ in the early 1960s—a factory with no human workers at all. In Britain in those days the big danger of automation was seen to be the so-called ‘leisure problem.’ It’s hard to believe now, but the idea was that people would have nothing to do once their jobs had been automated so that the older generation would sit around all day watching the television while the young ones lived a life of delinquency (the plot of Clockwork Orange). The Fun Palace was conceived as an antidote to the leisure problem, a place where the population could recover the creativity that had been stifled by work, on the one hand, and the society of the spectacle on the other.
How do you think cybernetics impacted the Soviet Union and other East Bloc states? How was that different from its role in the Chilean model of socialism? Do you have any speculations as to why it failed to shape overall state policy despite having more institutional support than in the west?
There are many different threads and branches to the history of cybernetics. As I understand it, in the Soviet context ‘cybernetics’ meant the use of digital computers and computer simulations in economic planning. I’m not sure to what extent that succeeded; I think it was terribly overambitious, apart from anythiing else. One should consult the writings of scholars such as Slava Gerovitch, Francis Spufford and Benjamin Peters on this.
Perhaps the key difference between the Soviet and Chilean versions of cybernetics is that the former lacked the experimental aspect of the latter. Both featured computers and computer models, but while the Soviets aimed to optimise the performance of the economy, the aim of Cybersyn was to explore the economic environment and continually update plans and models in the light of what came back. Cybersyn-style experimentalism is the strand of cybernetics I have focussed on in my work.
If someone were to ask you what are the best resources for a non-specialist to learn about cybernetics and apply it to their own life, professional work, or political organizing, what would you tell them?
Yes, well . . . When I first became interested in cybernetics I tried to find popular or scholarly accounts that would help me get into it, and I failed. There wasn’t much that I could recommend then or now. My own solution was to go back to read the original writings of the cyberneticians, and that would still be a good tactic: try Grey Walter, The Living Brain (1953), Ross Ashby, Design for a Brain (1952) (what a title!), Gordon Pask, An Approach to Cybernetics (1961). Modesty forbids me recommending The Cybernetic Brain, but it’s a great story and not a bad read . . . Sketches of Another Future . . .
Social Conservative defenses of the nuclear family pose it as the default natural form of kinship and blame working-class immiseration on its decline. Cam Scott takes aim at such arguments, including those made by leftists.
As the deepening crises of capitalism impel greater numbers of people to the left, the communist movement gains in strength. These numerical gains, however, bring about another slew of contradictions, as false friends and ideological seductions appear in a myriad of intimate guises. In imperial core countries such as the United States, a new brand of majoritarian socialism, backed by common sense, gathers around a program of drastic, but ultimately serviceable, reforms to the capitalist system. Within this recent ferment, opportunism flourishes, and right-wing talking points proliferate with the advantage of simplicity.
A persistent example of rightism within a widening socialist spectrum would be Angela Nagle, who made her debut as a cultural critic with the 2017 publication of Kill All Normies, a remedial ethnography of the online right and its misogynist ressentiment. Perhaps the author’s sympathies were already clear from this early screed against “Tumblr-liberalism,” in which Nagle more or less describes a penchant for denunciation from a “campus left” as a self-fulfilling prophecy, goading its nemesis into existence by sheer wishful hyperbole. But it was only after Nagle published a piece in the conservative journal American Affairs entitled “The Left Case against Open Borders,” calling internationalists “the useful idiots of big business,” that she attracted the interest and agreement of pundits like Tucker Carlson, and a reputation as an “anti-woke” culture warrior. Most recently, Nagle has turned her attention to the family—more specifically, to its defense against a deviant left—for The Lamp, a journal of “consistent, undiluted Catholic orthodoxy.”
As a moral institution, the bourgeois family proves a remarkably effective figure with which to condense Nagle’s racial and sexual politics. Her polemic opens defensively, like so many conservative rallying cries, positioning the family as an institution under attack: “The call to abolish the family has recently been revived by cultural revolutionaries who are getting their way on a number of issues to which most people had never given any consideration.” Beyond the lurching grammar of this curious assertion and its uncertain timeline lurks a fantasy of persecution. Nagle warns her reader of a return; but from whence does this renewed demand originate? Without addressing the pre-history of this apparently perverse fad, Nagle proceeds to ask a follow-up question: “Why is it being revived now, when the family has already been in decline for decades?”
Here one perceives a sudden and deceptive shift, for there’s a wide difference between ‘abolition’ and ‘decline.’ Any revolutionary will profess a desire for the abolition of capitalism, at the same time as they will almost certainly understand that any interval in which capitalism finds itself in decline is sure to be a time of intense cruelty, when its most oppressive institutions reassert themselves. Historical structures, particularly those that ought to be transformed altogether, often enter into periods of decline because of their own contradictions. Decline has never sufficed for revolution in itself; more often, it names the intolerable stage of an untenable state.
Leaving aside this sleight, the question remains: who are the cultural revolutionaries behind this revival? In a scaremongering rollcall of family abolitionists, Nagle includes “anarchists,” Black Lives Matter, one defunct magazine, and apparently, by implication, the Ford Foundation. With this roster of variously wretched and connected nemeses, Nagle panders to a moral majority, for whom—to the extent that she still claims any left politics whatsoever—she is determined to play the useful idiot. Nonetheless, only an extremely online reader could follow Nagle’s paranoid synopsis, in which she digresses upon the short-lived Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone in Seattle, characterizing organizer Raz Simone as a “warlord” with the racist panache of a Fox News telecaster, and seethingly obsesses over the work of theorist Sophie Lewis on surrogacy.1
Nagle appears certain that the family, as a unit of social production and necessary (however often obliged, coercive) care, follows natural law, and can be extrapolated from biological descendence. The nuclear family, she asserts, is a cornerstone of “virtually every society hitherto observed in human history.” This is demonstrably false, as well-observed by many decidedly non-radical sociologists and anthropologists. But one needn’t heed any academic in particular, where innumerable cultures world-over call attention to the socially corrosive imposition of the nuclear family form on their own kinship practices and ways of belonging. Nagle is something far worse than incurious, however—she is a reactionary, and the willingness of some on the left to take her seriously warrants a materialist summary of the ground on which she intervenes.
The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State
In 1884, Friedrich Engels published The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, a historical excavation of the development of the family in consequence of changing relations of production. While clearly dated, the work is a cornerstone of Marxist and feminist theory, in which Engels argues that the patrilinear organization of the modern family develops with the advent of private property, in order that “children of undisputed paternity (might) come into their father’s property as his natural heirs.” It is worth quoting at greater length from the text:
Monogamous marriage comes on the scene as the subjugation of the one sex by the other; it announces a struggle between the sexes unknown throughout the whole previous prehistoric period. In an old unpublished manuscript, written by Marx and myself in 1846, I find the words: “The first division of labor is that between man and woman for the propagation of children.” And today I can add: The first class opposition that appears in history coincides with the development of the antagonism between man and woman in monogamous marriage, and the first class oppression coincides with that of the female sex by the male. Monogamous marriage was a great historical step forward; nevertheless, together with slavery and private wealth, it opens the period that has lasted until today in which every step forward is also relatively a step backward, in which prosperity and development for some are won through the misery and frustration of others. It is the cellular form of civilized society, in which the nature of the oppositions and contradictions fully active in that society can be already studied.
‘The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State’ remains a blow to patriarchal ideology to this day.
In Engels’ account, it isn’t only that the nuclear family appears at a particular moment in history as a requirement of capitalist accumulation. Rather, the patriarchal distribution of property in relation to a gendered division of labor preconfigures class society. Theorist Shulamith Firestone believes that “Engels has been given too much credit for these scattered recognitions,” and that his work perceives the “sexual substratum of the historical dialectic” only insofar as it aligns with his own principally economic concerns.2 But it is precisely this alignment to which Nagle and conservative socialists must be accountable. Any serious examination of the emergence and maintenance of capitalism has to account for the development of the nuclear family, and any thought that attempts to circumvent the historicity of this development by reference to natural advantage is unsuitable to the critique of capitalism.
Over the course of his influential work, Engels narrates the rise of institutionalized patrilineality as a means of transmitting private wealth from generation to generation; and the Marxist demand for the abolition of all rights of inheritance makes little sense without a firm historical grasp of the institutions by which unyielding, multi-generational ownership of the means of production is naturalized along patrilineal, and racial, lines. At the same time, socialist feminists such as Selma James and Silvia Federici have demonstrated the extent to which the family as a minimal unity was essential to the success of free labor, where women and children necessarily tend to a household owned by a man. This is not only a holdover from a feudal arrangement; rather, as John D’Emilio explains in his influential essay on gay identity formation, family members remain mutually dependent under the capitalist mode of production, even as the family ceases to function as a self-sufficient unit of production. As individuals struck out into the market, selling their labor power, new principles of social affiliation emerged. It is the decline of this mutual dependency that Nagle and other defenders of family values bemoan:
Robert Putnam’s famous work, for example, documents the steady decline of social trust, community, and cooperation in the same time period during which the family has declined, with loneliness and isolation increasing by every statistical measure to a greater extent now than at any point in American history.
One should ask, however, what else has taken place over the decades in question. Correlation does not imply causation, and as Nagle herself claims to have noticed, almost every collectivity has been threatened by massive deregulation over the last half-century, from organized labor to team bowling. This citation on its own is specious; if proletarianization erodes family values, it in no way follows that this erosion is the cause of other, related symptoms; nor does it follow that the nuclear family as a feudal vestige must be defended. Nagle disagrees:
In the Eighties, the wealth gap that opened up between the educated and less educated due to offshoring and the decline in opportunities for the working class is considered one of the primary causes of family break-ups by sociologists such as Andrew Cherlin, the author of Love’s Labour Lost: The Rise and Fall of the Working Class Family in America. While the working-class family suffered under these economic conditions, family stability increased among the educated. This disparity has in turn exacerbated the wealth gap further. The many demonstrable positive benefits of growing up with two parents are among the many evils of the past from which the working class and the less educated appear to have been liberated.
Moving swiftly past the sleight of hand by which Nagle smuggles her economic nationalism into her defense of the family, she again confuses the disaggregation of the family by economic pressure, and the pains of further isolation from this minimal unity, with an abolitionist program of affirmative affiliation. Cherlin uses an apparent “marriage gap” to index the economic gulf between classes, and before any normative interpretation, this observation—that a stable family structure strongly correlates with economic security—is easily reconcilable with much Marxist and abolitionist thinking on the family. As noted, the family is a miniature unit of production and wealth-sharing in an otherwise atomized market society. As a legal institution, the family functions as a firm, by which wealth is inherited and inequality is reproduced. Otherwise, the security afforded to working people by the family is carefully annotated within Marxist sociology and feminist thought, which describes the family as a site of occluded labor, where unpaid domestic service is expected: the waged worker doesn’t reproduce themself alone.
Making and Breaking Kin
This reply is far too abstract, however, where Nagle’s racist innuendo is so brazen. Nagle’s assertions about the benefits of growing up in a two-parent household are either banally true, concerning the material advantages of pooling multiple incomes or having the full-time attention of an unwaged, stay-at-home caregiver—or they partake of the deep stereotypes used to ideologize American economic policy. Bluntly, Nagle’s determinism has less to do with Karl Marx than with Daniel Moynihan, whose 1965 report on Black poverty in the United States famously pathologized its subjects, venturing a dismal verdict on Black men and single mothers. As Angela Davis writes:
According to the report’s thesis, the source of oppression was deeper than the racial discrimination that produced unemployment, shoddy housing, inadequate education and substandard medical care. The root of oppression was described as a ‘tangle of pathology’ created by the absence of male authority among Black people!3
In this document, Moynihan framed the adverse effects of poverty and discrimination as evidence of the incompatibility of Black “matriarchal” custom with European American social mores and progress. Moynihan’s description of this alternative family arrangement was in no way ennobling—rather, this comparative term functioned to naturalize the bourgeois nuclear family and its constitutive divisions of labor and to prioritize this organization as a requirement of economic advancement.
The Moynihan report sent shockwaves through popular culture, creating the now commonplace narrative of the dysfunctional black family.
In a historically sweeping, meta-psychoanalytic reading of the Moynihan Report, theorist Hortense J. Spillers explains its fatal logic and flawed terminology. The report, she says, purports to compare the “’white’ family, by implication, and the ‘Negro Family,’ by outright assertion, in a constant opposition of binary meanings … with neither past nor future, as tribal currents moving out of time.”4 These two family forms, insofar as they are binarized and reference only each other, lack historical substantiality themselves while operating within a racist imaginary that is itself a historical product. The synchronic Oedipality of Moynihan’s account evades the history of which it is a product. This supposed cultural difference only stands for failure and exclusion where the family is both an amenity and an institution of whiteness:
It seems clear, however, that ‘Family,’ as we practice and understand it ‘in the West’—the vertical transfer of a bloodline, of a patronymic, of titles and entitlements, of real estate and the prerogatives of ‘cold cash,’ from fathers to sons and in the supposedly free exchange of affectional ties between a male and a female of his choice—becomes the mythically revered privilege of a free and freed community.5
Any verdict as regards Black family life, Spillers suggests, is “impertinent” where enslaved people were forcibly dispersed from their own familial and social arrangements. Slavery is a system that makes kinship impossible, for if it remained so, Spillers explains, “property relations would be undermined, since the offspring would then ‘belong’ to a mother and a father.”6 Thus the Moynihan report’s improper speculation as to the obstinacy of a Black “matriarchal” culture suggests that Black women have been empowered to claim their children throughout history, on a model of inheritance that was systematically denied them.
As one can see, it isn’t simply that the nuclear family has outlived a once-upon-a-time utility, but that it has served continuously as an instrument of subjugation. Where many cultures were suppressed by European colonizers and prohibited access to the conceptual and material resources afforded by the family, others were disciplined into accepting its strictures over the course of forced assimilation. As Europe colonized North America, a patriarchal family unit proved particularly beneficial to the new economy, which in turn transformed vast territories shared by First Nations into private property. The family, as the maximum society permitted by this dispersal, doubled as a workforce; and the drive by individual households to maximize productive capacity changed the demography of North America. As Dakota scholar Kim TallBear explains:
Growing the white population through biologically reproductive heterosexual marriage—in addition to encouraging immigration from some places and not others—was crucial to settler-colonial nation-building … At the same time that the biologically reproductive monogamous white marriage and family were solidified as ideal and central to both US and Canadian nation building, Indigenous peoples who found themselves inside these two countries were being viciously restrained both conceptually and physically inside colonial borders and institutions that included residential schools, churches and missions all designed to “save the man and kill the Indian.”7
For all of her concern about child welfare and the breaking up of homes, Nagle remains ignorant of how the mandate of the nuclear family has been used to destroy other systems of multi-generational care. The seizure of Indigenous children by the state has been a permanent feature of colonization, from residential schooling to Sixties Scoop— the massive abduction of Indigenous children from their communities throughout the 1960s, and their adoption into middle-class settler families across North America. In Canada today, there are more Indigenous children in the custody of Child and Family Services than were placed in residential schools; which have been named an officially genocidal institution. These apprehensions have been similarly denounced by human rights advocates, and often proceed on the basis of discrimination against young, “single” parents or the greater role of older community members in care. On this point, TallBear quotes Cree-Métis feminist Kim Anderson: “Our traditional societies had been sustained by strong kin relations in which women had significant authority. There was no such thing as a single mother because Native women and their children lived and worked in extended kin networks.”8
Throughout her work, Marxist anthropologist Eleanor Leacock makes a forceful case for the historical subversion of the labor of women, and the consequent transformation of social relations, in the development of capitalism. Based on her time with the Innu people, and less fanciful accounts of Indigenous North American life and customs than Engels’ third-hand characterization of the Haudenosaunee, Leacock observes the even dispersal of rights and responsibilities among men and women, in a collective arrangement that considerably surpasses the narrowness of the nuclear family. In these societies, Leacock explains, “women retained control over the products of their labor. These were not alienated, and women’s production of clothing, shelter, and canoe covering gave them concomitant practical power and influence.”9
Having observed the economic equality of genders as independent parties to exchange in non-European societies, Leacock argues adamantly for a Marxist theory to account for the subordination of women in the emergence of the family, as a crucial prerequisite to the capitalist transformation of work into abstract labour and cooperative production into private property relations. For want of such an account, anthropologists and laypersons alike will repeat “the widespread normative ideal of men as household heads who provision dependent women and children reflects some human need or drive … (and) the unique and valued culture history and tradition of each Third World people will continue to be distorted, twisted to fit the interests of capitalist exploitation.”10
In arguing for a trans-historical family integrity, Nagle and her fellow moral crusaders implicitly condone a trans-historical—that is to say, natural—dependency of women upon men. This imputed dependency serves in turn as a firm foundation for a rigid conception of sex and gender, extrapolated from a division of labour and its concomitant system of property. Little wonder, then, that Nagle’s declensionist account of the American family fixates upon the project of queer liberation as a scene of turpitude. But even she may be surprised at certain reevaluations of the family from the moral right.
The Brooks Debate
In an improbable piece for The Atlantic, conservative commentator David Brooks narrates the rise and fall of the American family with considerably less dread than one might expect. Brooks notes the social supports offered by the “corporate” family structure of the nineteenth-century, where multiple households supported a family business; and the subsequent decline of multi-generational habitation with the rise of an urban proletariat throughout the twentieth-century. Citing a middle-class cult of “togetherness,” Brooks correctly regards the nuclear family as an idealization, or an abstraction from a statistical average. The 1950s, Brooks declares, “was a freakish historical moment when all of society conspired, wittingly and not, to obscure the essential fragility of the nuclear family.”
Brooks, who for our purposes appears a better vulgar Marxist than Nagle, periodizes the decline of the nuclear family; marking a fall in real wages through the 1970s and a correspondent uptake in competitive individualism, alongside real gains in mobility for women by the feminist movement. (In this observation, he’s a better dialectician than Nagle, too.) Today, Brooks says, American marriage and birth rates continue to fall and the nuclear family seems on its way out. But this is only half the story. America, Brooks continues, “now has two entirely different family regimes.” Here Brooks winds up veering eerily close to the prognosis of The Communist Manifesto, where Marx and Engels declare that the bourgeois family, based on private gain, exists only for the bourgeoisie, while immiserating conditions have already abolished the family among proletarians. Now Brooks:
Among the highly educated, family patterns are almost as stable as they were in the 1950s; among the less fortunate, family life is often utter chaos. There’s a reason for that divide: Affluent people have the resources to effectively buy extended family, in order to shore themselves up. Think of all the child-rearing labor affluent parents now buy that used to be done by extended kin: babysitting, professional child care, tutoring, coaching, therapy, expensive after-school programs.
Brooks, like Nagle, cites Cherlin’s “marriage gap,” arguing that marriage is not only an amenity but an instrument of wealth. For moralists like Brooks, however, economic fortunes are an index of social behavior, and a secondary cause at best; and he’s quick to seek out sociological determinations of economic disparity, reading rates of divorce and remarriage as harbingers of poverty and very nearly parroting the Moynihan report’s foreclosure of Black sociality. The practical difference is in policy, where Brooks proposes a deemphasis of family life in favor of extended and experimental kinship structures.
“The good news is that human beings adapt, even if politics are slow to do so. When one family form stops working, people cast about for something new—sometimes finding it in something very old,” writes Brooks. Were the source concealed, one might almost agree. Surely politics trails actual developments within the lives of people, and the ways in which those lives are organized is nothing if not changeable. As Leacock explains, human beings only demonstrate a “potential for social living which cultural traditions then supply with specific goals. The notions of private property, or the monogamous family, are culturally learned goals.”11
In a series of anthropological overtures, looking to pre-capitalist and communal cultures throughout history and across the globe, Brooks strives to remind his reader that “throughout most of human history, kinship was something you could create.” This is doubtlessly true; though the recommendation is scarcely credible in Brooks’ voice, as a frontier mentality underwrites his canvassing of human custom writ large. Moreover, his account of the American family, however economistic, fails to apprehend the relations of production that subtend his broader thesis. Nothing about Brooks’ perspective is exemplary, except for its part in a broad consensus that the family isn’t working as one might expect.
Six different types of kinship according to 19th-century anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan.
The Lawful Structure of Love
In a response to Brooks, as part of an online symposium about his essay hosted by the Institute for Family Studies, Cherlin accuses sentimentality: large extended families form a nostalgic backdrop to a bygone way of life, he says, but rarely figured in the everyday; and those who have “innovated” their families outside of the white mainstream rarely did so by choice, and struggle in the present to repair conventional family bonds. All told, Cherlin opines on the side of natural law:
But one must recognize that forged families have some limitations. These kinship ties are easier to break because they are voluntary; neither strong norms nor laws stand in the way of ending them. They also take continual work to maintain: Although your sister is always your sister and your spouse is always your spouse, your close friend is part of your forged family only as long as you and she actively support each other.
This is a popular, and for many definitive, defense of the family bond, which takes on an ethical character insofar as it is both immutable and received. And yet, in setting forth their materialist determination of the family, Marx and Engels faced down an incredibly sophisticated version of this prejudice, in an account that forms a basis for many liberal defenses of the family today.
In his 1820 work, Outlines of the Philosophy of Right, G.W.F. Hegel characterized the loving family as the “immediate substantiality of mind”—a paradigm of individuality in essential unity with an external group.12 But even Hegel’s portrayal of the family as a social metabolism requires a moment of departure from this cozy interdependence, where the individual’s life within this group attains its meaning only when the group begins to dissolve. At this point, the family member in question sets out into the world; not as an act of secession but succession, to marry and recommence the cycle by which the family is “completed”—or, why not, abolished.
The act of marriage, Hegel continues, is a willed arrangement by which family capital is exchanged: “The family, as person, has its real external existence in property; and it is only when this property takes the form of capital that it becomes the embodiment of the substantial personality of the family.”13 In this description, free exchange motivates exogenous marriage rite, which market relation Hegel imbues with spiritual necessity, defining marriage as an ethical exemplum—a necessarily loving and conscious unity between consenting individuals. This subjective accord finds its objective unity in a child, to which both parties are absolutely obliged. One could always choose to end a marriage; but this new, dependant relation is non-elective, and thus forms a natural basis for social responsibility and property alike, as the objectification of the family’s intersubjective will.
Children are not property themselves, Hegel continues, but must be raised at expense of the family’s common capital until they reach self-subsistence and are capable of holding property of their own; in which case the dissolution of the family is nearly complete, pending inheritance on the death of the father. Regarding this transaction, Hegel is clear: “the essence of inheritance is the transfer to private ownership of property which is in principle common.”14 Hegel notes that certain earlier ideas of inheritance favored appropriation by proximity, insofar as death transforms private property into wealth without an owner, and the family was simply nearest to the deceased. This, however, “disregards the nature of family relationship,” which necessitates the transmission of property from generation to generation as a principle of ethical life.
In spite of his idealism, Hegel grasps the essential relationship between the family and private property, and the difficulty of accounting for family bonds outside of the latter logic. Here we can perform a simple Marxist manoeuvre and turn Hegel on his big head; for a re-historicization of bourgeois right—which extrapolates private property relations from personal embodiment and filiation—suggests that the custodial family models itself on private property relations, much as the productive family is a staple institution of an earlier feudalism. Moreover, the ethico-legal function of marriage in Hegel’s system models the calling of the authorizing state—to assuage an antagonism immanent to society itself.
Certainly, Marx and Engels oppose this metaphysical scheme in their demand for the abolition of the right to inheritance; otherwise, the redistribution in advance of lineal wealth allocation. But can the normative social function of Hegel’s family extend beyond the bourgeois property relations that it otherwise models? What, if anything, of this order might remain after the abolition of bourgeois right and property?
The Logical Structure of Love
In their work, Hegel and the Logical Structure of Love, philosophers Toula Nicolacopoulos andGeorge Vassilacopoulos attempt to rewrite the account of familial love offered in the Philosophy of Right, in a manner that proves generative for a communist program of generalized care. As many rebuttals construe the family along similar lines to Hegel, as a timeless unit of ethical life, this work imagines other forms of objective solicitude, irrespective of sex, station, or relation.
Hegel’s description of familial love is based on an ideal unity, which may or may not be present in other intersubjective relationships. Altruism and solidarity, for example, needn’t recognize the particular individuality of the other; friendship proceeds without a public witness. If recognition is a crucial litmus, Nicolacopoulos andVassilacopoulos argue, then the dynamic individuality that Hegel prizes is even absent from single-parenting, where the love of a parent for a child is initially asymmetrical; the child doesn’t recognize its self-unity in the parent as yet, and must move from undifferentiated identity with the parent to an atomic individuality before doing so.15 This insight is less disturbing than it sounds at first; for it only rejects the prospect of an unmediated ethical relationship. As noted above, the “single parent” exists only with reference to a double standard—nobody parents alone.
But what of marriage, the lawful relationship that culminates in the family? It’s true that the conceptual sacrament of marriage in Hegel is heterosexual, monogamous, dyadic; but its ethical necessity consists in loving and mutual consent. In Origins of the Family, Engels submits this implausible ideal to historical scrutiny, staging a dialectic of recognition; for where bourgeois property relations obtain, “the marriage is conditioned by the class position of the parties and is to that extent always a marriage of convenience,” if not outright captivity. Elaborating on a theme from the Manifesto—that in many respects, the family has already been abolished for the proletariat—Engels ventures that real mutual love can only exist amid the formal equality of the oppressed:
Sex-love in the relationship with a woman becomes, and can only become, the real rule among the oppressed classes, which means today among the proletariat—whether this relation is officially sanctioned or not. But here all the foundations of typical monogamy are cleared away. Here there is no property, for the preservation and inheritance of which monogamy and male supremacy were established; hence there is no incentive to make this male supremacy effective … The proletarian family is therefore no longer monogamous in the strict sense, even where there is passionate love and firmest loyalty on both sides, and maybe all the blessings of religious and civil authority.
Engels offers a historically specific definition of monogamy, as descended from property relations, that precludes the requirement of free consent. In this way, the disintegration of the family as a unit of production actually conditions love; though of course there are many other power differentials between people in a concrete situation, and in a patriarchal society marriage remains a point of access to a family wage. But Engels’ amoral claim by no means construes proletarianization as emancipatory in itself. One century later, John D’Emilio would ambivalently observe the correlation between “free labor” and free sexual association in a landmark essay on capitalism and gay identity, in an analysis that patiently attends to the domestic constraints placed upon women in the same conjuncture. These key materialist texts illuminate the difficulty of describing the family in terms of affective ties, and the impossibility of extrapolating affection from its legal sanction.
Nicolacopoulos andVassilacopoulos understand the necessity of monogamy for Hegel, as “immediate exclusive individuality,” to denote the singularity of the beloved, where “exclusivity” denotes the relationship between a beloved’s attributes and their rare person, rather than a pact pertaining to exclusive use.16 This ingenious reading opens away from legalistic monogamy, affording ethical status to all manner of potentially concurrent relationships, but fails by the standard of property, where the institution of marriage presides over the distribution of economic benefit. But where the matter of family capital is concerned, Nicolacopoulos andVassilacopoulos point out that Hegel defines family property as property that the family holds in common, that cannot be used by any family member in the capacity of the atomic individual. Truthfully, Nagle’s defense of the family as predictive of economic security, following Cherlin, is little more than a defense of this common property, to which empirical banality one must ultimately assent; it is better to have some wealth than none. But to expand the remit of the family beyond present recognition would surely change the meaning of collective wealth as well, including any protocol against the alienation of family property.
Most importantly, “although Hegel repeatedly invokes the biological family … he does not conflate this with the source of the ethical bond between parents and their children,” Nicolacopoulos andVassilacopoulos and explain. Rather, “the ethically significant relationship between parents and children concerns the ‘second or spiritual birth of the children,’” namely their upbringing.17 Parenting for Hegel is ethically imbued because it has the negative aim of raising children out of instinct into the freedom of personality, beyond which Hegel offers no instructions or prescriptions as to the cultural situation or particulars of parenting. Thus the Hegelian approach of Nicolacopoulos andVassilacopoulos “can recognise people sharing responsibility for raising children with a wider circle of intimate others. What matters for the ethical significance of parenting is whether or not those raising the children are related to each other and/or to the children through their mutual loving feeling.”18
Against heteronormativity—and an inconsequential homonormativity sourced from the reifications of queer theory, which seeks a universal figure of desire in historically proscribed behaviors—Nicolacopoulos andVassilacopoulos recommend a social fabric of “multiple loving forms.” Where Cherlin’s churlishness is concerned, it suffices to say that his thinking is entirely constrained by a society based on generalized self-interest and competition. One needn’t believe in an alternative, nor in the possibility of change; but then one needn’t be a Marxist, either.
Old Habits
In 1920, Soviet feminist Alexandra Kollontai wrote extensively on the family for the journal Komunistka, or ‘The Woman Communist.’ Kollontai stages the question directly:
Will the family continue to exist under communism? Will the family remain in the same form? These questions are troubling many women of the working class and worrying their menfolk as well. Life is changing before our very eyes; old habits and customs are dying out, and the whole life of the proletarian family is developing in a way that is new and unfamiliar and, in the eyes of some, “bizarre”.19
Noting the oppression of women within the traditional family, who are obliged to domestic labor and increasingly subject to the necessity of waged work outside the household, Kollontai observes that the family as a unit of production is disaggregated by capitalist expansion: “The circumstances that held the family together no longer exist. The family is ceasing to be necessary either to its members or to the nation as a whole.”20 Kollontai doesn’t simplistically bemoan this decline or superfluity, in which the family appears as an archaic form of organizing and disciplining labor, but presses further in observation of the historical character of this organization. The family is principally charged with education, in the Russian case; rather than expand this function, Kollontai wonders if it can’t be relieved of this task as well, envisioning the end of housework and domestic hierarchy.
As the individual household ceases to be productive, greater demands are to be made of the state; and Kollontai describes this movement in the precise terms of socialist transition. “Just as housework withers away, so the obligations of parents to their children wither away gradually until finally society assumes the full responsibility.”21 Kollontai’s subsequent proposals for dividing childcare in the service of “solidarity, comradeship, mutual help and loyalty to the collective,” and to overcome the strictures of “the old family, narrow and petty, where the parents quarrel and are only interested in their own offspring,” would surely scandalize readers of The Lamp every bit as much as Nagle’s lurid paraphrase of more recent, ultraleft opinion against the family.22
Yet Kollontai deals with the two facets or temporalities of family transformation that Nagle conflates—abolition and decline—as part of a movement: “There is no escaping the fact: the old type of family has had its day. The family is withering away not because it is being forcibly destroyed by the state, but because the family is ceasing to be a necessity.”23 To this way of thinking, the family is not destroyed by voluntarist deviancy, but in the same way that any culture opens itself to change in an orthodox Marxist description—insofar as its private remit enters into a contradiction with increasingly socialized production. Kollontai consoles the caring parent:
Working mothers have no need to be alarmed; communists are not intending to take children away from their parents or to tear the baby from the breast of its mother, and neither are they planning to take violent measures to destroy the family. No such thing! The aims of communist society are quite different. Communist society sees that the old type of family is breaking up, and that all the old pillars which supported the family as a social unit are being removed: the domestic economy is dying, and working-class parents are unable to take care of their children or provide them with sustenance and education. Parents and children suffer equally from this situation.24
In a recent summary of Marxist thinking on the family, Alyson Escalante reminds the reader that Kollontai, like Marx, “points to capitalism’s own destruction of the family among the workers” as proletarianization proceeds apace. Moreover, Escalante notes, Kollontai writes to counsel the necessity of change, not a program of abolition per se, where capitalism has already weakened, and perhaps destroyed, the productive substrate of the family. Because of this insight, Kollontai’s hundred-year-old words can help one to imagine an objective and affective future for innumerably many loving, fighting forms. As Escalante writes:
In the face of the capitalist destruction of the role of the family, (Kollontai) simultaneously argues that attempts to hold on to the old family are both doomed and also naturalize women’s subordination, while simultaneously insisting that a new type of family is possible. She does not tell concerned workers that they must suck it up, that their fears are reactionary and that they must embrace a world without the family. Rather, she preserves the language of the family but reinterprets it into a collectivist, that is to say, a communist, version of the family. The old family is dead, capitalism has killed it, and so we have been invited to build and define a new family.
Family Borders
This is a powerful reply, if not to Nagle and to Brooks themselves, then to the conditions that they differently, and partially, address. While Brooks’ thought experiment attempts to recompose the American social fabric after the fashion of a corporation, he fares considerably better than Nagle in observing the necessity of change. Faced with the specter of collectivism, Nagle taunts: “but where will the village, this hypothetical replacement network of solidarity that will recreate and even improve upon the intense loyalty and selfless caregiving of parents and their children in the family unit come from?” One might suggest that this network will necessarily come from those parents and children whose fortunes require a total transformation of society, but that would be only too logical. As Nagle refuses to see communal supersession as a solution to, rather than a cause of, the objective decline of the bourgeois family, she misapprehends the bearing of its discontents. The support network that Nagle disparages is already immanent to the crisis of the family—which is only ever a crisis of capitalism, shored at home—and her language of “replacement” alludes to a different set of anxieties altogether.
Nagle’s unsuitable nostalgia for a recent period of social cohesion, shored in the miniature family as a bulwark against social chaos, is perhaps too typical of the American left, though her conservatism is near-total:
Nobody would have believed just a few months ago that, say, abolishing the police would become a tenet of mainstream American liberalism. Even rightwing politicians have been cowed more or less overnight into publicly agreeing with things beyond the wildest dreams of the most radical anarchist of just a few years ago. If the abolition of the family is the next demand of our successful cultural revolutionaries, it is easy to imagine how the legal infrastructure undergirding could be dismantled; its moral and cultural foundations are already vulnerable old structures just waiting to be tipped over. Who exactly is going to stop them?
Who, “exactly,” does this call intend to summon to the family’s defense? Nagle’s culture war proceeds on many fronts, and it’s certainly handy that she can’t turn in a 1500-word screed on the family without calling the police. But an inventory of her various journalistic stunts paints a fairly clear picture of her ideology. The cause of the American family has facilitated racial and sexual panic for more than a century, and unspecified concern for the health of “the family” as a reproductive project has long been a polite expression of anxiety over racial purity and demographics.
In The Left Case against Open Borders, an execrable piece from 2018, Nagle punches left again. Here Nagle argues that “open borders radicalism ultimately benefits the elites within the most powerful countries in the world, further disempowers organized labor, robs the developing world of desperately needed professionals, and turns workers against workers.” Almost clause for clause, this sentence does the work that it attributes to irrational radicals, pitting workers against one another to the benefit of the ruling class. At any border, the contradiction between capital and labor means a relative porosity for capital flows and increased brutality and scrutiny for migrants; and an international division of labor is responsible for the domestic fortunes of a country’s working class in any case.25 “But the Left need not take my word for it,” Nagle gloats. “Just ask Karl Marx, whose position on immigration would get him banished from the modern Left.”
Nagle gives ideological ammunition to the anti-immigration right on Tucker Carlson.
Nagle’s staggeringly incorrect reading of Marx quotes from a letter regarding the division of English proletarians and Irish proletarians: “The ordinary English worker hates the Irish worker as a competitor who lowers his standard of life. In relation to the Irish worker he regards himself as a member of the ruling nation and consequently he becomes a tool of the English aristocrats and capitalists against Ireland, thus strengthening their domination over himself,” she recites. It’s difficult to enumerate the errors in thinking here. Where Marx sees a process of ethnic scapegoating, obscuring the true contradiction of labor and capital, Nagle chooses to see a contradiction between national interests, and her own racism is clear from her abuse of this citation. In the letter quoted above, Marx goes on to compare this divisive scenario to the enmity of “poor whites” for former slaves in the United States, anticipating W.E.B. Dubois’ description of whiteness as a “psychological wage,” preventing white workers from practicing solidarity by conferring public and legal benefits beyond simple remuneration.
It’s worth noting that there’s almost no chance that Nagle was familiar with Marx’s argumentation on this matter before seeking recourse to his authority. Rather than cite Marx’s 1870 correspondence with Sigfrid Meyer and August Vogt, in which this passage appears, Nagle’s bibliography points to an article by David L. Wilson, in which he quotes from Marx’s letter in order to make a very different argument. Wilson notes Marx’s assertion that Irish immigration precipitated a reduction in English workers’ wages—before theorizing the ideological utility of this national division for the ruling class, one might add—but is careful to note how racism and xenophobia create the climate in which migrant laborers face lower pay and worse conditions of work, putatively forcing wages down. The problem, Wilson concludes, is exploitation, not immigration.
Nagle’s national chauvinism is intimately related to her defense of the family; for closed borders and private families are two means of attempting to ensure the homogeneity and mores of a population. In Kill All Normies, Nagle portrays the online “alt-right” as a negation of the family-values conservatism evolved by pundits such as Pat Buchanan in the 1990s, which characterization both exaggerates the novelty of this phenomenon and paves the way for a rehabilitation of family values from the left. But as Sophie Bjork-James shows in her research into white nationalist web forums, the family is a central occupation, even a primary concern, of today’s online and alternative right:
Over the past few decades, changes in economic conditions and gender norms have created a proliferation of new family forms, further destabilizing the nuclear family—changes that effectively reduce the space of patriarchal power and disrupt the perceived division between personal and economic life … These conservative and racist activists fight to restore a model of the family, race, nation, and economy that has lost its hegemonic status.26
Bjork-James ventures a determination that eludes Nagle, where the family functions for its staunchest defenders as a fantastic unity beyond the economy and state, despite its historical existence as an expression of both. Ironically, it’s because of Nagle’s crude “class reductionism” that her economic analysis bottoms out at the usual racist canards—“cheap illegal labour,” “single parents,” and so on. Nagle attributes declining economic fortunes to the same scapegoats as the right—once an ethnographic quarry, now her preferred company.
Fordism and the Family Wage
For all of her dalliances with the right, it’s crucial to note that Nagle’s merely reflexive arguments have far more rigorous, if rigorously reactionary, precedent on the chauvinist left. One could look to sociologist Wolfgang Streeck, for example, whose grim assessment of the postwar welfare state was influential in the 2018 formation of Aufstehen, a German political coalition of “the materialist left, not the moral left.” Like Nagle, Streeck has a record of xenophobic invective, accusing refugee and asylum policy of serving elite interests by importing a foreign labor reserve.27 Streeck takes a special interest in the family, too—annotating its transformation after the decline of American industrial occupation in the postwar era, and the relative safety net extending from the factory to the father to his dependents. According to Streeck:
The social and family structure that the standard employment relationship had once underwritten has itself dissolved in a process of truly revolutionary change. In fact, it appears that the Fordist family was replaced by a flexible family in much the same way as Fordist employment was replaced by flexible employment, during the same period and also all across the Western world.28
Such an account offers the periodizing detail that Nagle omits. But Streeck also laments the disappearance of jobs from core capitalist countries at the same time as he divides the working class by national origin; thus his account of family “decline” is both tellingly chauvinistic, and elucidating in overlay. According to Streeck, “intensified commodification of labor, in particular the increased labor market participation of women, and the de-institutionalization of family relations,” are key factors in the decline of fertility in advanced industrial countries and not others.29 Political scientist Melinda Cooper calls attention to the apparent sexism of this description:
It was feminism, after all, that first challenged the legal and institutional forms of the Fordist family by encouraging women to seek an independent wage on a par with men and transforming marriage from a long-term, noncontractual obligation into a contract that could be dissolved at will. In so doing, feminists (whom he imagines as middle class) robbed women (whom he imagines as working class) of the economic security that came from marriage to a Fordist worker. By undermining the idea that men should be paid wages high enough to care for a wife and children, feminism helped managers to generalize the norm of precarious employment and workplace flexibility, eventually compromising the security of all workers.30
One ought to note the parallels between Streeck’s account of the flexibilized family and his characterization of the welfare state destabilized by rapid demographic change, in which he describes European immigration policy as an executive adjustment to wages and employment opportunities for domestic workers, enacted after the progressive desires of “liberal-cosmopolitans.” In broad strokes, Streeck’s sketch of the post-Fordist dissolution of the family implies an infiltration of the national economy from within—a domestication of the national economy transpiring in tandem with the global operators of deindustrialization. As with his disparaging remarks about the role of multiculturalism in economic deregulation, Streeck’s paranoia leads him to non-dynamically assert the leading role of culture in the family’s transformation:
Cultural change—the spread of non-standard forms of social life—may have paved the way for economic and institutional change, in particular the rise of non-standard forms of employment, with the deregulation of society as a forerunner to the deregulation of the economy … Clearly, the decisive development in this context was the mass entry of women into paid employment, which eventually came to be celebrated across the political spectrum as a long-overdue liberation from servitude in the feudal village of the patriarchal family. Especially for the liberal wing of the rapidly growing feminist movement, the associated increase in economic uncertainty and social instability appeared to be a price worth paying for what was seen as secular social progress.31
Streeck glancingly counters his own hypothesis with a more substantive claim—that a decline in real wages might have forced more members of a given household into the workforce in order to support their middle-class standard of living, for one—but doesn’t really attempt to mediate these two perspectives. As one should understand, social movements do not emerge under conditions of the participants’ choosing; and the abatement of the family organization isn’t a revenge fantasy of its feminized discontents. By Streeck’s account, incorrigible women en masse appear too covetous of precarity to recognize that they are about to destroy the patriarchal family wage, of which they are the foremost beneficiaries.
In the post-Fordist Genesis of Streeck’s simplifications, it seems inconceivable that women could make political demands upon capital, for liberation from the household, or for a subsequent social wage. Notably then, even though his own politics offer no greater destination than the recent past, Streeck already sees this post-Fordist deregulation of the family culminating in a paradoxical redistribution of responsibility. Streeck observes a trend toward the socialization of reproduction in a number of countries, including free childcare and wages for stay-at-home caregivers—and compares this to a shameful situation in the United States, where single parents have fewer real supports than any core capitalist country.
New Poor Law
When Nagle cites the outcomes of single parenting in North America without any reference to the paucity of available resources, she imputes the violence of the state to proletarian parents, exaggerating and denying their agency all at once. This is a fairly standard manoeuvre, that construes systemic obstacles as failings of personal morality. In its perfected form, this ideology makes moral demonstration into a condition of social support; which is, in broad strokes, exactly how the American welfare system was rearticulated during periods of neoliberal restructuring. Thus, as Melinda Cooper explains, broad neoliberal reforms in the period following the collapse of the Fordist paradigm sought to resuscitate a kind of poor law, emphasizing marital responsibility and familial relation as crucial institutions of economic security, apart from the welfare state.
This powerful ideology justifies the low participation of the United States government in social assistance programs, as observed by Streeck. But for all of his cultural fixations, Streeck’s empirical comparison between American and European data sets omits crucial mediations of data. The crisis of the 1970s was a crisis of the racial state, writes theorist M. Jacqui Alexander, in which “poverty had to be colored black”; and the reconstructed welfare system that emerged from this decade further entrenched this expectation. This era’s debates fixated on the issue of single parents, “as a way to animate state policy and mobilize a manufactured popular memory that made (black) poverty the causal derivative of welfare.”32
Cooper observes the special scrutiny reserved for federal assistance programs like Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), which was accused by the conservative left and the right alike of “undermining the American family and contributing to the problem of inflation.”33 This program comprised an important arm of the new poor law, establishing a state chaperone of ruthless prurience—“man-in-the-house” rules, for example, permitted random home inspection to determine whether or not a program participant was in a sexual relationship with a man. If they were, Cooper explains, benefits were revoked, as the male houseguest was deemed “a proper substitute for the paternal function of the state.”34 In this respect, the new liberal welfare regime and its flagship programs functioned as the precise obverse of the Fordist family wage system—presuming male attendance to betoken financial stability. In this lawful arrangement, Alexander says, the state assumes the position of “white fathers to blackness,” recalling the “memory of secret yet licit white paternity under slavery and its possible vengeful reemergence at a different historical moment.”35
As both Cooper and Alexander discuss, the AFDC program proved especially controversial for its perceived benefit to single Black mothers at public expense, even though it was relatively inexpensive among social security programs and the majority of recipients were white. Where the paternal function of the state is concerned, Alexander diagnoses a conservative moralism according to which “it was an irresponsibly absent black masculinity that made the potential conjugal couple incomplete and shifted the fiduciary obligations of the private patriarch onto the public patriarch, thereby forcing an uncomfortable and unwanted paternity onto the white public patriarch.”36 With this dynamic in mind, conservative attacks on single parents appear less a matter of superior morality than an ironic disputation of responsibility, historical and present.
Democrats and Republicans alike accused the AFDC program of fostering dependence on state support, even though benefits had declined precipitously since 1970; and AFDC was replaced with the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act (PRWORA) by President Bill Clinton in 1996. PRWORA replaced AFDC with a highly conditional program called Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF), offering benefits at approximately one-third of the poverty level; and proliferating conditions that were found to contravene human rights, even permitting states to withhold benefits from mothers who can’t identify the biological father of their children. In this respect, Cooper suggests, PRWORA is both precedent-setting and paradoxical—using the conservative sacrament of the heterosexual family to pursue a radical neoliberal agenda of atomized personal responsibility.
The “ideological blackening of welfare,” Alexander says, also adversely affects other racialized groups. She calls attention to the “ideological proximity between PRWORA (and) the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act also of 1996,” which work at once to “make welfare, labor, and immigration deeply intertwined.” Here Alexander follows the work of Payal Banerjee:
Banerjee argues that the state derived support for PRWORA from the widely held belief that “illegal” and “legal” immigrants relied on state public support and that prohibiting immigrants from receiving public assistance would act as a powerful deterrence to immigration. As a result, both “legal” immigrants (noncitizens) and “illegal” immigrants became ineligible for certain provisions under PRWORA.37
Weighing the Anchor
This complicated saga of targeted racism, massive deregulation, and misogynist stricture forms the basis for Nagle’s assertions as to the non-viability of single-parent homes and the apparently poor outcomes of non-patriarchal care. These are the family values that Nagle defends—a mercenary hodge-podge of spiritualized economic precepts, essentialized market relations, phobic prohibitions, and paranoia. It goes without saying that families of all kinds are places of intense care and devotion, among many other things; but that guise is ultimately incidental to Nagle’s rallying cry, where she knows very well that it is not being criticized by Marxist feminists for any of those occasional features. As noted above, the ethical dimension of family life is itself contingent, consisting of a collective life that can even help to envision its historical transformation.
The family is not only a historical phenomenon, subject to alteration; but as Bjork-James notes, can also serve as “an anchor of stability in a time of increasing economic and social change.”38 At its most constructive, Nagle’s argument tends to nostalgia for mid-century conditions of capital accumulation, in which sweeping and systemic exclusion procured limited security for a politically enfranchised section of the working class and their preordained dependents. This is a Trojan horse for racism and xenophobia—MAGA with medicare, to be blunt.
Where the family is an obvious synecdoche of nation, Nagle’s convenient narrative of its decline dovetails with her isolationism. This is a unified position, and a fascist one; such talking points have always traveled by way of a superficial socialist concern, and aren’t difficult to spot in their enthusiasms and vendettas. One might even ask whether Nagle herself is worth the trouble. But arguments like hers prove oddly persuasive in certain socialist circles. The Class Unity subgrouping of the DSA, who profess a materialist Marxist politics, enthusiastically promoted Nagle’s article on social media, for example; and her prejudices mirror those of a “traditional left,” characterized by Donald Parkinson as “socially conservative, economically leftist.” As the meaningless abstraction of “populism” tempts a back and forth traffic between these conventional poles, it is more vital than ever to insist upon the Marxist legacy of abolition; “to find the new world through criticism of the old one,” one might say. For communists don’t rally to the recent, nor the distant, past. Our real descendancy is in a better future—one in which family chauvinism, white supremacy, and class privilege are given to history in their entirety.
Is the UK Labour Party a possible vehicle for working-class emancipation? Alfie Hancox argues in the negative, posing the regroupment of communists independent of the Labour Party as an alternative.
‘The belief in the effective transformation of the Labour Party into an instrument of socialist policies is the most crippling of all illusions to which socialists in Britain have been prone.’
Ralph Miliband, ‘Moving On’ (1976)
Regroupment on the left
After five years of being swept up in Corbyn mania, socialists in Britain are faced with a rather dismal balance sheet. In retrospect a defining feature of the Labour left revival was its relentless draining of grassroots activist energies in the service of a permanent campaign footing, along with a collective biting of tongues while Labour councils across the country continued to implement cruel austerity measures. Corbyn’s perpetual compromises, not least on the issues of NATO imperialism and racist immigration controls, were blithely accepted on pragmatic grounds as sacrifices necessary for electoral success. A year has now passed since Labour’s general election defeat and the party’s subsequent reversion to Blairism, but parliamentary maneuvering continues to occupy center stage in socialist discourse. At a time of accelerating inequality which demands working-class unity against the capitalist onslaught, the left remains aimless and fragmented. There’s been worryingly little organized opposition to Tory wage freezes, the crackdown on trade union rights, and cuts to the health and social care sectors, which have had lethal consequences in the viral pandemic context.
There has nevertheless been some shakeup and rethinking within the radical left milieu, facilitated by the exoduses in 2013 in response to sexual violence cover-ups in the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and the Socialist Party (formerly Militant), as well as smaller splits from several nominally-‘Communist’ groups from 2016, in response to extreme anti-LGBTI+ attitudes (especially transphobia), national chauvinism and abuse apologia. The reconfigurations have led to networks of socialists which tend to be younger and socially progressive, committed to organizational democracy, disillusioned with the monomania of electoral ultimatums, and more attuned to the realities of working-class precarity. It is these issues that comprise the most significant fault lines within the left, rather than the old sectarian divisions inherited from the Cold War era. Among the new formations are Revolutionary Socialism in the 21st Century (rs21), formed by ex-members of the SWP, which defines itself as ‘a socialist, feminist and anti-racist organization’; Red Fightback, a non-dogmatic and intersectional communist (‘Marxist-Leninist’) group; and Anti*Capitalist Resistance (a recent merger of Socialist Resistance and Mutiny). There is also a more diffuse extra-parliamentary left including collectives organizing against carceral and border violence, small trade unions representing precarious workers and migrants, and organizations in the autonomist and left-communist traditions like Angry Workers of the World.
In the immediate term, there is thus a need to crystallize through dialogue and pragmatic organizational unity a forward-thinking revolutionary socialist movement, rather than endlessly seeking, from a position of relative weakness, diplomatic fronts with reformist leaders in which political differences are submerged. The last thing that’s needed is more of the ramshackle broad left coalitions (the Socialist Labour Party, Respect, Socialist Alliance, Left Unity etc.) which have invariably sought to ‘replace New Labourism with one or another version of old Labourism.’ Conversely, attempting to construct in splendid isolation new ‘vanguard parties’, based on fetishized notions of ideological unity in lieu of mass roots, will simply reproduce the old harmful patterns of sectarianism, abuse, and political irrelevancy. There may be scope for the progressive socialist networks to coalesce around a minimum revolutionary programme, purposefully differentiated from the moderate state-capitalist policies of the Labour left – i.e., a reassertion of the traditional communist united front approach.
In North America, the Marxist Center ‘base building’ initiative, for all its limitations (some of which are discussed below), has succeeded in bringing together socialists from an unprecedented number of tendencies, and represents ‘a serious commitment to centering revolutionary praxis above leftist infighting and bickering.’ The embryonic British Marxist Centre should aspire to fulfil a similar function. It can draw inspiration from the example of the foundation of the original Communist Party of Great Britain one hundred years ago, which brought together surprisingly divergent forces including syndicalists, ‘left communists’, anti-colonial militants and British Bolsheviks, with the shared aim of approaching a critical mass of committed revolutionaries necessary to have a qualitative impact on the class balance of forces in the country. As Sai Englert stresses in his thoughtful ‘Notes on Organisation’, any attempted construction of a new socialist unity must simultaneously acknowledge ‘that rejecting the old divisions that have plagued the socialist left will not make important political differences disappear … the aim should be to achieve practical unity wherever possible, while maintaining political tension and disagreement.’
We’re at a historical flashpoint with world capitalism slipping ever deeper into systemic crisis, which makes it all the more pressing to re-establish a strategic orientation towards building counter-power and planting deep roots in working-class communities, rather than hedging all our bets on the next election cycle. Conceptual clarity on the specific nature and role of the ‘left-wing’ of reformism is critical, in light of the organizational setbacks that occurred during the Corbyn years. The euphoria at the surprise 2015 breach in the neoliberal status quo meant there was no sober assessment of the politics of the Labour left, and the moderating role it has historically played in relation to working-class struggle. Of specific relevance for the Marxist Centre project, it is also important to avoid the temptation of viewing community organizing as in itself some kind of shortcut out of the pitfalls of gradualism and opportunism. Political lines of demarcation remain necessary to prevent base building from becoming just another avenue of front work for reformist politicians, a problem which has arisen in the US context in relation to the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).
The terminal sickness of Labourism
Decades of normalized despair under neoliberal hegemony blindsided the extra-parliamentary left to the treachery of social democracy, or what the New Left theorist Ralph Miliband referred to as the ‘sickness of Labourism’.1 As Carson Rainham notes in The Lever, ‘the energy poured into the Labour Party since 2015 by the radical and liberal Left felt necessary but only because it arose from the desperate state of the left-wing politics in Britain which still lacks any semblance of political power or organisational method.’ The ‘cult of non-personality’ that grew around Corbyn obscured how he was propelled to the Labour leadership upon a groundswell of existing anti-austerity sentiment, which was subsequently demobilized by being redirected into electoralism. Even Plan C, a libertarian-communist organization, ended up encouraging its supporters to cast their votes for old Labour-style state ‘socialism’. The myopic obsession with parliamentary activity lingers on, with groups like Socialist Appeal calling for continued agitation inside Labour to get Corbyn reinstated as an MP. The prevailing view that we must abstain from criticizing Corbynism for fear of strengthening the Labour right is precisely the outlook that maintains the British left’s eternal farce, of assuming the end goal of a ‘socialist’ Labour government justifies the most self-defeating means: permanent class collaborationism, equivocations and lesser evil-ism, betrayal of proletarian internationalism, and the erasure of ‘left’ reformists’ longstanding occupation as unwitting agents of the ruling class.
We need to be clear that Labour has never been a ‘centrist’ party like the German Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD), straddling a line between reform and revolution. Lenin correctly recognized Labour as a ‘thoroughly bourgeois party, because, although made up of workers, it is led by reactionaries, and the worst kind of reactionaries at that, who act quite in the spirit of the bourgeoisie’. A common mistake among British Marxists is to extrapolate Lenin’s point in “Left-Wing” Communism: An Infantile Disorder about the need for communists to agitate within conservative trade unions – which entails combating ‘spontaneous’ economism and sectionalism – as applicable to engagement with reformist politicalparties. Trade union officials are at one remove from the immediate class struggle, and under pressure from the rank-and-file can be forced leftwards and sometimes even be brought into confrontation with Labour governments (as during the Winter of Discontent in 1978-9). The Labour Party, however, was from its inception twice removed from struggles at the point of production.2
Strikers during the Winter of Discontent
‘Socialist’ politicians in Labour do not represent the working class; rather they have traditionally attempted to mediate between the conservative trade union bureaucracy and the bourgeois establishment. They remain committed to class compromise under the rubric of ‘national unity’, and do not side with workers against the capitalist state – the ruling-class dictatorship – which is why, despite their frequent radical phraseology and apparent conflict with Labour’s right wing (especially when the party is in opposition), they are routinely complicit in the crushing of independent working-class action.
The Labour left is loyal firstly to the Labour Party, which is in turn loyal to capitalism. Left Labourites have no coherent ideology of their own; they live ‘in a dream-world in which block vote millions take the place of the flesh and blood millions outside the conference chamber and committee room, in which the radical policy resolution substitutes for the real struggle of class against class.’3 As Mike Macnair puts it: ‘The Labour left, to the extent that it remains within the circle of nationalism, legalism and class-collaboration, is umbilically tied to the right.’ The rapid adaption of the early Labour Party to the disciplinary operations of the bourgeois parliamentary arena effectively defanged an entire generation of radical trade union leaders. Upon being elected as Labour MPs, the Red Clydesiders who had once ‘struck terror in the hearts of the upper class’ displayed ‘but the palest reflection of that earlier militancy.’ Likewise, the Labour MP George Lansbury who made a name for himself in the early 1920s as the hero of municipal socialism, defying the punitive government attacks on poverty relief, had by 1925 put his hopes in electoral action and called off a strike by council workers.4
Marxists defending their political dependence on the Labour Party will inevitably refer to how in 1920 Lenin instructed the newly-formed British Communist Party (CPGB) to attempt to affiliate with Labour. However, this was a strictly tactical gambit, based on Lenin’s (rather questionable) assessment that Labour was still a flexible political federation, in which revolutionaries would retain ‘sufficient freedom to write that certain leaders of the Labour Party are traitors … [and] agents of the bourgeoisie in the working-class movement.’ In the ten decades since Lenin’s death, a defining feature of most ‘revolutionary’ groups in Britain laying claim to Leninist doctrine has been their replacement of Lenin’s tactical formulation with its ensemble of caveats, by a pursuit of strategic alliances with the ‘left-wing’ of (often governing) reformism, in which key political differences are submerged. Lenin had recognized the need to continually expose the brand of opportunists who ‘flaunt before the workers’ high-sounding phrases about recognizing revolution but as far as deeds are concerned go no farther than adopting a purely reformist attitude’; emphasizing how the capitalist class ‘needs hirelings who enjoy the trust of a section of the working class, whitewash and prettify the bourgeoisie with talk about the reformist path being possible, throw dust in the eyes of the people by such talk, and divert the people from revolution’. This duplicity was exemplified by the Labour pioneer (and Corbyn’s idol) Keir Hardie, a self-professed Marxist who could talk left when it suited, for instance claiming his party was ‘revolutionary in the fullest sense of the word’, while simultaneously reassuring the capitalists by stating that ‘it is a degradation of the Socialist movement to drag it down to the level of a mere struggle for supremacy between two contending factions. We don’t want “class conscious” Socialists.’
After Lenin’s death in early 1924, Leon Trotsky elaborated the analysis of ‘left-wing’ reformism in his writings on the ‘Problems of the British Labour Movement’ (1925-6). Trotsky was able to pinpoint how Labour lefts ‘reflect the lethargy of the British working class’, converting workers’ emancipatory aspirations into ‘left phrases of opposition’ that place no real obligations on the pro-capitalist reformers. He explained that the Labour left functions as ‘a sort of safety valve for the radical mood of the masses’, by channelling ‘the political feebleness of the awakening masses into an ideological mish-mash. They represent the expression of a shift but also its brake.’ This moderating role was apparent during the climax of interwar class struggle in Britain: the General Strike of 1926, in which several million workers struck for nine days, withstanding acute state repression, only to be sold out by the Labour and Trades Union Council (TUC) leaderships. While communists played a central role in the Councils of Action at the local level, the CPGB, under the direction of the Communist International (Comintern), made a crucial strategic error in failing to expose the reactionary role of the reformist leaders. This was despite the fact that the 1924 Labour administration had paved the way for the ruling-class reaction, by setting in motion the Emergency Powers Act enabling the government to use troops against workers.
The CPGB’s muted criticism of Labour was based on its desire not to alienate TUC and Labour Party ‘lefts’ like George Hicks and Albert Purcell. However, when the Labour Party headquarters spearheaded the anti-communist witch hunts in 1924-5 the foremost left-wing Labour politicians, including Hicks and Purcell, had sided with the right and backed the expulsion of CPGB members, while Lansbury denounced communist sympathizers as ‘wreckers’. It was only in the aftermath of the Strike that the communists issued a declaration pointing out that the left reformists ‘were only with the miners while it was a question of phrases and resolutions … When the crisis came they ran away.’5 The experience demonstrated that Trotsky was correct to recognize that ‘in certain circumstances, the Labour left was actually more dangerous than the out and out imperialists such as [Ramsay] MacDonald and [J.H.] Thomas in that they misled the workers, providing left cover for the right only to betray the workers equally badly when the crunch came.’ Trotsky also predicted that if the Labour left did get into power it would immediately capitulate to the right, and indeed when Lansbury inherited the Labour leadership in 1932 he pursued a policy of ‘MacDonaldism without MacDonald’, and blocked proposals that Labour-controlled councils refuse to enforce the draconian Means Test on unemployment relief.6
It must be said, however, that in subsequent years Trotsky’s analysis of Labour became rather confused. His politics were overdetermined by his break with the Comintern, after which he often mirrored its policy vacillations. During the Third Period (1928-35) when the Comintern’s foreign policy veered sharply to the left, Trotsky lurched in the other direction and eventually began claiming Labour was not a ‘bourgeois labour party’ (as Lenin argued) but ‘a workers’ party’ which should be ‘critically supported’ (including against the Communist Party!)because, unlike the governing Tories, it ‘represented the working class masses’.7 Trotsky also, like Lenin, harboured millenarian expectations that a general crisis of capitalism would engender the rapid demise of reformism, and as early as 1926 he claimed that ‘Much less time will be needed to turn the Labour Party into a revolutionary one than was necessary to create it’ – in hindsight a ludicrous statement that has nevertheless been seized upon by Trotskyist advocates of ‘entryism’ in Labour like Rob Sewell. Typically, the surviving Labourphilic Trotskyist parties today produce very selective agitational materials omitting ‘any of Trotsky’s extremely sharp polemics with his supporters on when to leave reformist organizations and of the opportunism of those who did not.’
The lack of conceptual clarity on the nature of reformism expressed by both the post-Lenin Comintern and Trotsky has contributed to endless confusion about the true role of the Labour left. The existing Communist Party of Britain (a splinter group that survived the original CPGB’s self-liquidation in 1991) laments the historical ‘predominance of the social-democratic trend over the socialist trend’ within Labour, with the latter supposedly being hostile to monopoly capitalism.8 Likewise, Socialist Appeal, a successor to the Militant Tendency, states there are ‘two Labour parties’ and that ‘The Labour Party’s right-wing always considered the Marxist left a threat to their pro-capitalist policies … It is no accident that Stafford Cripps [one of the founders of Tribune] was expelled at the Labour Party conference in 1938, and Aneurin Bevan had the whip withdrawn’. The reality of this supposed ‘Marxist left’ was less than heroic. Immediately after the Second World War the new Labour government-imposed wage constraints and efficiency measures in the nationalised industries, provoking a series of industrial disputes. From 1945-51, Labour declared two states emergency and on 18 different occasions deployed troops to take over strikers’ jobs. In secret, the government also revived the Supply and Transport Organisation, used two decades earlier to undermine the General Strike, with the active involvement of prominent ‘left wingers’ including both Cripps and Bevan, who sat on the Ministerial Emergencies Committee in 1945, and was briefly Minister of Labour in 1951. Even the champion of ‘democratic socialism’, Tony Benn, oversaw the closure of 48 power stations in defiance of the National Union of Mineworkers when he was Energy Minister in 1977-6 (he also signed a deal to extract uranium from apartheid-ruled Namibia).9 When it comes to the treachery of reformists it is useless to talk of ‘betrayal’. As the above historical overview has demonstrated, when it comes down to the crunch even the most ‘left-wing’ Labour leaders will sacrifice the working class on the altar of ‘party unity’ or ‘the national interest’.
Winston Churchill and Clement Attlee, 1945.
Miliband once observed that ‘people on the left who have set out with the intention of transforming the Labour Party have more often than not ended up being transformed by it’. For example, the post-war Communist Party dropped its programme for working-class revolution in favor of seeking ‘progressive’ parliamentary coalitions, and by the 1970s it had relegated its role to that of a think tank for the class-collaborationist policies associated with the Labour left’s ‘Alternative Economic Strategy’. Another extreme example of adaptation to reformism was the entryist Militant Tendency, which pursued a ‘legal revolution’ in the form of full nationalization. Entryism was born in the 1930s as a pragmatic response to the extreme weakness of Trotsky’s supporters vis-à-vis both communist and centrist parties in Europe. It was only meant to be a temporary measure carried out until the Trotskyists found their feet, although a desperate Trotsky certainly exaggerated the prospects for success. In its pursuance of ‘deep entryism’, Militant became politically indistinguishable from the Labour left whose coattails it clung to, and infamously wound up condemning oppressed communities fighting the police and army in the north of Ireland and Britain’s inner cities. As Trotsky put it, ‘even in the minds of “socialists” the fetishism of bourgeois legality [forms] that ideal inner policeman.’
A more subtle approach to Labour was pursued by the Socialist Workers Party, which adopted an ‘open party’ perspective that in theory preserved its political independence. However, the SWP’s economistic obsession with ‘workers’ self-activity’, inherited from its early pre-party years, created a tendency to gloss over ‘the political problem of how to break the hold that Labourism has over workers, and implies that bigger and better strikes and demonstrations alone will provide the solution to the question of working-class consciousness.’10 The SWP’s permanent slogan ‘vote Labour without illusions’ is rather more passive than Lenin’s call to support Labour ‘as a rope supports a hanging man’ (or the communist Tommy Jackson’s promise to take Labour leaders by the hand ‘as a preliminary to taking them by the throat’). In practice, the SWP has sought endless broad fronts with Labour lefts (e.g. the Anti-Nazi League and Stop the War Coalition) in which its approach is to ‘fudge differences by diplomatic agreement to windy generalities, [or] self-censor and thereby pretend that there is more agreement than there actually is.’ Donald Parkinson identifies a similar trend in North America in relation to joint campaigns between Leninist groups like the Party for Socialism and Liberation, and the reformist Democratic Socialists. Likewise, one of the founders of the US Marxist Center has complained of a tendency among the affiliated organisations to ‘just focus on local shit’ and avoid political struggle against the hapless left-liberal leaders of the DSA.11
There is of course still a need for socialists to have some engagement with mass reformist organisations, and we can’t ignore the fact that Labour ‘could recruit hundreds of thousands of working-class members over a period of five years without ever turning these into active members’. But any such engagement must be aimed at crystallizing, not diluting, an unofficial Left Wing movement opposed to the social-democratic opportunism of the scab ‘soft’ left leaders like Corbyn and McDonnell. As Trotsky explained, ‘One must seek a way to the reformist masses not through the favor of their leaders, but against the leaders, because opportunist leaders represent not the masses but merely their backwardness, their servile instincts and, finally, their confusion.’ It is a shame that British Trotskyists have generally failed to heed their prophet’s own sound advice, that: ‘The Communist Party can prepare itself for the leading role only by a ruthless criticismof all the leading staff of the British labour movement and only by a day-to-day exposure of its conservative, anti-proletarian, imperialist, monarchist and lackeyish role in all spheres of social life and the class movement.’
Five wasted years
Since 2015, the left has been hamstrung by its failure to recall the painful lessons learned under old Labour. Corbyn’s ‘radicalism’ was severely overstated by both supporters and detractors, given that Labour had won office on more left-wing platforms in the 1970s. Corbynomics essentially presented a programme for capitalist growth based on technological innovation, with John McDonnell invoking ‘the Entrepreneurial State’ and ‘socialism with an iPad’. McDonnell quickly dropped his initial talk of nationalizing all the main banks, in favor of ‘people’s quantitative easing’ through a single state investment bank which, as Marxist economist Michael Roberts points out, is hardly extreme when there is already a European Investment Bank, a Nordic Investment Bank and many others, ‘all capitalised by states or groups of states for the purpose of financing mandated projects by borrowing in the capital markets’. McDonnell’s industrial strategy took its lead from ‘such uncompromisingly capitalist regimes as Singapore, South Korea, Japan – and most of all, the United States.’12 In any case state ownership does not amount to workers’ control, and neither does putting a few workers on company boards to involve them in the planning of their own exploitation.
Throughout the Labour Party’s history, a reinvigorated left-wing has served the function of successfully drawing disillusioned radicals back into the party’s orbit. To many ‘revolutionary’ socialists, the Labour left appears as a ‘bridge’ to the party’s rank-and-file; but as Miliband wrote the bridge ‘does not, so to speak, open out leftwards but rightwards’. The Bevanite politician Richard Crossman admitted the illusory character of democratic pressure on Labour, explaining how the party ‘required militants, politically conscious socialists to do the work of organizing the constituencies’; hence the utility of a party constitution ‘which maintained their enthusiasm by apparently creating a full party democracy while excluding them from effective power’.13 The same drive to assimilate and defang characterized Corbynism, with its notion of creating a ‘social movement party’ or what McDonnell described as ‘going into government together’. The grassroots anti-austerity campaigns that arose post-2010 were undermined when young socialists once again flocked into a Labour Party intent on implementing cuts at the council level. Corbyn supporters mourning the ‘inexplicable’ defeat of Laura Pidcock, the ‘anti-austerity’ candidate for North West Durham, at the 2019 general election were presumably unaware that as councillor for Northumberland she voted for £36m worth of spending cuts in 2017-20. In the 1980s left-wing Labour councils at least offered some resistance with their policy of ‘three noes’ – no cuts, no rent rises, no rate rises – although they were soon enough called to heel by Neil Kinnock.
Labour appropriates and disposes of activists’ demands as proves convenient: the Labour Campaign for Free Movement poured its efforts into securing a nonbinding resolution and was subsequently ‘betrayed’ by the 2019 manifesto, as was the campaign to get Labour to commit to net-zero carbon emissions by 2030. Corbynism even reinforced the passivity of left-wing trade unions like the FBU, which re-capitulated to their traditional ‘don’t rock the boat and ruin Labour’s electoral chances’ posture. Englert notes that investing all hopes and energies into the Labour left ‘leads activists all around us to pessimisms, demobilization, and/or – much worse – a moralistic sense of superiority that dismisses the very people on which the success of our struggles depends, as inherently reactionary, backward, or unorganizable.’ This accounts for the emotive social media displays of Labour canvassers lashing out at working-class voters in the wake of the December 2019 election.
The idea of a ‘democratic grassroots’ undergirding Corbynism was also frequently overstated. Momentum, led (and to a considerable extent owned) by millionaire-property developer Jon Lansman, was always relatively small, fractured and politically moderate. As Tom Blackburn writes in New Socialist, after ‘four-and-a-half years of acrid civil war, both the structures of the [Labour Party] and the political composition of the Parliamentary Labour Party remain essentially unchanged’; mirroring the failure of Benn’s Campaign for Labour Party Democracy in the 1970s, the error of which was to assume there was ever a possibility of democratization ‘in and against’ the capitalist state machine. As for the post-Lansman factions, they have all fallen into the trap of viewing ‘the causes of defeat in cultural or organizational issues, and refuse to acknowledge the real failure – a series of political errors’. The Forward Momentum splinter has committed to democratising a Labour Party in which the iron grip of Keir Starmer’s right-wing has been consolidated. As Richard Seymour points out, if what these groups want is a genuinely democratic Labour Party ‘they will be trying to bring about something that has never before existed, and which goes against all the dominant tendencies in parliamentary democracy.’14
Socialist Appeal has boldly proclaimed that ‘Corbyn’s serious mistake was not to move immediately after his election to purge the party of the right-wing Trojan horse in the parliamentary Labour Party’ – as if Corbyn (or any other left Labourite) ever possessed either the means or motivation to do so. Again, this framing is part of the eternal Labour left mythos, just like in 1988 when the Labour leadership contest between Benn and Kinnock (who paved the way for Blairism) was ‘portrayed by the bourgeois press and most of the ostensibly socialist left as a David and Goliath battle for the “socialist soul” of the party’ – upon his narrow defeat Benn and his followers of course immediately called for ‘unity’ with the right. Similar conciliatory attitudes were expressed by left-wing MPs when Corbyn was suspended in October by the Labour leadership, for pointing out the political motives underlying many of the allegations in the EHRC anti-Semitism report. McDonnell called Corbyn’s suspension ‘profoundly wrong’, but cravenly added that ‘my appeal is not the launch of some civil war or for members to leave the party … My appeal is for unity.’ Dianne Abbott likewise affirmed that ‘the priority right now for everyone in our party is to come together’, while another eminent Socialist Campaign Group MP, Nadia Whittome, stated she ‘cannot agree’ with Corbyn’s stance.
Right-wing witch hunts date from Labour’s earliest days, initially targeting CPGB members. Cripps and Bevan were both kicked out in 1939 for advocating a Popular Front with the communists; however they soon gained readmission after agreeing ‘to refrain from conducting or taking part in campaigns in opposition to the declared policy of the Party.’ In 1961 Michael Foot was expelled from the Parliamentary Labour Party when he rebelled over air force spending, but two decades later, as Labour leader, he embraced NATO and backed Thatcher’s imperialist war in the Falklands. Corbyn himself has now put out a grovelling statement pledging to ‘fully support Keir Starmer’s decision to accept all the EHRC recommendations’ and to ‘do what [he] can to help the Party move on … and unite to oppose and defeat this deeply damaging Conservative government.’ Obviously, even the soft left should be defended against the forces of overt reaction – since as Trotsky noted, the ruling class’s fear is that ‘behind the mock-heroic threats’ of reformist leaders there ‘lies concealed a real danger from the deeply stirring proletarian masses.’ But at the same time we are not obliged to cover for reformists’ opportunist vacillations and self-delusions, which only helps them maintain their parasitic vice over the more politically-conscious sections of the working class.
Shapurji Saklatvala, Communist MP and critic of Labour’s imperialist politics.
All this is not to argue that anti-electoralism should be made into a dogma. Under certain conditions, the parliamentary arena can be weaponized by socialists for agitational purposes, as with Karl Liebknecht’s heroic stand against the imperialist First World War in the German Reichstag; or the fiery House of Commons speeches by the British communist MP Shapurji Saklatvala, condemning Labour’s ‘enlightened’ colonial policy. However in general when it comes to electoral work, the Comintern’s guidelines laid down at its Second Congress remain applicable, namely that communist MPs must ‘subordinate all their parliamentary work to the extra-parliamentary work of their Party’; and must not only expose the bourgeoisie, but also ‘systematically and relentlessly’ expose reformists and centrists – communist MPs are principally agitators ‘in the enemy camp’. The socialist movement firstly needs its own infrastructure and political independence, in order to be able to engage with reformists from a position of relative strength. As Macnair summarises:
‘Marxists, who wish to oppose the present state rather than to manage it loyally, can then only be in partial unity with the loyalist [i.e. reformist] wing of the workers’ movement. We can bloc with them on particular issues. We can and will take membership in parties and organisations they control – and violate their constitutional rules and discipline – in order to fight their politics. But we have to organise ourselves independently of them. That means that we need our own press, finances, leadership committees, conferences, branches and other organisations.’
Counter-power and the long revolution
The revolutionary left in Britain has lost its nerve and its capacity for strategic thinking.
Intensifying inter-imperialist antagonisms and the climate crisis ensure an existential sense of urgency, but we can’t lose our heads and seek out revolutionary shortcuts, as happened with the Comintern in the turbulent years between the world wars. The economic conditions that enabled the ‘golden era’ of social-democratic ascendency are a relic of the past, but reformist consciousness does not mechanically disappear. Trotsky, in one of his more sober insights, noted of crisis-ridden Britain in the 1930s that ‘the political superstructure of this arch-conservative country extraordinarily lags behind the changes in its economic basis.’ Political tactics must be appropriate to the particular national conjuncture of class struggle. As against the CPGB’s Popular Front policy, Trotsky recognised that pursuing diplomatic unity with ‘progressive’ reformists and liberals as a preventative against fascisation was an absurdity that only weakened the position of the British working class, at a time of sharpening social antagonisms. The arrival of classical fascism is only possible after a ‘decisive victory of the bourgeoisie over the working class’, as in Italy and Germany; but ‘the great struggles in Britain [were] not behind us, rather ahead of us.’ In a context like today in which the fascist danger is ‘still in the third or fourth stage away’, Trotsky rightly argued that:
‘British reformism is the main hindrance now to the liberation [of the British proletariat] … The policy of a united front with reformists is obligatory but it is of necessity limited to partial tasks, especially to defensive struggles. There can be no thought of making the socialist revolution in a united front with reformist organizations. The principal task of a revolutionary party consists in freeing the working class from the influence of reformism.’
This is why uncritically supporting Corbyn at all costs as a path of lesser evil in the face of Tory savagery was self-defeating. Our strategic outlook should be that which would’ve been most appropriate for the CPGB in the post-1926 period of revolutionary downturn, namely a ‘practice based on attempting to build a solid, stable core of revolutionaries with an eye more for the horizon than for the next strike’ (or election cycle).15 Lenin explained how Bolshevik success in toppling Tsardom in 1917 owed to the fact that for many years legal and illegal networks and structures were ‘systematically built up to direct demonstrations and strikes’. The problem is that in Britain today the culture and infrastructure of working-class resistance has been completely hollowed out, and needs to be rebuilt from the ground up.
The idea of socialists getting rooted in working-class communities is of course not novel. The CPGB in the 1920s-30s managed to establish ‘Little Moscows’ in mining towns such as West Fife, Rhondda and the Vale of Leven: ‘The local Communist parties of these industrial villages were deeply integrated with every aspect of the community’s social life and culture as well as exercising their strengths in the workplace.’16 Agitation around wages, poor relief, and housing was coupled with the creation of red schools, sports leagues, and even music bands. There are a number of avenues today for building ‘dual power’ alongside the existing capitalist state, such as shop-floor committees, mutual aid societies, educational groups, trade and tenant unions, various anti-austerity campaigns, and migrant support networks. It’s also encouraging to see the emergence of new communist publications committed to producing analysis and theory that transcends the ossified twentieth-century dogmas of ‘official’ Marxism-Leninism, including Ebb Magazine, Cosmonaut, and The Lever. Dual power strategy should further address the role of working people’s councils at the district level. The surviving ‘Leninist’ parties in Britain have largely forgotten the need for independent working-class self-organisation capable of displacing the capitalist state machine, amounting to a paradoxical situation of ‘Bolsheviks without soviets’.
While the necessarily protracted nature of building counter-power is clear, this does not imply a return to the pre-1917 Kautskyan gradualism that is currently being promoted by Marxist theorists in the DSA including Eric Blanc. For ‘democratic socialists’ like Blanc, the state itself is seen as a zone of class struggle autonomous of capitalism. Teresa Kalisz of Red Bloom, another US Marxist Center affiliate, has also recently advocated a path between social democracy and revolutionary insurrection by drawing on the writings of the late E.O. Wright, who called for socialists to ‘control the capitalist state apparatus (or at least parts of it) and to use that apparatus systematically in the attack on capitalist state power itself.’17 The problem with this argument is that once within the existing state machinery, political organisations (like Labour) are ‘bound by thousands of threads’ to the dictates of capital accumulation and the reactionary governing bureaucracy, as the entire history of democratic socialism in practice has demonstrated. And behind the trappings of bourgeois parliament and the entrenched state bureaucracy as the first line of defense against working-class insurgency, there still stand the forces of the courts, police, and military – ‘the “bodies of armed men” which guarantee the power of the state whichever government is nominally in office.’18 The capitalists will never willingly give up power, and as Sophia Burns puts it socialism ‘isn’t a gradual process where reforms (or mutualist co-ops!) stack on top of each other until one morning, you wake up to find that capitalism is gone.’ There remains the inescapable question of the point of total rupture, or insurrection, beyond dual power to the replacement of the capitalist dictatorship with a workers’ government.
As capitalist violence is centralized through the state and cannot just be dismantled at the local level, there is still a need for some kind of general revolutionary (i.e. not broad left) organization on a national basis – an independent workers’ party. The American Marxist Center provides a useful model in bringing regionally-dispersed dual power initiatives together in a shared network, and enabling socialists of various leanings to begin to identify strategic points of unity. Ideally the British MC, in addition to foregrounding practical alternatives to parliamentary canvassing, will similarly function as a political centre that encourages dialogue between existing progressive tendencies. There is a pressing need to work towards a new socialist unity in diversity, in contrast to the ideological uniformity of the old sects. As Parkinson and Parker McQueeney have argued in the US context:
‘A party is simply an organization of political actors organized around a certain strategy and vision for change: a program. It is essential that the Marxist Center does not become another micro-sect that clings to a certain theoretical vision of Marxism with a priori shibboleths that define the group’s politics, whether Marxist-Leninist, Trotskyist, left-communist, etc. The organization must be internally democratic and oriented towards building working class political power independent from the bourgeois parties. Without this, any debates over the correct political line, while potentially useful intellectual exercises, will be effectively pointless.’
As suggested in the beginning of this article, there is in Britain a socialism that is dying and a socialism that must be reborn. In the first instance, however, this necessary regenerative process can only materialise through the recognition that the bourgeois Labour Party – ‘left’ flank included – never was and never will be anything but a brake on working-class liberation. The rupture in the oppressive logic of capitalist realism which 2015 heralded was of course itself extremely significant, and as the editorial collective of The Lever state:
‘Our task now, is not to let the dreams of emancipation which fuelled the Corbyn movement wither in defeat. We must steel ourselves, and divert these energies into building real counter-power, into long term revolutionary institutions, to re-build a base for an emancipatory politics, and one that can be lead into a revolutionary confrontation with the current system.’
In honor of Lenin on the anniversary of his death, we publish this short essay by Lunacharsky on Lenin’s views regarding art. This text was originally published in “Khudozhnik i Zritel” (Artist and Audience), issues 2-3, March-April 1924, and has been translated by Reuben Woolley. Introduction by Cliff Connolly. The original source of the translation can be found here.
Lunacharsky, third from left, with Lenin, 1920
In the days following Lenin’s death in late January 1924, the Soviet Union was flooded with artistic and literary works commemorating the fallen revolutionary. In his poem The Komsomol Song, Mayakovsky wrote the now-famous words: “Lenin lived, Lenin lives, Lenin is to live forever.” The city of Petrograd was renamed in Lenin’s honor, and the new Leningrad Gublit published a propaganda broadsheet with the poem A Drop of Ilych’s Blood. As the verses suggested, the departed leader continued to give inspiration to millions even in death; a drop of his blood in every communist’s veins. This was the environment that gave birth to the following work from Lunacharsky.
People were hungry for reminiscence to soothe their loss, and Lunacharsky delivered. A longtime Bolshevik and accomplished writer, he was made head of the People’s Commissariat for Education after the October 1917 revolution. In this position, he helped establish the Bolshoi Drama Theatre, protected historic cultural sites, oversaw public art exhibitions and experiments, and facilitated a drastic increase in Russia’s literacy rate. He had a unique perspective on Lenin, being sometimes in agreement with and other times in opposition to the latter’s policy ideas (although the disagreements were always comradely in nature). He also frequently served as an intermediary between Lenin and the art world, often taking measures to safeguard artistic institutions that Lenin was harshly critical of.
One such institution was that of Proletkult, a federated collective of avant-garde artists working mainly in drama, literature, and the visual arts. Over half a million members participated in its studios, clubs, and factory circles. The controversial organization sought to prefigure a purely proletarian culture untainted by capitalism, and produce works that would reflect this aesthetic. While Lunacharsky was a huge proponent and succeeded in acquiring state funding for Proletkult projects, others took issue with its founding ethos. Lenin in particular was concerned that it amounted to no more than a group of “bourgeois intellectuals” trying to create a culture from thin air and impose it on the working class.
Throughout this memoir of his time with Lenin, Lunacharsky paints a picture of a man with a passionate yet strangely distant relationship to art. Lenin loves music, but “it upsets him.” Lenin loves art history, but cannot devote enough time to it to form an opinion. Lenin has trouble funding an opulent theatre when there are run-down schools but refuses to close it. On matters of sculpture, Lenin defers to the judgment of others and then is elated to hear their learned conclusions match his insufficiently educated opinion. Overall, this is totally in line with the character of a disciplined revolutionary who avoids speaking on topics he hasn’t thoroughly investigated. The resulting quirks are entertaining and were precisely what a nation in mourning needed in the wake of a popular leader’s death.
It’s worth noting that the author did not originally intend this piece for publication, and didn’t bother editing closely after writing the piece essentially in note-form. The tone and pacing is somewhat strange in the original Russian, and this is exacerbated by its translation into another language. While not a perfect piece of prose, it still holds a great deal of merit and is well worth a read. Thanks to Lunachasky’s written memories, we know Lenin truly lived. In reading these words almost a hundred years after they were written, we see that Lenin lives. In our daily work as communist militants and organizers, we ensure that Lenin is to live forever.
Lenin and Art by Anatoly Lunacharksy (1924)
Lenin had very little time during his life to devote any concerted attention to art, and so he had always considered himself profane on the subject; he disliked making statements about art, as he always found dilettantism alien and hateful. His tastes, nevertheless, were strongly defined. He loved the Russian classics, realism in literature, portraiture, and so on.
Back in 1905, during the first revolution, he once had to spend the night at the flat of comrade D. I. Leshchenko, where, as it happened, there was a complete collection of Knackfuss’ publications, dedicated to the world’s greatest artists. The next morning, Vladimir Ilyich said to me: “What an engaging topic the history of art is. There is so much work here for a communist to do. I couldn’t get to sleep until morning, and spent the whole time looking through book after book. It tormented me to realize that I have not had the time to work at all with art, and will never have such time in the future.” I remember these words of Ilyich’s extremely distinctly.
I had to meet with him several times after the revolution to take part in various juries on artistic matters. In one such case, for example, I remember him calling for me, then he, Kamenev and I went to an exhibition of designs for statues to replace the figure of Alexander III, which had been torn from its luxurious plinth besides the temple of Christ the Savior. Vladimir Ilyich surveyed all of the statues with a strongly critical eye. He didn’t like a single one. He stood particularly intrigued in front of a design of the futurist school, but when asked for his opinion, said: “I can’t understand anything here, ask Lunacharsky.” Upon hearing me state that I could not see a single worthy piece, he looked elated, and said: “my, I thought that you were going to put any old futuristic scarecrow up there.”
Another time, the question at hand was a memorial for Karl Marx. The renowned sculptor M.1 showed particular obstinacy in the matter. He presented a design for a grand statue: “Karl Marx, standing atop four elephants.” Such an unexpected subject struck us all as bizarre, Vladimir Ilyich very much included. The artist began reworking his memorial, eventually doing so three times, not wishing to relinquish his victory in the competition on any grounds whatsoever. When the jury, under my chairmanship, finally rejected his design and settled on a collective piece by a group under the leadership of Aleshin, sculptor M. burst into the office of Vladimir Ilyich and complained to him directly. Vladimir Ilyich took his complaint to heart, and called me directly to summon a new jury. He said that he would come personally to view the Aleshin design alongside the design of sculptor M. And so he came. The Aleshin design was found to be perfectly satisfactory, sculptor M.’s design was rejected.
At the 1st of May celebration of the same year, in the same place that the construction of the Marx memorial had been proposed, the Aleshin group built a small-scale model of their piece. Vladimir Ilyich travelled there especially. He walked around the memorial several times, asked how large it was going to be, and eventually gave his approval, but not before saying: “Anatoly Vasilievich [Lunacharsky – trans.], instruct the artist specifically that the head must come out similar enough, that one gets the same impression of Karl Marx that one would get from his best portraits; the likeness here is somewhat diminished.”
Back in 1918 Vladimir Ilyich called me and said that we must propel art forwards as an agitational material, and with this in mind he laid out two projects. Firstly, in his opinion, we had to decorate buildings, fences, and other such places where there are usually posters with grand revolutionary slogans. He immediately suggested some such slogans himself.
This project was taken up wholeheartedly by comrade Brikhnichev, when he was in charge of the Gomel Department for People’s Education. I later saw that Gomel was absolutely covered in such slogans, all containing worthy ideas. Every single mirror in one grand old restaurant in particular, which had by then been transformed into an educational institute, was now covered in aphorisms penned by comrade Brikhnichev.
In Moscow and Petrograd, not only did this not catch on in such a grandiose manner, but not even according to Ilyich’s initial vision.
The second project concerned the placement of temporary alabaster statues of great revolutionaries on an unusually large scale, across both Petersburg and Moscow. Both cities responded eagerly to my suggestion that they put Ilyich’s idea into practice, suggesting even that each statue should have a ceremonial opening with a speech about the revolutionary in question, and that underneath each statue they would place explanatory plaques. Vladimir Ilyich termed this “monumental propaganda.”
In Petrograd this “monumental propaganda” was relatively successful. The first such statue was of Radishchev, designed by Leonid Shervud. A copy of it was erected in Moscow. Unfortunately, the Petrograd statue broke and was not replaced. Generally speaking, the majority of the wonderful Petersburg statues didn’t hold out, on account of their brittle material, but I remember some fine figures: busts of Garibaldi, Shevchenko, Dobroliubov, Herzen, and several others. Left-deviationist statues came out worse. For example, upon the unveiling of a cubist rendition of the head of Perovskaya, some just recoiled in shock, and Z. Lilina demanded in no uncertain terms that the statue be taken down immediately. I remember just as clearly that many found the statue of Chernyshevsky exceedingly ornate. Best of all was the statue of Lassale. This work, erected outside the former city Duma, remains there to this day. It’s like it was cut from bronze. The full-size statue of Marx, made by the sculptor Matveev, was also extremely successful. Sadly, it broke and has been replaced in the same spot – that is, next to the Smolny Institute – by a bronze bust of Marx in a more or less regular style, without Matveev’s original sculptural rendering.
In Moscow, where the statues could be seen at once by Vladimir Ilyich, they were not such a success. Marx and Engels were depicted in some sort of basin and earned themselves the nickname “the bearded swimmers”. The Sculptor K.2, however, managed to outdo everyone. For a long time, people and horses, walking and driving down Myasnitskaya, would glance fearfully at some enraged figure, who had been boarded up out of precaution. This was the respected artist’s depiction of Bakunin. If I’m not mistaken, the statue was immediately destroyed by anarchists upon its unveiling; despite all their progressiveness, they didn’t wish to suffer such harsh sculptural “mockery” of their great leader’s memory.
Generally speaking, there were very few successful statues in Moscow. Arguably better than most was the statue of the poet Nikitin. I don’t know if Vladimir Ilyich looked at them in any detail, but either way he told me, with some dissatisfaction, that nothing had come of monumental propaganda. I responded with reference to the experience in Petrograd and the report of Zinoviev. Vladimir Ilyich shook his head doubtfully and said “what, you’re telling me that every single talent gathered themselves in Petrograd, and Moscow is entirely worthless?” Indeed, I couldn’t explain to him such a strange occurrence.
He was distinctly doubtful of the memorial plaque for Konenkov. He didn’t consider it very convincing. Konenkov himself, incidentally, called this work his “imaginary-realist plaque”, not without a touch of sardonicism. I also remember the artist Altman gifting Vladimir Ilyich a bas-relief depicting Khalturin. Vladimir Ilyich liked the bas-relief very much, but he asked me, did this work not strike me as futuristic? His opinions regarding futurism were entirely negative. I wasn’t present for his conversation in Vkhutemas, whose accommodation he once visited, if I’m not mistaken because some young relative of his was living there.3 I was later told of the long conversation between him and, of course, the left-wing ‘Vkhutemastsy’. Vladimir Ilyich wrote them off, laughing a little condescendingly, but then stated that he wouldn’t personally take up the task of talking seriously on such matters, as he felt himself to be insufficiently competent. The youths themselves he found to be very nice, and their communist disposition pleased him.
Vladimir Ilyich rarely managed to enjoy art during the final period of his life. He went to the theatre a few times, seemingly exclusively the Khudozhestvenny, which he valued very highly. Plays in that theatre would invariably leave a wonderful impression on him.
Vladimir Ilyich had a strong love for music, but it would upset him. At one point I had impressive concerts arranged in my apartment. Shalyapin sang, Meichik, Romanovsky, the Stradivarius quartet, Kusevitsky on the contrabass and several others all played. I invited Vladimir Ilyich repeatedly, but he was always busy. One time he said to me directly: “of course it’s wonderful to listen to music, but you know, it upsets me. I somehow find it hard to bear.” I remember that comrade Tsiurupa, who managed to get Vladimir Ilyich to come twice to his home concerts with that same pianist Romanovsky, also told me that Vladimir Ilyich had enjoyed the music very much, but was visibly agitated.
I will add that Vladimir Ilyich was very irritated by the Bolshoi Theatre. I had to indicate to him several times that the Bolshoi cost us comparatively little, but nevertheless, at his insistence, its grant was reduced. Vladimir Ilyich was led in this by two considerations. One of them he admitted upfront: “I find it uncomfortable,” he said, “that we sustain such a luxurious theatre for great amounts of money, when we lack the resources to sustain even the simplest of village schools”. The other consideration was elaborated when I disputed his attack on the Bolshoi Theatre during a meeting. I pointed out the theatre’s undeniable cultural significance. Upon hearing this, Vladimir Ilyich wryly squinted at me, and said: “But regardless, it is a remnant of landlord culture, no one could possibly argue otherwise.”4
This is not to say that Vladimir Ilyich was entirely inimical to the culture of the past. He found the entire pompous-gentry tone of opera to be specifically landlord-like. On the whole he valued the visual art of the past, especially Russian realism (including, for example, the Peredvizhniki), very highly indeed.
1920 Bolshevik poster, reads “Citizens, preserve monuments of art”
Thus ends the factual information that I am able to offer the reader from my memories of Ilyich. But I will remind you that Vladimir Ilyich at no point used his aesthetic sympathies or antipathies to form any of his most fundamental ideas.
Comrades with an interest in art will remember the address to the Central Committee on questions of art which was quite sharply directed against futurism. I am no more familiar with this topic than others are, but I think it was one in which Vladimir Ilyich saw himself as having a genuine and serious contribution to make.5
At the same time, and entirely mistakenly, Vladimir Ilyich considered me not quite a supporter of futurism, but not quite entirely pandering to his own view either, and probably as a result he did not consult me before the publication of the Central Committee rescript, through which he intended to correct my stance.
Vladimir Ilyich also diverged from me quite sharply in relation to Proletkult. On one occasion, he even strongly scolded me. I’ll state first of all that Vladimir Ilyich absolutely did not deny the significance of workers’ circles for the production of writers and artists from a proletarian background, and promoted their national unification as a desirable aim, but he was very afraid of the feeble attempts of Proletkult to produce alongside this a proletarian science, as well as proletarian culture on a much larger scale. This, firstly, seemed to him a completely untimely task for which they lacked the capabilities; secondly, he thought that such ideas, which were of course still underdeveloped, distanced the proletariat from study, and from embracing the fundamentals of already-developed science and culture; thirdly, Vladimir Ilyich was evidently nervous to make sure that there was not, stirring in Proletkult, the beginnings of some kind of political heresy. He was considerably displeased, for example, with the large role played in Proletkult at the time by A. A. Bogdanov.
During the time of the Proletkult congress, which I believe was in 1920, he instructed me to travel there and state, in no uncertain terms, that Proletkult should be placed under the leadership of Narkompros, consider itself a Narkompros organisation, and so on. In short, Vladimir Ilyich wanted us to pull Proletkult in line with the state, at the same time as he took measures to pull it in line with the party. The speech that I gave at the congress I then made sure to edit in an evasive and appeasing manner. It didn’t seem right for me to come in with some sort of attack, upsetting the workers who had decided to gather together. This speech was shown to Vladimir Ilyich in an even softer revision. He called me to his office, and gave me a good dressing down. Later, Proletkult was restructured in accordance with Vladimir Ilyich’s orders. I repeat, he never so much as thought of its abolishment. On the contrary, he had great sympathy for its purely artistic aims.
The new artistic and literary formations that came into being during the revolution, for the most part, evaded Vladimir Ilyich’s attention. He simply had no time to devote to them. All the same, I can say that he definitely did not appreciate Mayakovsky’s 150,000,000. He found the book to be overly flowery and pretentious. One can’t help but regret that he was no longer able to pass judgement on the other, more insightful transformations in revolutionary literature that came later.
Everyone is well aware of the enormous interest Vladimir Ilyich had in cinematography.
Renato Flores responds to Cam W’s argument for Maoism and the mass line.
Global warming is progressing. Millions are going hungry and do not know whether they can make the next rent payment. The houseless crisis is intensifying. We know we cannot just stand by, and we have to do something. But how do we do something, how do we slay the monster? How do we become free? It is not going to be easy. Everyone has ideas, some more or less thought out than others. What is clear is that we need a plan, and we need one fast, or the monster will devour us all.
In Cosmonaut, we wish to have an open forum for debate, where these ideas can be shared and discussed. Three contributions have been published, with responses, counter-responses and synthesis. This piece is meant as a (short) reply to Cam’s intervention on the debates around the party form started by Taylor B’s piece “Beginnings of Politics” and Donald Parkinson’s piece “Without a party we have nothing”. Cam’s intervention is heavily influenced by, and largely follows Joshua Moufawad-Paul’s (JMP) ideas on how Maoism has been historically defined, what problems it is responding to, and how it must be applied today. Cam’s main thesis is that Maoism, being the only ideology that has correctly absorbed the knowledge produced by the learning process of the Paris Commune and the Russian and Chinese revolutions is uniquely poised to provide an answer to the problem of the party. And that answer comes in the shape of the mass line, which is “a mechanism to transform the nature of the party into a revolutionary mass organization which can resist the neutralizing force of the party-form”.
I take issue with this last statement, and that is what I will try to elaborate on in this article. I start by agreeing with Cam that we must emphasize the points of both continuity and rupture of our revolutionary process. But I diverge from him in seeing the evolution of Marxism as something much more complicated than the picture drawn by JMP. Indeed, in 2020, the experiences of revolutionaries both in overthrowing the old state and in running a new revolutionary state can fill entire libraries. We know much more about what to do, and especially what not to do, than we did in Marx’s time. However, the process through which knowledge has been accumulated and synthesized cannot be reduced to a single path of advancement of the “science of revolution”. By doing this, we risk ossifying slogans, and allowing spontaneity to fill in the gaps, harming our organizing. The picture painted by Cam, which is inherited from JMP, suffers from the same problems Donald is replying to in his piece: a simple periodization is being imposed into a complex process of knowledge production. This periodization is then used to make a dubious point, namely that through an event a lesson was learned that marks the death of a paradigm and the birth of a new one. Everyone stuck in the previous paradigm is at best naive and at worst, unscientific. This is an extremely loaded word that produces a hierarchy of power: my theory is more powerful than yours because it is scientific. No burden of proof is necessary, because I am being scientific and you are not. I have successfully absorbed the lessons of history while you haven’t.
To begin to deconstruct the claim that Maoism is the highest paradigm of revolutionary science, we have to understand that one of the axioms on which it stands is flawed, namely that progress is linear and happens through a single path. Biology and evolution provide a practical counter-example. In a very simplified manner1, organisms face a problem, the environment, and try to find a solution through adaptation. Faced with similar environments, organisms will find similar solutions, even when they are in geographic isolation.2 This is called convergent evolution, and there are many examples in Nature. Bats and whales both evolved the ability to locate prey by echos as an adaptation to finding food in dark environments. Wings have been evolved by pterosauruses, birds and mammals separately. Silk production appeared separately in spiders, silkworms and silk moths. In a similar manner, some characteristics can be devolved. For example, some species of birds have lost the ability to fly after having gained it. It is not correct to view organisms as more evolved, as if evolution was something that accumulates.
In the same manner, progress in all branches of science is far from neat and linear. Geniuses have been forgotten or dismissed for centuries just to be rediscovered. Dead ends are often reached which require looking back into the past to reinvigorate theories that were previously thought dead. More importantly, co-discoveries happen, and happen often. Wallace and Darwin both came to the theory of evolution. Newton and Leibniz both developed calculus. In both of these cases, the co-inventors were resting on similar theoretical knowledge and facing similar questions. It is therefore unsurprising that they would come to the same solution. Even more, scientists working within very different paradigms, say like Mach and Boltzmann, were both able to contribute immensely to the field of physics despite working from vastly distinct starting points.
Going back to the revolutionary movement, our theory and our practice have been developed to surpass obstacles in our liberation. Even if these obstacles are not identical, they have been very similar. In the same manner as biological evolution, the science of revolution develops very similar solutions to address the problems revolutionaries face. We should expect that similar ideas will arise from similar contexts, a convergent evolution of tactics. From experience, the more scientists independently arrive at the same conclusion, the more likely that this conclusion is correct. In this context, Donald is correct to emphasize Lenin’s unoriginality. Like scientists, practitioners of revolutionary politics are faced with questions that they must answer, both before, during, and after seizing power. They learn from each other, and try to apply the common mindset to their local conditions.
If one revolutionary movement progresses and breaks new ground in the process to establish socialism, changes in the environment give rise to new problems that were previously not recognized. They might have seized power, but what now? As the Bolsheviks repeatedly pointed out, they thought building socialism was going to be easier than it actually was. Before the Russian revolution, Hilferding had stated that it would be enough to seize the ten largest banks to get to socialism. Hilferding, among others, believed that this was the great mistake of the Paris Commune, and if revolutionaries had just seized these banks, they would have been able to build a socialist system. But as we know, that was far from enough for the Bolsheviks. They did this, and much more. They were forced to continuously experiment, finding ways that could lead to socialism without losing the support of the peasants and workers. The lessons from Leninism cannot be simply reduced to the necessity of smashing the state: they are much more extensive and valuable than this.
In the same vein, the Chinese Revolution was a gigantic experiment in emancipation that involved old and new questions, with old and new methods to answer them. And Mao diverged from Lenin in many aspects. Mao’s theory of change outlined in “On Contradiction” is quite different from Lenin’s understanding of dialectics. The Maoist theory of New Democracy also diverges from Lenin’s ideas of how a revolution should proceed. It is hard to answer if they are improvements or regressions. It is probably better to say that the Marxist canon was enriched by both thinkers.
Another example of returning to the Marxist canon and reevaluating or rediscovering old hypotheses can be seen in Kautsky, Lenin, Kwame Nkrumah’s theories of Imperialism. In his celebrated Imperialism, Lenin (rightfully) told Kautsky that the world was not heading towards an ultra-imperialist system where different imperial powers share the world peacefully—instead he argued that imperialist conflict was on the table. Indeed, Lenin was correct in that conjecture. World War I and World War II were both driven mainly by inter-imperial conflict.3 But after WW2, their differences would be sublated. A single capitalist superpower was able to set the rules on how the spoils would be divided. Nkrumah captured this in his Neo-Colonialism, basically rediscovering parts of Kautsky’s thesis and adapting them to the present. In this case, an exhausted paradigm was resurrected after significant adaptations were made.
You can see where I am going: it is impossible to lay out a simple evolution of knowledge for Marxism, with clean breaks from one another where knowledge only really had three leaps. Mao was correct in saying that socialism or communism was not permanent in the USSR and that a reversion to capitalism could happen, but he was surely not the only one to note the problems of socialist construction in the USSR. Revolutionary experience has been accumulated, and it has, for better or worse, been synthesized by revolutionaries. There are points where synthesizers like Lenin or Mao have made key contributions that have left a permanent imprint. Lenin was able to stabilize a revolutionary state, which allowed further problems of socialist construction to be posed. Mao was able to mobilize the masses against a stagnating party, which opened the problem of how to deal with class interests inside the party, and how to open a public sphere in a socialist state. Rather than having done science, it is probably better to think of them as having set up the stage for the further development of scientific socialism.
Whether Lenin and Mao were scientists or whether they set the stage for new science is a pedantic point— the important point is that periodizations of revolutionary science are not just meant to convey this, they are often used as discourses of power. When Stalin wrote “Foundations of Leninism”, “Trotskyism or Leninism”, or even the Short Course, he was not only trying to synthesize the knowledge gained from the construction of socialism in the USSR and set a roadmap for the future. It was an operation through which he declared himself to be the one true heir of Lenin and excluded others such as Trotsky or Bukharin. When the Indian Maoist Ajith wrote “Against Avakianism”, he was attempting to exclude Bob Avakian’s Revolutionary Communist Party from the mantle of Maoism. In the same way, JMP’s periodization is an attempt to claim for Maoism the mantle of the one science of revolution and exclude other Marxists from possibly contributing to this. But his claim ignores the complexity of knowledge development, something we have been addressing in this piece. Furthermore, even if one takes this periodization at its word, and we take Maoism to be a third synthesis, JMP’s periodization is not the only one in attempting to explain Mao’s epistemological breaks. Marxist-Leninists-Maoists—principally Maoists—who claim the legacy of the relatively successful Peruvian Shining Path, center Gonzalo’s theoretical contributions around People’s War in defining Maoism, rather than recognizing the Revolutionary International Movement (of which SP was a [critical] part) as the principal synthesizer of Maoism.4
More importantly, why is Maoism the only ideology that can claim to have absorbed the knowledge from revolutionary history? In terms of seizing power, or battling the state to a standstill, what have the Indian Naxalites achieved that has not been achieved by others, as for example by the Zapatistas who started from different premises5 yet face similar material conditions of indigenous dispossession? Are the Zapatistas somehow less scientific than the Naxalites? Or are they responding to different pressures of dependent capitalism in countries with backgrounds of settler-colonialism and casteism?6 Is there really nothing the titanic struggle of the African National Congress against apartheid can teach us, when the pitiful state of the ANC reminds us of how the Maoist revolution in Nepal has become increasingly coopted? What about the many other names of the long list of Latin American or African revolutionaries such as Amilcar Cabral or Paulo Freire, that are written out of this evolution? The successes and failures of the Arusha Declaration and Ujamaa or the Yugoslav experiment in self-management provide way more data points that enrich our knowledge, going way beyond the MLM straight line periodization that only really joins three points and attempts to exclude everyone else. In this spirit, it is worth noting that geographically diverse groups such as Matzpen in Israel and Race Traitor in the United States independently developed very similar ideas on what it means to be a race traitor, and how settler-colonialism and white privilege work to stabilize society.
Two-line struggles and “bourgeois” ideology
A periodization of history must be accompanied with explanations for the choices taken to divide one epoch from another. These divisions are usually used to give primacy to a political event or concept, after which one theory was proven absolutely correct and the other false. In the case of Taylor’s piece, he follows Badiou by stating that the Cultural Revolution showed that the party-form was an exhausted concept and brought forward the idea that new forms of organization must supplant it. In the case of Cam, who follows JMP’s periodization of MLM, the cultural revolution brings to the forefront the importance of the ‘two-line’ struggle and the mass line. Essentially, Mao reached a breakthrough realization: the ideological struggle between proletariat and bourgeoisie continued in socialism, and (a part of it) happened within the Communist party in the shape of a line-struggle. Stalin was wrong to declare that the USSR had achieved communism, and that this process could not be reversed. Indeed, capitalist roaders inside the party could reverse it and we have to struggle against them, and with the masses. A party which is properly embedded in the masses can successfully struggle against those who would reverse the revolution. And this is why Mao called for the Cultural Revolution: to rebuild those links between party and masses, and to battle the propagation of capitalist ideas in the party.
This framework is very appealing. It explains the restoration of capitalism in the USSR and China: the bourgeois wing of the party gained power because it was never defeated, despite the Cultural Revolution. It offers a simple and comforting answer to the question of socialist construction: just struggle hard enough against the capitalist roaders. It sounds a lot like a Manichean struggle for the world, and is especially well suited to an American mindset which is based on binaries. But while there definitely are undesirable elements within all Communist parties (just think of Yeltsin or Milosevic) the two-line struggle is a gross simplification that collapses all of the problems of revolutionary science into something that looks a lot like a magic trick: the masses will redeem us if we struggle with them. The whole problem of societal management, both politically and economically (which usually go together) is not a struggle between good and evil. It is the problem of how to control a totality, which risks becoming dysfunctional at places where faults happen, be it either improperly balanced alliances between classes such as the peasantry and the proletarians, existing monopolies on resources like technical skills, or sites of power which reproduce antisocial ideology. Mao was correct to identify some problems as originating from capitalist values and beliefs, which originate and are replicated from the existing conditions and require a cultural revolution to solve. But all of these problems cannot be all cast as bourgeois or capitalist, even if their sources come from constructing socialism on top of a capitalist society.7By taking this simplification we risk allowing spontaneity to creep in in all places and hoping that high spirits will solve things for us.
There is an in-jest comment that asks: tell me which year you think the Russian Revolution was defeated and I will tell you which tendency you belong to. Was it with War Communism? Kronstadt? The disempowering of the Soviets? The retreats of NEP? Rapid and often brutal collectivization? The purges that destroyed the Old Bolsheviks? Kruschev’s or Kosygin’s reforms? Were Gorbachov’s efforts doomed already or did he make serious blunders along the way? Worse even, did he sell the USSR out for a slice of Pizza? The bitter truth is there is no simple answer to when the USSR was defeated. There was a long list of decisions that strengthened some groups while weakening others, eroded the revolution’s mass base of support, slowly created alienated groups of people who felt displaced from power, and eventually created a stagnated, even ossified, society. No longer able to progress toward socialism, it disintegrated under pressure. Until we digest that tough conclusion we risk searching for magic bullets to solve all our problems.
Seeking redemption through the masses is just one more illusion from a suitcase of quixotic tricks meant to bring us to socialism. Even if it is pointing at a real problem8, the solution is little more than a slogan. The careful and difficult balancing act of institutional design meant to construct a system that would, among many things, grant political freedom as to everyone, abolish permanent managerial roles by ensuring that “every cook can govern”, and eliminate existing oppressive systems carried over from capitalism, is reduced to making sure the proletarian line is upheld by “going to the masses”. This confuses tactic and strategy, and allows ossification and spontaneity to creep into all the missing spaces. Think about it for a minute. Some problems are easier to solve than others: if a local administrator is behaving badly and abusing their powers, we should discipline them through re-education or even removal. But what if they’re the only one in town that can actually run the irrigation systems? If they’re removed agricultural output will underperform or fail. If this administrator is reinstated, the masses, who are our ultimate allies, will feel betrayed. They didn’t fight a revolution for this. The administrator could feel justified in their privileges and try to go even further in their pursuit of even more privileges and power. But if they aren’t reinstated, the masses might go hungry due to crop failures, or freeze in the winter. Either way, they will be frustrated with the party.
These sorts of dilemmas around specialists and local administrators were a repeated problem in many societies attempting socialist construction, including the USSR and Maoist China. Mao sought a solution through the mass mobilization of the Cultural Revolution. The first stage dispersed the agglomeration of specialists in the city by sending them to the countryside. This was meant to break their privileges and urban strongholds, and (re)rally the support of the peasants for the revolution. The declassed specialists would then participate in the second and protracted struggle of breaking the monopolies on knowledge by educating the peasantry and opening rural schools. By ensuring that the peasants were able to administer their own affairs as a collective, they would not be beholden to a single, and potentially corrupt, expert. Mao’s solution was implemented at a scale never seen before, especially in a country of China’s size and its deep city-countryside divide., But Mao wasn’t the only one to come up with this sort of solution to the specialist problem: Che Guevara tried to enforce a smaller-scale cultural revolution in Cuba to persuade managers and specialists to throw in their lot with the revolution. Other revolutions came up with their own solutions: the Yugoslavs had a persistent problem with managers monopolizing knowledge and tried to solve it through factory schools and deepening education—without forcing existing specialists to undergo a cultural revolution. This did not end well.
Another more complicated problem was faced by the USSR repeatedly during its history: what happens when the lack of proper food procurement to the cities forces the party to choose between extracting food by force from the peasantry or making significant concessions to it, either through paying higher prices or devoting higher investments. Which of these solutions is ‘proletarian’? The USSR was forced to constantly oscillate between disciplining the peasants by force and granting them concessions because it could not solely rely on the stick or the carrot. Neither of these can be labeled more ‘proletarian’ than the other. Especially when contrasted with alternatives not taken, which can be regarded as capitalist, such as the full liberalization of rural China in the Deng era.
With this short digression, I hope to have laid out an important point: the working of a society is the working of a complex totality, where relations can become dysfunctional, threatening the whole. It is not (just) a matter of conducting line-struggles between “proletarian” and “bourgeois” lines. It is a matter of sitting down and diagnosing the system, understanding where the dysfunctions are, what groups they are serving or harming, and how the socialist construction can proceed by removing these dysfunctions. Politics is not a Manichean struggle. It is somewhere between a science and an art of organization. Compromises must be made, and we must constantly be asking how the power relationships in society will change if we are to undergo these changes.
The successive educational policies of the USSR in the 1920s, meant to both democratize knowledge and improve production, ended up empowering a new class of “red specialists” who would control the party 30 years later. The Yugoslav experiment tried to disempower the federal state and empower factory councils to devolve power to the workers, but ended up empowering factory managers and creating a comprador class that would trigger a Civil War. The agricultural reforms enacted by the Great Leap Forward meant to increase food production but ended up causing a food crisis. The type of historical analysis we need is a tough one, but being honest results in a better framing of things which goes beyond simply good and bad lines, and higher or lower scientific tendencies, or who betrayed what revolution.
Beyond the mass line: deciding how and where to struggle
The same framework, with some caveats, can be applied to formulate the principles of a revolutionary party. The party inserts itself in a capitalist society while simultaneously attempting to destabilize the capitalist totality and replace it with a new totality.
How do we begin to construct such an organism? Cam’s suggested plan of action is taken from JMP’s book Continuity and Rupture:
The participants in a revolutionary movement begin with a revolutionary theory, taken from the history of Marxism, that they plan to take to the masses. If they succeed in taking this theory to the masses, then they emerge from these masses transformed, pulling in their wake new cadre that will teach both them and their movement something more about revolution, and demonstrating that the moment of from is far more significant than the moment of to because it is the mechanism that permits the recognition of a revolutionary politics.
This poses several questions and problems, but the main thing is that we begin with participants in a revolutionary movement who are armed with theory that they take to the masses.
The first critique of this position is that the party is seen as some sort of external agent, formed by intellectuals, who have acquired knowledge and will bring it to the masses. It sets the party aside, as the unique interpreter of Marxism, and the object through which the people’s demands are translated to communist ones. It hopes that with the bringing of theory to the masses, the party will transform itself. We can contrast this approach to the merger theory. In 1903, Kautsky wrote:
In addition to this antagonism between the intellectual and the proletarian in sentiment, there is yet another antagonism. The intellectual, armed with the general education of our time, conceives himself as very superior to the proletarian. Even Engels writes of the scholarly mystification with which he approached workers in his youth. The intellectual finds it very easy to overlook in the proletarian his equal as a fellow fighter, at whose side in the combat he must take his place. Instead he sees in the proletarian the latter’s low level of intellectual development, which it is the intellectual’s task to raise. He sees in the worker not a comrade but a pupil. The intellectual clings to Lassalle’s aphorism on the bond between science and the proletariat, a bond which will raise society to a higher plane. As advocate of science, the intellectuals come to the workers not in order to co-operate with them as comrades, but as an especially friendly external force in society, offering them aid.
The difference between these two conceptions is that the first pays little to no attention to the self-organization of the masses and the ways they are already resisting capitalism. It asks us to go to the masses, without specifying which masses and how to talk to them. The second conception is that of the merger, where the intellectuals come to co-operate with the workers and see them as comrades, inserting themselves into existing struggles and amplifying them.
This difference is especially critical because it explains the way in which Maoists in the United States fill in their lack of clear tactics and strategy with spontaneity, leaving them lacking a clear plan, something they are slowly coming to realize. “Go to the masses” is left as a magic bullet. This raises the second problem: the identification of the “masses”. Cam suggests we start by “serving and interacting with the people”. A detailed study of the conditions of the people is a prerequisite of any revolutionary movement; just ask Lenin or Mao, but as with JMP, Cam grazes over the question of who the masses are that we are supposed to be interacting with in the United States. This is a question worth some reflecting on: the US is a unique creature in the history of the world. It is an advanced imperialist country, which leads to comparisons with Western Europe, but is also a settler-colonial society scaffolded by whiteness. It has a significant labor aristocracy who have much more to lose than their chains, and also has a significant surplus population that is easily replaceable and has little power to stop the monster.
Which groups are going to lead the revolution and which groups are expected to follow? How will hegemony over these groups be won? Essentially, who is the revolutionary subject in the United States? Who will bell the cat? Without making this explicit we run the risk of fetishizing the most oppressed subjects who unfortunately do not have the power to change the system.
It is important to remember that Marx located the revolutionary subject in the proletariat because (1) he studied the workers’ self-organization, how they had the power to stop accumulation if they wanted to, and what they were capable of achieving under adequate leadership and structure, and (2) the proletariat had less to lose from overthrowing the system because it possessed nothing. It could only lose their chains. But as we well know, the proletariat in the centers of capitalism failed to revolt. The Paris Commune, which so enthralled Marx, would move East, and the working class of the capitalist centers was pacified at best, or at worst enlisted in imperial or fascistic projects.
The cat would not be belled because some mice were getting good spoils. Starting with Lenin, there have been plenty of attempts to rationalize why there were no more large-scale revolts, like the Paris Commune, in the centers of capitalism. The labor aristocracy, understood as those who have more to lose than their chains, did not live up to Marx’s tasks. And if they are not willing to revolt and pick up the sword, who will then finish the job? This question is especially pressing in the United States, where capitalism is strongly racialized and where poor whites have been used to stabilize settler-colonialism for centuries. This is where the question of “who are the revolutionary masses” appears. Spontaneity fills in when the prescriptions are vague, which is why so many “mass line” organizations fall into a pattern of providing service aid, in the form of food or legal means, to the most oppressed in hope of activating them for the struggle. I do not wish to repeat a full critique of mutual aid that was already done in an excellent manner by Gus Breslauer. The two basic points are: people do mutual aid because it’s easy and makes us feel good, but in the end what we are doing is redistributing the labor fund and not threatening the state or the bosses in the process. Even if mutual aid can sometimes create useful auxiliaries, such as unemployed committees, they often cannot substitute for the main event. They also require massive amounts of energy and fund expenditures to keep alive, energy which could be spent more efficiently in amplifying existing struggles. We run the risk of burning resources and ourselves in doing something that does not center class struggle and is of minor use in fighting against the capitalist system.
It is important to locate this new fetish with mutual aid not only in the realization that people are suffering immensely but also in the failure of locating a revolutionary subject willing to fight to the bitter end. Mutual aid attempts to activate the most oppressed layers in the United States, but Marx’s other principle still holds: look for subjects that have the power to change society, rather than just the most oppressed. We should be looking at the sites of class struggle that are actually happening in today’s world and how these can be amplified to throw the capitalist totality into disarray. For this, we could start by reading studies of material conditions, such as Hunsinger & Eisenberg’s Mask Off, in great detail. An important place of struggle in the US right now are the struggles around social reproduction, specifically those around housing, childcare, and healthcare. Teachers’ and nurses’ unions, as well as the tenants movement, are in the front lines of struggle, and they are hurting capitalists because they are breaking into the capitalist totality in a way food distribution among the houseless is not.9
For some people, the natural starting place might be their union, especially if it is an active and fighting one. But for those who do not have that option, focusing on the tenants union movement allows us to connect to pre-existing struggles in the masses, amplify them, and understand their conditions in a very different way than food distribution does. Tenant unionism also provides us with targets that are actually defeatable, such as a local slumlord, which motivates our members, gives us publicity, and allows our organization to grow while further embedding it in the struggle. Other and larger targets can be tempting, but these are often heroic feats. The fight against Amazon, led by Amazonians United and other unions, is fighting an enemy at a scale much larger than what the proletariat is capable of organizing against right now. Their fight will be an extremely tough one, as the working class in the US (or even internationally) is still in a state of learning. Victories can be quickly stolen from us. For example, German workers defeated Amazon in Germany, so Amazon simply moved across the border to the Czech Republic, continuing distribution in Germany while avoiding their laws.
Conclusion
As mentioned in the introduction, we are in a seriously demoralizing moment. There is a rapidly changing conjuncture, where the pandemic and climate change fill us with urgency but make organizing hard due to increasingly scarce resources. We want to do something that is effective and brings liberation fast,but we are faced with the weight of the failures of the socialist movement, be it revolutionary or reformist. We want answers on how to do this and are attracted to things that do not sound that dissimilar to what we already know, or the ways in which our brains are programmed.
JMP’s style of Maoism is particularly well suited to the American mind. It provides relatively easy answers and provides enough silences that we can choose to interpret in ways that are not dissonant with our previous mindset. JMP also borrows plenty of epistemological concepts from American Pragmatist philosophy10, such as how truth is evaluated through practice, which makes it even more amenable to the underlying concept of science already present in US society. JMP writes well and clearly and is very articulate in his interviews. Because of this, it is not strange to see him becoming increasingly popular for a younger generation searching for these quick answers on what to do. This Maoism can also claim the mantle of the few revolutionary movements which are still vibrant today: the Philippines and India, which gives us something hopeful to root for internationally— something not as stale as defending an increasingly capitalist China.
However, to develop a proper science of revolution for the United States, whatever doctrine we decide to base ourselves, has to be heavily enriched with anti-colonial thought. One of the referents of Maoism, the Naxalites in India. have not properly dealt with Adivasi culture, and have sometimes misunderstood the way it operates, facing local resentment and resistance.11 This should raise a warning flag on the operating methods of the “mass line”, where the party is left as an interpreter because of its knowledge of Marxism. Furthermore, Naxalites have not successfully linked their struggle with the struggles in Indian cities. A strategy that bases itself on the most oppressed in the US would surely face similar problems. In this respect, the Phillipino Communists do this linking much better, through the use of broad quasi-popular fronts. However, they also went as far as endorsing support for Biden in the last US presidential election. How to adequately interface with the labor aristocracy and win hegemony over them is going to be a gigantic tactical and strategic problem here.
So to end, I am proposing we do not rely on slogans that can be ossified and filled in with spontaneity. We do not have a Yunnan to build a red base in the US, geography is not as favorable here. Our fight is a long one that will not be solved with tricks but will require years and decades of changing tactics and reevaluating strategies. In this spirit, Cosmonaut is an open forum where revolutionaries can talk to each other and propose ways forward. I know this contribution raises more questions than gives answers, but I hope it serves as a starting point for asking better questions.
