Contrary to certain advocates of “Acid Communism”, P.H. Higgins argues that a turn towards counter-culture, consciousness-raising, and psychedelic drugs are not a means to building a better left.
“Political thinking that starts from the concept of the establishment is likely to lead nowhere. For, because it leaves the true centres of power unnoticed and unexamined, it can offer no general picture of the possibilities of our society, of the changes that are necessary, of the way in which the substance of human life could be transformed and enriched through political action.”
– Alasdair MacIntyre, “The Straw Man of the Age”
“Capitalist Realism” — the term, most notably used by Mark Fisher in his 2009 book of the same name, has become the buzzword of the post-Occupy left; it is the catchy diagnosis for a world without hope, and the obstacle any leftist movement must overcome. After Fisher took his own life in 2017, capitalist realism seemed to have become more all-encompassing than ever: Trump was president of the United States, Brexit was swallowing up British politics, climate crisis was going unaddressed, and now it appeared the prophet of a new revolutionary interest had been consumed by despair. However, a glimmer of hope seemed to appear, one last gift from Fisher, in the form of an unfinished introduction to a book titled Acid Communism. In this short text lay Fisher’s very own attempt to overcome the very impediment he had previously described. In September of 2017, Jeremy Gilbert elaborated on his encounters with Fisher and his own role in forming the foundation of Acid Communism, describing it as an attempt to formulate “a radically different conception of freedom to the one which we have inherited from the bourgeois liberal tradition… which understands freedom and agency as things which can only be exercised relationally, in the spaces between bodies, as modes of interaction. It would be the creation, constitution and cultivation of collective creativity.”1 Since the publication of Fisher’s unfinished manuscript in the K-Punk collection, the notion of Acid Communism has continued to garner interest. In their latest issue, Commune magazine has published two ecstatic pieces on the possibilities of Acid Communism by Sarah Jaffe and Emma Stamm. While Jaffe’s piece mostly operates as a tribute and retrospective on Fisher, Stamm’s article proclaims Acid Communism to be a new foundation for a leftist utopian vision based on “the politicization of tripping and trippy art.” Though Stamm’s piece proclaims the necessity of social consciousness, structural changes, and opposition to capitalism, it simultaneously reveals the failure of trendy leftist theorizing to conceive of concrete demands or actively study the societal relations of contemporary global capitalism.2 Using the articles of Gilbert and Stamm as models for Acid Communism, we will identify three major areas where the popular usage of Fisher’s concept fails to make clear its usefulness to leftist politics today:
An excessive focus on drug-use, mysticism, and disorientation as a break from ideology rather than social engagement through discussion of political ends.
A broad claim that Acid Communism upholds a leftist heritage, without partaking in a real examination of the history, tactics, and failures of that heritage; the latter critique forming a more significant and constructive part of a communist social consciousness.
Following from the first and second points: a stance of popular autonomism which lends itself towards liberal reformism and lacks the working-class militant interest of previous traditions it claims to be a part of. A kind of “festival-ism.”
SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS AND BRAIN CHEMISTRY
Despite the provocative title, Fisher’s fragmented piece mentions very little about psychedelic drug use (something that Jeremy Gilbert seems very much aware of).3 In his description of acid communism, Fisher writes, “The concept of acid communism is a provocation and a promise. It is a joke of sorts, but one with a very serious purpose. It points to something that, at one point, seemed inevitable, but which now appears impossible: the convergence of class consciousness, socialist-feminist consciousness-raising, and psychedelic consciousness, the fusion of new social movements with a communist project, an unprecedented aestheticization of everyday life.”4 Perhaps the vague notion of “psychedelic consciousness” could be seen as a call for this drug-haze-as-revolution, though Fisher’s descriptions of “psychedelic consciousness” seem more tied to the expressions in music, popular social movements, and a contested space of what Raymond Williams called the “means of communication as means of production.” Stamm and Gilbert, however, both emphasize the role of drug-induced experiences specifically, with Stamm even writing about their experiences at a bourgeois function for the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies. The focus on drugs as a means of escaping the effects of depression and anxiety specifically may have some resonance with Fisher’s concerns — his writings on depression and its effects are some of the most poignant pieces in his collected writings. However, one might also remember how skeptical Fisher was of medication as a method of treating the cause (rather than the symptoms) of depression without simultaneously changing social relations and the economic conditions that limited individual flourishing and healing.
If we are fighting to eliminate drug laws, perhaps we should consider the way that such laws often attack the working class and people of color while propagating a system of prison labor and global police measures (not to mention the contemporary immigrant crisis). In 2017 alone there were 1,632,921 drug-related arrests in the United States, with well over half of the arrests being for possession and nearly 600,000 arrests for marijuana possession alone.5 While there has been research showing how drugs like marijuana and psychedelics can potentially alleviate mental and social illnesses, taking clinical trials and then immediately projecting them into a method of politicization is dangerous. If Fisher’s concern for mental health was primarily about a lack of social opportunities and the individualization of social failure, then we should also be looking at less glamorous methods of assisting both cognitive health and social being. This means looking at the restrictions of the legal system, the techniques management utilizes to maintain workplace domination, the structure of the working day, and the growth of precarious and time-consuming gig economies through platforms like Uber. If we are concerned with systemic attacks on social well-being, we should begin with these social relations rather than seeking to provoke individual consciousness with psychedelics, yoga, or rituals.
Gilbert has stated that he’s “not saying everyone should take psychedelic drugs (which are illegal in most countries), or take up yoga, or anything else in particular.” Fair enough, but the only account of revolutionary consciousness given by Gilbert is a sudden refusal of “neoliberal and bourgeois values generally.”6 Even if we are assured that this new refusal will occur through social and communal action, the focus on consciousness as a kind of revelation will always turn back to the individual. To focus on consciousness in this way, even in the name of de-individualizing neoliberal identities, is to take the role of an “ideologue” like Feuerbach or Stirner rather than that of a political revolutionary.
HERITAGE AND HISTORY OF THE NEW LEFT
Stamm writes:
“The Acid Communist movement has helped me view my politics as part of a historical lineage, not a misappropriation of serious Leftism…Gilbert and Fisher both explored the viability of incorporating old-school ‘consciousness-raising’ events in a psychedelic framework. First developed by socialist feminists in the 1970s, consciousness-raising encourages participants to share stories about struggles normally conceived as private and shameful. The idea is that when people tune in to others’ narratives of hardship – which may include accounts of mental illness, social isolation and poverty – such problems revealed as not an exception, but the norm.”
These remarks about the insights of consciousness-raising, intended to connect Acid Communism to the history of real socialist activity, reveal a failure to interrogate that history. The principles of “consciousness-raising” that Acid Communism takes inspiration from are connected to Maoist practices of “speaking bitterness” whereby peasants could be radicalized into attacking their landlords and seizing the grounds which they worked. As Maoism became viewed as a newer, more radical alternative to the official line of Comintern politics in the ’60s, the principles of “speaking bitterness” were adapted into the softer form of consciousness-raising. But what could conscious raising accomplish in the Western urban context? Whether or not a peasant revolution could maintain socialism through a prolonged period of industrialization, there is no doubt that the immediate action of peasants in a developing nation in the midst of civil war is more likely to succeed than cells of oppressed groups in urbanized countries like the United States, Britain, France, or indeed the vast majority of the contemporary world. Mike Macnair of the Communist Party of Great Britain has commented before on the failures of consciousness-raising and its fracturing of Leftist discourse and organization: “While consciousness-raising for workers may often be a waste of time, for women, blacks and gays and lesbians it is a different story. They are hardly in a position to overthrow the exploiter, and their oppression is more diffuse. There is more atomisation. Consciousness-raising may produce radicalisation — but not the ability to move from here to immediately decisive action. The result is as often as not forms of demoralisation.”7Macnair’s criticisms are not the same as Fisher’s invocation of the infamous “vampire castle”; the issue here is not twitter infighting and virtue signaling, but an actual question of organization. Macnair’s criticism of consciousness-raising is that these methods of trying to expand the discussion of oppression on the left (itself a worthy goal) were implemented without considering plans for decisive action, producing atomization and organizational splintering that could hinder effective strategies and discussions. The left doesn’t have to be composed of friends who agree on everything (anyone who takes more than a glance at the history of the First, Second, or Third International should be well aware of this), but if we do not create methods within our own movement to deal with our disagreements, debate strategy, and come to standards for membership and political action, we will not have a movement at all.
Stamm continues: “Across the US, the reform of drug policy is a popular cause among libertarians and certain factions of the alt-right…When I pressed Jeremy Gilbert on this, he responded that contemporary hippies who embrace libertarianism fail to grasp the political history of their subculture. The New Agers of the mid-20th century, he claimed, were never in favor of capitalist principles.” This answer appears rather historically inaccurate. The contemporary right-libertarian claims to counterculture have historical ties that cannot be construed as merely a misunderstanding or late appropriation. One need only think of famous libertarian Robert A. Heinlein’s simultaneous admiration for drug use and free love in Stranger in a Strange Land and his positive portrayal of militarization and nationalist bravura in Starship Troopers. And what of Tom Wolfe, author of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, who supported George W. Bush? Paleoconservative Paul Gottfried was a student of Herbert Marcuse and has claimed to uphold the lineage of critical methodology from his former professor.8 There is a dangerous notion here that conservative and reactionary politics is simply passive. As though there were a simple dichotomy between progress on the one hand, and resistance to progress on the other. There are two kinds of progress advancing at the same time – one is the left’s strategy, the other the right. Both political wings produce new operations, goals, and projects in response to each other. The right-wing libertarianism that’s become popular in America is not simply sitting idly by, tricking those who haven’t learned their history. It is a political project that has its own history which connects to ’60s counterculture and has developed strategies through that history. We on the left cannot simply claim to take back all the history of the ’60s as though it has been merely distorted or foiled.
Gilbert insists “I’m not romanticizing the counterculture of the 1960s — but I think its ‘problems’ and ‘failures’ have become so well known and so well-documented that it has become easy to forget both that it had some significant positive effects, and that its failures were not just intrinsic to it, but a result of its political defeat by the New Right and its allies.”9 But we aren’t given an explanation of what the strategies or conditions were that allowed the New Right to overtake the New Left, nor are we given much concrete analysis of what the actual activities of the New Left were besides consciousness-raising, rallies, and the existence of some kind of vague utopian imagination. It is not objectionable to find positive examples of concrete action in the leftist movements of the ’60s, but doing so requires greater historical conviction. The notion that one can simply invert the “drop out” culture of the ’60s into “rise up” seems a gross misunderstanding of the contexts that brought Communists like Marcuse to the New Left in the first place. We cannot forget that much of the western consciousness-raising was done in a situation where the USSR, China, and Cuba had revolutionized while the already industrial and proletarianized west had failed to do so. The interest in consciousness raised by Lukacs, Gramsci, and the Frankfurt School occurred at a moment where authoritarian reaction was already absorbing liberal governments and crushing left-wing opposition. The later interest in consciousness with the New Left was brought about while unions, civil rights activism, and anti-war protests were already in motion. And, again, actual socialist countries (regardless of their usefulness as a contemporary model for socialism) existed and were fighting capitalism and supplying material support to movements around the world. It is hard to say that our contemporary position is much like either of these periods. Yes, there appears to be a new (and often violent) resurgence of reaction. There also seems to be a growth of interest in socialism and a return to discussion about Marxism. This is not necessarily unusual: reaction always grows in response to the appearance of potential for left movements. Persuading people to join in a political position is obviously part of politics, but what is our politics specifically? What are our positions? What is our movement, our organization? An interest in real utopianism and new futures relies just as much on these questions as it does on consciousness as-such.
Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver with LSD Guru Timothy Leary in Algeria
FESTIVALISM
“While Adorno upheld creativity as a space of revolutionary otherness,” writes Stann, “Fisher said, he did not provide any tangible visions for the politics that art might inform.“ Ironically, it seems the same could be said of this new wave of appropriating the concept of Acid Communism. To continue quoting Stann:
Radical politics, [Gilbert] said, are always utopian, and utopian intentions are wasted without a manifest blueprint for change. Psychedelic art, with its message of love and transcendence, delivers. ‘It’s not going to be for everybody,’ he clarified. But he indicated that its recognizable styles — whirling geometric patterns, fractals, and musical intricacy — offer an ‘aesthetics of complexity’ which contrast with the dull reductiveness of capitalist realism. ‘Not many people allow themselves the full extent of their complexity,’ he said, quoting composer Arthur Russell. With its multidimensional intricacies, both the art and the drugs might throw the banality of contemporary popular media into high relief.
But what vision of Utopia is here? If one were to look at another, relatively overlooked Frankfurt School figure, Ernst Bloch, one would see a much deeper and serious engagement with the notion of utopia whereby the concept of utopia throughout history is the imaginative capacity of people to think of a world without class divisions. Bloch’s project of utopian imagination, like Adorno’s interest in consciousness, was grounded in the rise of fascism, and later his professorship in East Germany. While Bloch appreciated the interest in the myths and stories of the past, he always insisted on the necessity of grounding action in the possibilities and structures of the present: “The friend of true enlightenment will hardly withhold his delight at and gratitude for such prefigurations and their instruction. But the activity of the intellect involving the processes of amending, augmenting, and illuminating the world from the basis of the world always starts out from a scientifically achieved awareness that retains a certain given context.”10Acid Communism generally claims to be upholding the history of the left, the principle of utopia, radical action, communism, but the actual visions of the future are put aside in favor of the activities which are integrated into the aesthetics of “whirling geometric fractals.” Jeremy Gilbert makes the astute observation that “we inhabit a culture whose institutions, laws, economies and social practices have for centuries been organised around the opposite idea, attributing individual responsibility to every action, treating private property as the foundation on which society is built, teaching us that private emotion is the seat of authentic experience. Under these circumstances, learning to function in such a way that the knowledge that nobody is really an in-dividual (i.e. indivisible, independent of social relations) becomes more than just abstract theory, is immensely challenging” only to follow up with a turn to ‘the whole countercultural panoply of raves, drugs, yoga, chi-kung, Zen etc.” and some “set of practices and ideas which are at one and the same time mystical and materialist — a materialist mysticism which acknowledges the complex potentialities of human embodied existence, without tying that recognition to any set of supernatural or theistic beliefs.”11 This is not a utopian vision, but a substitution.
It is true that interest in the festival and its role in social bonding has a significant part in leftist thought. The topic of social kinship and engagement through festivals and gifts is an important topic of inquiry in sociology and anthropology appearing as far back as Marcel Mauss’s The Gift and Franz Baermann Steiner’s Taboo. The French Marxist Henri Lefebvre, inspiration to the Situationists, took the ecstatic descriptions of festival in Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel as an early form of communal, revolutionary activity whose elements could be found in the crevices of contemporary life. Concern for meaning, practice, friendship, and fulfillment in everyday life has been an important part of turning individuals to the left and is particularly important for those who are subject to domination and exclusion in the public sphere due to their identity and/or ability. It is not unreasonable to believe that a new communist movement requires a legitimate concern for and analysis of the practices of everyday life, considering the wide variety of everyday experiences that many communities can have within the same spaces. However, even if a new social life is necessary, and even if a mass left movement would benefit from its own methods of socializing, recreation, and enjoyment, it is one thing to say this should grow out of a unity of worker’s movement and communist political platform, quite another to proclaim this is itself the political action of communism in the present.
While autonomist movements emerging in the United States (the Johnson-Forest tendency), Italy (“operaismo”), and France (Socialisme ou Barbarie) ultimately failed in producing movements capable of seizing and holding power, their interest in uncovering the desires of the workers is something the contemporary left can make use of, but the festivalism of Acid Communism isn’t willing to conceive of itself operating on the shop floor when it would prefer a dance floor. Counterculturalism that originates outside of the interests of the proletariat — who are composed of numerous social and cultural backgrounds — is liable to alienate them and appear farcical or frivolous. A leftist culture originates from the social grounds and desires of the proletariat; it is not viable to simply choose an image that stands in opposition to an image of “the establishment.” We would do well to consider yet another New Left veteran, the ethicist and ex-Trotskyist Alasdair MacIntyre, who wrote of the New Left:
Their thinking is imprisoned by two contradictions which prevent growth in socialist thought beyond a certain point. The first of these concerns the relation between a capitalist economy and the variety of social institutions within such an economy. The second concerns the problem of socialist organization… the New Left wants to stress both the all-pervasive corrupting influence of capitalism and the possibility of transforming institutions within capitalism…the trouble with this demand for building in the ‘here and now’ is its ambiguity. If this is offered as an alternative to building a working-class movement then it is doomed to frustration and failure. If on the other hand it is, as it could be, a way into the class struggle then it is important and full of possibility. For clearly, trying to create forms of community or culture which are opposed to the values of capitalism will at once bring one into social conflict.12
The focus on consciousness as some mystical quality to be played with, combined with the failure to appropriately study the history of the New Left and instead fetishize its appearances and figures, have returned us to this organizational problem. If there is potential in Acid Communism, it must explicitly see itself as a part of class struggle, not merely an opposition to social alienation and privatization. The revolutionary desires of the working class are already developed through the limitations of capitalism. Surely the working class already knows that it hates long hours, living by wages, the commodification of everyday values, and the precarity of the economy and job market. The point isn’t to make them suddenly realize they’re unhappy and want something different; the point is to give the working-class opportunities to express and act on the desires and needs that they already have through political and social revolution. Gilbert claims “the very notion of ‘class politics’ is simply oxymoronic,”13and in doing so he does nothing to ground Acid Communism in the demystification of material relations. Instead, he skirts the issue by treating class struggle as something self-evident, something that just happens when enough individual interests simply align. If Acid Communism isn’t ready to ready itself as a proponent of real class conflict as opposed to merely recreation, then it will not be a revolutionary asset.
The 1971 May Day protests against the war in Vietnam.
A RETURN TO STRATEGY
The issue here is strategy, not the proposition that Acid Communism is a strategy or should be one, but contextualizing the ideas presented by Acid Communism as a potential part of a strategy:
Is Acid Communism a rhetorical position? A center from which to produce aesthetics, discussions, and appeals in order to bolster a movement? If so, we need to start thinking in terms of a movement, which means Acid Communism must develop political positions and not simply demand an “end to capitalism” without considering what comes afterwards. How, exactly, the left should present itself given the long shadow of its history remains an open question. Anyone who has dealt with persons from (or who trace their descent to) the Ukraine, Cuba, Cambodia, or Peru (among many other countries with complicated, and sometimes terrible, relationships with state communist parties and vanguards) must acknowledge that historical defensiveness must be dealt with pragmatically and with respect to the failures of our own historical movements. We cannot always assume that those who are afraid of the associations of communism are acting in bad faith or are unreasonably exaggerating.
Is Acid Communism a research project in the strategies and activities of the New Left and late Western Marxisms of the ’60s? If so, it should not merely represent itself as a part of a “heritage” but take an active stance in rigorously debating, researching, and criticizing the movements of the ’60s even as it affirms their vision and potential. Politics is not simply invoking a culture and past optimism that is passed down through music, fashion, and a vague notion of altered consciousness in cognitive experiments.
Is Acid Communism about new ways to engage with social consciousness? If so, what are we producing consciousness of? Again, realizing capitalism is simply bad or harmful isn’t enough. Encouraging a real reflection on desire as a need, and desire as a part of a social sphere, is a step forward — but this alone does not guarantee a revolutionary project or even a revolutionary worldview. The failures of the sudden insurrectionary moments of the ’60s should be our starting point here: the sudden, mass realization of desires and utopian possibilities is not enough without an attempt to organize and plan. Social bases are important, they are not the end. We need to have a base of people who can recognize what they want from and for the future, we also need a position that can mediate those desires and think about the structure of a world that can listen to and attend to those desires through social action that is not currently possible.
It may be true that the concepts embedded in Acid Communism “could be a component of a dynamic, experimental Leftism that is as interested in creativity as it is in critique,” but whatever insights Fisher’s final manuscript might have contained, it will be of little use if it is overshadowed by idealized approaches to politics. If Acid Communism is going to be a component of leftist politics it must also be willing to identify its role in a greater strategy with end goals and demands, not merely claim to be an exercise in building some kind of vision — a circular project without a social movement already interested in mobilizing around such visions. Social community, mental wellbeing, and understanding of the real social desires and needs of individuals (desires and needs that are informed by race, gender, sexuality, and numerous other social identities as well as class) are all important issues for a left movement to address, but the lack of any real discussion of the social, material causes of these problems will always lead back to capitalist realism. A utopian vision of the future won’t simply come from some existential shift in individual consciousness. Global networks and communications, dark factories, universal healthcare, urban restructuring, public transportation, global redistribution of resources, a reduced workweek — these are all better foundations for a utopian future than so many festivals and trips will ever be. This utopian possibility will only matter if we conceive of these possibilities as a battleground for class struggle to be fought be a real, organized movement. If Acid Communism cannot conceive of itself within these terms, then it is sure to be a bad trip.
Revolution is outdated and no longer a realistic means to achieve socialism according to Nora Belrose, a DSA member who writes a popular blog. Is revolutionary politics now only an idealistic fantasy? Jonah Martell argues otherwise.
Revolution: the motor of history.
‘Revolution’ is a peculiar concept. Few words in the English language have been so thoroughly stripped of substance, yet it retains a near universal appeal. Liberal hacks fantasize about a great blue tide of ‘Resistance’ sweeping Donald Trump out of office; Tea Party wingnuts dream of ‘fighting big government’ with AR-15s and Fox News talking points; even Elon Musk is fond of ‘revolution’ as a buzzword: he uses it to market his Tesla cars.1
Everyone loves revolution—except for Nora Belrose, a DSA activist from Indiana. In her increasingly popular blog, she argues that American socialists must “put down their pitchforks” and accept that revolution is no longer relevant in advanced capitalist countries. She challenges the basics of Marxist political strategy and advances a pacifistic alternative centered on electoral engagement within the Democratic Party.
As a Marxist, I welcome Belrose’s challenge. We should never cling to political views that do not hold up to scrutiny, even if they are widely cherished. But Belrose’s legalistic road to socialism does not solve any of the problems that it claims to address. On the contrary, it is profoundly naïve, manipulative, and undemocratic. What we need instead is a renewed commitment to revolutionary struggle, updated to the 21st century and adapted to American political conditions. Only revolution can bring us to our ultimate goal: a socialist America in a socialist world.
I
In this piece, I will pass over Belrose’s more peripheral ideas, including her pop-psychology rejection of free will,2 her sci-fi speculations about human extinction,3 and her belief that automation will “kill capitalism” by making workers obsolete.4I will focus instead on her core political principles and their implications.
Belrose’s most distinctive political stance is her cheery enthusiasm for the two-party system. Many socialists have given up on fighting two-party rule, but very few of them actually support it. Belrose is a peculiar exception. “The two-party system,” she declares in her blog’s second essay, “is actually good.”5
It is true, Belrose concedes, that many leftists consider two-party rule undemocratic. But a richer democracy is not her primary goal: her goal is to “make the state do things that benefit workers” and “transform the economy in the direction of democratic socialism.”6 Apparently, this would take too much effort in a multiparty system:
In countries with proportional representation (PR) and several viable political parties, it’s nearly impossible for any one party to gain an outright majority in parliament. This forces parties to join together in coalitions and make compromises. While this may sound good in the abstract, it makes it much more difficult to get any kind of radical socialist program enacted … The ideal for the Left is to realign the American party system in such a way that there is one right-wing capitalist party, and one left-wing social democratic or socialist party.7
How will we produce this polarizing realignment? By taking over the Democratic Party. Because American political parties cannot directly control their candidate nomination process, Belrose believes that “labor-based parties are illegal in the U.S.,” so we may as well roll over and give up on building one. Instead, we should create a loose “network of civil society organizations” to run candidates in Democratic primaries, conquering the party from within.8This would be easier than building our own party anyway since the working class is too ignorant to handle independent politics:
Most voters are working-class people who have little time to research each candidate in detail—so they use candidates’ party identifications to get a general idea of what they likely stand for … Because of this, candidates running on Democratic or Republican Party ballot lines can effortlessly win thousands of votes based on party identification alone. Any third party or independent candidate will needlessly have to work much harder … We shouldn’t make it gratuitously harder to get leftists elected—it’s hard enough as it is.9
A brilliant plan! With cunning and patience, a socialist network wins control of the world’s largest capitalist party. Its members rise to state power on a wave of busy, ignorant voters who back them out of loyalty to the Democrats, and use the state to implement their program. Auguste Blanqui would be impressed: Belrose has found a way to implement his conspiratorial path to socialism without spilling a single drop of blood.
The only problem, of course, is that Belrose’s plan will never work, for two critical reasons. The first is that the clean-cut ‘conquest’ of the Democratic Party that she envisions is impossible. The party’s neoliberal establishment is utterly ruthless and its members have billions of dollars at their disposal. Even consistent primary defeats will not eliminate them as an organized political force (unless guillotines are part of Belrose’s long-term strategy). If left-wing reformers continue to advance within the Democratic Party, the party establishment will begin to retaliate with increasingly dirty maneuvers. They will file frivolous lawsuits to keep reform candidates off the ballot, a move they already tried (unsuccessfully) against Julia Salazar, a DSA candidate for the New York State Senate.10Where this fails, they may push legislation to close up their primary elections, or even use their limitless resources to set up a breakaway political party. The result will at best be a fragmentation of the existing party system, not a simple polarization.
It is unlikely that Belrose’s informal “network” could survive this upheaval with its head intact. She cites Momentum, Jeremy Corbyn, and the UK Labour Party as an example of her realignment strategy working in practice, but in fact it illustrates just the opposite. Momentum is a useless fiefdom controlled by a single man named Jon Lansman, and the Corbyn movement has repeatedly capitulated to the party right’s anti-Semitism witch hunts. Even in intra-party struggles, formal, democratic organizations are indispensable, and the Labour Left is learning this the hard way.
A more serious issue with Belrose’s strategy is its obvious lack of commitment to principled majoritarian politics. She appears to believe that the path to socialism should be ‘easy’ and that the Left must pursue elected office at any cost. This leads her to endorse clever political maneuvers over the hard game of long-term organizing—a sort of electoral Blanquism. She even argues that progressive politicians should be welcome to call themselves democratic socialists without backing social ownership of the economy, because “at this stage, it is more important to popularize [democratic socialism] … than it is to fill it with clear anti-capitalist content.”11
Revolutionary Marxism is more sensible and pragmatic than Nora Belrose. It recognizes that socialists cannot hold power sustainably without conscious majority support. As Friedrich Engels wrote in his 1895 introduction to The Class Struggles in France:
The time of surprise attacks, of revolutions carried through by small conscious minorities at the head of unconscious masses, is past. Where it is a question of a complete transformation of the social organization, the masses themselves must also be in it, must themselves already have grasped what is at stake, what they are going in for [with body and soul]. The history of the last fifty years has taught us that. But in order that the masses may understand what is to be done, long, persistent work is required, and it is just this work which we are now pursuing, and with a success which drives the enemy to despair.12
Proportional representation (PR) is a valuable goal for socialists who value this patient approach to organizing. Under PR, a party’s representation is tied directly to its percentage of the vote, eradicating the spoiler effect forever. In the short term, it would help us run candidates under a distinctive ballot line, with full independence from the Democratic Party. In the long term, it would force us to win a conscious majority to our program before we gain any democratic mandate to govern.
Belrose may be surprised to learn that PR has a rich history in the United States. It was used for decades by over two dozen local governments, including New York City—until Cold War redbaiters scrapped it to disenfranchise black and Communist voters.13 They were wise to take it away from us, and we would be wise to take it back.
Belrose objects yet again that this fight would be too hard. After all, winning PR and other electoral reforms would require us to “embark on an ambitious project of electoral reform in almost every state in the Union.”14
Precisely! As I discussed in my previous article, The Conquest of Ballots,a nationwide struggle for electoral reform would be a boon for the American Left. It would certainly be difficult, but it would also be a powerful organizing catalyst that could lay the foundations of an independent working-class party. Belrose warns that attempting to gain control over our ballot line by abolishing primary elections would turn the entire public against us. However, we can always frame the issue as one of “free association” and combine it with a package of more immediately palatable reforms. We could even put the demand on the backburner entirely and find ways to work around it. Howie Hawkins has suggested that socialists form a party based on a dual legal structure, with a state-recognized skeleton party under the de facto control of a more formal membership organization. The Socialist Party of America used this tactic in the early 20th century, and although it is not ideal, it could be used again.15
There is no easy shortcut to socialism—only the long, hard battle of democracy. In an age of court-rigging, gerrymandering, and mass voter suppression, we should be fighting it now more than ever.
II
Belrose’s brand of socialism also features a noxious affinity for the capitalist police. In her fourth essay, she declares in large bold print that “police officers are actually good.”16 She claims that abolishing the police is “utopian thinking” that could never work in the real world, and takes issue with the idea that the police are servants of the ruling class: if their purpose is to crush popular revolt, then why do they “spend most of their time preventing theft and assault”?17
Belrose acknowledges that police brutality is real, but she claims that it is a purely American issue. Police in other countries such as the UK are benevolent because they “almost never kill civilians,” and things could be the same in the United States. She offers up several policy proposals to reduce American police violence, including universal legal care, drug decriminalization, and mandatory body cameras. In the meantime, we should recognize that “police are public servants, just like teachers and firefighters.” 18 What’s the difference?
The first is that teachers do not shoot puppies19 or murder children20 with impunity. The second, snark aside, is that police are hitmen for the ruling class, whether Belrose likes it or not. Modern police forces were first developed in the early 19th century to crush strikes, riots, and slave revolts.21 Their purpose has always been intrinsically repressive, and even their mundane work “preventing theft and assault” serves capitalist interests. How could anyone make money in a society overrun by violent criminals? Day-to-day law enforcement also prepares police for the more spectacular acts of brutality that define their profession. It desensitizes them to violence, gives them a sense of self-legitimacy, and allows commanders to handpick the most ruthless cops to lead their riot squads.22
This is not a uniquely American problem. Capitalism in the United States is sustained by a vicious racial hierarchy, which gives its police a particularly brutal disposition, but oppressive policing exists even in Europe, Belrose’s social-democratic utopia. In the United Kingdom, black people are stopped by police nearly six times as often as whites, and in France, cops brutalize North Africans with tear gas, beatings, and sexual abuse.23 For every outright murder committed by police, there are hundreds of pat-downs, baton swings, and other daily indignities that Belrose completely overlooks.
The fact that police do socially necessary work does not make them benevolent—or irreplaceable—as an institution. Marxists acknowledge the need for a process of law enforcement under socialism, but we insist that it take on a completely new institutional form: the people’s militia. Instead of relying on militarized goon squads to maintain the peace, we demand that the entire population receive training in gun use, self-defense, and non-violent conflict resolution. Under the militia system, every competent citizen will be able to serve in a democratic, self-managed community patrol.
The militia system does not mean an end to all law enforcement professions. There will still be a need for crime scene investigators, hostage negotiators, victim advocates and other specialties that most people are not trained in. The difference from the present system is that the people who work in these professions will still be civilians, accountable to the militia as a whole. The result will be a self-policed society, without the brutal authoritarianism of capitalist law enforcement. As society further develops towards communism, the need for prisons, policing, and other coercive institutions will gradually wither away.
It is striking that Belrose does not include community control of the police in her list of policy proposals. For all its limitations, community control could help us rein in the worst police abuses and initiate the transition to a popular militia. Of course, this idea is completely foreign to Belrose: her technocratic brand of socialism does not mesh with such radically democratic demands.
Belrose’s police apologia did not drop out of the sky. It reflects her broader belief that the capitalist state is a class-neutral entity. As she declares in her fourth essay:
The state isn’t inherently on any one “side” of the class struggle. Rather, the state mediates between various different social groups and tries (and often fails) to maintain a relatively peaceful coexistence among all of them. This does mean that the state will tend to protect the property of the rich—but it will also work to prevent individual crime, and it will even give protections to workers if it feels that this is necessary to maintain order. Despite its many flaws and shortcomings, working people are better off with the state than they would be without it.24
This analysis is completely detached from reality, especially in the United States. Unlike most capitalist states, the American political system did not evolve naturally over time. It was crafted behind closed doors by a class-conscious ruling class, by aristocrats desperate to maintain their grip on power. To prove this, we need only refer to the writings of James Madison, who kindly informs us that the Constitution was designed to keep the unpropertied majority from enacting “a rage for paper money … an abolition of debts … an equal division of property … [or] any other improper or wicked project.”25
Most Americans understand on an intuitive level that they do not live in a genuine democracy. Millions of people are disenfranchised; the president is not elected by the popular vote; the Senate overrepresents conservative rural areas; congressional districts are gerrymandered, and Supreme Court justices—appointed for life—claim the right to strike down legislation whenever they see fit. At best, the American state is a plutocratic republic. What limited democratic features it does possess were carved into it, by decades of militant struggle.
III
For Belrose, however, militant struggle is obsolete. Her strategy is based on a blanket rejection of revolution, as demonstrated by her most provocative article “Put Down Your Pitchforks: Why Revolutionary Politics Doesn’t Work.”
In this piece (which she later retitled to condemn “insurrectionary” politics), she declares that revolution is impossible in advanced capitalist countries because “the democratic state commands legitimacy.”26Revolutions only occur in times of extreme tyranny, poverty, and degradation, and in all circumstances, workers will confine themselves to legal electoral struggle. Because the existing state has democratic institutions, we must strive to win power within it, on its own terms. When this happens, nothing can stand in our way:
When a popular movement wins a commanding majority in parliament, it immediately inherits all the legitimacy associated with the democratic state … As long as the elections are fair, no one can question that the new government is a reflection of the popular will.27
Franco, Pinochet, and many others would beg to differ, but thankfully, Belrose does not present an immediate threat to them. Because she believes that immiseration is the source of revolutionary progress, she banishes socialist transition to the distant future. Capitalism will only be abolished by an extreme crisis, when the “rising tide of automation” has plunged millions of workers into grinding poverty. Until then, we should merely “push the boundaries of social democracy … preparing for the moment later this century when society will be ready to leap into the bright democratic socialist future.”28
This is a peculiar combination of gradualism and catastrophism, but its rejection of a revolutionary break is not unique: it reflects the mainstream opinion of most American democratic socialists, including key writers for Jacobin Magazine. As Vivek Chibber declares in his article “Our Road to Power”:
The state has infinitely greater legitimacy with the population than European states did a century ago. Further, its coercive power, its power of surveillance, and the ruling class’s internal cohesiveness give the social order a stability that is orders of magnitude greater than it had in 1917 … Our strategic perspective has to downplay the centrality of a revolutionary rupture and navigate a more gradualist approach. For the foreseeable future, left strategy has to revolve around building a movement to pressure the state, gain power within it, change the institutional structure of capitalism, and erode the structural power of capital — rather than vaulting over it.29
Underlying all of these arguments is the widespread belief that modern governments are omnipotent. In an age of tear gas, nuclear weapons, and the NSA, it seems outrageous to promote self-defense against the state, or any other break with legality. But beneath the surface, the reality is much more nuanced. Technological development has given states more eyes to see with, but it has also given them more streets to patrol. The same social media networks that enable mass surveillance also helped spark the Arab Spring, as well as the recent wave of teacher strikes in the U.S. More importantly, a revolution is not an act of brute physical force: it is a complex social process that can be relatively bloodless, especially if the military joins its ranks.
Because Chibber and Belrose fear to attempt the impossible, they refuse to fight for what is necessary. It is certainly important for socialists to work hard at winning elections, to fight for immediate reforms and build a majority mandate for socialism. But if this struggle is successful, it will eventually hit political limits that make revolutionary rupture the only path forward.
For the purpose of illustration, let us imagine that the year is 2028. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has won the presidential elections in a landslide and DSA candidates have taken control of the House of Representatives. The vast majority of Americans are ready for their program: Medicare for All, universal college, and a gradual nationalization of the Fortune 500 companies. Only two obstacles stand in the way: a Senate controlled by neoliberal Democrats and a Supreme Court dominated by the reactionary right.
President Ocasio-Cortez and her allies know that they have majority support, and they make every effort to enact their program. But time and again, the Senate Democrats block their proposals or water them down to the point of unrecognizability. Eventually, a compromise bill for healthcare reform makes it through Congress—only to be struck down by the Supreme Court. Brett Kavanaugh gleefully writes the majority opinion, which declares single-payer healthcare unconstitutional.
At this point, the socialist movement stands at a crossroads. It can bow down to Brett Kavanaugh and work within the rules of the system, or it can demand the right to rule on the basis of its majority political support. Choosing the former can only mean retreat. Choosing the latter would spark revolutionary upheaval.
This scenario may be imaginary, but it displays the fragmented, reactionary nature of American political institutions. ‘Democratic’ legalism is a naïve fantasy in a state that is profoundly undemocratic. We must learn to embrace the more sensible course: revolution.
IV
American socialists need a revolutionary alternative to Belrose’s pacifistic reformism—a strategy that is principled, militant, and pragmatic. For decades, self-described ‘revolutionaries’ have prided themselves on meeting the first and second of these criteria, but they have never met the third. The failure of revolutionary politics in the advanced capitalist world is an extraordinarily complex topic, and no one will ever unravel it completely. It is rooted in a combination of historical conditions and strategic blunders by socialists that have mutually reinforced one another. We will never know if history could have taken a different path in 1914, in 1968, or in 2011. But we can learn from the mistakes of the past, and use them to forge a better strategy for the future. What could be some defining features of this pragmatic revolutionism?
Above all else, it would require a commitment to formal, democratic, majoritarian organization. There is no substitute for this—not a ‘Leninist’ vanguard party, not Belrose’s ‘network’ of left-liberal Democrats, and certainly not anarchist dumpster-diving collectives. At their core revolutions are not destructive, but constructive processes: they are moments in which the masses strive to consciously remake society. This requires formal discussion, debate, and deliberation. Most ‘revolutionaries’ in the developed world have completely failed to recognize this: they believe that revolutions are explosions set off by immiseration and incendiary rhetoric. Consequently, they reject all efforts at long-term institution-building. They promote a perpetual sense of emergency among their members and make efforts to turn every street demonstration into a revolutionary crisis. The result is a ‘workers’ movement’ that is completely detached from the working class, self-relegated to the fringes of political life.
The idea that immiseration by itself produces revolutionary change is profoundly anti-Marxist. Revolutionary moments have unfolded in many historical periods when people were not starving en masse, from the American Revolution of the 1770s to Chile in the early 1970s. The real source of revolution is more subjective: it is the development of a wide gap between what the working class has and what it believes is possible. The task of a socialist party is to do everything in its power to expand that gap.
To do this, it must be willing to engage with existing institutions without grounding its legitimacy in them. We can vigorously contest elections and fight for reforms while still acknowledging the limits of this struggle, acknowledging the need for an eventual break with the capitalist state. Our source of legitimacy must be majority support from the working class, not 18th-century constitutional protocols. Even as we send our representatives into Congress, we must build up our own institutions outside the state, from parties to unions to cooperative organizations, that can lay the foundations of a post-revolutionary society.
On a more prosaic level, we must abandon the fantasy of ‘conquering the Democrats.’ Even if this were possible, it would mean embedding ourselves in a two-party system that betrays our fundamental political values. The system of primary elections in the United States is in some ways uniquely democratic, and in the short term, we should make use of it by running socialists in bothRepublican and Democraticprimaries. Running in both parties would help establish the fact that we are loyal to neither, and make it easier for us to build a mass constituency that cuts across existing party lines. But these efforts must be joined at the hip with a nationwide struggle for electoral reform. We must uphold the fight for a higher democracy, every step of the way.
V
Nora Belrose is not good at socialist theory. Her ideas are strategically bankrupt. But even so, she has done the Left a great service by presenting them in an honest, straightforward light. She never minces her words or dawdles in half-measures. With her effort to slaughter every sacred cow of orthodox Marxism, she has forced us to defend our views intelligently.
For that, she deserves our undying gratitude and respect.
Stani Bjegunac takes a look at different approaches to the national question by historical communists and how we may approach issues of national oppression in a 21st-century context.
FLN partisans fight for national independence in Algeria.
Preface
It should not be surprising that the reason I chose to take part in this publication was due to my disappointment with the left in my country. I assume for the purposes of discussion, that the circle associated with this publication is of a communist sentiment and adopts a broadly materialist view of both history and studying the contemporary world. The topic I wish to discuss is one which inspires in me both unsurprised disappointment and even disgust, as well as constant fascination: the communist stance towards the national question. With that said I think the Left, at least those who consider themselves “revolutionary” has mostly gotten the national question wrong, which leads to all kinds of questionable politics, such as leftist support for Rojava, the Assad government in Syria (or the nationalist and Islamist opposition groups), North Korea’s right to own nuclear weapons and the Bolivarian “revolution” in Venezuela. I think this is so important considering how there still exist objectively unresolved national questions, like the oppression of Palestinians. Furthermore, agreement on the national question is of such importance to communist strategy because it includes two central issues, namely what our stance is vis-a-vis the bourgeois state and internationalism: that the revolution that overthrows capitalism must be international or it is a failure, and thus that we aim for the unification of the proletariat internationally across the many borders that divide it.
Introduction
The left has a problem with the national question. Apart from simple lack of debate, agreement, formulation and fresh theorization of the issue as it concerns the present, the actual positions that are offered are often flawed: from anarchists who talk about “Solidarity with Rojava”, to a whole swag of activists — leftist and otherwise — who “support” Palestinian, West Papuan or even Novorossian independence. On the other hand, the minuscule and historically marginal left communist sects which have been largely critical of the support of “socialists” for national liberation. These groups and circles of theorists, while often having thought-provoking positions and theories reading the question of nationalities (due to a commitment to principle and empirical analysis), are limited by naive reasoning that is both mechanical and lacking in nuance. These left communists have also been naïve insofar as they often ignore the actual practical implication of their own positions.1
This essay is not intended to pick apart a bunch of positions and say why they are wrong. This leads to wasting time with a variety of particular opinions and unproductive sect-bashing. The purpose of this essay is, instead, to critique and clarify the basis on which the national question may be discussed by leftists and to make a fresh contribution to the communist understanding of the national question which is relevant to the 21st century, rather than something pulled straight out of 1917 or from boring Comintern sloganeering. Along the way, some proposals will be stated about particular topics that need to be studied more carefully.
The first section will be about 20th-century national liberation movements. I will draw out some of the general characteristics of the wave of nationalism of the 20th century as qualitatively distinct historical phenomena from the wave of bourgeois revolutions that struck Europe in the 19th century and earlier. Note that the epochal divide does not need to be drawn at 1900 exactly (or 1914 for the decadence theorists), perhaps it even goes back to the “New Imperialism” of the late 19th century. A historical periodization needs to be drawn up of 20th century nationalism.
In the second section I go back to Marx (and Engels) and review very briefly their support for nationalisms in their time. It is important to question why these important “founding fathers” of communism were such enthusiastic supporters of bourgeois causes. Were they wrong or were they right? What view of world history guided them to think this way? And were their views consistent with their self-professed “historical materialism”? I also look into some examples of how the national question has been argued by communists critical of the classic Comintern formulation on national liberation. This includes left-communists such as the International Communist Current (ICC) and International Communist Tendency (ICT) who take a hard stance against all nationalism based on an argument about the overall trajectory of capitalism. Other theorists such as Mike Macnair for example would not dismiss the progressive nature of national aspirations in many situations, but uses Marx’s statements about the necessity of class independence to argue against alliances with bourgeois nationalists for an approach of invariant class independence. The ICC on the other hand has a more elaborate approach of decadence theory that shapes its view of the of the national question. They use a historical periodization in which nationalism of different eras has different qualities depending on whether capitalism is ascendent and still progressive or in its decadent phase and therefore to be destroyed, having outlived its progressive characteristics. Decadence in this theory begins post-1914, which entails all national struggles can only have a reactionary anti-proletarian character and are not deserving of communist support like in the way. Marx is excused of his support for national struggles because he was living when capitalism was still ascendant and progressive. This distinguishes an invariant view based on basic principles of how the class struggle of the proletariat relates to the national bourgeoisie, and a more historically contingent view, both of which may arrive at similar political conclusions for present conditions.
In the third section, I will critically look at the actual practice of leftist groups in support of this or that nat lib or “anti-imperialism”.2 I call this “remote control activism” and argue that it is ineffective.
In the fourth section, I will deal with the claims of oppressed nations and “progressive” nationalisms. Although national liberation is a faulty program for communists, we should not dismiss national oppression, and we should develop nuanced reasons for its “continuing appeal”.3
Next I look at the indigenous question in white settled states, like Australia or New Zealand. Communists have undertheorised the “indigenous question” and this I hope is a start. I write this mostly from my knowledge in my own country (Australia) and find the proposals of various leftists and indigenous activists (e.g. vague ideas about “decolonization”, “recognition”, “sovereignty”, “treaty”, land rights etc.) to be quite deficient. With this in mind, please consider the situation of the indigenous question in other places might be quite different. I conclude that communists need to think programmatically about the indigenous question from a resolutely proletarian internationalist perspective that accounts for the dispossession and systematic racism that indigenous peoples have experienced historically and continue to experience. In other words, what can a communist movement do for the indigenous people in the event of a proletarian revolution, and in the build-up to it? It is a serious issue in some countries that will not automatically go away and in the event of a global revolutionary wave it will have to be resolved or else capitalism will deal with it “blindly and bloodily”.4
The 20th Century: Nationalism Returns
A mural is painted with the words: “PLO IRA ONE STRUGGLE.” Painted by the Irish Republican Youth Movement.
At that time, I supported the October Revolution only instinctively, not yet grasping all its historic importance. I loved and admired Lenin because he was a great patriot who liberated his compatriots; until then, I had read none of his books.
After the Second World War, the world settled into a Cold War that would last four and a half decades. This split the international state system into two sides based on political allegiances, trade, and military might. From 1945-1991, this is how we should see geopolitics. The period after the war was a time when the major colonial empires had already broken up or were at the very least shadows of their former selves and in a state of decay. Even during the war, a number of nationalist movements in the former colonies (in which an important part of the war was fought) had become invigorated and some had even come to power like in Indonesia in 1945.
This is essentially the era that leftists around the world today — a diverse crowd who call themselves anti-capitalists, communists, socialists, anarchists, Marxists, anti-imperialists etc. — use as a reference point for their position on nationalism, in particular, the question of national oppression and support for national liberation. Arguably this reference point also extends back to the nationalist movements occurring at the time of the the revolutionary wave of 1917-1923 (e.g. the Chinese Civil War), when the Comintern supported “revolutionaries” outside of Russia, only to have these intrigues backfire against them anyway (e.g. Shanghai in 1923 or, less well known, Turkey in 1921).5For such leftists, Lenin’s “Imperialism: The Highest Form of Capitalism” and the position of the Bolshevik party on the “right of nations to self-determination” are the theoretical and political guides to anti-imperialism. If they are not so sophisticated, those who fetishize third world nationalism do not bother with citing historical examples and give in to the liberal mode of political discourse, moralising: who is the aggressor, who is the most “progressive” force, who is resisting imperialist domination, who is the “representative” of an oppressed people, who is the greater or lesser evil,6etc. This all, of course, disregards the complexities of the historical socialist debates about the national question.
These leftists who were enchanted by national liberation in the countries of the “imperialist core”, during the New Left, looked on these national liberation movements with reverence. Vietnam, China, Cuba, Algeria, Angola, Palestine, Nicaragua etc. Leftists disappointed with the “labor aristocracy” and low class-consciousness of their own country’s working class, who were allegedly “bought off” by imperialists, could see an image of themselves in the armed mass movements in other countries which were fighting the good fight, “surrounding the cities”, taking power, throwing out foreign imperialists, and apparently creating a new society, the living proof, if there ever was, of an alternative to the capitalist global order.
A simple historical analysis of the facts, in other words, an empirical argument against national liberation, is enough for communists to achieve clarity on this issue with regards to this era of “national liberation” nationalisms. To make things transparent, I have no illusions in the possibility of “socialism in one country”, a position which Marx and Engels did not hold to.7 In the 20th century, national liberation generally took these following characteristics.
Political Economy of Colonialism: Exclusionary and Exploitative Models of Colonization
Marxists have distinguished two basic models of colonisation. In both models the indigenous people are dispossessed. However, in one model — the exploitative model — they are reintegrated economically as the main source of labour-power. The political economy of this model depends on exploitation of the labour of the indigenous people. In the second model — the exclusionary model — the settlers’ political economy does not depend significantly on indigenous labour-power, so the indigenous people are excluded: pushed aside, ethnically cleansed, and in some cases (as in Tasmania) exterminated. This distinction between two models of colonisation goes back to Marx, who made it en passant, and was theorised by Karl Kautsky.
As should be clear to any Marxist, the distinction between these two types of colonisation, with their very different political economies, is absolutely fundamental. It has many crucial consequences. In exploitative colonisation, the settlers are a small minority, and usually form a dominant exploiting quasi-class. This was the case, for example, in Algeria and South Africa. In contrast, wherever exclusionary colonisation took place, the settlers formed a new nation. Such was the case in North America, Australia and New Zealand. In fact, I do not know of any exception to this rule.
In the same interview, it is also noted that anti-colonial movements only succeeded in countries where the exploitative model of colonialism had been in operation. The problem of exclusionary colonialism and the indigenous population, in the case of white settler states, will be discussed later. It is fair to say that the material conditions resulting from an exploitative model of colonization allowed anti-colonial movements to arise and succeed while in the lands where the exclusionary model was in operation, this possibility was cut off by the absolute destruction of the native population through massacres, disease, and land-grabs.
Class Structure: Bourgeoisie (or Lack Thereof), Peasantry, Proletariat
In the colonies of the modern colonial empires (British, French, Dutch, Portuguese) the colonizers met the most variegated societies they had ever seen. Marxists to this day debate about whether the Incas or the Mughal Empire constituted a kind of “Asiatic mode of production”. These civilizations had a considerably different class structure to what was seen back in the Old World, yet with hierarchies that made them intelligible to foreigners upon contact: kings at the top; peasants and slaves at the bottom. On the other hand, the Australian aborigines and certain peoples in North America, were classless, tribal, living off the land as nomads, or engaging in small amounts of cultivation and fish-farming here and there.8These things are historically worth seeing in terms of how the colonial systems were built, especially the way that colonizers acted with regards to the existing social structures they had found: making deals with local rulers and tapping into existing markets without fundamentally altering the mode of production (British India), conducting massacre and enslavement of the native population on plantations and mixing royal families (Caribbean, Mexico), or flat-out war of destruction and expulsion after treaties proved to be worthless (Australia, New Zealand, USA’s westward expansion in the 19th century).
Beyond all these particularities, by the beginning of the 20th century there was a world system of capitalism that had reached much of the Earth. Even in non-capitalist regions the global market was not far, and by the end of the century it would pull almost everyone into its orbit. Factories in Russia, funded by foreign capital, were forging steel for use in armaments which went into the First World War; British and German Banks were issuing notes in China; textile and garment workshops in India were exporting to the world. In the countries in which the decolonial movements occurred in the 20th century, which were as mentioned before, run on the exploitative model of colonization, it is safe to generalize that proletarians were in the minority and that peasants made up the bulk of society.9
National Liberation Party-Form
What restrains state rackets from mutual extermination is their awareness that cohesion and self-control assure their mutual survival. Below them, there’s the mass of humanity enclosed by exploitation and national frontiers. Dominant rackets have learned to negotiate and tolerate each other by coexisting in the state. The role of national mediation alters their function, from private looting to large scale administration and bureaucratic (and legal) access to the national treasure. In this form, modern politicians and functionaries buy themselves national pedigree, legitimacy, and incomes. But the racket remains the underlying state module. Dominant classes secrete them constantly, and in a democracy, this tendency is generalized in civil society. The fragmentation of commodity society and its consequent ‘war of all against all’, creates a fertile soil for rackets. As long as a strong Leviathan is not disturbed and undermined by this, rackets are tolerated even if legally proscribed.
Political rackets are informal specialist bodies, usually legal and aspiring to state domination. However, their reduced size forces them to an unstable and precarious existence. At most, they become pressure groups for parties that have gone beyond the racket stage. The larger the racket, the more it approximates a party, which contains a few rackets called tendencies or factions. Only extraordinary world and national events propel rackets to become mass parties and even attain state power. But these moments are few and far between. Most rackets have a relatively short existence. A few last for years, as torture chambers for their members…
Though political rackets seldom attain their goal of state power, their internal organisation mimics statist functions. The membership of the racket is its proletariat, and the leaders constitute a sort of portable mini-state. Rackets are essentially conservative, even if some of them, the Marxist and anarchist ones, spout radical or emancipatory messages.
In the countries in which decolonial movements grew and took power, there was invariably a party or at least a coalition of parties that had independence and their goal and aimed to lead that struggle. These parties engaged in “anti-imperialist” or “national liberation” fronts that encompassed organizations of a range of political positions; for example, the National Liberation Front (NLF) in Vietnam did not just contain the “communists” around Ho Chi Minh. These “fronts” were never quite so perfect, with different factions — “communist”, “anti-communist”, and others — fighting and murdering each other even after a period of cooperation, a most egregious example being the killing off of other political leaders by the Khmer Rouge before they had taken power.10 In the countries in which “socialism” was a decolonial force, the communist parties that came to power were “armed to the teeth” and politically and logistically supported by the USSR and its allies. It is hard to imagine the Vietnamese NLF or Castro’s revolutionaries coming to power without the tremendous force of arms. No amount of national will can make AK-47s materialize out of nowhere. Power does in a sense come out of the barrel of a gun.
These national liberation fronts and parties by their nature always involved the combination of people of a variety of class backgrounds: peasants of varying propertied status, proletarians, bourgeoisie. This, for example, found its expression in Mao’s theory of the “Bloc of Four Classes”. “Intellectuals” or the “intelligentsia” are not a class as such — they could be autodidact proles or petit-bourgeois professionals for example — however, their importance in certain movements should not be dismissed (e.g. the participation of Frantz Fanon in the Algerian independence movement) as often they rose to positions of leadership and were heavily involved. It is helpful, but not enough, to point to the class breakdown of the membership of these movements. The local football club is mostly made of working-class people, but that does not make it a proletarian organization that fights for the class as a class. It is thus important to see what their program was. Program, in this case, is not necessarily the stated goals of an organization or movement, but what its practice actually moves towards and achieves — its political content or movement. To judge this part of history we need to prioritize the assessment of actions over words.
National Liberation: Power and Program
Whether you consider the 20th-century national liberation movements to be strictly bourgeois revolutions or not, they were nonetheless bourgeois in their content.11 What made the French revolution and the bourgeois revolutions before it different to the 20th century national revolutions was that the contradiction of civil society (i.e. between the proletariat and capital) had not yet emerged, and the proletariat was simply existing in the folds of the “Third Estate”. The French revolution was a milestone event, partly because it was the last democratic bourgeois revolution to occur before this class contradiction emerged, which it did in 1848, where the bourgeoisie was triumphant but the communist movement was not.12
Trotskyists continue to repeat the outdated refrain about how, in the backward countries, the bourgeoisie is/was too weak to complete the bourgeois revolution. However, the history of 20th century decolonization and developmentalism tells us that one way or another these “weak” bourgeoisies successfully completed it, albeit by calling upon their allies, by being heavily armed and by the use of a wide-sector of society (proletarians, peasants, intellectuals, petit-bourgeois) as their support in national liberation fronts. They may not have been very democratic and peaceful about it but they did the job (when has the bourgeoisie ever secured its political dominance without force?). For those that went under the banner of “socialism”, “socialism” was just the better model of modernization to the competing model of “Western” capitalism. The problem was never that the proletariat’s job was now to complete the bourgeois revolution, rather it was that the bourgeoisie conducted it and smashed what little proletarian autonomy there was in the process.
They not only conducted (to varying degrees) the political programme (the establishment of bourgeois state institutions) but a bourgeois agrarian programme of capital: land to the peasants, which helped to win the peasantry over to their side. However, in some cases (China and Vietnam) the victorious regime expropriated the peasants in the form of forced collectivization. 13Resistance to collectivization was ruthlessly crushed. The Chinese collective farms were no idyllic paradise. One way or another this agrarian program expands that part of the population which is “doubly free” in Marx’s sense, setting the conditions for more comprehensive development, like industrialization, in attempts to “catch up” with the more developed countries. Until the end of the 20th century, developmentalist programs like nationalization of large capital and the transformation of class struggle into development could ensure some measure of class peace, as a kind of third world counterpart to social-democracy.14 Arguably this pattern has been repeated recently with the “petro-Peronism” of Chavez’s Venezuela.15
In any case, we do not live in such a world of peasant countries, colonial empires and “weak bourgeoisies” anymore: there is no room for additional bourgeois revolutions. Even in some middle-eastern countries where there are monarchs or dictators in charge, where bourgeois revolutions have never truly occurred and democracy is “foreign”, capital is nonetheless everywhere, and the proletariat makes up the mass of the population.16 We should have no illusions about the ascendancy of the bourgeoisie inevitably bringing with it democracy. Liberalism never lived up to its own promises of universalism and equality anyway.
Where the proletarians got in the way of the “anti-imperialist” “revolutionaries” they were ruthlessly repressed. Examples are abound:
Vietnam: Suppression of the Saigon Commune of 1945 by the Viet Minh and later the massacre of Vietnamese Trotskyists by the Stalinists of the NLF.17
Angola: Suppression of the Luanda dockers’ strike of 1975 by the MPLA-led state.18
China: The Shanghai massacre of 1927 conducted by the Koumintang after the Communist Party had behaved as “bag-carriers” for the nationalists.19
Cuba: The coercion of unions into not striking in the name of the “revolution”, the integration of the dictatorship into the union apparatus, persecution of the anarcho-syndicalists, many of whom were forced into exile by the new Castro government. The torture and killings of political opponents and a variety of other measures of terror against the working class.20
National liberation movements, furthermore have created states which have gone on to engage in wars and oppress national/ethnic minorities. Indonesia, which won independence in 1945 from the Dutch empire, now conducts a policy of genocide in West Papua. In response, the Free Papua Movement has appeared. China, once part of the center of the “anti-imperialist” “socialist” bloc, is now ethnically repopulating Tibet with a mass influx of ethnic Han people. Vietnam went to war too with China and Cambodia after its reunification. Although a great number of Khmers were killed, Vietnamese, Chinese and muslim minorities were particularly targeted by the Khmer Rouge during the Cambodian Genocide, until the Vietnamese forces put an end to it. If there is one special thing Uncle Ho could be commended for it was putting an end to a genuinely reactionary and genocidal anti-colonial nationalist movement.
Thus if we look at the history of nation-forming, it shows us that “anti-colonial” movements expelled their colonial rulers only to deepen and extend the modernization social process that began with colonization, including the very idea of nationality, onto themselves under a native ruling class.21 These movements were undoubtedly “progressive” in general because they overthrew colonial forms of exploitation — slavery or otherwise forced-labor, and wholesale plunder of the colony’s wealth for the metropole — and built the preconditions for communism (i.e. they kickstarted capitalist development).
Gender and National Liberation
Palestinian Motherhood by Sliman Mansour
An aesthetic element that has recently captivated foreign leftist supporters of national liberation movements, has been the image of women with guns. This gives a feminist cover to these national liberation movements — femme-washing them. There is some truth here, because women may find the movement as a method of escape from particularly backward patriarchal traditions, as we have seen with some of the women fighters in the YPJ, who have escaped arranged marriages.22 But recent feminist theory which demands a closer examination of the nation-state as an organizer of gender relations points to a contradictory dynamic:
As postcolonial feminism in particular has compellingly showed, the nation-state as capital’s chief political form is not thinkable without the oppression of women. This occurs in a twofold manner. On the one hand, the nation as the allegedly homogenous community, with a common origin/destiny and kinship that is “attached” to the state, can only think of women as its symbolic markers as well as cultural and biological reproducers. This is true not only for ethnic conceptions of the nation as Kulturnation and Volknation, but also in those cases in which the nation as such is the driving force of liberation movements. Even when nationalism has played the role of a liberating force, such as in the context of the decolonization, and the issue of women’s rights has accompanied that of national independence, the results for women have often been disappointing. After independence, women’s role has frequently been reaffirmed as that of biological reproducers of the (new, liberated) nation. For instance, despite their key role during the Algerian war of independence from France and in the National Liberation Front, at the end of the conflict Algerian women did not gain the equality and rights they had wished for. One of the reasons for this limitation was, as Moghadam argues, that the struggle was one for “national liberation, not for social (class/gender) transformation.” In other words, the nation – any nation – cannot do without exercising its control over women’s bodies and women’s child-raising role, because the very future of the nation depends on them.23
If nationalist movements have progressed in gender relations by smashing archaic forms of colonial exploitation and undermining traditional gender relations, they do so only to reconstitute gender in a more modern order. With this in mind, it will not be surprising to see the Kurdish women disappointed by a new patriarchal normality if a Kurdish nation-state is formed when they are no longer needed as soldiers, but as wives, mothers and wage-workers who will rebuild the fledgling nation.
Conclusions and Directions for Further Study
With this brief overview of 20th-century national liberation movements there are a few major conclusions I wish to make:
20th-century national liberation carried out a bourgeois program and was thoroughly anti-working class in character despite being progressive due to the overthrow of colonial forms of exploitation. The anti-imperialist fronts were heavily involved in the geopolitics of the time which played out as opposition between the Western/liberal/capitalist camp on one side and the “socialist” camp on the other.
A balance sheet of 20th-century national liberation is still required to understand precisely what it achieved and how it differed from country to country. What has been written here is at best a starting point but it is not a comprehensive historical analysis colored with detail and nuance. Revolutionaries need to see how the poison of nationalism has been sowed in the hearts of the working class in every country in order to better combat it in particular situations.
We need an understanding of how decolonization influenced the composition of the working class in these countries, especially now since the demise of the old developmentalist dictatorships. As these nations were formed through liberation from colonization this might have the effect of tightly binding proletarians to their nation-state.
Perhaps the phenomenon of the national liberation party-form should also be more thoroughly investigated. Why was this a recurring pattern? How did these parties navigate their road to power? What can we learn about them now that we live in a world where various nationalist movements are on the rise? Not in order to copy them but to develop counter-strategies in the event that similar situations might emerge, which seems inevitable considering all the war that emerges out of a continuing capitalist crisis.
An investigation is required into what are the implications of the end of the peasant question on contemporary and future nationalism? National liberation movements of the 20th century occurred in backward countries and relied on a peasant base, especially to form their armies, and carried out the aforementioned “agrarian program”. Obviously contemporary separatist movements do not have this resource at hand anymore.24
Back to Marx: Progress and Class-Political Independence
Battle at Soufflot barricades at Rue Soufflot Street on 24 June 1848 by Horace Vernet
In Germany, finally, the decisive struggle now on the order of the day is that between the bourgeoisie and the absolute monarchy. Since the communists cannot enter upon the decisive struggle between themselves and the bourgeoisie until the bourgeoisie is in power, it follows that it is in the interest of the communists to help the bourgeoisie to power as soon as possible in order the sooner to be able to overthrow it. Against the governments, therefore, the communists must continually support the radical liberal party, taking care to avoid the self-deceptions of the bourgeoisie and not fall for the enticing promises of benefits which a victory for the bourgeoisie would allegedly bring to the proletariat. The sole advantages which the proletariat would derive from a bourgeois victory would consist
(i) in various concessions which would facilitate the unification of the proletariat into a closely knit, battle-worthy, and organized class; and
(ii) in the certainly that, on the very day the absolute monarchies fall, the struggle between bourgeoisie and proletariat will start. From that day on, the policy of the communists will be the same as it now is in the countries where the bourgeoisie is already in power.
It is quite an interesting thing that Marx and Engels, the key thinkers of communism, had lived in a time of bourgeois revolution. The bourgeoisie, at least in Europe and the Americas, was smashing the aristocracy or slavocracy, pronouncing liberty, equality and fraternity, conquering new lands, and “civilizing” the world under its order.
Neil Davidson very clearly summarizes the perspective they took which informed what they thought the position socialists should take towards nationalist movements:
Where Marx and Engels have important things which are directly about nations is in relation to the attitude socialists should take towards specific national movements. At heart, their attitude is based on whether the success of any movement – secessionist or irredentist – is likely to advance the possibility of the socialist revolution, although this was often in indirect ways. Essentially, they saw nationalism, in the sense of political movements leading to the establishment of nation-states, as part of the process of bourgeois revolution which would sweep away pre-capitalist forms and enable the conditions for the creation of a working class. This is the context in which they decided which nationalisms to support and which to oppose. Poland and Ireland are respectively oppressed and held back in developmental terms by the British and Russian Empires, and so had to be supported. Equally, national movements which relied on the great empires for their existence, such as pan-Slavism in 1848, had to be opposed. It is, of course, possible to agree with the latter conclusion with[out] accepting the mystified nonsense about “non-historic nations” that Engels sometimes used to support it.25
Paul Mattick’s essay “Nationalism and Socialism”, which gives a good commentary on 20th-century national liberation, also summarizes it well:
“Progressive nations” of the last century [19th century] were those with a rapid capital development; “reactionary nations” were those in which social relationships hindered the unfolding of the capitalist mode of production. Because the “next future” belonged to capitalism and because capitalism is the precondition for socialism, non-utopian socialists favored capitalism as against older social production relations and welcomed nationalism in so far as it served to hasten capitalist development. Though reluctant to admit this, they were not disinclined to accept capitalist imperialism as a way of breaking the stagnation and backwardness of non-capitalist areas from without, and thus to direct their development into “progressive” channels. They also favored the disappearance of small nations unable to develop large-scale economies, and their incorporation into larger national entities capable of capitalist development. They would, however, side with small “progressive nations” as against larger reactionary countries and, when suppressed by the latter, would support the former’s national liberation movements. At all times and on all occasions, however, nationalism was not a socialist goal but was accepted as a mere instrument of social advancement which, in turn, would come to its end in the internationalism of socialism. Western capitalism was the “capitalist world” of the last century. National issues were concerned with the unification of countries such as Germany and Italy, with the liberation of such oppressed nations as Ireland, Poland, Hungary, Greece, and with the consolidation of such “synthetic” nations as the United States. This was also the “world” of socialism; a small world indeed viewed from the twentieth century. While national questions that agitated the socialist movement in the middle of the nineteenth century had either been resolved, or were in the process of being resolved, and, in any case, had ceased to be of real importance to Western socialism, the world-wide revolutionary movement of the twentieth century opened the question of nationalism anew. Is this new nationalism, which sheds Western dominance and institutes capitalist production relations and modern industry in hitherto under-developed areas, still a “progressive” force as was the nationalism of old? Do these national aspirations coincide in some manner with those of socialism? Do they hasten the end of capitalism by weakening Western imperialism or do they inject new life into capitalism by extending its mode of production all over the globe?
The position of nineteenth-century socialism on the question of nationalism involved more than preferring capitalism to more static social systems. Socialists operated within bourgeois-democratic revolutions which were also nationalist; they supported national liberation movements of oppressed people because they promised to take on bourgeois-democratic features, because in socialist eyes these national-bourgeois-democratic revolutions were no longer strictly capitalist revolutions. They could be utilized if not for the installation of socialism itself, then for furthering the growth of socialist movements and for bringing about conditions more favorable to the latter.
Marx and Engels supported certain nationalist movements, like German unification and Polish independence, insofar as they quickened the development of the pre-conditions for communist revolution. They were not interested in moralizing about oppressed nations or nationalism for nationalism’s sake and would have had no time for the intellectual advocates of so-called “national-cultural autonomy”, who do not seem to see a problem with the possibility of nationalities existing after the establishment of socialism.26
It is also important to note Marx’s support for the Union side in the American Civil War.27The USA was already the most advanced capitalist nation of its time, but it was faced with a slaveholders’ rebellion in the South. It seems like one of the last examples Marx saw of the bourgeois state acting in a revolutionary capacity, in this case crushing the leftovers of the slave system, allowing the workers’ movement to progress, regardless of the intention of the statesmen, soldiers, and generals on the Union side.28 Also worth noting is that Marx and Engels did not frame their support for nationalism in moral terms like the “rights” of the category of “oppressed” nations which Lenin talked about. Indeed, they supported the Hungarian national revolution, but as Rosa Luxemburg noted, the Magyar ethnic minority were known at the time for their oppression of the other nationalities/ethnic groups.29 Their perspective was not about national oppression, but about bourgeois revolution accelerating the conditions which would make communism a possibility. It is worth mentioning that Rosa Luxemburg also takes on Marx and Engel’s approach in her methodology of looking at the class forces at work in specific cases (e.g. in Poland) to determine if socialists should support national independence.30
Is there a tension between their advocacy for bourgeois causes and, at the same time, their stated commitment to the necessity of proletarian class-political independence as necessary for communist strategy? For some communists who dealt with this question, history is split into two phases, one where it is okay to support the bourgeois-democratic revolution, and the other when it is time to fight for the proletarian revolution, which the Engels’ quote above suggests, although it would, of course, be adjusted to the varying situations of different countries: not all countries experience capitalist development in the same way and some had a bourgeois revolution before others. Can there be, however, a line that can be drawn when it is no longer viable for communists to support nationalist movements and what are the criteria for it? For certain Marxists, particularly left-communists, that hold to a strict decadence theory, a world-historical line is drawn at 1914, when the capitalist world went into decay. One of the strategic implications of decadence theory is that communists, to be true internationalists, must not support any nationalist movements — in other words, our era is qualitatively different.
I think some convincing criticisms have been made of this kind of decadence theory and so I am not going to deal with this any further.31
In short, anti-national communists can argue the national question problem from three main perspectives (which are not necessarily mutually exclusive):
Decadence theory or something which gives alternate historical periodization or directionality to world capitalist development.
An empirical statement of the anti-proletarian character of national liberation struggles, which has been presented above.
From the perspective of an invariant communist principle of proletarian class-political independence, such as that advocated by Mike Macnair of the CPGB. His argument, learning from 20th-century national liberation relies on a pretty simple observation:
…the class contradiction between the working class and national bourgeoisie of the oppressed countries is stronger than the national contradiction between the bourgeoisie of the oppressed country and the bourgeoisie of the imperialist country. Notice that I am not saying that there is no such thing as imperialism, or that there is no such thing as national oppression: just that the class contradiction tends to be more fundamental, and that consequently, the anti-imperialist united front fails.32
The last stance seems the most convincing to me. Regardless of whether Marx was right to support the nationalisms of his time, the age of bourgeois revolutions is over, the bourgeoisie has fulfilled its “historic mission” internationally and capitalism has conquered the world so much more thoroughly than it had in Marx’s time, that it is absurd to ask for more capitalist “progress”, especially when it seems like more of it will only lead to more of the war, ecological destruction, and misery which we are experiencing now, which you do not need a decadence theory to explain. The objective conditions for communism — the international spread of the capitalist mode of production, the immense forces of production based on mechanization (and now automation), and the international proletariat, the class which has nothing to lose but its chains, and which is the negation of all classes — have been ripe for a long time. Nothing lacks but a revolutionary movement.
Remote Control Activism
The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.
— Karl Marx, The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852)
There is no shortage of leftists who assemble in the streets in protest against this or that act of imperialism. When a new war starts or a new country enters a war, you are bound to observe all kinds of ridiculous signs, slogans, leaflets, and cartoons at such protests. “Victory to the Iraqi Resistance” or something similar was in fact spouted by the SWP and the Stop the War Coalition in the UK in protests against the Iraq War. Leftists of all stripes take particular positions: who to denounce, who to “critically” or “unconditionally” support. Often their logic is that of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”, in which case so-called “socialists” should really have no problem marching with Islamists — we are all fighting imperialism, right?33 Anti-war coalitions will desperately seek support from whoever: businesspeople, politicians, foreign policy experts, and people who they would otherwise hate for their politics. With the seriousness of generals, they perform this farce as if they actually have any relevant outcome on conflicts happening thousands of kilometers away. The best these activist groups get out of it is some more paper sales and more recruits to keep these political rackets going. Left organizations need something horrific to be indignant about to keep their blood pumping. It makes people feel like they are doing something.
These rituals of opportunism simply save the consciences of activists from the inevitable fact that many will perish in bloodthirsty massacres, regardless of what slogans and marches are organized absent the international proletariat instaurating a dictatorship of the proletariat.
If we put the nonsense of their “positions” and slogans aside, and use, as a kind of reference point, the protests against the Iraq War, then it is pretty clear that this kind of “anti-imperialist” practice of protest is ineffective.
Before the Iraq War was launched, millions poured into the streets around the world in protest. It all came to nothing. The simple fact is that it was impossible to stop the Iraq War without overthrowing the state. Did we see any concrete attempts to foster resistance to the war inside the armed forces? It seems like the answer is no. It is not surprising, because the difference between the days of the anti-war movement during the Vietnam War and now is that the invading force in Vietnam tried to fight a colonial war with an unreliable conscript army, which was receptive to the anti-war sentiment of the population back at home. But a gigantic modern military machine like that of the USA, staffed completely by professional enlisted personnel cannot be stopped by good old-fashioned civil disobedience. To be realistic, anything short of a dictatorship of the proletariat, with significant portions of the military splitting to the proletarian side, will mean the continuation of the war and crisis that is occurring across the globe.
Oppressor and Oppressed
As a postscript I’d like to answer a question before it is asked. The question is: “Don’t you think a descendant of oppressed people is better off as a supermarket manager or police chief?” My answer is another question: What concentration camp manager, national executioner or torturer is not a descendant of oppressed people?”
— Fredy Perlman, The Continuing Appeal of Nationalism (1984)
It is pretty easy to see that the left sees the national question through a moralistic lens of “oppressor”, “imperialist” and “first world” nations against “oppressed”, “third world nations”. If any serious theory is cited it is simply to confirm existing biases and such theory e.g. Lenin’s Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism is simply accepted uncritically and out of historical context. The nationalism of an oppressed nation (e.g. the Palestinians) just as much implies class collaboration as that of the chauvinistic nationalism of oppressor nations (e.g. Israel). However, when internationalists make our anti-national critique we should be sensitive to nuances. We do not deny that there is oppression on the basis of nationality, otherwise, we would not have to deal with this question in the first place.
In the case of Israel and Palestine, it is clear that the Israeli military is engaging in a military occupation over Palestinian lands — it is doing the oppressing — and is armed with tanks, an air force, heavy artillery etc. while the Palestinian resistance fighters are simply armed with rocks, homemade weaponry, and some small arms — in other words, the forces are massively disproportionate. For these reasons, the left is quick to condemn, for example, Israel’s military crimes but will turn a blind eye to the repression of workers’ strikes and the murderous racketeering of Hamas or the idiotic adventurism of Stalinist national liberation fronts like the PFLP.
While we communists can say that: in war, the proletarians of various nations slaughter each other (that is to say, go against their class interest), and that “the main enemy is at home”, this should not hide us from the fact that proletarians who engage in nationalist causes often do with very real material pressures motivating them to act in the ways they do. They know what it is like to be under military occupation, to be dispossessed of their home, and turn into a desperate refugee. The Kurds and Yezidis who have rapidly joined the YPG and YPJ, have done so because they are afraid of the genocidal terror perpetrated by ISIS, whether or not they seriously believe in all the ideological stuff spouted by Ocalan. In Indonesia, the formerly colonized have become the colonizers: with the Dutch gone, the West Papuans are left to the mercy of the Indonesian army. The Palestinians live under direct military occupation and outside the edges of Israeli settlements, so it is no surprise that ordinary people will throw stones and physically confront the security forces. While we should not forget the power of nationalist parties, with their patronage links and their armed thugs, we should also realize that not every part of a resistance to military occupation is a conspiracy controlled by a nationalist racket. We communists would be the last to condemn anyone who takes up arms to defend themselves or their family.
In the West Papuan example, there is plenty of resistance that falls outside of the well known Free Papua Movement34: there are the tribal warriors in the remote jungle who spear Indonesian soldiers, the youths who throw rocks at cops, the rioters in the streets. We cannot just shrug off the people who engage in this activity as having “false consciousness” because they happen to not be acting as a class and are instead fighting against their oppression as an oppressed nation or ethnic group. They are not under “nationalist illusions”; they are directly reacting to material pressures, fighting for survival in many cases. We cannot ignore these facts. Without any powerful organized internationalist proletarian alternative to the barbarisms that surround them, an alternative beyond nations, what other hope do these people have?
The programmatic implications for communists are as follows:
Maintaining class-political independence will be especially difficult in countries under military and colonial occupation. The reality of their daily oppression will mean that many workers will identify with a nationalist cause before they start to unite on a class basis and fight against their own bourgeoisie and those foreign to them. In addition, the repression that proletarians would face as a result of efforts to organize as a class would be intense. Principled communists in such oppressed nations would refuse to engage in opportunistic entryism into nationalist movements to “turn them to the left”. Their best hope lies in the class-struggle breaking out nearby to challenge the state regionally and internationally.
In countries in which there are significant national or racialized minorities (e.g. Romas in Europe, African-Americans in the USA, Kurds in Turkey, Maoris in New Zealand), and where the situation requires it, communists should advocate for special caucuses within working class institutions to ensure that these minorities are included in class organization and are better placed to overcome language barriers and combat racism and nationalist chauvinism. This is not an argument for separatism, on the contrary, it would help national and racialized minorities abandon a nationalist consciousness in favor of integration through class struggle. In some countries, such a strategy is simply not necessary (e.g. in ethnically homogenous Japan and Korea), so it needs to be applied carefully to particular circumstances.
Forming solidarity between workers of the oppressor and oppressed countries that goes beyond mere symbolic actions. To make such solidarity more effective across borders would require a better understanding of how migration affects class struggle and what dominant supply chains are liable to disruption along multiple points. What the BDS campaign against Israel lacks is understanding of how vast modern supply chains are: boycotts will not cut it.
Given sufficient power of a communist movement to enact these tasks:
Initiating campaigns to resist conscription if it is ever introduced.
If possible, demand democratic reform of the military. Governments would be very reluctant to grant such demands, but in the case of a revolutionary situation, it is at least a good guarantee against the troops being used against workers, and would make foreign military interventions much more difficult.
Spreading defeatist propaganda, and encouraging and facilitating defection amongst the soldiers of all forces, and the split of the military along class lines.35
Strategic blockages and sabotage of the key logistics and military industry.
An unapologetically universal end to national borders and the end of intra-national borders (e.g. the hukou system). Intra-national borders also effectively divide the working class, based on geography, into citizens and non-citizens. Freedom of movement for all.
Demand the end of oppressive laws that target people based on national, ethnic or racial status e.g. the “race powers” in Section 51 (xxvi) of the Australian constitution which allow the government to produce special laws for certain races.36
A realistic strategy must acknowledge that without an international dictatorship of the proletariat, imperialist wars will continue to ravage the world. Refuse to settle for any half-measures.
The Indigenous Question in (Settled) Settler-Colonial States
Aboriginal Australia. Cultural-linguistic groups are shown in different colors.
We have taken away their land, have destroyed their food, made them subject to our laws, which are antagonistic to their habits and traditions, have endeavoured to make them subject to our tastes, which they hate, have massacred them when they defended themselves and their possessions after their own fashion, and have taught them by hard warfare to acknowledge us to be their master.
In the Territory the mating of an Aboriginal with any person other than an Aboriginal is prohibited. The mating of colored aliens with any female of part Aboriginal blood is also forbidden. Every endeavor is being made to breed out the color by elevating female half-castes to the white standard with a view to their absorption by mating into the white population.
—Northern Territory Administrator’s Report, 1933, p 7.38
In spite of efforts to euphemize and hide pre-colonial history, it is no secret that in white settled countries (Australia, New Zealand, Canada, USA) the nation-state was founded on the dispossession and destruction of the indigenous population, and that many years after these countries have been invaded, the surviving indigenous people are subject to the most shocking conditions of life, as the most marginalized in a white supremacist society.39There is a clear international pattern that indigenous people in these countries experience without exception: disproportionately lower life expectancy,40 poorer health outcomes,41 poorer education, higher incarceration rates,42 lower employment rates, disintegration of family ties, higher incidence of drug abuse, and higher suicide rates compared to the general (largely white) population. This is not a coincidence. This section will concern matters associated with the indigenous question in Australia, the situation will obviously differ from country to country, where the history is different, although commonalities will exist.
To seek justice and remedy the racial inequality experienced by indigenous Australians (that is Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples), indigenous activists and the left have proposed a variety of demands of which there is no general consensus (and which are not necessarily mutually exclusive, best seen as a bundle):
Land rights (not simply the existing native title scheme)
Parliamentary representation (a separate indigenous parliament that works with the Australian government, in order to better represent indigenous people)
Indigenous independence or regional self-government (e.g. articulated in the form of indigenous regional autonomy (“sovereignty”) as part of more complicated Australian federation)43
A treaty or multiple treaties between indigenous and non-indigenous people.44The treaties will formalize a collection of rights and responsibilities between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians e.g. to care for sites and artifacts of cultural significance, to maintain a standard of housing, health, and education for indigenous people or whatever else the treaty might specify. The treaty is best seen as a form of constitutionalism that will establish an institutional framework in the state for further reforms that are meant to be beneficial for indigenous people.45
I do not propose to have all the answers. It is clear that it cannot be dealt with in the same way as the national question. I think communists have to really think hard about how to programmatically confront the indigenous question, just as we have to think hard about the national question or the question of whether to conduct electoralism. One thing that is clear however is that existing proposals do not fundamentally challenge the sovereignty of the Australian state, they are all essentially about how the state deals with this “racial problem”, how its “people” are represented, and they do not seem to assume or propose a break with the nation-state and capitalism.
It will be interesting to observe which sections of the indigenous population will reap the benefits of land settlements. It will be interesting to see, if it is implemented, regional indigenous governments as part of an Australian federation, with indigenous politicians who represent their people and set economic agendas, indigenous capitalists, indigenous cops and so on. Localist “sovereignty” schemes should be met with extreme skepticism for the possibility of the formation of an enriched stratum of the indigenous population, a “Black Bourgeoisie”. Remote regional governments would have to deal with economic development (this is a stated goal of treaty advocates by the way) one way or another, maybe requesting that resource-extraction or energy companies invest in their “communities” to produce “jobs” for people whose labor-power capital already mostly deems unnecessary. Plans for autarky (or “self-reliance”) in the bush are plain fantasy. Rights and responsibilities are the currency of a bourgeois state: formalized changes to land tenure, political administration and representation are things that, even if difficult, are totally achievable within its framework, but whether they actually have a positive effect on the lives of the majority of indigenous proletarians is another matter.
I would highly recommend that leftists in Australia, New Zealand, and other settled countries read a great text written about the relationship between class struggle and indigenous struggle in Hawaii—“Hawaii: Class Militancy or Cultural Patriotism?”—that deals with these kinds of problems. The promotion of shared culture by aspiring indigenous “community leaders” is something that should be criticized if it promotes an identity that undermines class solidarity.
Examples of what happens in NZ and Canada with indigenous people, where there are treaties and institutional frameworks that are more “progressive” and which activists in Australia are demanding a move towards, should also provoke criticisms. Indigenous people in NZ and Canada are still racially marginalized and worse off in every regard compared to whites. A recurring problem in the political consciousness of people in Canada is how they compare themselves to the USA to show “how much better things are than in the US”, the same applying for New Zealanders with Australia.
It is an undertheorised issue. The left often does not give enough criticism to these proposals, giving things over to aboriginal elders, “representatives”, and “leaders” to speak on behalf of “their people” at meetings and at rallies, and does not engage in any clear programmatic debate, preferring to engage in representations of white guilt and shouting slogans that sound right instead and expecting change to come about. Perhaps this is for fear of being labeled as uncaring or racist. This would go along with changes in anti-racist discourse towards standpoint epistemology in recent years. I will leave this issue with a few points for consideration:
Indigenous Australians, and many indigenous populations throughout the world, are thoroughly proletarianized and highly urbanized.46 This is the result of a gradual process of colonization. In colonial Australia there was a genuinely colonial settled or semi-settled region with a frontier, beyond which was simply a grand “unexplored” continent populated with indigenous people who still lived in traditional ways, albeit at war with settlers. That is no longer the case. Eventually, settler-colonies stop being colonies and actually complete themselves as settled nation-states, this was completed sometime in the 20th century. The last uncontacted people were found in 1984. More recently, an important effect of the Northern Territory (NT) Intervention was to remove children from their families, depopulate remote communities, and accelerate the urbanization of the indigenous population. The benefits for capital are obvious: this makes it easier for mining companies to get their hands on valuable land.
Indigenous people are frequently used as an experimental population for the testing of welfare policies before they are implemented on wider society, e.g. income management and cashless welfare cards. The state can act with the utmost cruelty against them and get away with just as it has done with the NT Intervention. It is no secret that as a result of their exclusion from working life, many indigenous people are dependent on the dole — this is a tendency seen consistently since early colonialism. As a result, an important element of racism in Australia has been the resentment towards indigenous people for being “unproductive” and “lazy”, and this has always manifested itself among the resentful white working class time and again. More attention needs to be given to struggles centered around welfare, attempts at sabotaging or blocking such welfare experiments, and demands for dole freedom.47Rather than supporting policies by “progressive” politicians that will promise “development” and jobs for indigenous people on national parks, mines, oil/gas refineries or government admin (i.e. jobs for jobs sake), should we instead focus on fighting for the unemployed, and those deemed unnecessary by the labor market? This is a key element of the integration that would help to bring down resentful racist divisions in the working class.
Some things are not salvageable. The disconnection of indigenous people from their traditional mode of living is real and mostly permanent. Some cultural practices remain but they are relics disconnected from the society that produced them. There is no way that people can go back to pre-colonial existence. To propose that you can, after a magical process of “decolonization”, is pure voluntarism, and radically understates the effects of colonization, and the permeation of the market into every aspect of life. Modernity must be accepted as the starting point of our politics. Proposals for some sort of infra-political cultural revival (like that advocated by Warriors of the Aboriginal Resistance48) within a perspective of “decolonization” will be at best futile in uniting and liberating indigenous people from racial oppression and at worst reactionary and have little relation to the reality of the largely proletarianized and urbanized indigenous people, creating a cultural veneer on the same capitalist social relations seen everywhere.
The best thing a communist program can do for indigenous people in white settler states is, in addition to destroying the nation-state and its repressive apparatus in the dictatorship of the proletariat, is to meet universal demands — housing, healthcare, education, safety from violence, and others — that serve to eradicate uneven development, which is currently experienced most acutely along racial divisions. We are concerned here with lifting the status of the most excluded section of the proletariat, whose basic needs are hardly being met and who are faced with the violence of the state on a daily basis. No amount of infra-political “cultural” revival will deal with that. Just as the programs to lift the global south out of underdevelopment will be something that will need to start in the “first hundred days” of world revolution, so will the dictatorship of the proletariat have to give priority to pour a lot of resources into addressing the uneven development within a rich country like Australia, giving indigenous people for once, the real benefits of modernity that they have been excluded from. Modernity, socialist central planning, and the scientific mastery of nature are the ways to achieve this, not separatism and a return to tradition. These measures, however, must be implemented in a way in which the indigenous communities have control over how it is done, and this is compatible with the “self-government of localities” that is an essential part of communist republicanism. A degree of cultural autonomy is also compatible with this, for example, school lessons in the language, songs, and history of the local indigenous community.
A Fresh View
What matters for a communist organization and the development of our political positions is to prioritize programmatic unity over theoretical unity. This means that as long as we can practically work together, share a common set of basic positions and have a minimum basis for productive dialogue, having different theoretical explanations for different political “questions” is fine.
It is not enough to take the right “positions” and then to go into fruitless activism. The state machine is too powerful for large protests to stop wars. The state machine at the very least needs to be threatened to halt a war, but ultimately the state must be smashed and the rule of the bourgeoisie brought to an end in order to bring an end to war. The dictatorship of the proletariat that smashes it will be international and anti-national, not producing new national sovereignties, or it will fail.
Programs for returning what was “stolen” to “rightful owners” as a way of dealing with the national question has nothing to do with communism. It reduces a question of democratic rights to a question of land redistribution. If anything it has more in common with the Proudhonism which Marx critiqued in The Poverty of Philosophy. Communists do not wish to return lands to “rightful owners” any more than we want proletarians to reverse the passage of time and go “back to the land” as their peasant ancestors used to live. Rather we wish to abolish property, and nations. It should not be controversial for us to say that we want anyone to live wherever they damn well please. Yes, this means Africans and Arabs living in Europe, just as much as Jews living in Palestine. We have no place for reactionary appeals to ancestry or tradition, and ethno-racial claims to land. A socialist cosmopolitanism is essential, especially in an epoch where right-wing nationalism is in the ascendancy.
We wish to do away with the nation-state, something that some advocates of “decolonization” wish to do, but that does not mean that we advocate for backward social forms and petty localism e.g. tribal “self-rule”.49The communist goal is the universal liberation of humanity. With the overcoming of the capitalist system, there is no reason to group people into clans, tribes, nations, races and so on. National and racial oppression can only be finally overcome by negating the material conditions that enable them, not by fostering new nationalisms to compete with existing ones.
Even if previously it may have been justified for communists to make exception to their guiding principle of class-political independence of the proletariat and to support the bourgeois revolution, which took a national form, it is not the task of communists to liberate or build nations, in other words, to conduct the program of the bourgeoisie. Just because a certain historical endeavor (liberation of the colonies) was progressive did not mean that communists should necessarily have supported it, because ultimately it is our duty to take the side of the proletariat wherever it is. Bourgeois progress has been done enough and trying to further it would get in the way of our task, which is to participate in and enhance the international proletariat’s struggle to overthrow this system once and for all.
Rosa Janis takes on all the different tendencies of the intellectual fad of ‘Accelerationism’ and reveals the poverty of their visions of a better future and contradictory beliefs. An emancipatory movement must develop a vision of a better future without internalizing the logic of capitalism.
There is a major difference between what is now called ‘accelerationism’ and its utopian futurist influences from the early 20th century: whether human reason is powerful enough to not only overcome the conditions of capitalism but ultimately the biological limits of humanity itself. “Big-A” Accelerationism, on the other hand, is devoid of human reason as a force of history: capitalism’s tendency to uproot and reconfigure (“deterritorialization” in Deleuze-talk) destroys not only Humanity but the concept of agency altogether. The disagreement on human reason makes the similarities between so-called early “accelerationisms” and accelerationism proper almost completely superficial, as these philosophical differences are the difference between communist utopia and cyberpunk hellscape. Where technology allows humankind to transcend its limitations in early “accelerationisms”, technology in Landian Accelerationism is an alien force that consumes all of humanity.
Therefore we find it helpful to use a completely different term categorize the early “accelerationisms”. We shall instead use the term “Speculative Utopianism” to refer to them, these materialists who nonetheless preserved a utopian imaginary for a future world. One might wince at the term utopian being used in a positive manner, as the fathers of communism Marx and Engels used the word as an insult to their opponents. But then again, Marx replaced Hegel’s concept of spirit with the agency of the proletariat and brought Hegelian-idealist emancipatory desires into the material realm of class struggle. Here I will use the term ‘utopian’ to describe people who are not necessarily futurist mystics who reject material reality: but, rather, in the sense of speculative fiction writers who take the social relations and forces of production that already exist in our reality, and seek to build upon them towards a new world. Since the experience of ‘actually existing socialism’ defines the perception of communism amongst most people (including other supposed communists) it might be necessary to imagine what communism would look like in more detail than Marx and Engels attempted in the Critique of the Gotha Programme. For example, the failure of central planning in the Soviet bloc means that envisioning an alternative system of planning becomes more important in order to make the communist project viable.
The Left Accelerationism
Some may point out this ‘speculative utopianism’ sounds similar to something that already exists: left accelerationism. While there are interesting trends within what is called left accelerationism, there is still a connection to the purely reactionary Landian accelerationism that makes it philosophically incoherent. While they understand that the speed of capitalism is nothing more than illusion at this point in time created by market fetishism, they do not understand that they cannot disconnect this fetish from the core of accelerationism. Capitalism and Technology are inseparable in accelerationism as Nick Land—the main theorist of accelerationism—points out in a quick-and-dirty introduction to accelerationism:
In 2013, Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams sought to resolve this intolerable — even ‘schizophrenic’ — ambivalence in their ‘Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics,’ which aimed to precipitate a specifically anti-capitalist ‘Left-accelerationism’, clearly demarcated over against its abominably pro-capitalist ‘Right-accelerationist’ shadow. This project — predictably — was more successful at re-animating the accelerationist question than at ideologically purifying it in any sustainable way. It was only by introducing a wholly artificial distinction between capitalism and modernistic technological acceleration that their boundary lines could be drawn at all. The implicit call was for a new Leninism without the NEP (and with the Utopian techno-managerial experiments of Chilean communism drawn upon for illustration 1
Nick Land correctly points out in this quote also correctly points out that these “left accelerationists” have more in common with the sort of utopianism inspired the efforts of Chilean attempts at economic planning than accelerationism. This poses the question of why even bother going out of the way to embrace the brand of ‘accelerationism’ when ultimately these people have barely anything in common with its ultimate goals? Benjamin Noys refers to accelerationism as a whole as a “post-grad disorder”: a sort of ideological Stockholm Syndrome in which post-graduate students rationalize their inability to survive in the marketplace, reimagining it as the beauty of speed eliminating the deadweight of the old world. This is why L/ACC hangs on to Landian philosophy, even though it’s detrimental to their overall goals. There’s also an issue with the specific demands that are presented in Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams that makes them utopians in the worst way. In chapter six of their book Inventing the Future, they list out there 4 basic demands which are intended to be “non-reformist reforms”:
Full automation of production
The reduction of the working week
The provision of a basic income
The diminishment of the work ethic
The major problem is that 3 out of 4 demands cannot really be carried out politically through “non-reformist reforms”, as they would have to involve the nationalization of industry in order to be plausible. The old delusions of Bernstein’s Evolutionary Socialism reappear, where the current state can gradually be transformed into socialism through reforms. To their credit, they do seem to understand that capitalism is not “speeding” up, but rather going into a state of decay: due to a crisis of profitability, it becomes necessary to demand things that capitalism used to be doing more rapidly, such as automation of production and the reduction of work hours. However, it is not particularly clear how these demands are possible on the scale of national politics, as taking production from the hands of capitalists would require some kind of revolution at the bare minimum. Capitalists, after all, are not going to willing to go along with having production ripped out of their hands peacefully. This not only leaves them philosophically incoherent but politically impotent as well, unable to do anything but clinging on to the left of the Labour Party.
Unconditional Accelerationism
What is referred to as unconditional accelerationism, or “U/ACC” for short, is probably the most faithful to the old tradition of Landian CCRU accelerationism: it follows the anti-humanism of CCRU thought in that it completely denies all human agency (along with the possibility of politics) and fantasizes over the supposed cyberpunk apocalypse that is coming. They refer to this masturbatory practice as anti-praxis.2 Despite garnering Praise from Nick Land, the right wing of accelerationist Twitter flames them for their lack of enthusiasm for “Human biodiversity”—basically a revival of pseudoscientific racism. There’s also the fact that there were too many trans people involved in U/ACC blogs for the taste of the neoreactionaries.
I wholeheartedly encourage the Folks who run these U/ACC blogs to keep on going, as they seem to send the faux transgressive FOX News grandpas of NRx in fits of anger. Yet, I can not help but laugh at how pathetic this all is. Why would you feel the need to write blog post after blog post about doing nothing in extremely verbose and cryptic language? Do these people understand that capitalism is not “speeding” up but simply decaying? In all honesty, I would love to live in the dystopian hell that they think they’re going to live in; it would be cool to have cyber augmentation to balance out the horrific poverty and ecological catastrophe that we are actually facing, instead of just rotting away completely in the mediocrity of capitalism.
This is where the post-grad disorder that U/ACC people suffer from becomes extremely apparent, as the dystopian hell that we are heading towards is not cool or interesting in any way—unless you find people living in Walmart parking lots to be aesthetically pleasing. To engage in the deeper philosophical point in Marx’s work, we find the concept of species-being: the essential human process by which humans are altered by their surroundings—nature, social relations, etc.—while at the same time creating those very surroundings. “Men make their own history,” he summarizes in the 18th Brumaire, “but not as they please”: while humanity has agency to a certain degree, it is part of the feedback loop that constrains it.
However, Marx believes we gain more control over this loop by collectively acting as a species at greater levels, eventually leading to communism. Marx in The German Ideology reflects on the relationship between communism and human agency:
Only at this stage does self-activity coincide with material life, which corresponds to the development of individuals into complete individuals and the casting-off of all natural limitations. The transformation of labour into self-activity corresponds to the transformation of the earlier limited intercourse into the intercourse of individuals as such. With the appropriation of the total productive forces through united individuals, private property comes to an end. Whilst previously in history a particular condition always appeared as accidental, now the isolation of individuals and the particular private gain of each man have themselves become accidental.
Here, one finds communism as a freeing of the individual and mankind as a whole from all the natural limitations of the past, fulfilling the Promethean mission of Hegelian-Marxist philosophy. This all may seem unrealistically optimistic view of human nature and agency, but we can potentially find evidence in relatively recent developments in science that lend credibility. Take epigenetics, as an example: the genetic expression or the way in which genetic traits are turned on and off is determined by environmental factors which means that even if “genetics is destiny” we could have some control over the way genetic traits are expressed. These discoveries are relatively young and we still don’t know what specific environmental factors trigger the turning on and off different traits, but they have already proved valuable in destroying the hard bio determinist conceptions of genetics that had existed before 1990s, and point towards a science that is not merely an ideological product in service of the ruling classes. This points toward the concept of human nature that is found in Marx—species-being—as the human is unique in their ability to heavily alter their environment and therefore nature itself, which in effect alters the nature of humanity itself.
I genuinely do not think the people that push this sort of anti-humanism and fatalist determinism really believe that they lack agency because they behave otherwise. Why go through the trouble of having a blog to tell people that they do not have agency over their own lives? Or that they have no control over the collective destiny of mankind, as though you saying these things would have any effect on these things or the people? You can basically just respond to U/ACC or any kind of hard determinism by pointing out that they are essentially wasting their time if they actually believed anything that they were saying.
I mean it sort of makes sense—if you are post-grad who wasted their rich parents’ money on a media studies degree, you might as well do something with all that time you spent pretending to read Anti-Oedipus. At least you can get 2000 or so followers on Twitter who think your word salads are genius pieces of theory. When all is said and done in the end, with their children abandoned to the future wasteland, they may turn to ask “what did you do while the earth was being killed”? The Unconditional Accelerationists can only mumble some shit about their WordPress blog, and how they urged people to do nothing, but that they had a number of followers for it.
Right Accelerationism
Now we turn to the old master: Nick Land. The man and the “think tank” that he was tied to—the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU)—became the thing of legends. This reputation has been earned to a certain degree by the entertainment value that comes from reading the writings of—and the stories about—drugged-out academic nihilists. What’s more entertaining than a young professor lying on the ground screaming incessantly to jungle music as his students stare in sheer bewilderment? These people were the hippies of a decade where peace and love were out and the sunken-in embrace of cyberpunk dystopia was in. Like the tragic hippies of the 1960s and 70s, no amount of “radical” claims or dropping acid could prevent all these farcical overeducated Gen-Xers from collapsing into resentful conservatives. Land does not like admitting it this fact, even though deep down he knows it is true. That’s why he latched onto framing his slide into the Paleolibertarianism and Hoppean Neo-Monarchism as “Neo-Reaction” or “The Dark Enlightenment”, as rebelling against the low-key Christianity of “The Cathedral”. “The Cathedral” is a slightly more complex version of the “cultural Marxism” conspiracy theory that still sees reds under the bed of every NGO, union, party, and think-tank. The purpose of the Cathedral is to promote the myth of democracy, that all humans are equals. Even then, this concept of “The Cathedral” ignores inconvenient facts that get in the way of this narrative: the existence of “The Cathedral” rests on a vision of Democracy in that is run by the principles of neoliberal political science like public-choice theory—the idea that increased democratic rights expand the power of interest groups, increase the size of the government, and negatively affect society as a whole. Land, ever the speculative spinmaster, gives an apocalyptic variation on this theme: untrammeled democracy will lead to the breakdown in society, a “tyranny of the majority”. Nick Land refers to this phenomenon as the “zombie apocalypse” in his insufferably overwrought polemic The Dark Enlightenment.
However is there much evidence for the claim that “democracy” has led to the expansion of government? Perhaps the one consistent thing about Nick Land is that he still seems to be allergic to is citing any kind of empirical data to back up his claims. This was sort was forgivable in his youth when he was writing Shadowrun copypastas that were intended to be “Theory Fiction”, but it starts to become laughable when he tries to do anything outside the realm of bad sci-fi—the “zombie apocalypse” being a specific case of this sort of nonsense. Land is clutching his pearls about “the zombies” using the state to take away the wealth of capitalists while 45% of the adults in the US do not (or cannot) vote!3 Particularly those Land singles out as the worst offenders of Zombism—black people and immigrants —are part of a larger trend of dissatisfaction with representative democracy and political nonparticipation that is being referred to as “Anti-Politics by a number of political commentators.45 Anti-political trends are also coupled with the slow demolishing of the welfare state across the western world. Why would “Cathedral” figureheads like Bill Clinton destroy the means of them securing votes from the zombies by pushing for welfare reform in the 90s? What if there’s a special interest group that holds way more power in the Cathedral than everyone else? This interest group would be the capitalist class: the people who fund the campaigns, the think tanks, the activist NGOs, and both of the parties to the point where their interests almost completely override popular opinion or any other interest group when it comes to policy. 6
With that we have destroyed “The Cathedral”, accomplishing more than Nick Land, Moldbug or anyone in their corner blogosphere will in their entire lives. Now that we’ve shown Nick that “The Cathedral” was not in his closet or under his bed, we can go back to addressing why they would need to create such a bogeyman to rebel against in the first place. Nick Land’s enemy isn’t The Cathedral—his enemy is the emancipatory commitments of his youth. The bitterness of this break becomes incredibly apparent in an interview that he did with Marko Bauer and Andrej Tomažin titled “’The Only Thing I Would Impose is Fragmentation’”; after a few banal softball questions, he gets this blazing 90 MPH pitch of a question:
Interviewer: There seems to be a lot of engagements with contrarianism and Poe’s Law. Via @Outsideness you wrote: “Actually I like plenty of immigrants and black people, just not the grievance-mongers, rioters, street-criminals, and Jihadists that the Cathedral preaches incessantly in favor of.” Don’t you here sound a bit like Borges (of the Tlon Corporation) advocating ‘liberty and order’ while supporting Pinochet, preserving or reestablishing the Human Security System? Isn’t all of this a far cry from:
Meltdown has a place for you as a schizophrenic HIV+ transsexual chinese-latino stim-addicted LA hooker with implanted mirrorshades and a bad attitude. Blitzed on a polydrug mix of K-nova, synthetic serotonin, and female orgasm analogs, you have just iced three Turing cops with a highly cinematic 9mm automatic
Nick Land: [Long silence.] Let me see what is the best way to answer. [Long silence.] I don’t know, it’s difficult. I’ve got a whole ankle-biting fraternity on Twitter now. I am not identifying you with them, let me make that clear from the start, but I think that their question is very much like yours. One element of it is age. Youngsters are highly tolerant of massive incendiary social chaos. There are reasons for that, the best music comes out of it. It’s not that I am not understanding that, the whole appeal of cyberpunk is based on this. But I just don’t think you can make an ideology purely out of entropic social collapse, it’s not gonna fit together. It is not a sustainable, practically consistent process and, therefore, it’s a bad flag for acceleration. It produces a reaction that will win. All historical evidence seems to be that the party of chaos is suppressed by the party of order. Even if you’re completely unsympathetic with the party of order, and I am not pretending to be anything quite so unambiguous, it’s not something that you want to see. Nixon put down hippies, the Thermidor put down the craziness of the French revolution. It’s an absolutely relentless and inevitable historical story that the party of chaos is not going to be allowed to run the process and will be suppressed. There’s obviously various types of aesthetic and libidinal attractions to it, but in terms of programmatic practicality there is nothing. What I would say to these crazy youngsters now is, you don’t have a programme. What you’re advocating leads perversely to the exact opposite of what you say you want.
I cannot express enough how beautiful this moment is from the long awkward silence to the begrudging (half) tongue-in-cheek bemoaning of youngsters and their desire for chaos. At that moment it should be clear to every Nick Land fanboy that their king of transgression was nothing more than a Fox News-watching sexagenarian who clings onto the cyberpunk aesthetic as part of his brand more than anything else. But the follow up makes it even better:
Interviewer: You sound a bit like a Left accelerationist right now with all this talk of having a programme and ideology.
Land: Yes, there is that problem, but you always have a practical orientation. NRx has a programme, even in its most libertarian form. It’s not a programme that is going to be implemented by a bureaucratic apparatus in a centralized regime, but it’s an attempt to have some consistency in your pattern of interventions. Of course, everyone is trying to do that. Even the chaos fraternity, in so far as they want to be the chaos fraternity when they wake up the next day, have a programme in this minimal sense. And that sense, I think, is the only sense I would strongly hold onto here. A strategy.
And with that, Nick Land utterly destroyed any claim to the coherence of “right accelerationism” without even comprehending what he just did: his admissions undermine the spiritual continuity between the chaotic nihilism of his youth and his poorly-masked, tepid conservatism. The Nick Land of the present day is a man who thinks of himself more aligned with Nixon than the crazy youths, who simply want to create a nice gated free-market utopia away from the rainbow coalition of cybernetic queer brown zombies that he used to get high with. Nick Land is no more of an “accelerationist” than the left accelerationists that he mocks for wanting to imitate Project Cybersyn; he also wants to imitate a Chilean utopian program, just that of Pinochet rather than Allende.
But let us not pretend that this development came out of nowhere. Much like hippies of the 60s slowly turning into conservatives over time, the seeds of their conservatism was always there from the beginning in their superficial rebelliousness. Nick Land talked of death, destruction, and nihilism along with the rest of CCRU cult, but they were merely riding the wave of neoliberal market fetishism by proxy—the myth of creative destruction translated into Deleuzian word salads. It was a straight line from Nick Land’s bad reading of Deleuze and Guattari to Schumpeter and Hans-Hermann Hoppe.
The Social Basis for Accelerationism
We must ask ourselves if Accelerationism is a hollow ideology, then what is its appeal? Why would mainstream publications such asThe New Statesman7 and The Guardian8 be writing articles about an obscure dogma composed of the blog droppings of post-grad dorks and professional pseudo-intellectuals?
The answer becomes clear as we look at the history of the political left leading up to this point. What spurred the CCRU into existence was the then-recent collapse of the Soviet Union, in tandem with the slow decline of the social-democratic left and the introduction of Deng’s reforms in China. The only thing that seemed—and continues to seem—possible was to ride the waves of the free-market, hoping to god that this process would be destructive enough to destroy everything this mediocre world.
The Capitalist Stockholm Syndrome still lives on today in light of the failures of SYRIZA to revive the social democratic tradition of the left, but neither the social democrats nor the Accelerationists realize that their pet ideologies will not bring about their desired outcomes. There will be no social-democratic revival that will end up being successful because the power of international capital will overwhelm any attempt to institute these reforms on a national level. This is the lesson they should have learned when SYRIZA was forced to implement austerity measures, betraying whatever social democratic values that they had, in order to appease the EU backing 2015. 9 Or, hell, they should have learned back in the 80s when the socialist government of France suffered horrific capital flight that tanked their economy in response to them implementing relatively modest reforms.10. Meanwhile, Accelerationists should actually take a moment to look at the slowdown in technological innovations that have happened in relation to the implementation of free-market policies11, since at the bare minimum L/ACC people have seemed to notice this decline. Instead of falling back with the tide of capitalist restructuration, this social democratic ideology of a certain form has mangled itself into something new: they ride the waves of the free market into a new kind of social democracy, one built around immiseration rather than enrichment.
The Nihilistic Utopia and the Future beyond it
It becomes clear reflecting upon the whole of Accelerationism, from the CCRU onwards, that it was on a fundamental level a utopian project of sorts: a utopian project for those who could not believe utopias anymore, who could only see the future as a process of destruction of humanity. The only thing that these young post-grads could possibly envision in the depths of the 90s was a cyberpunk selection process where the weight of poverty and ecological catastrophe would eliminate the weak humanism of past, finally completing a Nietzschean mission of crushing the remnants of Christianity within secular culture. They welcomed this future with open arms wherever they saw it, whether it was early hacker culture or science fiction films, and especially so when all these things became cultural artifacts of the 90s. Instead of reveling in the past in order to find a future that was worth living in, these post-grad hacks are nostalgic for a catastrophe-ridden hellscape that never came. They will never get to enjoy the mass cyberdeath extravaganza that Terminator and “Meltdown” promised them. We are not seeing the Blade Runner future when we look at Rust Belt towns, just empty desolation but for the few wandering ghosts of alcoholics and opioid addicts struggling to remain in this plane of existence. It is a world of slow and painful decay. If we are going to turn to the past to realize the future, we might as well turn to a time in which humanity sought out to create utopias that were worth living in, where speculative fiction had higher aspirations than showing the ugliest face of man.
