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The Platform is the Message

Amelia Davenport and Renato Flores argue that social media cannot be ignored despite its negative effects on modern culture. Instead, the left needs its own approach to social media that takes into account the values encoded into tech platforms.

Technology Frustration and Cyberattack by Nalisda. Sourced from here.

The Social Dilemma is an impressive film on how social media is affecting the way we relate to each other. Combining docudrama and interviews with former social media platform workers, the film is a mashup of the fictionalized story of a social media addict, who becomes radicalized through anti-establishment “fake news” (with no obvious left or right bent), and ends up arrested at a demonstration, and the real stories of Europeans traveling to Syria and Iraq to enlist in ISIS and white Americans joining white supremacist organizations. The film blames the present-day political radicalization on careful design choices in social media platforms which keep us hooked to the apps, and make us vulnerable to this sort of manipulation. However, like many standard left-liberal documentaries (think Michael Moore), the film presents the overview of a significant issue and suggests mild reforms to solve it while ignoring the elephant in the room: capitalism. By focusing on the neuroscience of social media addiction and how apps are designed to maximize engagement, the documentary brushes over the role market imperatives have in structuring and shaping technology to maximize profit1, and ignores the way economic factors are responsible for destroying the social fabric of communities. 

Critiques of ever-increasing alienation due to the trajectory of bourgeois mass society stretch from the beginning of the communist movement through the work of critics like Theodor Adorno, Thorstein Veblen, and Guy Debord. As Marx said in The Communist Manifesto:

The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. […] In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation. The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage laborers.

The capitalist process of creative destruction is not a new thing, nor are the feelings of alienation from society. One only has to remember that Mark Fisher’s portrait of a broken society in Capitalist Realism was written in 2009, before smartphones were as extensively used as today.

Richard Seymour critiques The Social Dilemma in a review aptly titled “No, Social Media Isn’t Destroying Civilization.” As Seymour points out, The Social Dilemma repeatedly fails to address capitalism and instead focuses on an epiphenomenon: the role of social media in the increasing amounts of people radicalized through the internet. It ignores the role of US imperialism, much more important than the internet in creating ISIS. The documentary’s failings are even starker with racism—social media did not create white supremacy. Racism is as American as apple pie. Even if white supremacists find each other on social media, the wide-spread economic ruin of the Rust Belt and decline in the living standards of the white petty bourgeoisie after NAFTA has more to do with Trump’s election than Facebook ads and groups. 

This does not mean that we should ignore the problems of social media. In his review, Seymour rightly tackles the gaps and the catastrophist outlook of the documentary, but undersells the ways social media is actually affecting our society. Seymour is not in an easy position: he balances on a tightrope between acknowledging the massive power of social media and denying that it is uniquely responsible for the current moment. But ultimately he ends up overcorrecting against the documentary’s pessimistic assessment of social media. Seymour is correct that the neuroscience of the documentary about the way social media has addicted us is too simplistic and neuro-reductionist, but he does not sufficiently acknowledge that Facebook and friends have managed to addict us in a way that is unhealthy, and operate to maximize the profit advertisers can obtain from our interactions. They spend enormous sums on behavioral research for that purpose. We can always imagine better AI algorithms that will work for our benefit and mental wellbeing; under capitalism, this can at best be apps that help our mental health and overall wellbeing2 as long as we do not threaten, or even talk about the C-word. 

To elucidate this, we can contrast Facebook with programs oriented for the corporate world for which you are paying for the software. These are qualitatively different from those whose business model is maximizing engagement. For example, Microsoft Teams incorporates features to encourage wellbeing and an “adequate” work-life balance by adding meditation to your schedule. It is not hard to imagine how a benign corporate social media that prioritizes wellbeing will end up being nothing other than self-help apps encouraging us to do yoga and to eat healthy while hiding the destructive role of capitalism.3 Indeed, most of these apps are already available in your app store, with a price tag. While capitalism still drives immiseration regardless of our technological platforms, some technologies remain decidedly worse than others in their social effects. 

Seymour ends his review with the question: “where is the communist program for the social industry?” Not only is this question hard to answer (and attempts at such, like nationalization of the data centers, have already been proposed4), but it is a higher-order question than what is needed right now. We are far from being able to affect those decisions. It is a bit like deciding how you’re going to spend lottery winnings on a ticket you just purchased. What activists must be asking right now is “what is the social industry, or even social media, strategy of our organizing?” because it is clear that social media drastically affects the way we understand organizing, the way we develop trust in our organizing, or even who gets the largest platform in an organizational debate. We must reckon with the fact that whether we want it or not, social media plays a disproportionate role in our organizing. Parties currently relate to this either by ignoring it, or by enforcing strict social media discipline5, and these cannot be good answers to the dilemma.

Whereas individuals can choose to unplug, our organizing will never be able to fully escape social media. We can decide to not partake, but that doesn’t stop others. The time to come to terms with this harsh reality is long overdue. We are no longer living in the times of the Bolsheviks: the difficulties of getting the message out is not just censorship, but also our signal being drowned in the noise of the hot take economy. It is easier to generate attention by calling Holocaust victims “Karens” than it is by writing lengthy critiques of the concept of race. And a second difficulty appears: are we on social media for the “social” part or for the “media” part? How much of our ego goes into making sure that it is our take that is liked, retweeted and shared, rather than the other person’s or groups’ takes? Even with the best of intentions, it is difficult to not feel good from social validation and watching our follower count or page likes go up.

The Platform and the Party

Turning back to the immediate implications of social media for communist organizing one question stands out: “should a party impose a social media discipline on their members?” It is easy to agree that some discipline is necessary: racism, sexism and any other form of discrimination should get you expelled. Likewise, an informal intervention may be needed if a comrade is having a Twitter meltdown. But the question of precisely how much intra- and inter-organization debate should be allowed on social media is not an easy one to answer. Sometimes debates happen on Facebook groups or on Twitter because there is no other platform to have them. These are responses to organizational failures and the feeling of a lack of democracy. In this case, this is a symptom of an organizational disease, and should not be seen as a lack of discipline so much as an uncontrolled explosion due to inadequate communication channels. But other times, party members simply are not happy when a party decides against them and then take to social media to protest this, or even to sabotage the decision. For instance, the infamous letter calling for DSA members to phonebank for Biden despite the National Convention and the National Political Committee of DSA deciding against a Biden endorsement. In this case the unaccountability and uncontrollability of social media following comes to the forefront. 

Social media appears to flatten power structures, but what it really does is mask them. DSA-adjacent celebrities, such as AOC, have over ten times the amount of Twitter followers than the organization itself. This sets a clear boundary for accountability. Indeed, platform abuse was what caused the introduction of “democratic centralism”6 in the German Socialist Party of yesteryear. Democratic centralism entailed that the votes, and even the speeches members of parliament gave, had to be decided on by the party as a whole. This was a means to ensure that the party controls their elected officials, rather than the opposite. The current structure of DSA prevents this accountability through democratic centralism from happening. The only event which can take place is a public repudiation, similar to the Chicago DSA’s disavowal of their elected alderman Andre Vazquez for voting for a right-wing city budget. While a positive development, it is very unclear that this has a medium- or long-term influence that is larger than the revoking of an endorsement for re-election by a similarly-sized NGO. The current individualistic electoral system is not well suited for these kinds of collective discipline. Vazquez cannot be expelled from a parliamentary fraction or removed from his seat. 

Aside from politician-celebrities, social media influences our organizing in undesirable ways. Even if a large social media base does not account for a large popular base, there are still real-life ripples every time a social media celebrity decides to make others hear their opinion. Charismatic people, or even just conventionally attractive people end up having large platforms to disseminate their thoughts about what is to be done, often causing wastes of time and resources. An example of someone who has a large Twitter following due to her charisma and past involvement in politics is Briahna Joy Gray, the former advisor to the Sanders campaign. Gray, among other media celebrities launched a #ForceTheVote campaign, which attempted to pressure progressive Democratic legislators to withhold their vote for Pelosi as House Speaker unless she would accept bringing Medicare for All to a floor vote. The campaign went nowhere despite producing vigorous debates online for a few days; it lacked a real popular base beyond social media presence. Online platforms do not often translate to on-the-ground organizing and power.

The Medium is the Message 

Founding father of Media Studies Marshall McLuhan argued that to understand communication, rather than focusing on particular content being transmitted, we should focus on the medium through which it occurs. He summarized this succinctly with the catch-phrase “the medium is the message.” For McLuhan, “media” is not simply audio-visual transmissions like newspapers, television or radio and communication goes beyond language. All technologies are media in McLuhan’s account because at their root they serve to extend some capacity of humanity to effect change in the environment and/or receive sensory stimulation:

“Any invention or technology is an extension or self-amputation of our physical bodies, and such extension also demands new ratios or new equilibriums among the other organs and extensions of the body.”7

For instance, the transition from rail to highways as modes of transportation had profound impacts on the structure of cities, logistics networks, and broader human activities like recreation independent of what any given train or car was doing on its network. And it’s not just our social structures, but our bodies that adjust to the stimulation of our technologies. The blue light from electronic screens disrupts sleep patterns, while the consumption of convenience food is linked to heart disease and other health risks, and on a more profound level, as the Greek philosopher Plato bemoaned, our transition to written language led to a loss of our ability to remember nearly as much information as oral cultures. Moreover, every message, be it linguistic or economic, is itself a medium. A car and a train themselves are media transmitting passengers to their destinations who themselves, in the exercise of their social roles for business or pleasure, transmit messages to their destinations. Likewise, a historical television program transmits the message of a script that transmits a lesson of history which itself serves to transmit a particular moral or emotional sentiment to the general public. Media are like nested matryoshka dolls.

From Mcluhan’s ‘The Medium is the Massage”

This especially applies to social media platforms. Off the bat, Twitter messages have a maximum of 280 characters, are evaluated by the likes of a public network, and are very rapid to send. This has a profound impact on the way the medium structures social engagement through it. Most debates will be primarily performed through rapid hits, searching the approval of the public rather than making a convincing argument. In that respect, Facebook provides a marginally better platform for debate, with unlimited length messages—and slightly more secluded commentary, but we are still judged by a large public, in real-time, and performing the debate for the audience. Moreover, Facebook comes with its own drawbacks because of the way its system of invite-only or join-request-based groups work, which create isolated bubbles often characterized by not only group-think but bizarre power dynamics and moderator cliques. What Facebook cares about is that you are engaged; being engaged because you are angry, depressed and seeking validation, or fulfilling yourself through meaningful engagement all look exactly the same to their algorithms. The same way treating disease rather than the symptoms can be seen as unprofitable for medical companies, as long as the tools of social media are dominated by the profit motive, they will maximize the profit of the company, and not necessarily the welfare of the users. Because these platforms condition what sort of media content is enacted through them, they will inevitably shape our habits of thought outside their domain. Thinking about intellectual content in the form of “takes” positions all viewpoints in relation to clout seeking and personal validation and it is increasingly common to see this terminology replace the notion of a political “line” outside decrepit sects.   

Tinder might be a clearer example. What is Tinder’s service, or Tinder’s product? If Tinder were optimized to find us an adequate life companion, or at least someone to walk with us for a bit, people would use Tinder for one or two weeks, and then log off, depleting the user base. This would hurt the company. It is in Tinder’s interest to keep us logged on, replying to messages and matches, so we keep on paying our account, keep on watching the ads, and keep on giving away our data. So then, from a financial perspective it makes sense for Tinder to produce matches who provide only temporary relief from loneliness, instead of finding someone who would make us leave the app maybe not forever, but at least for a while. 

On Tinder, at least one knows what they hope to get. What do we hope to get from social media aside from social-ness? With social isolation especially exacerbated in the age of a pandemic, the social media giants seek to capitalize on this. Facebook naturally tends to show people who think like us, to maximize interactions. This is where Seymour’s critique of The Social Dilemma, which focuses mainly on the power of capital, is incomplete. Social media does produce dopamine and other chemicals which give us a psychological addiction and keep us on the platform. Even avoiding vulgar materialism, it would be foolish to deny the fact that our central nervous system structures how we engage with reality. It’s not just a neutral medium. Psychedelic drugs, workplace stress, physical health, and meditation practices attest to this in their own ways. But through increased technical understanding of the regularities in the material cognitive processes in our brains, and the ability to artificially process and filter information through computers, our central nervous system itself has been extended. As McLuhan says, 

The electric media are the telegraph, radio, films, telephone, computer and television, all of which have not only extended a single sense or function as the old mechanical media did—i.e., the wheel as an extension of the foot, clothing as an extension of the skin, the phonetic alphabet as an extension of the eye—but have enhanced and externalized our entire central nervous systems, thus transforming all aspects of our social and psychic existence.8

Our smartphones filter spam calls, our thermostats adjust the temperature, and the weather channel tells you to prepare for snow next week. In some ways, this development of an extended, collective, electronic nervous system has cost the broad masses its antiquated faculties of self-reliance and the same concern for privacy that historically dominated the highly literate specialists and the bourgeoisie. But is this such a loss? 

McLuhan notes that this new electronic way of living is much more suited to formerly marginalized cultures with strong memories and legacies of tribal existence, not the white bourgeoisie and upper-stratum of workers who financed it. Communities that had to maintain strong ties and forms of resilience in the face of colonial genocide, or forged through the hardship of the proletarian condition, are more aligned with technological logics that emphasize contextual awareness, socialness, and generalized rather than specialized knowledge. Where yesterday’s actuaries and skilled craftsmen are dinosaurs in the face of automation, a day laborer who runs several independent side hustles is more likely to have the flexibility needed to survive in an economy whose rate of change is constantly accelerating. But it isn’t the street-smart entrepreneur who is most resilient, but those who can develop strong community networks of mutual support and solidarity. The hierarchical and individualist culture of the machine age is unsuited to the conditions of life that our technologies have created when it takes Venmo micro-donations from one’s social circle to meet the rent, and a tenant union to keep the rent from rising higher. In the spirit of socialist architect and futurist Buckminster Fuller, McLuhan remarked, “There are no passengers on spaceship earth. We are all crew.”

Singing Sea Shanties on Neurath’s Boat

The present socialization methods are a contrast to those that dominated the past, but a close comparison can help us bridge the gap and develop our program. Recently on Tiktok, hundreds of videos have been uploaded of people joining in the singing of sea shanties. Passionate yet wholesome, the shared activity shines out like a beacon amid the darkness of plague and civil discord. Sparked by a viral video of a postal worker singing the song “Wellerman,” whose name’s meaning has been lost to history, a glimpse of what a healthier culture might look like flashes on our screens. But unlike earlier viral videos, this one involves widespread social participation. With Tiktok’s duet feature, people can join in song across the gaps social distancing demands. 

The social context which produced sea shanties could hardly appear farther from our own: an age of heroic and well-sinewed men setting off on daring struggles with the elements and Nature in pursuit of fortune. It is an era characterized by images of widows staring longingly from the shore, great storms, and drink-sodden invalids telling tall tales to any who would listen. A time when men had no choice but to risk their lives so that their children might eat. 

But is that time actually so different from our own? For all our attempts to smooth out the difficulties of life through technology, anxieties and uncertainty still beset us. Today, every time you go to work, buy a coffee, or visit with a friend, you take a calculated risk that a chain of events may result in killing you, a grandparent, or a partner. But even absent the plague, we simply tune out the 3,700 auto fatalities a day as we commute to work. “It won’t be me,” we tell ourselves, if we think about it at all. We live our lives in the face of tornadoes, floods, landslides, and other man-accelerated disasters because we must. Are the meatpackers who face a roughly 25% injury rate any less brave than the whalers or herring fishermen of old? Are retail workers who live in fear of assault by customers or mass shootings? 

And yet, as much as things have remained the same, what has changed is the increased atomization and alienation of people from one another. The pandemic has only cast existing trends in sharper relief. Where the whalers had camaraderie and brotherhood, today we have parasocial relationships with twitter celebrities and podcasters. The bourgeois culture our schools and institutions force us into is incompatible with the real demands of the new techno-economic reality we face. And this has real implications for social struggle to improve conditions. As Max Dewes put it in a recent article for Organizing.work:

But all of the knowledge in the world can’t change the fact that the single hardest part of any campaign is talking to your coworkers. Almost every shortcut and miscalibration in organizing pivots around the universal truth that most workers would rather personally and publicly challenge Sundar Pichai or the President of the United States than ask Meng from accounting to have an emotional conversation about his issues at work, and pitch him on acting collectively on the job.

Where a crew of sailors might turn mutinous and maroon their tyrant captain on a rocky outcropping, today we are anxious not to hurt the feelings of our employers. Where discipline on a ship was enforced with the lash, and in the factory with the boss’s cane, today we live in enlightened times where a supervisor’s well-timed tantrum does the trick. 

There was a time when the class line was more clear. Organized workers could exert discipline of their own. Scabs feared for their lives, and employers knew that driving the workers too hard would have direct consequences. But the police and national guard were always available to crack heads if workers stepped too far out of line. Organized workers had a culture apart from and subordinated to the dominant bourgeois culture of the men of letters and it played out in a low-grade struggle that involved violence in both directions. 

Binding workers together and reinforcing a shared collectivity was a culture distinct from bourgeois high society and from the mass culture that united the classes. Songs sung to keep the pace at work, at the bar, and in the union hall created a shared language that reinforced an identity opposed to the boss. The Industrial Workers of the World’s Little Red Songbook acted like a passport to a world of shared meaning for those who were tired of lies told from the pulpits of corrupt preachers and in the pages of the newspapers. Visual art, poetry, novels, and plays written to advance working-class values could be found across the world and across nations. Works like Takiji Kobayashi’s Kanikosen (The Crab Cannery Ship), Robert Tressell’s The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists, Daniel Alomía Robles’ El cóndor pasa (The Condor Passes), and Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children expressed the political subjectivity of the oppressed. 

But not all working-class culture was political in character. Much dealt with the tragedies and sorrows of the lived reality of the times like many blues and country songs, spoke of imagined better futures, or recorded memories outside the official histories of polite society. This is where sea shanties largely sat. Singing them was a means for workers in maritime communities to enact their identities and participate in something far beyond themselves. The act of shared singing provided shared structure and narrative to the otherwise disconnected and traumatic experiences of lives on the periphery of society. The singing created a reality where sense could be made of the uncertainty of life. Is it any wonder people today have rediscovered the medium?

In his discussion of human knowledge and the nature of scientific knowledge, Austrian philosopher of science, Otto Neurath, used the metaphor of a boat to explain progress: 

We are like sailors who on the open sea must reconstruct their ship but are never able to start afresh from the bottom. Where a beam is taken away a new one must at once be put there, and for this the rest of the ship is used as support. In this way, by using the old beams and driftwood the ship can be shaped entirely anew, but only by gradual reconstruction.9

Standing on existing scientific knowledge as a platform, researchers could replace parts of the general body of theory as they were shown inadequate or incompatible with current understanding. But the reconstruction necessarily takes as elements ideas and notions from the past, even as it seemingly discards the outdated. 

This is also true with culture. There is no absolute foundation upon which a new culture can be constructed; it will necessarily be made from elements of the old. But as the ways of living and narrative structures created by capitalist mass cultural institutions like individualism, blind faith in the salvific power of scientific progress, and the civic institutions of western democracy are increasingly recognized as rotten to the core, they will be organically replaced by whatever is at hand. Even as we have to isolate through the plague, we also have to come together to survive the growing challenges and threats ecological and economic changes pose to all but the most privileged. Collective forms of cultural expression like sea shanties are a spontaneous expression of this. Socialist political art and media are a conscious attempt to address it. Both can play a mutual reinforcing role. 

Even as revolutionaries focus on building direct power against the bosses in organizational and strategic terms, time and resources have to be set aside for the culture that creates political subjectivity. Whether it’s something fun like sea shanties, rap music, video game tournaments, fiction reading circles, or shared meals and recipe swapping, we have to do more than just give it space. This does not mean creating a prescriptive or top-down model of culture that excludes any “problematic” elements. Such a project is impossible beyond its undesirability. But we don’t have to be passive or tail organic cultural development either. If there’s something that needs to be said or a social need unfulfilled, revolutionaries can make conscious interventions. Our revolutionary forebears were not austere killjoys. Part and parcel with revolutions were the creation of traditions like the Soviet Haggadah, a set of prayers created by communist Jews in Russia, songs like “The East is Red” sung during the Chinese Cultural Revolution, and many others. 

The Social Dilemma‘s tepid reformism is a dead-end for communists, as is pretending these platforms are neutral and play no role in shaping messages. Taking note from McLuhan, we can’t simply take the existing social media and feed in communist politics and working-class culture. But that does not mean we can’t or shouldn’t engage with it. What is important is first recognizing how the technical frameworks shape the message and then adjusting our engagement accordingly. We must note that how our organizations structure their interaction with social media is more important than any particular content they post. Instead of planning and coordinating our organizations through Facebook, Google Apps, and Zoom, we can look to other platforms such as those developed by Common Knowledge. We can develop user-friendly protocols for operational security that minimize electronic records altogether or use burner flip phones and text messages, and we can develop robust policies for the behavior of organizational officers on public social media. The bourgeoisie is not all-powerful, and while their engineers do design their platforms for maximizing profit, the dynamics of social media in the real world are too complex for them to ever fully control. But the same goes for our movement too. 

The traditions of dead generations may weigh like a nightmare on the brains of the living, but it’s a dream workers can take control of and remake according to our own purposes. The power to do so is in your hands!

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Disarming the Magic Bullet

Renato Flores responds to Cam W’s argument for Maoism and the mass line. 

Global warming is progressing. Millions are going hungry and do not know whether they can make the next rent payment. The houseless crisis is intensifying. We know we cannot just stand by, and we have to do something. But how do we do something, how do we slay the monster? How do we become free? It is not going to be easy. Everyone has ideas, some more or less thought out than others. What is clear is that we need a plan, and we need one fast, or the monster will devour us all.

In Cosmonaut, we wish to have an open forum for debate, where these ideas can be shared and discussed. Three contributions have been published, with responses, counter-responses and synthesis. This piece is meant as a (short) reply to Cam’s intervention on the debates around the party form started by Taylor B’s piece “Beginnings of Politics” and Donald Parkinson’s piece “Without a party we have nothing”. Cam’s intervention is heavily influenced by, and largely follows Joshua Moufawad-Paul’s (JMP) ideas on how Maoism has been historically defined, what problems it is responding to, and how it must be applied today. Cam’s main thesis is that Maoism, being the only ideology that has correctly absorbed the knowledge produced by the learning process of the Paris Commune and the Russian and Chinese revolutions is uniquely poised to provide an answer to the problem of the party. And that answer comes in the shape of the mass line, which is “a mechanism to transform the nature of the party into a revolutionary mass organization which can resist the neutralizing force of the party-form”.

I take issue with this last statement, and that is what I will try to elaborate on in this article. I start by agreeing with Cam that we must emphasize the points of both continuity and rupture of our revolutionary process. But I diverge from him in seeing the evolution of Marxism as something much more complicated than the picture drawn by JMP. Indeed, in 2020, the experiences of revolutionaries both in overthrowing the old state and in running a new revolutionary state can fill entire libraries. We know much more about what to do, and especially what not to do, than we did in Marx’s time. However, the process through which knowledge has been accumulated and synthesized cannot be reduced to a single path of advancement of the “science of revolution”. By doing this, we risk ossifying slogans, and allowing spontaneity to fill in the gaps, harming our organizing. The picture painted by Cam, which is inherited from JMP, suffers from the same problems Donald is replying to in his piece: a simple periodization is being imposed into a complex process of knowledge production. This periodization is then used to make a dubious point, namely that through an event a lesson was learned that marks the death of a paradigm and the birth of a new one. Everyone stuck in the previous paradigm is at best naive and at worst, unscientific. This is an extremely loaded word that produces a hierarchy of power: my theory is more powerful than yours because it is scientific. No burden of proof is necessary, because I am being scientific and you are not. I have successfully absorbed the lessons of history while you haven’t.

To begin to deconstruct the claim that Maoism is the highest paradigm of revolutionary science, we have to understand that one of the axioms on which it stands is flawed, namely that progress is linear and happens through a single path. Biology and evolution provide a practical counter-example. In a very simplified manner1, organisms face a problem, the environment, and try to find a solution through adaptation. Faced with similar environments, organisms will find similar solutions, even when they are in geographic isolation.2 This is called convergent evolution, and there are many examples in Nature. Bats and whales both evolved the ability to locate prey by echos as an adaptation to finding food in dark environments. Wings have been evolved by pterosauruses, birds and mammals separately. Silk production appeared separately in spiders, silkworms and silk moths. In a similar manner, some characteristics can be devolved. For example, some species of birds have lost the ability to fly after having gained it. It is not correct to view organisms as more evolved, as if evolution was something that accumulates.

In the same manner, progress in all branches of science is far from neat and linear. Geniuses have been forgotten or dismissed for centuries just to be rediscovered. Dead ends are often reached which require looking back into the past to reinvigorate theories that were previously thought dead. More importantly, co-discoveries happen, and happen often. Wallace and Darwin both came to the theory of evolution. Newton and Leibniz both developed calculus. In both of these cases, the co-inventors were resting on similar theoretical knowledge and facing similar questions. It is therefore unsurprising that they would come to the same solution. Even more, scientists working within very different paradigms, say like Mach and Boltzmann, were both able to contribute immensely to the field of physics despite working from vastly distinct starting points. 

Going back to the revolutionary movement, our theory and our practice have been developed to surpass obstacles in our liberation. Even if these obstacles are not identical, they have been very similar. In the same manner as biological evolution, the science of revolution develops very similar solutions to address the problems revolutionaries face. We should expect that similar ideas will arise from similar contexts, a convergent evolution of tactics. From experience, the more scientists independently arrive at the same conclusion, the more likely that this conclusion is correct. In this context, Donald is correct to emphasize Lenin’s unoriginality. Like scientists, practitioners of revolutionary politics are faced with questions that they must answer, both before, during, and after seizing power. They learn from each other, and try to apply the common mindset to their local conditions. 

If one revolutionary movement progresses and breaks new ground in the process to establish socialism, changes in the environment give rise to new problems that were previously not recognized. They might have seized power, but what now? As the Bolsheviks repeatedly pointed out, they thought building socialism was going to be easier than it actually was. Before the Russian revolution, Hilferding had stated that it would be enough to seize the ten largest banks to get to socialism. Hilferding, among others, believed that this was the great mistake of the Paris Commune, and if revolutionaries had just seized these banks, they would have been able to build a socialist system. But as we know, that was far from enough for the Bolsheviks. They did this, and much more. They were forced to continuously experiment, finding ways that could lead to socialism without losing the support of the peasants and workers. The lessons from Leninism cannot be simply reduced to the necessity of smashing the state: they are much more extensive and valuable than this.

In the same vein, the Chinese Revolution was a gigantic experiment in emancipation that involved old and new questions, with old and new methods to answer them. And Mao diverged from Lenin in many aspects. Mao’s theory of change outlined in “On Contradiction” is quite different from Lenin’s understanding of dialectics. The Maoist theory of New Democracy also diverges from Lenin’s ideas of how a revolution should proceed. It is hard to answer if they are improvements or regressions. It is probably better to say that the Marxist canon was enriched by both thinkers. 

Another example of returning to the Marxist canon and reevaluating or rediscovering old hypotheses can be seen in Kautsky, Lenin, Kwame Nkrumah’s theories of Imperialism. In his celebrated Imperialism, Lenin (rightfully) told Kautsky that the world was not heading towards an ultra-imperialist system where different imperial powers share the world peacefully—instead he argued that imperialist conflict was on the table. Indeed, Lenin was correct in that conjecture. World War I and World War II were both driven mainly by inter-imperial conflict.3 But after WW2, their differences would be sublated. A single capitalist superpower was able to set the rules on how the spoils would be divided. Nkrumah captured this in his Neo-Colonialism, basically rediscovering parts of Kautsky’s thesis and adapting them to the present. In this case, an exhausted paradigm was resurrected after significant adaptations were made.

You can see where I am going: it is impossible to lay out a simple evolution of knowledge for Marxism, with clean breaks from one another where knowledge only really had three leaps.  Mao was correct in saying that socialism or communism was not permanent in the USSR and that a reversion to capitalism could happen, but he was surely not the only one to note the problems of socialist construction in the USSR. Revolutionary experience has been accumulated, and it has, for better or worse, been synthesized by revolutionaries. There are points where synthesizers like Lenin or Mao have made key contributions that have left a permanent imprint. Lenin was able to stabilize a revolutionary state, which allowed further problems of socialist construction to be posed. Mao was able to mobilize the masses against a stagnating party, which opened the problem of how to deal with class interests inside the party, and how to open a public sphere in a socialist state. Rather than having done science, it is probably better to think of them as having set up the stage for the further development of scientific socialism. 

Whether Lenin and Mao were scientists or whether they set the stage for new science is a pedantic point— the important point is that periodizations of revolutionary science are not just meant to convey this, they are often used as discourses of power. When Stalin wrote “Foundations of Leninism”, “Trotskyism or Leninism”, or even the Short Course, he was not only trying to synthesize the knowledge gained from the construction of socialism in the USSR and set a roadmap for the future. It was an operation through which he declared himself to be the one true heir of Lenin and excluded others such as Trotsky or Bukharin. When the Indian Maoist Ajith wrote “Against Avakianism”, he was attempting to exclude Bob Avakian’s Revolutionary Communist Party from the mantle of Maoism. In the same way, JMP’s periodization is an attempt to claim for Maoism the mantle of the one science of revolution and exclude other Marxists from possibly contributing to this. But his claim ignores the complexity of knowledge development, something we have been addressing in this piece. Furthermore, even if one takes this periodization at its word, and we take Maoism to be a third synthesis, JMP’s periodization is not the only one in attempting to explain Mao’s epistemological breaks. Marxist-Leninists-Maoists—principally Maoists—who claim the legacy of the relatively successful Peruvian Shining Path, center Gonzalo’s theoretical contributions around People’s War in defining Maoism, rather than recognizing the Revolutionary International Movement (of which SP was a [critical] part) as the principal synthesizer of Maoism.4 

More importantly, why is Maoism the only ideology that can claim to have absorbed the knowledge from revolutionary history? In terms of seizing power, or battling the state to a standstill, what have the Indian Naxalites achieved that has not been achieved by others, as for example by the Zapatistas who started from different premises5 yet face similar material conditions of indigenous dispossession? Are the Zapatistas somehow less scientific than the Naxalites? Or are they responding to different pressures of dependent capitalism in countries with backgrounds of settler-colonialism and casteism?6 Is there really nothing the titanic struggle of the African National Congress against apartheid can teach us, when the pitiful state of the ANC reminds us of how the Maoist revolution in Nepal has become increasingly coopted? What about the many other names of the long list of Latin American or African revolutionaries such as Amilcar Cabral or Paulo Freire, that are written out of this evolution? The successes and failures of the Arusha Declaration and Ujamaa or the Yugoslav experiment in self-management provide way more data points that enrich our knowledge, going way beyond the MLM straight line periodization that only really joins three points and attempts to exclude everyone else. In this spirit, it is worth noting that geographically diverse groups such as Matzpen in Israel and Race Traitor in the United States independently developed very similar ideas on what it means to be a race traitor, and how settler-colonialism and white privilege work to stabilize society. 

Two-line struggles and “bourgeois” ideology

A periodization of history must be accompanied with explanations for the choices taken to divide one epoch from another. These divisions are usually used to give primacy to a political event or concept, after which one theory was proven absolutely correct and the other false. In the case of Taylor’s piece, he follows Badiou by stating that the Cultural Revolution showed that the party-form was an exhausted concept and brought forward the idea that new forms of organization must supplant it. In the case of Cam, who follows JMP’s periodization of MLM, the cultural revolution brings to the forefront the importance of the ‘two-line’ struggle and the mass line. Essentially, Mao reached a breakthrough realization: the ideological struggle between proletariat and bourgeoisie continued in socialism, and (a part of it) happened within the Communist party in the shape of a line-struggle. Stalin was wrong to declare that the USSR had achieved communism, and that this process could not be reversed. Indeed, capitalist roaders inside the party could reverse it and we have to struggle against them, and with the masses. A party which is properly embedded in the masses can successfully struggle against those who would reverse the revolution. And this is why Mao called for the Cultural Revolution: to rebuild those links between party and masses, and to battle the propagation of capitalist ideas in the party. 

This framework is very appealing. It explains the restoration of capitalism in the USSR and China: the bourgeois wing of the party gained power because it was never defeated, despite the Cultural Revolution. It offers a simple and comforting answer to the question of socialist construction: just struggle hard enough against the capitalist roaders. It sounds a lot like a Manichean struggle for the world, and is especially well suited to an American mindset which is based on binaries. But while there definitely are undesirable elements within all Communist parties (just think of Yeltsin or Milosevic) the two-line struggle is a gross simplification that collapses all of the problems of revolutionary science into something that looks a lot like a magic trick: the masses will redeem us if we struggle with them. The whole problem of societal management, both politically and economically (which usually go together) is not a struggle between good and evil. It is the problem of how to control a totality, which risks becoming dysfunctional at places where faults happen, be it either improperly balanced alliances between classes such as the peasantry and the proletarians, existing monopolies on resources like technical skills, or sites of power which reproduce antisocial ideology. Mao was correct to identify some problems as originating from capitalist values and beliefs, which originate and are replicated from the existing conditions and require a cultural revolution to solve. But all of these problems cannot be all cast as bourgeois or capitalist, even if their sources come from constructing socialism on top of a capitalist society.7 By taking this simplification we risk allowing spontaneity to creep in in all places and hoping that high spirits will solve things for us.

 

There is an in-jest comment that asks: tell me which year you think the Russian Revolution was defeated and I will tell you which tendency you belong to. Was it with War Communism? Kronstadt? The disempowering of the Soviets? The retreats of NEP? Rapid and often brutal collectivization? The purges that destroyed the Old Bolsheviks? Kruschev’s or Kosygin’s reforms? Were Gorbachov’s efforts doomed already or did he make serious blunders along the way? Worse even, did he sell the USSR out for a slice of Pizza? The bitter truth is there is no simple answer to when the USSR was defeated. There was a long list of decisions that strengthened some groups while weakening others, eroded the revolution’s mass base of support, slowly created alienated groups of people who felt displaced from power, and eventually created a stagnated, even ossified, society. No longer able to progress toward socialism, it disintegrated under pressure. Until we digest that tough conclusion we risk searching for magic bullets to solve all our problems. 

Seeking redemption through the masses is just one more illusion from a suitcase of quixotic tricks meant to bring us to socialism. Even if it is pointing at a real problem8, the solution is little more than a slogan. The careful and difficult balancing act of institutional design meant to construct a system that would, among many things, grant political freedom as to everyone, abolish permanent managerial roles by ensuring that “every cook can govern”, and eliminate existing oppressive systems carried over from capitalism, is reduced to making sure the proletarian line is upheld by “going to the masses”. This confuses tactic and strategy, and allows ossification and spontaneity to creep into  all the missing spaces. Think about it for a minute. Some problems are easier to solve than others: if a local administrator is behaving badly and abusing their powers, we should discipline them through re-education or even removal. But what if they’re the only one in town that can actually run the irrigation systems? If they’re removed agricultural output will underperform or fail. If this administrator is reinstated, the masses, who are our ultimate allies, will feel betrayed. They didn’t fight a revolution for this. The administrator could feel justified in their privileges and try to go even further in their pursuit of even more privileges and power. But if they aren’t reinstated, the masses might go hungry due to crop failures, or freeze in the winter. Either way, they will be frustrated with the party. 

These sorts of dilemmas around specialists and local administrators were a repeated problem in many societies attempting socialist construction, including the USSR and Maoist China. Mao sought a solution through the mass mobilization of the Cultural Revolution. The first stage dispersed the agglomeration of specialists in the city by sending them to the countryside. This was meant to break their privileges and urban strongholds, and (re)rally the support of the peasants for the revolution. The declassed specialists would then participate in the second and protracted struggle of breaking the monopolies on knowledge by educating the peasantry and opening rural schools. By ensuring that the peasants were able to administer their own affairs as a collective, they would not be beholden to a single, and potentially corrupt, expert. Mao’s solution was implemented at a scale never seen before, especially in a country of China’s size and its deep city-countryside divide., But Mao wasn’t the only one to come up with this sort of solution to the specialist problem: Che Guevara tried to enforce a smaller-scale cultural revolution in Cuba to persuade managers and specialists to throw in their lot with the revolution. Other revolutions came up with their own solutions: the Yugoslavs had a persistent problem with managers monopolizing knowledge and tried to solve it through factory schools and deepening education—without forcing existing specialists to undergo a cultural revolution. This did not end well.

Another more complicated problem was faced by the USSR repeatedly during its history: what happens when the lack of proper food procurement to the cities forces the party to choose between extracting food by force from the peasantry or making significant concessions to it, either through paying higher prices or devoting higher investments. Which of these solutions is ‘proletarian’? The USSR was forced to constantly oscillate between disciplining the peasants by force and granting them concessions because it could not solely rely on the stick or the carrot. Neither of these can be labeled more ‘proletarian’ than the other. Especially when contrasted with alternatives not taken, which can be regarded as capitalist, such as the full liberalization of rural China in the Deng era.  

With this short digression, I hope to have laid out an important point: the working of a society is the working of a complex totality, where relations can become dysfunctional, threatening the whole. It is not (just) a matter of conducting line-struggles between “proletarian” and “bourgeois” lines. It is a matter of sitting down and diagnosing the system, understanding where the dysfunctions are, what groups they are serving or harming, and how the socialist construction can proceed by removing these dysfunctions. Politics is not a Manichean struggle. It is somewhere between a science and an art of organization. Compromises must be made, and we must constantly be asking how the power relationships in society will change if we are to undergo these changes. 

The successive educational policies of the USSR in the 1920s, meant to both democratize knowledge and improve production, ended up empowering a new class of “red specialists” who would control the party 30 years later. The Yugoslav experiment tried to disempower the federal state and empower factory councils to devolve power to the workers, but ended up empowering factory managers and creating a comprador class that would trigger a Civil War. The agricultural reforms enacted by the Great Leap Forward meant to increase food production but ended up causing a food crisis. The type of historical analysis we need is a tough one, but being honest results in a better framing of things which goes beyond simply good and bad lines, and higher or lower scientific tendencies, or who betrayed what revolution. 

Beyond the mass line: deciding how and where to struggle

The same framework, with some caveats, can be applied to formulate the principles of a revolutionary party. The party inserts itself in a capitalist society while simultaneously attempting to destabilize the capitalist totality and replace it with a new totality. 

How do we begin to construct such an organism? Cam’s suggested plan of action is taken from JMP’s book Continuity and Rupture:

The participants in a revolutionary movement begin with a revolutionary theory, taken from the history of Marxism, that they plan to take to the masses. If they succeed in taking this theory to the masses, then they emerge from these masses transformed, pulling in their wake new cadre that will teach both them and their movement something more about revolution, and demonstrating that the moment of from is far more significant than the moment of to because it is the mechanism that permits the recognition of a revolutionary politics.  

This poses several questions and problems, but the main thing is that we begin with participants in a revolutionary movement who are armed with theory that they take to the masses. 

The first critique of this position is that the party is seen as some sort of external agent, formed by intellectuals, who have acquired knowledge and will bring it to the masses. It sets the party aside, as the unique interpreter of Marxism, and the object through which the people’s demands are translated to communist ones. It hopes that with the bringing of theory to the masses, the party will transform itself. We can contrast this approach to the merger theory. In 1903, Kautsky wrote:

In addition to this antagonism between the intellectual and the proletarian in sentiment, there is yet another antagonism. The intellectual, armed with the general education of our time, conceives himself as very superior to the proletarian. Even Engels writes of the scholarly mystification with which he approached workers in his youth. The intellectual finds it very easy to overlook in the proletarian his equal as a fellow fighter, at whose side in the combat he must take his place. Instead he sees in the proletarian the latter’s low level of intellectual development, which it is the intellectual’s task to raise. He sees in the worker not a comrade but a pupil. The intellectual clings to Lassalle’s aphorism on the bond between science and the proletariat, a bond which will raise society to a higher plane. As advocate of science, the intellectuals come to the workers not in order to co-operate with them as comrades, but as an especially friendly external force in society, offering them aid.

The difference between these two conceptions is that the first pays little to no attention to the self-organization of the masses and the ways they are already resisting capitalism. It asks us to go to the masses, without specifying which masses and how to talk to them. The second conception is that of the merger, where the intellectuals come to co-operate with the workers and see them as comrades, inserting themselves into existing struggles and amplifying them. 

This difference is especially critical because it explains the way in which Maoists in the United States fill in their lack of clear tactics and strategy with spontaneity, leaving them lacking a clear plan, something they are slowly coming to realize. “Go to the masses” is left as a magic bullet. This raises the second problem: the identification of the “masses”. Cam suggests we start by “serving and interacting with the people”. A detailed study of the conditions of the people is a prerequisite of any revolutionary movement; just ask Lenin or Mao, but as with JMP, Cam grazes over the question of who the masses are that we are supposed to be interacting with in the United States. This is a question worth some reflecting on: the US is a unique creature in the history of the world. It is an advanced imperialist country, which leads to comparisons with Western Europe, but is also a settler-colonial society scaffolded by whiteness. It has a significant labor aristocracy who have much more to lose than their chains, and also has a significant surplus population that is easily replaceable and has little power to stop the monster.

Which groups are going to lead the revolution and which groups are expected to follow? How will hegemony over these groups be won? Essentially, who is the revolutionary subject in the United States? Who will bell the cat? Without making this explicit we run the risk of fetishizing the most oppressed subjects who unfortunately do not have the power to change the system. 

It is important to remember that Marx located the revolutionary subject in the proletariat because (1) he studied the workers’ self-organization, how they had the power to stop accumulation if they wanted to, and what they were capable of achieving under adequate leadership and structure, and (2) the proletariat had less to lose from overthrowing the system because it possessed nothing. It could only lose their chains. But as we well know, the proletariat in the centers of capitalism failed to revolt. The Paris Commune, which so enthralled Marx, would move East, and the working class of the capitalist centers was pacified at best, or at worst enlisted in imperial or fascistic projects. 

The cat would not be belled because some mice were getting good spoils. Starting with Lenin, there have been plenty of attempts to rationalize why there were no more large-scale revolts, like the Paris Commune, in the centers of capitalism. The labor aristocracy, understood as those who have more to lose than their chains, did not live up to Marx’s tasks. And if they are not willing to revolt and pick up the sword, who will then finish the job? This question is especially pressing in the United States, where capitalism is strongly racialized and where poor whites have been used to stabilize settler-colonialism for centuries. This is where the question of “who are the revolutionary masses” appears. Spontaneity fills in when the prescriptions are vague, which is why so many “mass line” organizations fall into a pattern of providing service aid, in the form of food or legal means, to the most oppressed in hope of activating them for the struggle. I do not wish to repeat a full critique of mutual aid that was already done in an excellent manner by Gus Breslauer. The two basic points are: people do mutual aid because it’s easy and makes us feel good, but in the end what we are doing is redistributing the labor fund and not threatening the state or the bosses in the process. Even if mutual aid can sometimes create useful auxiliaries, such as unemployed committees, they often cannot substitute for the main event. They also require massive amounts of energy and fund expenditures to keep alive, energy which could be spent more efficiently in amplifying existing struggles. We run the risk of burning resources and ourselves in doing something that does not center class struggle and is of minor use in fighting against the capitalist system. 

It is important to locate this new fetish with mutual aid not only in the realization that people are suffering immensely but also in the failure of locating a revolutionary subject willing to fight to the bitter end. Mutual aid attempts to activate the most oppressed layers in the United States, but Marx’s other principle still holds: look for subjects that have the power to change society, rather than just the most oppressed. We should be looking at the sites of class struggle that are actually happening in today’s world and how these can be amplified to throw the capitalist totality into disarray. For this, we could start by reading studies of material conditions, such as Hunsinger & Eisenberg’s Mask Off, in great detail. An important place of struggle in the US right now are the struggles around social reproduction, specifically those around housing, childcare, and healthcare. Teachers’ and nurses’ unions, as well as the tenants movement, are in the front lines of struggle, and they are hurting capitalists because they are breaking into the capitalist totality in a way food distribution among the houseless is not.9 

For some people, the natural starting place might be their union, especially if it is an active and fighting one. But for those who do not have that option, focusing on the tenants union movement allows us to connect to pre-existing struggles in the masses, amplify them, and understand their conditions in a very different way than food distribution does. Tenant unionism also provides us with targets that are actually defeatable, such as a local slumlord, which motivates our members, gives us publicity, and allows our organization to grow while further embedding it in the struggle. Other and larger targets can be tempting, but these are often heroic feats. The fight against Amazon, led by Amazonians United and other unions, is fighting an enemy at a scale much larger than what the proletariat is capable of organizing against right now. Their fight will be an extremely tough one, as the working class in the US (or even internationally) is still in a state of learning. Victories can be quickly stolen from us. For example, German workers defeated Amazon in Germany, so Amazon simply moved across the border to the Czech Republic, continuing distribution in Germany while avoiding their laws.

Conclusion

As mentioned in the introduction, we are in a seriously demoralizing moment. There is a rapidly changing conjuncture, where the pandemic and climate change fill us with urgency but make organizing hard due to increasingly scarce resources. We want to do something that is effective and brings liberation fast, but we are faced with the weight of the failures of the socialist movement, be it revolutionary or reformist. We want answers on how to do this and are attracted to things that do not sound that dissimilar to what we already know, or the ways in which our brains are programmed. 

JMP’s style of Maoism is particularly well suited to the American mind. It provides relatively easy answers and provides enough silences that we can choose to interpret in ways that are not dissonant with our previous mindset. JMP also borrows plenty of epistemological concepts from American Pragmatist philosophy10, such as how truth is evaluated through practice, which makes it even more amenable to the underlying concept of science already present in US society. JMP writes well and clearly and is very articulate in his interviews. Because of this, it is not strange to see him becoming increasingly popular for a younger generation searching for these quick answers on what to do. This Maoism can also claim the mantle of the few revolutionary movements which are still vibrant today: the Philippines and India, which gives us something hopeful to root for internationally— something not as stale as defending an increasingly capitalist China.

However, to develop a proper science of revolution for the United States, whatever doctrine we decide to base ourselves, has to be heavily enriched with anti-colonial thought. One of the referents of Maoism, the Naxalites in India. have not properly dealt with Adivasi culture, and have sometimes misunderstood the way it operates, facing local resentment and resistance.11 This should raise a warning flag on the operating methods of the “mass line”, where the party is left as an interpreter because of its knowledge of Marxism. Furthermore, Naxalites have not successfully linked their struggle with the struggles in Indian cities. A strategy that bases itself on the most oppressed in the US would surely face similar problems. In this respect, the Phillipino Communists do this linking much better, through the use of broad quasi-popular fronts. However, they also went as far as endorsing support for Biden in the last US presidential election. How to adequately interface with the labor aristocracy and win hegemony over them is going to be a gigantic tactical and strategic problem here. 

So to end, I am proposing we do not rely on slogans that can be ossified and filled in with spontaneity. We do not have a Yunnan to build a red base in the US, geography is not as favorable here. Our fight is a long one that will not be solved with tricks but will require years and decades of changing tactics and reevaluating strategies. In this spirit, Cosmonaut is an open forum where revolutionaries can talk to each other and propose ways forward. I know this contribution raises more questions than gives answers, but I hope it serves as a starting point for asking better questions. 

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“Going Back or Moving Forward” & “Speech to the 8th CPSU(B) Congress” by N. Osinsky

Translations by Mark Alexandrovich, introduction by Mark Alexandrovich and Renato Flores. 

Depiction of Council of People’s Commissar, or Sovnarkom.

Osinsky is the pseudonym of old Bolshevik Valerian Valerianovich Obolensky. Born in 1887, Osinsky is an often forgotten but very influential Bolshevik and theoretician. He started off on the left-wing of the Bolsheviks, being active around the journal Kommunist. After the revolution, he became chairperson of the Supreme Soviet of the National Economy but lost that position due to his opposition to the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. He was elected in 1919 as a delegate to the founding congress of the Communist International, and in this same year became part of the oppositional tendency, or unofficial faction of the Democratic Centralists, alongside other figures such as Sapronov and Smirnov. 

The Democratic Centralists, or Deceists, were a tendency within the Bolshevik party who came together on the basis of attempting to reform the organizational structures of the nascent Soviet state. In particular, they questioned the existing relationship between the party and the state, which they saw as inefficient and undemocratic. They were concerned with the proliferation of unresponsive bureaucracy due to either excessive centralization, duplication, or triplication of roles that were supposed to deal with the same competencies. They also heavily opposed the encroaching militarism of the government which was caused by the civil war. They realized that this was demobilizing the workers and disenchanting them from the idea that the Soviet government was their own. During the brief time during which they were active, they pushed for more debate, and more collegiality at all levels, proposing new ways of running the government. They became moribund after the 10th Communist Party Congress, which alongside approving most of their demands, also approved the temporal ban on factions. 

Below, we present two texts from Osinsky which have never been available in English: an article from Pravda in January 1919, and a speech from the 8th Communist Party Congress. The former text’s original scan is unreadable in places in the digital scans, so if anyone has or knows of a complete copy we invite them to make it available to us. This text is meant for a more popular audience, even if some sentences are long and convoluted. If some passages are confusing in English, they are like that in the original Russian, too. The translator tried to make it clearer where possible. Osinsky’s language is also old fashioned, even for 1919. This could either have been the way he wrote or purposeful use of old fashioned, peasant language for his audience. The second text’s source was much clearer as the proceedings from the 8th Communist Party Congress are fully available in digital format. This text also does not have the old-fashioned language and is overall an easier read. 

Osinsky was one of the most prominent members of the Demcents. These texts we present are an important exhibit of the type of diagnosis and reforms proposed by the Deceists in order to improve Soviet democracy and make it a true government of the people. Like many of their contemporaries (such as Krupskaya), the critiques from the Deceists were constructive and presented as resolutions with actionable points in the congresses of the Communist Party. We present this text with two intentions. First, to show the vibrancy and depth of Bolshevik debates in general; unfortunately, in modern-day “common-sense” historiography the struggle is too often reduced to the two poles of Stalin and Trotsky, forgetting everyone and everything else constituting Soviet life and government. This text from 1920 is prior to Trotsky’s critiques of bureaucratization in 1923, and in many ways opposes Trotsky’s politics at the time of the text regarding the militarization of the state. Second, this text clearly shows that the Bolsheviks realized quite early that forming a workers state was not going to be as easy as expected, and that the tasks of government and the articulation between Party and State, and between centralization and decentralization, were extremely complex. In this context, the diagnostics and resolutions of Osinsky, although opposed by Lenin and heavily voted down in the 8th Congress, are crucial for understanding the development of the Soviet government. 

Osinsky, alongside many Deceists, would later sign the Declaration of 46 in 1923, a communique to the Central Committee which asked for urgent reforms to solve the increasingly aggravated problems of government malfunction. The Deceists would end up fracturing, with many (including Osinsky) joining the Left Opposition. Some Deceists like Sapronov and Smirnov would end up expelled from the party, going as far as characterizing the USSR as state capitalist and unworthy of defense. Osinsky would end up aligned with Bukharin’s views on the peasantry, and served as Professor of the Agricultural Academy of Moscow. With the downfall of Bukharin, his protection disappeared. Like many Old Bolsheviks, Osinsky would be executed during the Purges, on the first of September 1938. However, the issues and problems that Osinsky raises here are still as relevant today as ever as other problems of socialist transition.

Further readings:
Lara Douds, “Inside Lenin’s Government: Power, Ideology and Practice in the Early Soviet State”, Bloomsbury Academic, 2008
David Priestland, “Bolshevik ideology and the debate over party‐state relations, 1918–21”, Revolutionary Russia Volume 10, 1997 – Issue 2 

Photo of Osinsky

Going Back or Moving Forward

Pravda, 15 January 1919

“Ah, yes, you preach no more no less a return to ‘democracy’, your reasoning smells a lot of liberalism”, we have already heard the objection from some comrades. Such comrades have not learned at all of our attitude to democracy, to populism. By renouncing the so-called “democratic republic”, we gave up bourgeois parliamentary democracy. We gave up its foundation, the capitalist mode of production, which provides in such a republic a financial dictatorship. We have renounced all the formal features of a “democratic republic” that, in words, give rights to the people and, in fact, ensure the domination of the bourgeoisie: universal (rather than class) suffrage; essentially irreplaceable elected bodies detached from the masses; separation of powers, transforming parliaments into legislative institutions: independence and irreplaceability of officials; universal and formal civil “freedoms”. 

But we gave up all this only in order to secure the dictatorship of the widest masses of the working people and to create a true people’s rule of law, a worker-peasant democracy. The Soviet republic is the only form of real democracy. And if so, some features of its working may coincide with the corresponding features of bourgeois democracy, recreating them in a new form. Moreover, some of the principles of the “proclamation” of bourgeois democracy are only truly implemented in the workers’ and peasants’ state. Also, direct participation of the masses in decisions of public affairs […] in the Soviet Republic, it is carried out in practice, thanks to the creation of a separate network of electoral cells and the unification of powers: responsibility […] ([…] only in the Soviet Republic, it is carried out due to replacement of officials and the same unification of powers); genuine public opinion controls all organs of power (bourgeois forgeries of public opinion disappear), etc.

We do not call to go back to bourgeois democracy, but forward to the expanded form of worker-peasant democracy. Only people infected with bureaucratic spirit may not understand that this is our goal, but authoritarian techniques are a temporary phenomenon, which is not the sole manifestation of a worker-peasant dictatorship. 

By the way, the attraction of new layers to public work to replace the “exhausted” part of the proletarian avant-garde, presupposes the reduction of “command” methods and increase in public initiative of the masses. A class mobilization in the proletariat under current conditions can be created by moving towards a developed form of worker-peasant democracy. 

What should be done to eliminate the main “shortcomings of the mechanism”.

The ways in which we must make this transition are as follows: 

First of all, it is necessary to connect all Soviet agencies directly to the organizations of the working masses. Commissariats of foodstuffs and finance, first of all, should be “workerized” by involving proletarian organizations in their system and involving representatives of these organizations in decision making. This is how the “personal union” of Soviet bureaucracy and the proletariat is created. 

But the position of Soviet officials should be radically changed as well. The number of emergency commissioners with extraordinary powers should be limited to a minimum. The rights, duties, and activities of the officials should be defined by precise norms. […] a Soviet republic may demand from them to fulfill their legal duties and refuse to fulfill their illegal demands. For their actions, especially for abuse of power, officials are responsible not only to their “department,” but also to elected bodies and the people’s court (it is best to arrange special tribunals for this purpose), to which every worker and peasant can summon them. 

All bodies carrying out searches and arrests (in particular, emergency commissions) must be subordinate to the judicial power. It should be explicitly stated that the emergency commissions should be turned into a properly appointed (i.e. subordinated to the control of the court), criminal and political police, which should exist in the workers’ and peasants’ state until further development makes it possible to replace it with a nationwide people’s militia. 

Both local Soviets and especially VTsIK (All-Russian Central Executive Committee) should become collegial institutions that discuss general norms and following policy measures, guide their implementation and indeed control their implementation. For this purpose, VTsIK may establish standing committees. It is necessary to reduce, and partially stop the concentration of legislative and executive powers within the narrow closed ministries–starting with the Presidium of VTsIK, the Council of People’s Commissars and departmental tops to the corresponding local cells. Uniting legislative and executive powers does not create arbitrariness and detachment from the masses only if the powers are united in the hands of experienced elected bodies.

The activities of all authorities should be controlled by the public opinion of workers and peasants. The meetings of collegial institutions should be public, open, and the commissariats should give reports on their work to VTsIK. All their work and the activities of individual officials should be constantly illuminated by this body of central power. The same shall apply to local councils. It is also clear that only a free discussion of all issues of public life in the press and at meetings leads to a firm ground for public discussion in elected institutions. 

The workers’ and peasants’ public opinion and the petty-bourgeois parties.

Here again we hear the questions: So you are proposing universal freedom of the press, of assembly (and therefore of unions)? Does this not mean a return to bourgeois democracy? And further: isn’t it related to the return to the soviets of parties hostile to workers’ and peasants’ power? And isn’t it related to the change of the course of our policy, which is so heavily criticized by the Mensheviks?

And in any case, we do not call back to bourgeois democracy, but forward to the full implementation of workers’ and peasants’ democracy. First of all, the workers’ and peasants’ democracy provides the workers and peasants with a real basis for the free use of speech, press, and assembly in a union organization (the bourgeoisie is deprived of space for […] telegraphy and paper, and the possibility of any bribed campaigning is destroyed). As for the very use of these real opportunities, we take care to ensure that workers and peasants are able to freely express their opinions. For us, only their public opinion exists, but not that of the bourgeoisie and its parties. The bourgeoisie and its parties are dead; they do not exist. 

So, who can express their opinion in the Soviet Republic and what can they say? Only parties and organizations whose representatives were sent by workers and peasants to their councils. Between them should be deployed, according to the number behind us of […]–premises, telegraph machines, and paper. At meetings and in the columns of newspapers, they shall substantiate the same views as those expressed in the councils. 

Thus, we have indeed come to the question of which parties may be represented on the councils. Until recently, petty-bourgeois parties were expelled from the Soviets. Now they are in a semi-legal position there. We must say clearly and unequivocally that at this stage of development there is no need to remove from the Soviets and from free discussion, parties that do not call for a direct overthrow of Soviet power. It is also possible that we will come to grant this freedom to all parties that can have representation in the Soviets. 

Since the balance of real forces has been confirmed in favor of the proletariat and the poor, since the Soviet state has been strengthened and established, freedom of the press and assembly for the petty-bourgeois parties represented in the Soviets is possible and necessary. The control of public opinion over the work of the Soviet authorities is thus expanding. In the chorus of public opinion, are heard the voices of backward politicians who express the opinion of the most backward and hardened layers of the petty-bourgeoisie. All the better: any clash of opinions is useful in the Soviet state because it has strengthened its existence. Variety makes it easier to find the right path quickly. As for gentlemen petty-bourgeois politicians, they are offered full opportunity to push for a change in general policy by influencing public opinion in a “soft parliamentary way” that they so praise. Only here public opinion is different and voters are different. But these voters, not worse, but better than parliamentary voters, can understand who is right and who is wrong.

As far as policy changes are concerned, allowing a minority to defend their opinions does not mean a change of course on the part of the majority. It only expresses the strengthening of the position of this majority. In addition, petty-bourgeois politicians and petty-bourgeois masses are “two big differences”. The overwhelming majority of the petty-bourgeois masses (peasants) followed the proletariat and its party and approved its policies. And this policy […] the party offered the petty-bourgeois masses through the head of people who wanted to speak on their behalf, but spoke only in the name of the kulaks and the bosses […]. Therefore, if we admit the lords of petty-bourgeois politicians to the Soviets, it does not mean that we “made peace with the petty-bourgeoisie” (we did not quarrel with it), and therefore it does not mean that we commit ourselves to any concessions to these lords. 

Thus, the question of the content of Soviet politics is by no means predetermined by fallen defeats. This is a special question. But the forms of defining this policy are predetermined: it is managed by elected bodies; it is conducted by officials directly subordinate to these bodies, who give them permanent master reports; they are rightfully controlled by the public opinion of workers and peasants. 

We think that if the Soviet Republic enters this path in the near future, the petty-bourgeois lords […] will have to testify bitterly that the Soviet Republic has survived another crisis unscathed. If this does not happen, the crisis will drag on, but it will still be resolved, and namely that is necessary. And the historical necessity will sooner or later declare and realize its rights. And the historical necessity is that the great and strong Soviet Republic grows and develops further, throwing off its skin, which has become tight for it. 

8th Congress of the R.C.P.(B.) — SECOND MEETING

ORGANIZATIONAL SECTION

March 21st, morning, 1919

Original proceedings, pages 187-197:

The meeting opens at 11:10 a.m.

Chairperson: I declare the meeting open. Comrade Avanesov has a word for order.

Avanessov: To reduce the time, I would suggest connecting the last two questions and giving the speakers a little more time.

Chairman: Are there any objections? No. Is it convenient to amend the regulations in order to provide the co-rapporteur with 30 minutes and 10 minutes for the final word? Accepted.

Osinsky:

Comrades, our party program includes a clause that speaks of the struggle against the revival of bureaucracy. By stating that we have a revival of bureaucracy, I must begin my report. This revival of bureaucracy is what we have called the “minor” and sometimes the “major” shortcomings of the Soviet mechanism in newspapers and discussions all the time. How is it expressed? Critics dwelt very little on elucidating the causes of this phenomenon. It should be noted that in our Soviet activities, the work of open elected collegia1, for example, plenums of local Soviets, plenary sessions of the CEC [Central Executive Committee]2, meetings, etc. is dying down. At meetings where the prepared bills are voted upon, there is no discussion of these bills.

Then, the lively work of the masses in state-building has frozen in our country. Decision-making is concentrated in narrow collegia, which — we need to straightforwardly state — to a considerable extent are detached from the masses in a significant way. We now have all issues resolved in executive bodies, starting from the very top and ending with the very bottom. The development of personal politics should be attributed to the phenomenon just mentioned. I must say that two months ago Comrade Lenin raised the question in the Central Committee about the development of our personal policy. This is called, speaking the German language–“Zettelwirtschaft”–economy by means of notes. We have solved a lot of problems by notes of various commissars.3 On this basis, starting from the very top, from party comrades, a system is developed for resolving problems by one-on-one means and a personal conduct of business is being developed. From here a whole system of irregularities arises, which leads to the fact that we are intensely developing patronage for close people, protectionism, and, in parallel, abuse, bribery; and, in the end, especially in the provinces obvious outrages are committed by our senior, sometimes party, workers. 

At present, the old party comrades have created a whole bureaucratic apparatus, built, in fact, on the old model. We have created an official hierarchy. When we made the demand of the commune state at the beginning of the revolution, this demand included the following provision: all officials must be elected and must be accountable to elected institutions. In fact, we now have a situation where the lower official, who acts in a province or county and is responsible to his commissariat, in most cases is not responsible to anyone. This explains to a large extent the outrages caused by the “people with mandates”, and despotism develops on this basis.

There’s an extreme development of paperwork. Entire groups of people gather who do nothing. And if our program is the so-called cheap government, then at the present time we can say that our government machine is extremely expensive. There are a lot of extra posts, they are paid all the time, and people who are registered as staff but to a large extent do nothing, eat bread for nothing and only increase clerical red tape. The question is, what is the reason for this? Two explanations are outlined in the draft of our program. On the one hand, it is indicated that the layer of advanced workers in Russia is unusually thin, while our state apparatus can be based only on this stratum of advanced workers. The new class state of the republic of workers and peasants should be based on personnel from the new classes that came to power–from the workers and the rural poor. Meanwhile, the layer of conscious representatives of these revolutionary classes is unusually thin. If this layer is thin, then the second layer is little cultivated due to the backwardness of our country. Then there is another main factor: under such circumstances, it is necessary to use the old bureaucratic apparatus, composed of the old workers of the former tsarist apparatus. As a result of this, all the old habits began to carry over to our institutions.

Such an explanation of the revival of bureaucracy is given by the program. Those two reasons, closely related to each other, which are indicated here, are undoubtedly very important, but not the only ones. There are other equally important reasons. We must reckon with the general situation in which our state-building is still taking place. Firstly, it takes place in a setting of acute civil war, and secondly, the construction of a new state mechanism was to be completed extremely quickly. Both required a military-style dictatorship. Our dictatorship acquired a military command character, we had to concentrate our powers in the hands of a small collegium, which was to quickly, without friction, discuss bills, etc. We had to quickly build a new state machine. Since the proletariat took power into its own hands, it needed to be consolidated by the creation of a solid apparatus, a solid state machine. Clearly, this could only be done if quick directives were given from the center. To a large extent this explains the phenomenon that we had to concentrate in the hands of a small collegium, sometimes even individuals, executive and legislative functions. This was supposed to strengthen the bureaucracy that is now beginning to penetrate us from the other end in the person of the old officials.

If we turn to measures to treat the shortcomings of the Soviet mechanism, then, taking into account the two kinds of reasons that I spoke about, we should outline a few other measures than those that are usually exhibited. The following question may arise: do these two reasons continue to have effect, that is, that we must quickly build the state apparatus and that we are at war? Of course, these reasons continue to operate, mainly the reason that comes down to the severity of the civil war. However, their action at some point begins to weaken. The civil war is weakening around the beginning of the winter of 18-19. It should be noted that in relation to the civil war, we had some change: namely, inside the country, the old state class was basically broken by the beginning of this winter, the bourgeoisie was defeated, it transferred forces to the outskirts, from where it is trying to send regiments that want to overthrow our power. But in the center this dominion is undermined, the bourgeoisie is broken, and the layer that supports it is also broken, such as the petty-bourgeois intelligentsia, from which vast detachments of the White Guards were recruited. Comrade Dzerzhinsky at the CEC factional meeting stated that at present we do not have the large kulaks of the White Guards, we have only scattered intelligentsia groups in the center of Russia, then the middle layer of clerks, various employees, etc. If they are not completely remade by us, then they are disorganized. The economic power has been taken away from the bourgeoisie, the main enterprises, banks, etc., have been taken away — in short, its keys to the economy, which are usually the keys of political power, have been taken away. This fact is important: there is no trace of the old state machine, the new state machine is basically laid down. In general, it turns out that we defeated our enemies within the country. We leveled all classes and even if they are not destroyed, we disorganized the enemy.

In such an environment, for us, the correct operation of the apparatus is a matter of great importance. If our apparatus is unable to cope with the tasks it faces, it can make it possible for these sectors of the population to oppose us not even because they will be counter-revolutionary, but simply because our apparatus will not serve them. We are mainly threatened by the fact that we are not coping with economic tasks. We defeated the bourgeoisie, but can we organize new production, feed and clothe the citizens of the Soviet Republic? That is the question. Because in this area we will not be able to cope with our task, we will be at risk of spontaneous indignation against us. Here it must be noted that the mass of peasant uprisings is explained by the outrages of the commissars of our provincial bureaucracy. Very often, the news of these revolts indicates that the peasants have nothing against the Soviet regime, but they rebel against the commissars who end up in the village. We need to seriously think about how to find ways to treat this deficiency. A transition is necessary from such forms when legislative and executive powers are concentrated in few hands to such forms when legislative and executive powers are exercised by the broadest possible masses. We cannot now proceed to the full, expanded form of the new democracy, to the workers ‘and peasants’ democracy, to that which is called the commune state. We cannot proceed because this is primarily hindered by the ongoing civil war inside the Soviet Republic, and, on the other hand, by an external onslaught. For a long time we will practice military command forms of the proletarian dictatorship. But at present, in order for us to have a stronger foundation within the country, so as not to incline the population against ourselves, we must expand the circle of those citizens who directly implement this dictatorship. We must involve at least the entire mass of the proletarian vanguard, if not the entire working class as a whole, if not the entire mass of workers and peasants in legislative, executive, and supervisory work. To do so, a number of concrete measures need to be taken to ensure that the power of government is transferred to the wider collegia chosen by the wider proletarian vanguard masses.

In addition, we need to take a number of different special measures against the revival of bureaucracy for the special reasons mentioned in the program. From these measures, I can clearly point out the following. First of all, it is necessary to start from the very top. At the top of our state apparatus there is an incredible parallelism, a repetition of institutions that do the same thing. For example, I now head the department of Soviet propaganda, which conducts international propaganda of the ideas of the Soviets and Soviet construction. In addition, at least 6-7 institutions are involved in this business, which absolutely cannot demarcate themselves from each other and interfere with each other all the time. I have given this example in order to go straight to the main one. First of all, there is parallelism in central government bodies. On the one hand, there is a Council of People’s Commissars, and on the other, there is a Presidium of the CEC, and their work largely coincides. Since the Presidium of the CEC is not only the Presidium that implements the decisions of the CEC or directs its meetings, it takes over the consideration of bills. On the other hand, the Council of People’s Commissars is considering the same bills. And neither the members of the CEC Presidium, nor the Council of People’s Commissars can say for sure where the powers of one body end and the powers of another begin. First of all, it is necessary to merge these two central government bodies into one. The question is which one to join to which: should the Presidium be attached to the Council of People’s Commissars or the Council of People’s Commissars to the Presidium? The Moscow Provincial Conference decided to add the Council of People’s Commissars to the Presidium. I am speaking on this issue not only on behalf of the provincial conference in Moscow, but also on behalf of the Ural delegation. At a joint meeting of these two delegations, it was decided that we should act differently: we must take the old name of the Council of People’s Commissars and attach the Presidium to the Council of Commissars. 

In essence, there is no difference whatsoever, and there can be no serious objections to that. On the ground, the Executive Committee is at the same time the Presidium of the Council, the legislative body and the executive body. Parallelism will be reduced by this, and the legislative and executive work will be clarified. If we do this, then our people’s commissariats will turn into what we need, into what they should be according to the Constitution, but which really is not. They are constitutional departments of the CEC, but in fact there are also departments of the CEC, whose activities coincide with those of the former, and the commissariats are actually becoming independent. If the Council of Ministers merges with the CEC Presidium, it will be the first guarantee that the commissariats will be CEC departments. Similarly, various local authorities – financial, educational, etc. – must be departments of local councils.

Next is the second proposal. I mentioned it yesterday and today I repeat it in a very serious way and now I will prove that at the moment, in fact, if we keep in mind the Council of People’s Commissars, there is no single government. I had the honor of being a member of the Council of People’s Commissars in November, December and January 17-18. Then, the Council of People’s Commissars discussed the main issues of politics. If there was a conflict with the Romanian ambassador, he was arrested or a war was declared – all this was considered at a meeting of the Council of People’s Commissars. This is currently not observed. Comrade Sapronov mentioned that Chicherin’s note about the Princes’ Islands fell into the regions, as if from heaven. Comrade Zinoviev says it’s not the case. In fact, this is true in some respects, because according to Chicherin’s first answer, it seemed that we were accepting an agreement, but we would not accept the Princes’ Islands, that this was a provocative proposal. But it was accepted. And this answer was completely unexpected for local organizations: they were not prepared for this form of response. This answer turned out to be unexpected even for members of the collegium of the Commissariat of Foreign Affairs, the institution that should consider foreign policy issues. The members of the board read this note in the newspapers, but did not take part in the discussion. Did the Council of People’s Commissars take part in this discussion? No. And not one of the major notes in the Council of People’s Commissars was considered. Now individual decrees are being considered there, they are being edited there, and some of the board members state that they have turned into an editorial commission. They do not rule the country, but consider decrees and resolve interagency tensions and disputes. There is no single government that governs politics in general. This situation needs to be changed.

Of course, there are no forms or prescriptions that can help the cause. At the beginning of the revolution, the situation was such that our government was a real government. And at this point, if the majority of the Central Committee members are members of the Council of People’s Commissars, the following advantages will be obtained. First, the Council of People’s Commissars will become a government in the full sense of the word. It will have to be in charge of policy at all times, as there will be the most senior political workers there. On the other hand, the Central Committee will always be in place and will not even have to meet to decide on individual issues, as these will be dealt with by the Council of People’s Commissars. And if it is necessary to solve more general issues, it will not be difficult to convene the Central Committee. Such a structure of the Council of People’s Commissars guarantees the existence of a real government, which is alive and working. On the other hand, there will really be a Central Committee. Against this, there may be objections that by doing so we will disrupt the business work of the Council of People’s Commissars. Nowadays, the Council of People’s Commissars consists exclusively of business people, and if not exclusively, then to a large extent, of people who understand political questions very poorly, but know very well their own departments. And it is necessary to understand, comrades, that this departmentalism does harm. If the government consists of business people, if it is a business cabinet, it is quite clear that everyone here will talk about the interests of their department and will argue about the boundaries of the competence of their agencies, and there will be no general political leadership. Typically the government is structured as follows: each agency should be headed by a responsible political head, and with him there are business fellow ministers. This is the case abroad, and it was also the case with us before. And thanks to this, the business work is not disturbed at all. All business commissars can be turned into deputy commissars. We will not lose anything from this, but we will acquire a real government, which we lack.

Chairperson: Your time is running out.

Osinsky: Then I will have to just read the theses. Here they are. (He reads.)

THESES ABOUT SOVIET CONSTRUCTION

Under the conditions of the civil war the apparatus of the new class state was built at an increased pace, the workers’ and peasants’ power still had to concentrate its legislative and executive powers in narrow and closed collegia (executive committees, bureaus, presidiums, etc.) or in the hands of individuals with unlimited powers. The need for such military command forms of proletarian dictatorship will not disappear completely until the victory of the international revolution. But now that the old state machine has been destroyed, the new one has been built, the old ruling classes and the production relations have been broken down, it is an opportunity to take a number of steps towards the proletarian class democracy, which is our goal in the field of state-building. Under these conditions, these steps consist of the broad involvement of the proletarian avant-garde in the legislation, management, and supervision. These steps will prevent the bureaucratic rigidity of the Soviet mechanism, revive its work, attract new cadres of workers and help to eliminate the spontaneous discontent of the masses with the shortcomings of the Soviet mechanism.

When we issued a decree on the emergency tax, then at the meeting of the CEC faction it turned out that no preparation had been done for the population. And the very same is true. Krestinsky admitted that it would have been more expedient if this issue had been widely discussed beforehand – then the masses would have been prepared and it would have been easier to implement it. Nowadays, even non-urgent draft laws are carried out without any preliminary preparation. In addition to measures to democratize the forms of proletarian dictatorship, it is necessary to take a number of special measures against the revival of bureaucracy. To this end, the Congress considers it necessary to implement the following provisions:

1) In order to fully unite and centralize legislative and executive activities, the Presidium of the Central Electoral Commission merges with the Council of People’s Commissars, which assumes all the functions of the Presidium. Existing people’s commissariats, in accordance with the requirements of the Constitution, become departments of the Central Electoral Commission, people’s commissariats are the heads of these departments and, at the same time, the members of the Presidium.

2) In order to eliminate this situation, when the Council of People’s Commissars has become a meeting of business commissars, which discusses individual decrees and does not actually direct the government policy as a whole, which leads to the strengthening of bureaucracy, it is necessary that as many members of the Central Committee of the party as possible should be part of the government.

3) In order to involve all CEC members in active work, the CEC composition is divided into sections corresponding to the departments. The sections are responsible for the preliminary review of decrees and major events of a fundamental nature that fall within the competence of the department.

4) As some people’s commissariats nowadays find themselves inclined to issue orders without discussion in the Council of People’s Commissars that contradict decrees and interfere with the competence of other central and local institutions, it is necessary to establish and implement a rule that no department has the right to issue principal and other particularly important decisions without discussion and approval by the Council of People’s Commissars.

5) The CEC plenum, being the supreme body of the Republic in the period between congresses and sitting at least twice a month, should take part in the legislation on the most important issues and in fact discuss and monitor the activity of the Council of People’s Commissars and departments of the All-Russian CEC.

6) Department estimates are discussed in detail in the financial section of the CEC and are approved by the plenary for each department separately.

7) Elections to the CEC at the Congress of Soviets are held only after all the candidates nominated separately are discussed in the party factions, and none of the members of the Presidium of the previous CEC should chair the election sessions. The list of members of the Communist faction of the CEC is approved by the Party Central Committee. After the approval of the lists by the Congress, they are announced at the last session of the Congress and are immediately published.

8) In order to establish a close connection between the CEC and the organizations of working masses, the majority of the CEC and its sections shall consist of employees of professional, cooperative, cultural, and educational organizations, etc.

9) In order to properly prepare and implement new actions, decrees and orders of general principle, except for the most urgent ones, should be discussed in advance in the sections and plenum of the CEC, reported in the abstracts to the local executive committees for review and considered in the press, as well as at meetings of workers’ organizations.

10) In order to save revolutionary forces and centralize local power, all executive committees of the city except for the executive committees of the capital cities and industrial centers are abolished, merging with provincial and district executive committees, to which all local power is transferred in the period between congresses.

11) Local executive committees shall organize departments and sections accordingly to departments and sections*. Each department is headed by a member of the executive committee. Members of the executive committee must be employees of local territorial-production cells. Plenums of local councils should take part in the discussion of the most important cases and supervise the activity of the executive committee.

(* Apparently, a word is missing “[of the] All-Russian Central Executive Committee”. -Ed.)4

12) As the People’s Commissariats currently seek to subordinate local departments to their direct influence, separate them from the executive committees, appoint their own heads of departments and members of the boards, it is necessary to restore and confirm the provision of the Constitution that all local departments are subordinate to and controlled by the executive committees, that the heads of departments, subdivisions, members of boards and other responsible persons are elected by the councils, congresses and their executive committees. Only local and higher executive committees and the Council of People’s Commissars have the right to withdraw the elected persons. 

In order to establish proper relations between the central and local authorities, an exact separation of powers should be worked out and fixed by law. In matters of national importance, local executive committees should be agents of the CEC and its presidium. All decrees and orders of the Central Authority are mandatory for executive committees. At the same time, local executive committees should exercise the widest right of local self-government.

13) In order to establish permanent relations between the Soviet bodies and working organizations, to constantly monitor the activities of the Soviet institutions by broad layers of the working class, members of sections related to professional, cooperative, cultural and educational organizations and cells should make regular reports on the activities of plenums, departments, and sections in which they participated. Heads of departments shall submit such reports to specially convened district workers and peasant conferences.

14) Special administrative and judicial departments shall be established in all executive committees in order to establish the real responsibility of officials and provide the public with a real opportunity to pursue officials who violate decrees and commit abuses. Collegia of departments are elected by the congresses and cannot be members of other departments. These departments have the right, upon complaints from the public, to overturn improper orders of officials, to remove officials who have committed offences, and to bring them to trial.

15) In view of the current abnormal tendency of the centers to establish separate local branch offices, which escape from the control of local executive committees, it must be established that local executive committees form a single office for all their departments. Loans granted by the centers to the relevant local departments are transferred to the account of the executive committee, which in turn has no right to delay and change the nature of the loans without special permission from the center.

16) In view of the apparent desire of the Revolutionary Military Council, individual headquarters, even individual commissioners to declare martial law without the consent of the executive committees, it is necessary to leave the right to declare martial law outside the front only to the executive committees and the Council of People’s Commissars. 

The basic norms of martial law and the conditions under which it can be extended should be elaborated by the CEC in the near future.

17) Since the existing outdated division of the country into provinces and counties prevents the proper establishment of central and local government, it is urgent to develop and implement a new division based on the tendency of territories to production centers.

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Knowledge Democratization, Bourgeois Specialists and the Organization of Science in the Early Soviet Union

For the first installment of our in-depth study of Soviet Science, Djamil, Donald and Rudy sit down to discuss the scientific institutions and the practice of Science in the early Soviet Union up to the conclusion of the Stalin Revolution. They start off with a survey of the Tsarist Academy, and what kind of structures and specialists the Bolsheviks inherited. The conversation continues with the changing ways the Bolsheviks related to specialists during the Civil War and the NEP, and how they were trying to assimilate the culture of specialists when they realized it was impossible to seize cultural power, and how this relates to the present-day debate around the Professional Managerial Class. They then discuss the role of the two anti-specialist trials that kick off the Stalin revolution: the Shakhty affair and the Industrial Party Trial, and how that served to strengthen Stalin’s hand in taking over the politbureau and resulted in a culture of blaming specialists for the failure of five-year plans. They finish by analyzing the resulting academy and intelligentsia of the 1930s, fully loyal to Stalin, and how that sets the stage for the rise of someone like Lysenko.

Further reading:

  • Loren R. Graham – Science in Russia and the Soviet Union (1993)
  • Sheila Fitzpatrick – The Cultural Front (1992)
  • Kendall E. Bailes – Technology and Society Under Lenin and Stalin (1978)
  • Simon Ings – Stalin and the Scientists (2019)
  • James T. Andrews – Science for the Masses (2003)

Stay tuned for episodes on Lysenko, the relation of dialectical materialism to the sciences, physics, chemistry, computing, and space travel.

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Che Guevara and the Economics of Socialist Transition

Christian, Donald, and Rudy sit down for a podcast discussion on Che Guevara’s program for a socialist transition using Helen Yaffe’s book Che Guevara: The Economics of Revolution as a background.  We visit the economic “Great Debate” of Cuba in the early 1960s, the different approaches to using the law of value for socialist transformation, Che’s critique of market socialism, his model of Cuba as a single socialist factory, and how this model compares to contemporary approaches such as the People’s Republic of Walmart. We emphasize how Che’s humanistic outlook in molding new humans prefigured some of the problems that other socialist societies such as Yugoslavia or the Brezhnev USSR would face, and how his contributions add to the debate around cybernetical socialism today.

As always, please subscribe to our Patreon for early access to podcasts and other rewards.

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Unmasking Social Construction with Djamil Lakhdar

Donald and Rudy are joined by Djamil Lakhdar to discuss Ian Hacking’s book The Social Construction of What?. Written during the “science wars”, Hacking intervenes in the debate between strict constructivism and strict realism. Hacking reframes the types of questions to be asked when interrogating the social origin of something, and clarifies the different approaches we can take when we interrogate the construction of a concept. We start off with natural and social sciences, and continue to the application of these questions to today’s world. Is physics socially constructed? What does it mean to say gender, race or even capitalism are socially constructed? Where can we go from that assertion? What does it mean to say Marxism has Eurocentric origins and how does that matter today? Does Marxism have a single method, and how do different tendencies relate to that method? We try to answer these and more questions on this episode of Cosmopod.

 

As always, please subscribe to our Patreon for early access to podcasts and other rewards.
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Food, Capitalism and the Necessity of a Socialist Program

Capitalist food production is based on ecological destruction, imperialism, inhumane labor practices, and the degradation of human health. A socialist program that guarantees healthy food for all is the only alternative.  By Katie Paige, Kelly Alana, and Renato Flores.

A Meat Stall with the Holy Family Giving Alms, Pieter Aertsen (1551)

Food, capitalism, and the Metabolic Rift 

The first surplus in human history is food. Food needs to be produced by labor, but labor can produce more food than is required for the producer to survive. This generates a surplus which can be used to feed others, who can then take on other jobs. Agricultural surpluses facilitated the settlement of humans into towns and cities, the first steps to developing society as we know it. Indeed, the rhythms of food production and consumption have been deeply ingrained in our culture since time immemorial. Cultivation and communal eating rituals are commonplace: harvest festivals, potlucks, the Passover Seder, or the Christian communion are just a few examples. 

Today, billions of people are still intimately involved in the cultivation of crops. But the distribution is hardly uniform. While 70% of the world population are farmers, agricultural workers constitute only 2% of the population in industrialized countries. This means that for 98% of people in the Global North, food is acquired through the capitalist market. Meanwhile, the entry of capitalism into food production has completely changed the way we produce and consume food. The value of food is reduced to the profits which can be obtained, and every step is taken to maximize these profits. As consumers of a commodity, we have been alienated from our historical relationship with food, with severe consequences for the environment and our health. The production process behind our food and its overall effects on the environment is concealed. We only see the abstract labor of food producers in the shape of heads of lettuce or shrink-wrapped cuts of meat.

Food was not always in the circuit of capitalism. Historically, most farming methods have been sustainable, with a deep relationship to nature and its rhythms. Methodical large-scale environmental damage only arose with the advent of capitalism. This is not to say that environmental damage did not exist, but it was only with the advent of resource-intensive, cash-crops such as sugar and cotton that cultivation became unsustainable by design rather than by accident.1 As the Atlantic capitalist-slave economy was being formed, plantation owners would privatize an “unclaimed” piece of land, overexploit it in the search for shorter and shorter production cycles, and later abandon it, moving on to the next place. The slow westward drift of the Southern system of slave plantations in the US is a testament to this.

With the export of commodities far from where they were produced, nutrients were no longer returning to the ground they came out of. This was theorized as a global “metabolic rift” between the soil and its products, a disconnect in the inputs and outputs in the agricultural system.2 At first, plantation owners left behind an exhausted soil which took decades to replenish. But eventually, there was no new land for producers to move into. Instead of moving to sustainable agricultural cycles with lower yields, alternatives were sought after which would bring nutrients back into the soil in the shape of fertilizers. The first fertilizer used en masse was guano. It was harvested first in Peru, and later across many islands in the Pacific, Atlantic, and Caribbean. The guano trade was the starting shot for the mass-scale transport of nutrients across the world. And, in good capitalist fashion, it led to imperialist expansion and conflict. The United States passed the Guano Islands Act in 1856 which allowed private citizens to lay claims to guano deposits in uninhabited islands, followed by the annexation of nearly 100 islands in the Caribbean. But the largest deposits lay further South, which the governments of Chile, Bolivia, and Peru fought over in the Pacific War of 1879-84.

The victory of Chile in the Pacific War gave Chile hegemony over the Southern Pacific and contributed to its comparative wealth amongst its neighbors. But guano mining was not enough, it was geographically limited and required large supply chains which were endangered in the first World War. The use of guano as a fertilizer was superseded by the development of the industrial Haber-Bosch process, which produces ammonia out of nitrogen, hydrogen, and a great amount of energy. Soils could now be kept productive for decades, as this process allowed for the mass production of artificial fertilizers. But the input-output disconnect was not eliminated, just reframed. This modern version of the metabolic rift is described by John Bellamy Foster: the inputs of the agricultural system (such as commercial fertilizers, pesticides, seeds, and fuels) come at a high energy cost and are made into “downstream products” which are processed over and over again before being sent to retail outlets for sale to the public.3 The lack of circular flows in the system is reflected as an unbalanced flow of energy and nutrients, generating an unsustainable system.

The change in food production and distribution accelerated throughout the last century. Capital has permeated everything we eat. It wrestled the control and distribution of food away from small producers and commodified a basic need for survival. Today, small farming has given way to cash crops, monocultures, and factory farms. With this dominance, capitalist agriculture has increased its damage to the environment by orders of magnitude, transforming depleted agricultural sites into wastelands through excessive fertilizer and pesticide use. And if the waters become too polluted and the soil is too contaminated to continue production, the inherent mobility of capital means operations can just be moved. No mind is paid to the people whose livelihoods have been destroyed and who can no longer produce food for themselves, forcing them to rely on imports or starve. Modern farming destroys all in the name of profit, a “rape and run”.4

Sale points have also been completely transformed: local and seasonal markets have been replaced with massive grocery stores, fast food restaurants, and convenience stores. Putting the global market in charge seems like an advantage. Certain fruits and vegetables appear always in season, as global supply chains mean seasons have been abolished. It’s always time for apples if you can bring them from Chile or New Zealand. But the choice we can make in a supermarket is limited. Profit determines what grocery shelves stock, so processed cash crops like sugar, corn, and soy become capitalism’s favorites– and nearly everything we can purchase contains both in high quantity. Profit also determines how food is stocked with disastrous consequences. As it is more profitable for supermarkets to have an overabundance of produce, large food waste is generated at the point of retail. The numbers are gigantic: over a hundred kilograms of food per person is thrown away per year in industrialized countries.

To compound things, as we have become further alienated from the production of our food, we have also seen a massive rise in preventable food-related illnesses, especially in the Global North. Diseases like heart disease, diabetes, and cancer are now the largest killers in the United States. And due to capitalism’s twisted logic, treatment or mitigation of these diseases has become extremely profitable for pharmaceutical companies. From a liberal point of view, the state should step in and regulate the externalities and prevent large ecological damage. But instead, regulatory agencies are living proof of the Marxist theory of the state. They are full of former and future agribusiness executives who turn a blind eye to the gross safety violations or even work with these businesses to help bolster sales and profits. Tax loopholes, lax workplace regulations, and the use of immigrant and prison labor have made agribusiness companies billions in profit, with externalities pushed on taxpayers.

So where does a socialist program for food start? It must seek to alleviate and eliminate all the effects capitalist production has. One must start by naming the issues. In the rest of the essay we detail some of the most pressing, namely, (1) the current use of food as an imperialist spear, (2) the extreme impact our meat diets cause on the environment and how this level of meat consumption is unsustainable, (3) labor in the meat industry, and (4) the systemic racism that affects food distribution.

Imperialistic practices in the food and biotech industries

The adverse effects of international free-market policy on food affordability has a long history. Capitalism in Ireland led to the Irish Potato Famine taking the form that it did. The opening of India and China by force to capitalist markets in the late 1800s is responsible for the reappearance of large famines in those regions.5 Today, rather than force, it takes more subtle forms. American and European agribusiness has often required the help of the World Trade Organization to extend their domination to the international market. The earlier imperialist flow is reversed: rather than the profits realizable from international exports excluding the locals from the food market as in late 1800s India and China, the enforcement of free-trade policies causes a flooding of the local market with cheap imported food goods. This leads to the disappearance of local production– which means the loss of food self-sufficiency– while the Global North remains self-sufficient. This can only result in mass-scale domination. Once international prices, largely uncontrollable by local and national governments, increase again, food becomes unaffordable. Famines are brought back to areas from which they had largely disappeared. Good examples of this are the neoliberal policies imposed on the Horn of Africa in the 1960-70s, which are directly linked to present-day famines.

After their local agriculture is destroyed, countries in the Global South usually turn to the same “rape and run” capitalist agriculture to produce cash crops that can be sold in the market. Chemical companies like Dow, Monsanto, and DuPont rebrand themselves as biotech companies, and cloak themselves with a mission of “feeding the world”, a cover for rapacious profit-seeking. These companies bioengineer and later patent the seeds of certain cash crops, like corn and soy, to withstand the heavy use of pesticides and herbicides.6 Farmers are no longer able to save their seeds and replant them the following season but instead are locked into buying seeds and their corresponding pesticides from the company every year. This is highly profitable for these corporations, but traps farmers in a loop of spiraling debt which eventually leads to loss of their lands– or even of their lives, as in the plague of farmer suicides in India.

Many countries become reliant on very few, or even single crops, like sugar, cocoa, or coffee, to balance their budgets. This not only causes accelerated environmental degradation but also subordinates the lifelines of countries into the chaos of the market. Price fluctuations can make or break economies. Indeed, the economic instability of Ghana which followed the declining price of cocoa in the world market was one of the factors leading to the coup that removed the pan-Africanist Kwame Nkrumah from power.7 Price fluctuations can even be used by malicious state actors to destabilize popular leftist leaders through the tanking of exchange rates. Food is a spear of imperialism because those who feed you control you. Basic necessities can be made unaffordable, and thus any “rebel” leader can be brought to heel easily with the threat of mass starvation. This was done several times to rouse opposition to Chavismo just before elections in Venezuela. In this context, it hardly comes as a surprise that one of Thomas Sankara’s primary emphases was on food self-sufficiency, or that the Zapatista movement centers the struggle around corn.8

Combine harvesters crop soybeans in Campo Novo do Parecis, Brazil (YASUYOSHI CHIBA/AFP/Getty Images )

The unsustainability of our meat consumption: environmental impact and EROEI

Not all foods are created equally. Some foods take a much greater toll to produce than others. These include two products heavily consumed in western countries: industrial meat and dairy. The high profitability of these sectors in the last century has led to a quadrupling of meat production in the last 60 years. This is not only because of its production structure, which gives it the opportunity to extract a larger amount of surplus labor, meaning higher profits down the line, but also due to the shortening of production cycles via growth hormones and creative engineering. It also has provided a profitable venue for excess cash-crops such as soy for feed.

But this is not simple. Raising and slaughtering approximately 60 billion livestock per year requires food, water, land, and medication. It is by far the most resource-intensive food that we produce.9 Meat and dairy provide just 18% of calories and 37% of protein worldwide while using 83% of all farmland and generating 60% of agriculture’s greenhouse gas emission, mainly in the shape of methane and of nitrous oxide. This is true for even the very lowest-impact meat and dairy products, which still cause much more environmental harm than the least sustainable vegetable and cereal growing. This is because of trophic change: the position an organism occupies in the food web. To produce animal calories requires producing the plant calories that feed them, and many more calories go into an animal than what we get out to consume.

A way to quantify this is the Energy Return on Energy Invested (EROEI), the ratio of energy in to calories out. To reduce energy consumption and mitigate carbon footprints, moving to foods with higher EROEI is essential. By doing this, we will also reduce the quantity of land allocated to food production worldwide. By switching to a sufficient diet without meat and dairy consumption, global farmland use could be reduced by more than 75%, an area described as the equivalent to the US, China, European Union, and Australia combined. The EROEI of livestock meat is so low that the grain used to feed livestock in the US alone could feed about 800 million people. To satisfy the ever-increasing desire for meat, additional land is constantly consigned to the circuit of capital. As a result, the use of land for meat production is the largest contributor to habitat loss and species extinction: it is responsible for over 70% of rainforest clearing and is propelling the current mass extinction of wildlife and reduction in ecosystem diversity. Meat production is also the leading cause of ocean acidification, which creates dead zones where life cannot exist. For example, the largest dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico was caused almost single-handedly by Tyson Foods.

Environmental damage does not affect everyone equally. Meat companies are usually located in poor, rural communities where they can pollute the environment without much fear of repercussion from the locals, a form of environmental racism. But there also are pushbacks everywhere factory farms are being built, especially in North Carolina. During the last year, two separate nuisance lawsuits were won by residents, forcing pork farmers to pay out tens of millions of dollars in damages to the local community. Within North Carolina, pigs not only outnumber humans, they also produce 8-10x the amount of fecal waste. Due to the lax environmental regulations on untreated waste, hog farmers build football-field-sized trenches called “lagoons” to dispose of all the raw waste material. When lagoons become too full for ordinary pumping, excess waste is liquified and pumped through a series of sprinklers and sprayed directly into the air. According to an op-ed published in the NYT: “The bacteria from these lagoons have been known to pollute groundwater and surface water, permeating nearby communities with noxious fumes. These lagoons also breached after Hurricane Florence, spraying hog manure all over the floodwaters and communities nearby. People living near these lagoons are at increased risk of asthma, diarrhea, eye irritation, depression, and other health problems.” A 2016 report conducted by Julia Kravchenko from the Duke University School of Medicine found links between exposure to waste from hog farms and acute blood pressure increase, impaired neurobehavioral and pulmonary function. Her report also discovered carcinogenic effects induced by chemicals from hog farming waste.

Even while knowing the disastrous effect of meat on the environment and especially on climate change, capital is still projecting increases in meat consumption in the near future. In its death drive it is even actively subsidizing these products, and regularly buying the unsold surpluses overproduced by the food industry. In 2016, the US had an excess production of 1.2 billion pounds of cheese, with no market demand to dispense with it. This amount is increasing, due to a recent drop in milk consumption and the importation tariffs on US goods imposed by Trump’s administration. Instead of addressing this overproduction by downsizing operations, creative efforts by the state have been made to reprocess and squeeze as much of these products as possible into the food on a supermarket shelf. The USDA, in partnership with the industry-created Dairy Management Inc., a corporation funded by federally-mandated checkoff fees on dairy products, spends $140M million dollars every single year to increase dairy consumption. Dairy Management has injected increasing amounts of cheese into the US diet; for example, in 2018, Pizza Hut was pressured to add extra cheese in their products, after Dairy Management convinced them that consumers wanted more pizza.

Labor in the meat industry

Meat companies do not just harm the environment but are also home to the worst abuses of labor. This has been documented for over 100 years, starting with Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle. With extremely tame regulatory agencies, it is not a surprise that labor conditions are abysmal in the food industry, because all capitalist industries will maximize the profit they make from their workers to the greatest extent they can get away with. The industry preys on immigrants and prisoners, as their labor is the easiest to exploit. Meat companies intentionally build their factory farm facilities in rural, low-income areas, generally populated by a desperate, non-white reserve army of labor which will be willing to work for less under worse conditions. Bathroom breaks prevent the processing line from moving quickly, so workers wear diapers to work and are forced to urinate and defecate on themselves. Covid-19 outbreaks in meat factories have been among the worst because meat plants refused to slow down or take safety standards seriously. Accidents are commonplace. Just in the US, there are two reported amputations every single week. US meat industry workers are three times more likely to suffer serious injury than the average American worker, that factor increasing to seven times more likely with repetitive strain injuries for pork and beef workers. These numbers are probably underestimated, due to the prevalence of undocumented workers who are afraid of retribution if they report their injuries.

Chicago Slaughterhouse, 1906

The injuries extend beyond just physical ones. Slaughterhouse work is extremely traumatic and has been linked to a variety of disorders, including PTSD and the lesser-known PITS (perpetration-induced traumatic stress). It has also been connected to an increase in crime rates, including higher incidents of domestic abuse, as well as alcohol and drug abuse. Virgil Butler, an ex-Tyson poultry plant worker turned environmental activist, was quoted saying

“The sheer amount of killing and blood can really get to you after a while. Especially if you can’t just shut down all emotion and turn into a robot zombie of death. You feel like part of a big death machine and pretty much treated that way as well. Sometimes weird thoughts will enter your head. It’s just you and the dying chickens. The surreal feelings grow into such a horror of the barbaric nature of your behaviour. You are murdering helpless birds by the thousands (75,000 to 90,000 a night). You are a killer.”10

Butler further detailed the isolation he and his colleagues faced, saying,

“You feel isolated from society, not a part of it. Alone. You know you are different from most people. They don’t have visions of horrible death in their heads. They have not seen what you have seen. And they don’t want to. They don’t even want to hear about it.”

Forming and joining unions has the potential to increase the pay, safety standards, and working conditions within this industry, but that is precisely why these agribusiness giants fight so hard against the right of the workers to freely associate. A report by the Human Rights Watch, titled Unfair Advantage, goes into great detail describing the lengths companies like Tyson, Perdue, and Smithfield go to crush any workplace organizing that may arise, going as far as threatening workers with firing and deportation, spying, harassment, intimidation and outright shutting down facilities where workers attempt to unionize. In the 1970’s Perdue Farms purchased several unionized poultry plants in the Delmarva Peninsula, immediately shut them down and fired all the union workers only to reopen the plants as non-union facilities. One of the more horrifying examples of threats and intimidation comes from a 1995 case in which the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) found Perdue guilty of threats, intimidation, and confiscating materials related to organizing after workers reported what they described as a “KKK-style cross burning” at the plant with the cross bearing a union t-shirt. This kind of harassment and intimidation is commonplace within the animal agriculture industry.

Many of these intimidation tactics tend to be aimed at immigrant and undocumented workers. In 2001 Nebraska Beef workers filed for an election with the NLRB to seek representation with the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW). In the weeks prior to the vote, workers described a number of intimidation tactics used by the company to scare them out of voting to unionize such as targeting and calling in undocumented workers individually telling them that a ‘yes’ vote would get them deported and that if they opposed the unionizing efforts they would receive a 25 cent per hour raise. They also lied to the workers, telling them that if they were to unionize the union would not allow them to travel to Mexico for important events. Ultimately these intimidation tactics succeeded and the effort to unionize was defeated. Upon review by the NLRB, management was ruled guilty of multiple violations of workers’ rights in connection with the election.

There are dozens of examples like the ones previously mentioned, and these kinds of illegal tactics used to destroy unionizing efforts have led to an astonishingly low level of unionization within the agriculture industry. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 2017 union members made up just 2.1 percent of all private-sector agriculture workers. Even minor resistance is severely punished: the largest ICE raid in US history was conducted at a chicken processing plant, shortly after the women of the plant won a sexual harassment lawsuit for $3.75M. It remains to be seen what organizing happens in the face of the Covid-19 pandemic, with meat workers’ lives on the line.

The problems of food distribution: Food deserts and Dietary racism

As mentioned previously, the choice we have in a supermarket seems limitless but actually is not, and this impacts heavily what we consume. Structural racism comes into play as the adverse effects of certain food both disproportionately affect brown and Black communities and might constitute the majority of the products available in supermarkets close to them. The structural racism of “food deserts” (places where access to affordable and nutritious food is limited or absent) has reached mainstream discourse. But other problems with food distribution are not so well discussed. For example, take dairy, the largest source of saturated fat in the standard US diet. Dairy has been linked to numerous food-related illnesses. People of Western European descent better digest lactose than the vast majority of POC, who tend to have dairy allergies. But poor people cannot simply choose to buy other foods. With healthier alternatives pushed out of the market, animal products, processed grains, and sugars are the only thing available as they are highly subsidized and push externalities onto the taxpayer. Despite their unhealthiness, they are the only available nutrition poor families can buy due to their artificially cheap prices.

It is estimated that one in every eight people in the US is “food insecure”, a euphemism for going hungry. The rate becomes even higher when looking at children in the US: one in every six is “food insecure”. Many families rely on charitable support, welfare, and school lunch programs to feed themselves and their families, and millions of children rely on notoriously unhealthy, highly processed school lunches. It hardly comes as a surprise that the number of children in the US facing obesity and food-related illness has spiked, especially among low-income kids. Children as young as ten years show signs of hardened arteries, a precursor to heart disease. According to research published in the Journal of the American Heart Association, “Socioeconomic position as early as age 2-3 years was linked to thickness in carotid artery measurements at age 11-12.”

Capitalism sets up the poor and working-class for an artificially shortened lifetime of health problems and medical debt with our current food culture. The Standard American Diet, a diet consistent with very little whole plant-based foods and excessive processed meat, cheese, refined grains, and sugars has been pushed on us by capitalism. Low-income and food- insecure individuals people are far more likely to develop chronic diseases, with scientific journals reporting that “A number of studies have reported cross-sectional associations between food insecurity and self-reported chronic disease, including heart disease, diabetes, hypertension, and general health status.” This has helped lead to what is known as the “death gap”: wealthier Americans live on average 10-15 years longer than low-income Americans. This becomes even starker when looking at communities of color, with African Americans 1.5 times more likely than whites to be obese, twice as likely to suffer heart disease and strokes, and twice as likely to be diagnosed with diabetes. These numbers are very similar for Latine communities as well. Furthermore, obesity, or “fatness”, is recast as a marker of personalized failure and shunned in popular culture. By turning the responsibility for this systemic failure into a personal one, this further protects the system, while degrading the self-esteem and physical health of millions of people, especially of color.11 This means that capitalism not only alienates us from food to the detriment of our health, it also generates an industry of dietary products to supplant this alienation. This industry ranges from ‘miraculous’ food to professional psychological advice, which very often do not work because the root cause is never addressed: the fact that our food is unhealthy, addictive, and unequally distributed.

Food-related illness is estimated to cost nearly $25 billion per year and is set to increase to $50 billion per year by 2050. This helps to generate massive profits for pharmaceutical companies, who have no incentive to push for preventive medicine, including the distribution of healthy foods. An even larger conflict of interest between capitalist profits and people’s health is created by the massive use of antibiotics to keep livestock healthy (around 70-80% of the antibiotics used in the United States are used in animal agriculture).12 The entire population is at risk of developing dangerous antibiotic-resistant infections, which is quickly becoming an issue. At least two million people become infected with bacteria that are resistant to antibiotics every single year in the US, and at least 23,000 people die each year as a direct result of these infections. Furthermore, the close proximity of animals is a breeding ground for viral infections. The Middle Eastern respiratory syndrome (MERS) coronavirus of 2012 can be directly linked to an industrializing camel sector, as can the avian flu outbreaks of 2005. This is not to mention the increasing commercialization of wild species and forced urbanization of formerly rural populations, to which the SARS and the Covid-19 outbreaks are related.

Conclusion

As socialists, we must center food production and consumption in our programs. Food sovereignty is an urgent step for a budding socialist project. The recent COVID-19 crisis has highlighted that many things are superfluous, but we simply cannot live without food. Commercial drivers and transportation workers are deemed essential, as the supply chains must be kept going so that society survives. For now, the grocery stores remain stocked. But consistently in history, the shock of sudden changes led to famines. As food production networks are extended and globalized, COVID-19 has the potential to generate food insecurity.

On a more local scale, many groups are attracted to food distribution at first, and later to the establishment of community gardens. In an age of insecurity, the importance of food in political programs is rising. People do not forget who fed them. A promising horizon is Cuba’s turn: despite the suffering of the special period after the USSR’s collapse, Cuba used the chance to fully redesign their agriculture to become the only country in the world with sustainable cultivation.13

Food sovereignty is essential, but it cannot come from just any food.14 Socialists must center healthy and sustainable food production. As food is progressively decommodified, we will see a sharp decline in the production of highly processed foods, as the incentive to process food to extract surplus value will be greatly reduced under socialism. Socialists must seriously consider that decommodification of meat is a necessary plank of a program, both due to environmental and health issues. We must also recognize how deeply-embedded images of “sexism” and “the hunt” are used when selling us meat.15 Under more rational planning, meat production will have to see major downsizing to cast fewer externalities onto taxpayers, and perverse incentives will be of the question. Global farmland could be freed or converted into natural spaces, and the use of harmful pesticides or antibiotics must be heavily slashed as the economy is run for the benefit of all.

An internationalist platform must include the immediate abolition of food patents, as well as recognition and empowerment of indigenous communities. Indeed, the pre-Columbian populations were the world’s greatest agricultural engineers. But now the situation is grim: Mexico has become the second-largest importer of corn after the implementation of NAFTA, and has seen the infiltration of patented crop varieties, even when the indigenous communities there are responsible for domesticating and developing corn. The Zapatista resistance through corn seed exchange, is an example of the shapes resistance to monoculture patented agriculture can take.

Depiction of Chiampas, a highly productive form of aquaculture practiced in the pre-Columbian Americas.

With imperialist profit flows out of the equation, countries in the Global South would not be forced to mass-produce cash crops for exportation. Their agriculture could return to sustainable operations, and their forests could be grown back. A counter-example to ecosystem destruction is again provided by Cuba, which was 90% forest when Columbus arrived, reduced to 10% before the Revolution, and is now up to 30%.

In the present, organized labor can demand higher safety standards, which would come with a reduction of the use of monocultures, pesticides and herbicides. Many success stories in organizing farmworkers exist, most notably the United Farm Workers, led by Cesar Chavez. The meat industry is also ripe for organizing and is not beholden to seasonality.

Socialists recognize housing and healthcare as a human right, but it is time we start demanding healthy food as a human right as well. A healthy and well balanced, highly nutritious, and varied diet will not only make our people healthier and save resources and lives further down the line, but will also improve our relationship with the environment and the rest of the world. Food is a working-class issue, and a system that perpetuates hunger while overproducing food at the expense of workers and the environment must be done away with at once, which is why we as socialists have an obligation to stand up and fight for food justice for all.

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Prefiguration and (Cosmic) Utopia with A. M. Gittlitz

Remi and Rudy welcome A. M. Gittlitz, the author of I Want to Believe: J. Posadas, UFOs and Apocalypse Communism and producers of The Antifada podcast to discuss the role of utopias and prefiguration in historical and modern-day communist strategy. We cover topics from Russian Cosmism, the parallels between New World and Space Utopias, the relationship between the subjective and objective conditions for revolution, finding spaces where we can imagine a better world, and how to find hope in the end of the end of history. The episode ends with the opening of Cosmos: Carl Sagan’s hope for a brighter future.

Check out Andy’s article on the Space force here.

For early access to episodes and more, support our Patreon.

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Articulating and Organizing the Social Body with Asad Haider

Donald and Rudy welcome Asad Haider from Viewpoint Magazine to discuss the present political moment. Using Badiou’s “The Rebirth of History: Times of Riots and Uprisings” as a starting point, we discuss riots as a political expression in an intervallic period. We talk about the shape of the party should take to represent this political will, the racial context, overdetermination and spontaneity, and how history is being restarted.

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To Live and Die in Kerala

Rudy, Ahmed, and Remi join Sam Agarwal, a PhD student at Johns Hopkins University in sociology, whose research on and fieldwork in Kerala provide insight into the Indian state’s handling of societal crisis like the 2018-9 floods and COVID-19. We discuss the left politics of the CPI(M) and its various rival parties, the Indian political climate, the feminist movement, the handling and mitigation of climate change, and what we can learn from a contemporary communist-governed state while dealing with its limitations.

Check out Sam’s work here: https://truthout.org/articles/this-state-in-india-shows-us-why-fighting-covid-19-requires-working-class-power/

Books recommended include: The Rise of Hindu Authoritarianism: Secular Claims, Communal Realities by Achin Vanaik and The Phoenix Moment: Challenges Confronting the Indian Left by Praful Bidwai.