For this installment of our series on Actually Existing Socialism we take a look at an attempt to solve the issues of central planning with a novel experiment unlike any other in history: Project Cybersyn in Salvador Allende’s Chile. In a discussion based on Eden Medina’s book Cybernetic Revolutionaries, Donald, Christian, and Rudy discuss the idea of Stafford Beer and their limitations, the difficulties of the democratic road to socialism, and if Cybersyn is totalitarian but in a good way. Outro music is “Litany for a computer and a child about to be born” by Angel Parra and Stafford Beer.
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To continue our series on the relation of Marxism to science, we read and discussed Christopher Caudwell’s Crisis in Physics. Join Donald, Matthew, Rudy, and Remi for a conversation that covers the life of Caudwell, the relevance of his thought to topics such as ecology and the meaning of freedom, theoretical physics, and the possibility/impossibility of “proletarian science”.
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Renato Flores argues that a grand narrative is needed to unify and mobilize the exploited and oppressed against an exterminist world order.
Early Bourgeois Revolution in Germany by Werner Tübke
I
The permanent news cycle paralyzes us. We wait in an anxious manner for the next push notification containing the latest breaking news item. It further spells our doom as a species. We share it on social media, screaming to the void that we are all doomed. We are validated. Tally up a few likes, regain some sanity, and wait for the next notification. International politics is predominantly reduced to a spectator sport and we can only watch in despair at how our side is losing: Bolivia, Corbyn, and the inaction on climate change after the Australian fires. Dreams of Fully Automated Luxury Communism (FALC) remain a fanciful hope for an earthly heaven, and not a practical political program. Instead, utopias are confronted by cruel reality. We are stuck on Spaceship Earth accelerating towards the dystopian future of exterminism outlined in the book Four Futures: neither the overcoming of scarcity nor the conquest of equality.1
Already, the four Horsemen of the Apocalypse appear lined up and ready to head the exterministic state: Trump, Bolsonaro, Modi and Johnson. But these four are far from the final product Capital needs to keep on going, and in some ways are just throwbacks to an older era. For example, Bolsonaro has received wide attention for his role promoting settler-colonialism in the Amazon. But in the Americas, accumulation by dispossession is centuries old and cannot be understood as a new phenomenon. The future state that Capital needs is darker. One that manages a society where there are not enough resources to go around, provided the economic and power structure stays the same. One where climate change and the limits of ecology mean capitalism cannot appropriate Cheap Nature to keep on reinventing itself.2 One where there is a population surplus that must be first pacified and eventually disposed of to ensure the stability of the system.
The combination of falling rates of profit, and a falling capacity to appropriate natural surpluses leads to surplus population. This concept was originally introduced by Marx, and is specific to an economic system. Because Cheap Nature is no longer as cheap, and production is overcapitalized, the wheels of capitalism are stalling. Within this framework, stating that there is a population surplus is simply reframing the fact that labor-power is being (over)produced in such quantities that capital cannot accomodate for a profitable use of it. The wage fund which would correspond to “normal” capitalist operation cannot pay the social reproduction costs. This means that the labor supply must be reduced, that is, the workers must be disposed of.
It is necessary to distinguish the concept of surplus population in an economic system from the Malthusian “overpopulation” argument that has been around for some time. The latter is a thinly-veiled racist red herring that basically states: (1) there are too many people on Earth; (2) we have gone beyond Earth’s carrying capacity, and (3) to return to sustainability we have to drastically reduce the population. This is often done by encouraging poor and racialized people to have less children. Because it is logically simple, distributes the blame equally among all of us, and does not challenge the power structure, it is repeatedly promoted and given intellectual currency. But this argument fails to acknowledge that most damage to the environment is done by a fraction of the world’s population. These people, who mainly reside within the imperial core, unsustainably enjoy what was best theorized by Brand and Wissen as the imperial mode of living.3 The imperial mode of living relies on “the unlimited appropriation of resources, a disproportionate claim to global and local ecosystem sinks, and cheap labor from elsewhere”. If this imperial mode of living were substituted with a more rational and ecologically sound system of food and commodity production, more than enough resources exist on Earth to provide a decent living for all.
With respect to surplus labor, the concept can bend in many directions. In a positive manner it promises freedom from toil. The automation utopians refer to “peak horse”, a real phenomenon: when cars were introduced, fewer horses were needed to draw carts around.4 Because of the declining demand for horse work, their population reached a peak in the early 20th century and declined after. The analogy is drawn to humans: it has become clear that the capitalist system cannot adequately employ large sections of the population, because these sections cannot contribute to profitability. In the global imperial centers, people remain underemployed in jobs which could perfectly be replaced by robots, or even eliminated. With this, the techno-utopians jump at the idea that advances in technology indicate that we have reached “peak humans” needed for production of essential commodities. Automation means that in the future we will need to work less. We will be in a post-scarcity society, and we will find a way of sharing the toils of labor adequately.
What the proponents of FALC fail to consider is that with automation, the surplus population might just as well be ignored or left to die. This is not a future designed by the Malthusian Thanos, the archvillain of the Avengers, who wanted to kill off half of the population selected at random. Instead, it will involve the isolation and elimination of the most vulnerable who no longer serve a purpose. The surplus population in the peripheries keeps on growing, becoming increasingly informalized and displaced from production, and at the same time forced to live in destitute housing, as Mike Davis studies in Planet of Slums. For millions of people, the costs of social reproduction aren’t being met, and they are either relying on the extended family and remittances from abroad, or simply waiting to die. On an individual basis, they can risk their lives to migrate towards the centers of capitalism. But the numbers are insufficient to provide structural relief. “Strong” borders make sure that the surplus population of the global South stays there, so transnational companies can reap the benefits of cheap labor.5
Instead of providing a fully automated future, the state returns to its basic skeleton of coercion and parasitism. And coercion can devolve into getting rid of the nuisance population that demands the means to live, but often has little to fight back with. There are several examples of this happening in history. The prime one is the recent fate of the Palestinians: in the 90s, due to the collapse of the USSR, a large number of Soviet Jews emigrated to Israel. They replaced the Palestinians at the lowest level of the Israeli class pyramid. This was very advantageous to Israeli capitalism, as it substituted cheap Palestinian labor, which had recently engaged in campaigns of civil resistance like strikes and boycotts, for more reliable workers. Palestinians were pushed out of the economy and slowly confined to their open-air prisons, which at the same time severely hurt their ability to engage in nonviolent campaigns.
An objection could be raised: Israel is not just a capitalist state, it is a settler-colonial state which attempts to erase Palestinians. Indeed, watching the working class in the Global North repeatedly vote to protect its privileges, it is tempting to adopt a “third-worldist” approach and deny that these classes are revolutionary at all, and that the potential for revolution lies in the Global South. However, these dynamics are barely contained to the centers of capitalism. Another current example is the role of Black people in Brazil. Brazil is similar to the United States in that it has a large black population directly descended from slaves. After emancipation, they were left in rural areas where opportunities did not abound. They chose to move towards the large cities (a Southward pattern in Brazil). In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, their homes were demolished, and they were forced into neighborhoods full of informal housing: the favelas, which grew steadily during the 20th century. Their inhabitants often worked informal jobs, but as Brazil’s economic situation worsened, they were pushed out of the economy and into progressively worse jobs and even the criminal market. To deal with this, the police are increasingly empowered to indiscriminately enact violence, to deal with crime resulting from these transactions. In a racist society, this results in thousands killed at the hands of the police yearly.
So far, the picture painted does not differ much from the current situation in the United States, where police routinely kill people of color and walk away free. The murder of black councilwoman Marielle Franco is not that different from the murder of Black Lives Matter activists in the United States, if one sets aside the visibility of Marielle. But this would miss the point- more and more the quiet parts are said and acted out loud. Instead of Bolsonaro, who has his hands dirty in Marielle’s murder even if he denies it, we should be looking at another Brazilian politician. Rio governor Wilson Witzel was elected in 2018 on a platform of slaughtering “drug gangsters”. He has basically given carteblanche to the police to shoot on sight, and has proposed shutting down access completely to certain favelas. Witzel does this to wide applause, and it is not hard to imagine his reelection.
In the case of Brazil, racism comes into play, and is weaponized. But there are other examples of exterministic politicians who do not force themselves into office in the Global South, but are elected. One of the most infamous is Filipino president Rodrigo Duterte, who won the national election on a platform of slaughtering “drug-dealers”. Before jumping to the national stage, Duterte was the mayor of the city of Davao, and served seven terms. The emphasis here is placed on the fact that despite being known to command death squads, he was repeatedly re-elected as mayor. Later, he was promoted to the national stage, where he won a national election with 39% of the vote out of an 81% turnout. This is the barbarism which Rosa Luxemburg warned us about, with voters clearly electing barbarism. In the exterministic future which awaits us we will have more figures like Duterte and Witzel, who will openly shoot the increasing number of marginalized people to protect an ever decreasing community of the free who enthusiastically vote for them.
In the United States, the stage is set for something worse than Trump. Frank Rizzo, the police chief-turned-mayor of Philadelphia who supervised the MOVE bombing provides a historical example which was ultimately contained to just a mayoral position. The system produces many Rizzos, as a glance at any police “union” shows. Finding the cracks where stress will first concentrate in the US is not hard. Black and brown communities, both within the US and trying to access it will be prime cannon fodder. One just has to read history, or even the present news, to find that the list of affronts against them is long. However, the way the COVID-19 pandemic is being handled, and the inaction on climate change in the face of the fires in Australia, make it clear that the ruling classes do not care about any of us, and will do nothing to protect us from devastation if it inconveniences the death march of profit. The Climate Leviathan, an authoritarian planetary government led by a liberal consensus to adequately address climate change will never happen.6 The future where many Climate Behemoth states led by populist right-wingers, which simply refuse to deal with the structural problems of ecological destruction and population surplus, are much more likely. We are seeing this around the world, even in the centers of capitalism: rather than address the fires, the prime minister of Australia decided to outlaw climate boycotts. The time of monsters is coming.
II
Faced with this depressing prospect, how do we begin to organize? Postmodernism has repeatedly tried to kill grand narratives, while at the same time claiming the end of history has been reached. The underlying message was that class struggle is off the table. And it worked, for a while. But the house of cards is collapsing. The actually existing left is not prepared for the collapse of capitalism, often stuck in debates on theory that appear very important, but in practice make little difference in how they relate to the working class. Old-time socialists are disoriented as they face a working-class subjected to decades of ideological conditioning. They often forget that this is not the 20th century, and the same propaganda will not work.
We are missing both a unifying ethics of sacrifice and collectivity, and a sense of how merciless and brutal our enemies can be. Until this is regained, the confines of ideology channel rebellion into a simple solution- giving our powers to a terrestrial shaman, through the sacred ritual of the ballot box. The shaman knows how to interface between the world of the commoners and the sacred world of the political. He or she can lead us to salvation if we trust and follow his lead.
Frida Kahlo, Moses, 1945
The shaman once again comes to ask us for our strength. We need to push him using all our might past the portal to take the sacred altar. Donations are requested, and we open our wallets. The most ardent canvass and phonebank to share the good news of “democratic socialism”. We study Salvador Allende and think, “well this time it could work, the US cannot coup itself?” And even if half the box of oranges is rotten, we believe that the bottom half must be good to eat. Once we get our shaman into office, he will be able to interface between the sacred and the common as long as we keep giving him our powers, delivering us to the utopia. Other kinds of shamans also draw from the collective, but our strength in numbers must be greater. We just need to show it in the ballot box.
But many cannot give their power through the ballot box ritual. And the other, darker shamans do not play fair. They control the tempo of the battle, and can cast their message across time and space much better. After all, the ruling class would rather have a dark shaman who doesn’t threaten its power than a red sorcerer who threatens capitalists profits. Our shaman plays by the rules of the game, and the most destructive weapons end up being unleashed by one side only. Even when backed by messianaic movements, Corbyn played fair, and lost. Sanders played fair in 2016, and also lost. Lula played fair, and was imprisoned to prevent his electoral candidacy. It remains to be seen what will become of the Sanders 2020 campaign, but the box of oranges is looking rotten. The dark shamans are able to weaponize our differences, to persuade others to give them powers. Our powers do not lie in the ballot box or within the constitutional framework at all. Until we achieve a grand narrative which not only includes all of us, the dispossessed, but speaks to all of us too, we are bound to lose again and again. Understanding this involves transcending the shamanistic and legalistic individual view to a collective, religious view of our historic mission of redemption and change.
I would be accused, fairly, of abusing the metaphor when describing the current state of politics. But narratives can be the best way to get a point across. We often make sense of the world around us with the use of metaphors and imaginary creatures. Our fears are often turned into monsters, and fear of monsters provokes hatred. The Right knows how to transform the Other into the monster: the Jew, the immigrant, the Muslim, the black, the LGBTQ… all of them ruining our society. They are deviants and criminals, and once we get rid of them, we will all be more prosperous. This narrative crystallizes a dominant group. It legitimizes the exterminist state, delineating the “us” from the “them”. It propels our bright leader to power not just through the gun but also through the ballot box. Because “they” are sabotaging us, we are not doing as well as we should. And when the left lacks the power to counter this monster-making with its own mythmaking, it can feel immobilized. Coexist stickers are not sufficient to unify a mass, and without a collective vision, as people like Elizabeth Warren are discovering, policy proposals amount to nothing.
We could try and play the same game of monsters. But the power of demonic imagery in the hands of the dispossessed is somewhat limited unless it is deployed as part of a wider struggle. At its minimum, it serves as a substitution used to relate to capitalism when it becomes something sublime and out of our control. In this disorientation, the structures of power are often reimagined through the imagery of monsters. This has a long history both in England and the Netherlands in the centuries of the ascendant bourgeoise, and has seen use in Haiti through the image of zombie-slaves.7 It is also present in contemporary Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa, as each endures massive “structural adjustments” where the commons are privatized.8
Monsters have served as valuable storytelling devices for progressives. Thomas Paine laid bare how the aristocracy was a cannibal system, in which aside from the first-born male everything else was discarded.9 In Frankenstein, the abilities of the new ruling class to lay claim to subaltern bodies and forming a monster provides a metaphor for the new factory system. Even before the Marxist analysis of capitalism, it was clear that the new proletariat of the nineteenth century was something historically distinct. The gothic, understood as the world of the desolate and macabre, was used to efficiently drive the political message home. It is not enough to understand something, dispossession must be felt. The warm strain of politics must be activated when the cold one is not enough, and as David McNally pointed out, they are still used in the Global South. While McNally focuses mainly on contemporary Sub-Saharan novels, he glances over the most effective present day example of this weaponizing: Sendero Luminoso’s use of the image of the pishtaco, a monster who would kill the children to rob them of their body fat so it could sell it in the market. Sendero was able to racialize the pishtaco as a white colonizer, and sow even more distrust of the Amerindians towards the white NGO workers. It was a key part of their Peruvian-flavoured Marxist story-telling.
At its best, Marxism with Gothic flavor appeals to the subconscious, making us feel the injustice, teaching us a primal instinct of repulsion to capitalism. It makes us gaze at the Monsters of the Market and understand that Capital lies behind them. Since his early correspondence with Ruge, Marx noted that he needed to “awaken the world from the dream of itself”. Marx’s Gothic imagery in Capital and the Eighteenth Brumaire was a way of telling the story of capitalism, and the conflict between bourgeoisie and proletariat, in a way that spoke to us directly, and mobilized us. The description of Capital as a vampire remains as memorable as ever.
Walter Benjamin took this much further.10 He wrote mainly in the interwar period- a time when psychoanalysis was a buzzword, and Lukacs had only recently published History and Class Consciousness in an attempt to link the subjective to the objective. It was also a time when the fascist monster was growing. Benjamin stressed the importance of imagery and revelation in bridging the gap between individuals and the collective understanding of capital. He brought insights from psychoanalysis into Marxism, and sought to break the hold of religion by means of what he called profane illumination– by intoxicating us with imagery to reach a revelation which inspires us. Heavily influenced by his Judaism, Benjamin sought out the historical memory for inspiration. By glancing at the Angelus Novus we understand that we must fight for the victims of Capital, to deliver a justice dedicated to their memory. In today’s world, we have no lack of sites to illuminate us: the lynching memorials; Standing Rock; the mass graves of the Paris communards or those of the Spanish Civil War; the river Rosa Luxemburg was thrown into; The Palace of La Moneda in Chile where Allende was murdered; the streets of the Soweto and Tlatelolco massacres; and of course the horrors of Auschwitz. The memory of the dispossessed stretches across time and space, waiting for justice.
Angelus Novus, Paul Klee, 1920
III
Thomas Paine was not just trying to describe the kings as monsters, from which nothing could be expected except “miseries and crimes”.11 Paine also wrote, and attempted to put into practice, a political program for a better world. The formation of a mythology for the proletariat has been an integral part of the success of movements across the world. As Paine and Marx understood, gothicness is just the beginning. It gives us a way to tell a story which unveils the malice of our enemies, but we still require a positive force, a force of collectivity and millennialism to bring us together. Even the most mild form of leftist “othering”, the narrative of the 1%, presupposes the idea of a 99% that shares interests, and brings people together through their common dispossession.
Finding gaps in which Marxist ideology can be inserted has been one of the central research programs of Western Marxism. In essence, it articulates the Marxist view of the links between base and superstructure in a way that activates feelings, and the irrationality of being willing to suffer and die for a political program. The defeat of revolution in Western Europe came about from the strength of bourgeois ideology. It was able to perpetuate its hegemony. When the time came, there were not enough people willing to break their chains simultaneously. Many have written on this problem: Gramsci, Althusser and the Frankfurt School to name a few. After the Second World War, the golden age of capitalism provided a decent living for the working class in the centers of capitalism. Cultural critique or critiques of alienation were not enough to break the hold of the capitalist cultural hegemony. It could serve to identify weak points in societal cohesion, but it was never enough to inspire and guide a revolution. The Frankfurt School is an example of how critical theory can be divorced from practice when it is not grounded in class struggle.
Liberation theology provides a counterpoint of what is possible when class struggle advances ideology even within a reactionary institution like the Catholic Church. Taking inspiration from the Bible, religious figures reinterpreted passages that warned about the idolatry of money. Priests articulated how capitalism does not match the underlying values of society, and so were able to speak in the language of the people without abandoning their faith. Liberation theology set alight the underlying tensions present in many countries, and was particularly effective in mobilizing people in Nicaragua, El Salvador and Brazil. It was only defeated by an unholy combination of the Vatican and US imperialism, and has been replaced by religious faiths with a counter-revolutionary ethos.
Today, pessimism is warranted. To the historical defeat in the centers of Capitalism, we must add the collapse of the Eastern Bloc as well as the century of Latin American tragedies, where only Venezuela and Cuba barely hang on. Under a deluge of ideology the masses have abandoned liberatory faiths and embraced anti-communist worldviews. Socialism in our lifetime appears impossible, and the totems of revolution we hold dear have changed. This generation no longer venerates Che the way previous generations did. Che was not just a martyr who gave up a comfortable life for the cause— he was also someone who won. In this time of darkness, the voluntarism of a Che Guevara, who not only demanded, but exemplified a new type of person, a person who could challenge the US empire with dozens of “Vietnams”, fades away.
For a short while some heroic victories happened: US imperialism was forced to retreat from Southeast Asia and Nicaragua by guerillas. But this did not last. Today we look to more tragic figures like Rosa Luxemburg, and celebrate her supposed penchant for the spontaneity of the masses. We wait for the unplanned revolution, forgetting that Rosa was a tireless party organizer. A symptom indicating that we do not know where to begin. Somehow mass demonstrations against Trump and other right-wing populists are supposed to lead to a revolution, even when their politics are at best confused and the protestors hardly united by a material base. Those who praise spontaneity forget that groundwork has to be patiently lain, and even the most simple strike action requires tight organization. It is a wild dream to think that a social media hashtag will lead to the toppling of extremely resilient structures.
IV
Culture changes rapidly. As E.P. Thompson relates in his Making of the English Working Class, the pre-revolutionary wave of the late 1700s took root mainly through two mechanisms: the establishment of the Correspondence Societies and the Dissenting churches. Unlike the French one, the second English revolution never took place as it faced a stronger ruling class. This ruling class acted to break these societies, and the story of the late 1790s culminates in the Despard execution of 1803. During the early 1800s, a counter-revolutionary culture war was also taking place. A new faith of poor and rich alike was disseminated, while serving the cultural hegemony of the ruling classes: Wesleyan Methodism. Encouraged and financed by the upper classes, it was a denomination that emphasized social order. This picture resembles the birth, growth and defeat of Liberation Theology in Latin America. The streets and mountains where Catholic priests would lay their lives are today full of the churches which have propelled extremist politicians to power in Colombia and Brazil.
But English history offers us hope. The counter-revolution did not last forever, it was only a temporary sleep. The misery which caused movements to arise remained. After the cultural counter-revolutionary offensive wore off, Methodist churches provided an individual locus for community outside the official sanctioned channels. This was not the high Anglican church but a rough community center. Methodism would breed Luddites and Painites within its ranks. It became a path through which other rebels would rise up the ranks and use their organizing skills and access to the community to launch new counter-hegemonic offences. Some Methodist preachers became preachers of class consciousness, and explained how the values laid out by the church were opposite to those of Capital. They became involved first in the Luddite movement, and later in the growing Trade Union movement, over which they came into conflict with the church hierarchy. Chartists and Trade Unionists alike benefited from the organizer school that was the Methodist Church.12
Portrayal of the Luddites
Providing places where the dispossessed can come together and find their commonality is of utmost importance to the present socialist movement. Working-class ideology must be produced and reproduced. The German and Austrian Social Democratic parties of the late 1800s and early 1900s understood this, and built schools, sports clubs and all sorts of facilities in proletarian neighborhoods, which laid down the foundations for their success. While we might stare at the proliferation of churches in the American continent, and see them as a lost cause, the material roots that gave origin to liberation theology and many other working-class movements like the Poor People’s Campaign of Martin Luther King Jr. are still there, and will not disappear anytime soon. These communities will surely undergo re-radicalization.
V
Shamans and totems provide an initial bridge to radicalizing people, because they break their social conditioning. But in the long run we cannot rely on the shamans because, even if they recognize that their power comes from us, we are tempted into the lie that without them we are nothing, and this gives them undue control over the movement. In fact, the opposite is true. They are nothing without us. Socialism is about collectivity, much more a religion than a magic. Magic is always a private thing, while religion relies on collective experience.
Today it is hard to ignore that religious feelings abound in the community that follows the terrestrial shamans. Bernie Sanders’ supporters do not care if the man is flawed, or if the odds are stacked against him. What matters is the process that brings them together towards political power. Their recipe is insufficient: the community needs to learn that their power lies not in their vote, but in their ability to stop the economy if they wish. By bringing people together in the same spaces, they are laying down the seeds for something bigger. The dispossessed need to realize that they already are bigger than the shaman who leads them. Shamanic movements suffer from the domination of a person. We can relate to this person, but he or she can have too much control over the movement and in crucial moments can initiate its downfall. Sendero Luminoso disintegrated after Abimael Guzman went from the invincible Inca Sun to a man behind bars. It was not their terrible treatment of other leftists within their territory, but the shattering of the shaman that ended them. We should ensure that a movement does not base itself on a leader but produces organic leadership. Otherwise tragedy awaits: Chavismo could survive Chavez because he actively trusted and followed the masses. Lula’s Sebastianism required the masses to follow instead of lead, which left the Brazilian Left disoriented and defeated, a situation that worsened after the personalist “Lula livre” demand was won.
The odds facing Lenin, Mao, Castro and Ho Chi Minh were never good. And the odds facing us today might be even worse. But by looking at history we can learn how they were able to unify, motivate and mobilize the people behind their program with grand narratives. These narratives are mixed and intertwined with religion, even if they are subconsciously secular versions of the prevailing faith. Demonstrating how the values of people do not correspond to the social system is a great weapon in the hands of organizers. Like Paulo Freire and Amilcar Cabral recognized, rearticulating and recreating our own culture is inherently revolutionary. The bridge to turn religions of the dispossessed into socialist movements is very buildable. In the West, Bloch understood this the best. In Latin America, Mariategui’s theorization surely had an influence on both liberation theology and Sendero Luminoso.
The history of revolution is plagued by millennialism. From those who died in the German Peasant War demanding omnia sunt communia during the Reformation, to the North Koreans inspired to fight against unthinkable odds by Juche, a thinly-concealed revolutionary Cheondoism13, religion serves as an inspiration. Any serious revolutionary should explore his local culture, and weaponize cultural cues to show the dispossessed how to stand together, and make us aware that we’re all in the same fight. Of course, not all cultures and icons are built the same: for example, American nationalism is hardly redeemable, tied as it is to white supremacy. But most icons are mixed, with Chavez’s reclamation of Bolivar as a positive example. Whatever the case, inspiration is needed to break social conditioning, reinstall a collective ethic, and defeat the exterminists.
This comes through understanding that the revolutionary fights for a terrestrial paradise, and makes the highest of wagers to do so. In today’s world, where religion remains the last relief of the masses, utopia and brotherhood blend in as a starting point. Religion has two sociological functions: integrating communities, and resisting change. The latter can be a double-edged sword, serving both a counter-revolutionary purpose and a revolutionary one, when people feel their entire livelihoods are being swept from underneath them. It is not strange to see that many revolutionary movements against accumulation by dispossession end up triggering religious feelings. There are many examples, from the earliest records of the new faiths sweeping Europe during the Reformation in the German Peasant War, to 17th century England, to more current examples across the world. It is hardly surprising that the hardest enemies of late-stage capitalism are indigenous people fighting for their lives. The rallying cry during the Standing Rock protests was to “kill the black snake”, the pipeline threatening water. The cosmovision in which water is life proved itself revolutionary when faced with settler-colonialism. It was armed to face the monsters of the market, and able to unify the dispossessed. We would be fools to ignore it.
Join Remi as he discusses the history and philosophy of science, as well as its use for socialists with two professional scientists, Matt and Renato Flores (author of the Cosmonaut article “Knowledge: Power and Emancipation”).
Translation by Mark Alexandrovich, introduction by Renato Flores.
Time motion study being performed in the central institute of labor, 1923
Nadezhda Krupskaya is unfairly remembered by the identity of her husband. A glance at her page in Marxists.org predominantly shows texts related to Lenin’s persona. One of her most detailed biographies is titled “Bride of the Revolution”. But as many women of the time who have been written out of history, she was a revolutionary in her own right, standing alongside Alexandra Kollontai or Inessa Armand. She was the chief Bolshevik cryptographer and served as secretary of Iskra for many years. She was hailed by Trotsky as being “in the center of all the organization work”. After the revolution, she contributed decisively to the revamping and democratization of the Soviet library system, always pushing for more campaigns that would increase literacy and general education.
Her persistent interest in education and organization was a result of her life story. Krupskaya was the daughter of a downwardly mobile noble family: her father was a radical army officer, who combated prosecution of Polish Jews and ended up ejected from the government service, and her mother Elizaveta came from a landless noble family. Nadezhda was provided a decent, albeit unsteady education. She was committed to radical politics early on in her life, starting off as a Tolstoyan. Tolstoyism emphasized “going to the people”, so Krupskaya became a teacher to educate Russian peasants and seasonally spend time working in the fields. However, she found it hard to penetrate the peasant mistrust for outsiders and realized this was a political dead end.
Krupskaya became a Marxist when enmeshed in the radical circles of St. Petersburg. Marxism appealed to her because it provided a methodology for revolution, with its science substituting the failures of Tolstoyan mystique. After her “conversion”, Krupskaya worked as an instructor in the industrial suburbs of St. Petersburg between 1891 and 1896. The “Evening-Sunday school” was financed by a factory owner, and provided evening classes for his workers. Although she nominally taught just reading, writing and basic arithmetic, she would also teach additional illegal classes on leftist topics and helped grow the revolutionary movement. Her first-hand experience in the factories of St. Petersburg would inform her life-long interests, heavily influencing her views on the organization of production.
In this piece, Krupskaya looks at Frederick Taylor’s principles of scientific management and shows how they could be applied to the Soviet government. The early “collegiality”-based Soviet State was leading to inefficiencies all around, which produced a stagnant and unresponsive bureaucracy. Krupskaya believed that scientifically-driven organization would alleviate these organizational problems, and at the same time raise everyone’s consciousness of the work they were doing. She provided several prescriptions for the organization of production to achieve these goals, as well as a rationale for them.
Taylorism is a dirty word in leftism today. But as Krupskaya did, we have to understand that we should not hate technology itself. Technology is deployed by certain class interests. Krupskaya mentions that workers rightly hated Taylor because the scientific organization of production had been deployed to the advantage of the capitalists. But Krupskaya also believed that Taylorism could be a weapon wielded by the Soviet State so that it could be more responsive to workers’ needs. Taylorism could even be used by the workers themselves to increase productivity and work shorter hours.
Krupskaya was not alone in her support of a Soviet Taylorism. Gastev’s Central Institute of Labor wanted the full application of Taylor’s principles to production as the best way to organize the scarce resources available. Others opposed Taylorism, understanding that it came with insurmountable ideological baggage and would alienate workers from production. This old debate sees new spins played out today in the context of automation. And while there is no longer a Soviet state to organize scientifically, we can still use the principles of Taylorism in our political organizing as Amelia Davenport recently discussed in “Organizing for Power”.
Krupskaya, date unknown
Taylor’s system and organization – Krupskaya N.
The strange thing is that every communist knows that bureaucracy is an extremely negative thing, that it is ruining every living endeavor, that it is distorting all the measures, all the decrees, all the orders, but when the communist starts working in some commissariat or other Soviet institution, he will not have time to look back, as he will see himself half mired in such a hated bureaucratic swamp.
What’s the matter? Who is to blame here – evil saboteurs, old officials who broke into our commissariats, Soviet ladies?
No, the root of bureaucracy lies not in the evil will of one or another person, but in the absence of the ability to systematically and rationally organize the work.
Management is not an easy thing to do. It is a whole science. In order to properly organize the work of an institution, you need to know in detail the work itself, you need to know people, you need to have more perseverance, etc., etc.
We, Russians, have so far been little tempted in this science of management, but without studying it, without learning to manage, we will not move not only to communism, but even to socialism.
We can learn a lot from Taylor, and although he speaks mainly about the way the work is done at the plant, many of the organizational principles he preaches can, and should, be applied to Soviet work.
Here’s what Taylor himself writes about the application of the well-known organizational principles:
“There is no work that cannot be researched to the benefit of the study, to find out the units of time, to divide it into elements… It is also possible to study well, for example, the time of clerical work and to assign a daily lesson to it, despite the fact that at first it seems to be very diverse in nature” (F. Taylor, “Industrial Administration and Technology Organization”, pp. 148).
Already from this quote it is clear that one of the basic principles of F. Taylor considers the decomposition of the work into its elements and the division of labour based on this.
Let’s take the work of people’s commissariats. Undoubtedly, there is a well-known division of labor in them. There is a people’s commissariat, there is a board of commissariats, there are departments, departments are divided into subdivisions, there are secretaries, clerks, typists, reporters, etc. But this, after all, is the coarsest division. Very often there is no borderline between the cases under the jurisdiction of the commissioner, board, department. This is usually determined by somehow eyeballing. The functions of different subdivisions are not always precisely defined and delineated. There are also states. But in most cases, these “states” are very approximate. There is no precise definition of the functions of individual employees at all. Hence, the multiplicity of institutions follows. There are, say, 10 people in an institution, and their functions are not exactly distributed. Eight of them are misinterpreted, the other two are overwhelmed with work over and above measure. The work is moving badly. It seems to the head of the institution that there are not enough people, he takes another ten, but the work is going badly. Why? Because the work is not distributed properly, the employees do not know what to do and how to do it. The swelling of commissariats is a constantly observed fact. But does it work better?
The question of “collegiality and identity”, a question that has grown precisely because of the lack of division of labour, the lack of separation between the functions of the commissioner and the functions of the collegium, the lack of separation between the responsibilities of the collegium and those of the commissioner. A misunderstanding of this seemingly simple thing often leads to administrative fiction. Thus, during the period of discussion in the Council of People’s Commissars of the question of collegiality and identity, one absolutely monstrous project was presented in the Council of People’s Commissars. It proposed to destroy not only the board, but also the heads of departments and subdivisions, it was proposed to leave only the commissioner and technical officers, to whom the people’s commissar had to give direct tasks. This project revealed a complete lack of understanding of the need for a detailed and strict division of labour. The authors wanted to simplify the office, but overlooked one small detail: if there was only a commissioner and technical staff, the commissioner would have to give several thousand tasks to the staff every day. No commissioner can do that.
The division of labour in the factory is very thorough and far-reaching. There, no one will ever doubt the usefulness of such a division.
The division of labour in Soviet institutions is the most crude, and there is no detailed division of functions. It must be created. The responsibilities of each employee should be defined in the most precise way – from the commissioner to the last messenger.
The terms of reference of each employee must be formulated in writing. These responsibilities can be very complex and extensive, but the more important it is to formulate them as precisely as possible. Of course, this applies even more to all sorts of boards, presidiums, etc.
Then F. Taylor insists on an exact instruction, also in writing, indicating in detail how to perform a particular job.
Taylor means the factory enterprise, but this requirement applies to all commissariat work.
“Instructional cards can be used very widely and variedly. They play the same role in the art of management as in the technique of drawing and, like the latter, must change in size and shape to reflect the amount and variety of information it should provide. In some cases, the instruction may include a note written in pencil on a piece of paper that is sent directly to the worker in need of instructions; in other cases, it will contain many pages of typewriter text that have been properly corrected and stitched together and will be issued on the basis of control marks or other established procedures so that it can be used” (Ibid., p. 152).
Just think how much better the introduction of written instructions would be to set up a case in commissariats, how much would it reduce unnecessary conversations, how much accuracy would it bring to it, what would it be a reduction in unproductive waste of time.
Taylor insists on written instructions, reports, etc.
The written report is much more precise and, most importantly, it is recorded. The written form also facilitates control.
Separation of functions, introduction of a written instruction allow assigning less qualified people to one or another job. Taylor says that you can’t “take advantage of the work of a qualified worker where you can put a cheaper and less specialized person. No one would ever think about carrying a load on a trotter and put a draft horse where a small pony is enough. All the more so, a good craftsman should not be allowed to do the work that a laborer is good enough for” (Ibid., p. 30).
“To put the right man on the right place”, as the English say, is the task of the administrator. Most commissariats have so-called accounting and distribution departments. These departments should have highly qualified employees who know in detail the work of their commissariat, its needs, who are able to correctly evaluate people, find out their experience, knowledge and so on. This is one of the most important jobs, on which the success of the entire institution depends. Is this understood enough by the commissariats? No. This is occupied by random people.
“No people”, you have to hear it all the time. That’s what bad administrators say. A skilled administrator can also use people with secondary qualifications if he or she is able to instruct them properly and distribute the work among them. There is no doubt,” Taylor writes, “that the average person works best when he or she or someone else is assigning him or her a certain lesson, and that the job must be done by him or her at a certain time. The lower the person’s mental and physical abilities, the shorter the lesson to be assigned” (Ibid., p. 60).
And Taylor gives instructions on how the work should be distributed:
“Every worker, good and mediocre, must learn a certain lesson every day. In no case should it be inaccurate or uncertain. The lesson should be carefully and clearly described and should not be easy…
“Each worker should have a full day’s lesson…
“In order to be able to schedule a lesson for the next day and determine how far the entire plant has moved in one day, workers must submit written information to the accounting department every day, with an exact indication of the work performed” (Ibid., p. 57).
A system of bonus pay is only possible with detailed work distribution and accounting.
In commissariats, the premium system is usually used completely incorrectly. Bonuses are not given for extra hours of work or for more work given out, but are given in the form of an additional salary. One thing that indicates this is that there is no proper distribution of business work in Soviet institutions.
Of course, only those who know the job very well, to the smallest detail, can distribute it correctly.
“The art of management is defined by us as the thorough knowledge of the work you want to give to workers and the ability to do it in the best and most economical way” (Ibid.)
It would seem that this is a matter of course, yet it is almost constantly ignored. Comrades are good administrators and, in general, good workers are constantly moving from one area of work to another: today he works in the Ministry of Agriculture and Food, tomorrow in the theater department, the day after tomorrow in supply, then in Supreme Soviet of the National Economy or elsewhere. Before he has time to study a new field of work, he is transferred to a new field of work. It is clear that he cannot do what he could have done if he had worked in the same field for longer.
It is not enough to know people, to have general organizational skills – you need to know this area of work perfectly, only then you can distribute it correctly, instruct correctly, do accounting and supervise it.
Taylor’s control is particularly important. He suggests daily and even twice a day to quality control the work of workers, he insists on the most detailed written reporting, suggests not to be afraid of increasing the number of administrative personnel able to control the work. According to Taylor, the best thing would be if it were possible to organize a purely mechanical quality control (not for nothing, the control clocks are linked to the name of Taylor).
It’s vain to write laws if you don’t obey them. And Taylor understands that all the orders hang in the air, if they are not accompanied by a strictly carried out control.
Meanwhile, in terms of control in commissariats the situation is often very unfavorable.
The purpose of Taylor’s system is to increase the intensity of the worker’s work, to make his work more productive. Its goal is to change the slow pace of work to a faster pace and teach the worker to work without unnecessary breaks, cautiously and cherish every minute.
Of course, Taylor is the enemy of all the time-consuming conversations. He tries to replace oral reports with written ones. Where they are unavoidable, he tries to make them as concise as possible.
“The management system increasingly includes a principle that can be called the “principle of exceptions”. However, like many other elements of the art of governance, it is applied on an ad hoc basis and, for the most part, is not recognized as a principle to be disseminated everywhere. The usual, albeit sad, look is represented by the administrator of a large business, sitting at his desk in good faith in the midst of a sea of letters and reports, on each of which he considers it his duty to sign and initial. He thinks that, having passed through his hands this mass of details, he is quite aware of the whole case. The principle of exceptions represents the exact opposite of this. With him, the manager receives only brief, concise and necessarily comparative information, however, covering all the issues related to management. Even this summary, before it reaches the director, must be carefully reviewed by one of his assistants and must contain the latest data, both good and bad, in comparison with past average figures or with established norms; thus, this information in a few minutes gives him a complete picture of the course of affairs and leaves him free time to reflect on the more general issues of the management system and to study the qualities and suitability of the more responsible, subordinate and employees”. (Ibid., p. 105).
What business-like character would the work of commissariats take if the comrades working there would keep to the “principle of exceptions”?
Let’s sum it up. F. Taylor believes that it is necessary:
1) Decomposition of the work into its simplest elements;
2) the most detailed division of labour based on the study of the work and its decomposition into elements;
3) precise definition of the functions that fall on each employee;
4) definition of these functions in exact written form;
5) Appropriate selection of employees;
6) such distribution of work, so that each employee has as many jobs as he can perform during the day, working at the fastest pace;
7) Continuous instruction by more knowledgeable persons, if possible in writing;
8) systematic, properly organized control;
9) to facilitate its written reporting (as soon as possible);
10) Where possible, mechanization of controls.
“This is what everyone knows,” the reader will say.
But the point is not only to know, but to be able to apply. That’s the whole point.
“No system should be conducted ineptly,” notes Taylor.
Where do you learn to manage? “Unfortunately, there are no management schools, not even a single enterprise to inspect most of the management details that represent the best of their kind” (Ibid., p. 164).
That’s what Taylor says about industry in advanced countries.
Clearly, in Russia, we will not find any samples of the industry, not just of the industry, but of the administrative apparatuses. We need to lay new groundwork here. Through thoughtful attitude to business, taking into account all working conditions, it is necessary to systematically improve the health of Soviet institutions, to expel the shadow of bureaucracy from them. Bureaucracy is not in reporting, not in writing papers, not in distributing functions, in the office – bureaucracy is a negligent attitude to business, confusion and stupidity, inability to work, inability to check the work. You have to learn how to manage, you have to learn how to work. Of course, everything is not done in one go. “It takes time, a lot of time for a fundamental change of control… The change of management is connected with the change of notions, views and customs of many people, ingrained beliefs and prejudices. The latter can only be changed slowly and mainly through a series of subject lessons, each of which takes time, and through constant criticism and discussion. In deciding to apply this type of governance, the necessary steps for this introduction should be taken one by one as soon as possible. You need to be prepared to lose some of your valuable people who will not be able to adapt to the changes, as well as the angry protests of many old, reliable employees who will see nothing but nonsense and ruin in the innovations ahead. It is very important that, apart from the directors of the company, all those involved in management are given a broad and understandable explanation of the main goals that are being achieved and the means that will be applied.
Taylor, as an experienced administrator, understands that the success of the case depends not so much on the individual, but on the sincerity of the entire team.
Only this Taylor’s team limits itself to administrative employees. This is quite understandable. In general, Taylor’s system has not only positive aspects – increasing labor productivity through its scientific formulation, but also negative aspects: increasing labor intensity, and the wage system is built by Taylor so that this increase in intensity benefits not the worker, but the entrepreneur.
The workers understood that Taylor’s system was an excellent sweat squeezing system and fought against it. Since all the production was in the hands of capitalists, the workers were not interested in increasing labor productivity, not interested in the rise of industry. Now, under Soviet rule, when the exploitation of the labor force has been destroyed and when workers are interested to the extreme in the rise of the industry – a team that should consciously relate to the introduction of improving working methods – there should be a team of all the workers of the plant or factory. The capitalist could not rely on the collective of the workers he was exploiting, he relied on the collective of administrative employees who helped him to carry out this exploitation. Now the working collective itself has to apply the most appropriate methods of work. He only needs to be familiarized in theory and practice with these methods. This is production propaganda.
As far as the employees of Soviet institutions and people’s commissariats are concerned, it is necessary to familiarize them with the methods of labor productivity. This falls on the production cell of the collective of employees. But only by raising the level of consciousness of all employees, only by involving them in the work of increasing the productivity of commissariats – it is possible to actually improve the state of affairs and destroy not in words, but in practice, the dead bureaucracy.
Renato Flores discusses the privatization of scientific knowledge and examines efforts of revolutionary movements to democratize this knowledge to help develop a communist approach to science.
I
The famous quote “knowledge is power” can be read in two ways. The first is that knowledge is power over nature: it gives us the ability to free ourselves from natural necessity. Knowledge is Promethean, it is the stolen fire that cooks our food and keeps us warm, the vessel that gave us civilization. The second way to read this quote is more sinister: knowledge is power over others. Advanced weaponry allowed Europe to dominate the world for centuries. Surveillance technology allows the modern state to respond to potential threats within before they become actual. Domination can be subtle: knowledge of law is reserved to lawyers, an elite professional sector of society. This means that poor people are still at a disadvantage in court because their access to knowledge is limited, even if one assumes the state to be neutral.
Marginalized communities become either mystified or suspicious of science, if not both because knowledge is used to further their oppression. But this misses the question- how was knowledge of advanced weaponry acquired? And why was it exclusive to some peoples? The popularized history of science is that a few Great Minds produced all knowledge while in the service of the State. The West was made great by Galileo’s experiments in the Venitian Arsenal and Henry the Navigator’s School of Sagres. The scientific wit of a Great Few fits perfectly in a Darwinian story of the world. Western civilization dominated the world because they were (led by) the smartest, and thus the fittest, while the rest of the world was stuck in primitive mysticism. The White man’s burden was to bring knowledge to the world.
But this history of science is a sanitized and distorted one of its material realities. Knowledge is intimately linked to labor and practice. People low in the pecking order often generate it, and it is appropriated and stolen by more reputable people or institutions. Onesimus, the slave who used ancestral African knowledge to introduce inoculation against smallpox to the New England settlers is just one example among many. We only remember his name because his owner, Cotton Mather, revealed the source of his methods. But the list of forgotten names is immense: entire fields such as pharmacology have a deep debt to the Aztecs and Incas.
A full historical account of this appropriation-privatization of science is given by Cliff Conner’s People’s History of Science.1 Ancient scribes developed more advanced counting systems to work more efficiently, while prehistoric builders were forced to reckon with notions of geometry. With the rise of the centralized state, the power of this knowledge became more and more reserved for the exclusive use of the ruling classes. And with this privatization, knowledge was no longer linked to practice and idealism sneaked back in. The five regular polyhedra became sacred geometry. Astronomers doubled as priests to make predictions about the harvest, while the lower castes continued with their lives, now beholden to the knowledge their forefathers had generated.
Ancient Egyptian Artisans
The culmination of ancient idealism is Plato’s strict anti-empiricist program. The elevation and sacralization of Truth reached its extreme in The Forms, located outside the material sphere and only accessible through a learning process that would bring reminiscences of past lives. This program was not very conducive to future research: once the “official” line had been revealed, it was impossible to challenge. Aristotle, Plato’s greatest disciple, had to retreat from pure idealism to reincorporate the role of observation and experiment. But the Aristotelian system still suffered from much apriori reasoning.
Even more important for our story is that Plato was the father of an elitist cast of scientist-philosophers: the Academy. In Plato’s ideal Republic the philosophers were the kings while the other castes would only have access to a vulgarized and controlled version of the Truth. Aristotle’s Lyceum did little to change that fundamental idea of an elite which was entitled to rule because they were educated in Virtue. And through continuity and rupture, this germinal idea survives to our present day. The Hellenistic Academies passed the torch to the Christian church, the first replacement in the long chain that leads to the present.
After the fall of Rome, Europe went through a period of stagnation, where knowledge was lost. This was followed by the scholasticism of the Middle Ages, where both translations of the old, and new works from the Islamic world were received through reconquered Spain. But even scholasticism reduced the academic search for truth to commentaries of philosophers, in particular Aristotle and Averroes. It was a largely idealistic pursuit, and the Averroists were derided by Petrarch as people who “had much to tell about […] how many hairs are there in the lion’s mane”, yet “would not contribute anything to the blessed life”. While Petrarch was formulating the humanistic critique of scholasticism, as much can apply to a materialistic critique- scholarly knowledge had little to say about practical life.
In the meantime, the accumulation of material knowledge persisted outside the European sphere,. The scientific revolution could have seen its birth in the works of Ibn al-Haytham. He discovered principles of optics by combining Aristotelian systemic thinking and careful experimentation. Driven by his experience as a civil engineer, al-Haytham established one of the first known formulations of the scientific method. But the Islamic world was let down by one component. Even if European monks remained far from the generation of material knowledge, the Church and the Universities provided a structure for scientific formalization and institutional memory which was absent in the Near East. The new Academy was waiting to be born, longing for the replacement of scholastic disputations by practical treatises.
Ibn al-Haytham
II
The Zilsel Thesis was one of the first attacks against the Official History of Science.2Zilsel claims that the Scientific Revolution was not just the product of Great Minds. It happened as two currents converged: the experimenting artisans generated the Knowledge, while sections of the Academy provided the method to organize it. The same way that the Social Democratic Party was the merger of the worker movement and socialist theory brought from without, Science was born when the rebels of the intelligentsia decided to merge their methods with the practical knowledge of the artisans. Francis Bacon supplanted the Aristotelian Organon, the par-excellence tool of scholasticism with his own Novum Organon, a new way to systematize knowledge. Bacon realized that the university-based sciences “st[ood] like statues, worshiped and celebrated, but not moved or advanced”. His project to revitalize the sciences passed through systematizing the collected experience of craftsmen to alter nature.
Bacon’s vision of the merger was twisted. The two currents would not stand equally. Instead, his utopian New Atlantis laid out a comprehensive vision of a futuristic and sanitized scientific establishment which had enthroned itself by appropriating the knowledge of the lower classes. The new philosopher-kings were in many ways the same as the old, they just operated under a new method. They had a monopoly on the access to systematized knowledge, and even had power over the State: the Scientists of the House of Solomon were even entitled to keep scientific findings for themselves. This was not a new idea – Plato had already envisioned that the populace would be taught a vulgar vision of the world, adequate to fulfill their predetermined role. But the Baconian monopoly on knowledge would now be real power: it was based on materially applicable Truth with that could bind and dominate; and not on endless disputations and annotations on the origin of the Universe.
Bacon’s ideas represented that of the nascent bourgeoisie. Despite his utopia, Bacon was no revolutionary. He was a faithful servant of the English court and was laying out a blueprint for strengthening it. His project was one of a passive revolution, which replaced one elite with another one. But during the 16th and 17th centuries, the future of Europe was contested. The Catholic church’s monopoly was finally broken, and radical and utopian projects floated in the air. Another utopian proposal, Campanella’s City of the Sun dignified all work, allowing artisans and peasants into the dreamed city. Knowledge was shared: the walls of the city were pictures of a painted encyclopedia, openly shown to everyone. But Campanella relied on an elitist conspiracy to achieve his utopia and ended up in jail most of his life.
Campanella’s City of the Sun
The only radical scientist of the time to build a substantial movement behind him was Paracelsus. Rising from his experience as a medic in the mines, he gave a scholarly voice to the artisanal understanding of medicine, opposing the existing distinctions between the lowly manual surgeons and the high physicians that never touched a body. Paracelsus supported the Radical Reformation and the German Peasants War. He inaugurated a movement of folk healers for the People, which would democratize access to medicine. The Paracelsian movement would only grow after Paracelsus’ death. It was revolutionary because it sought to break the monopoly on knowledge and democratize its power. Paracelsianism would become one of Bacon’s main targets of attack, he rightly seen as a dangerous threat to the established order.
The torch of a rebel science was carried forward. In a pattern we will see emerge, every great social revolt posed the question of knowledge democratization. The Diggers, the most radical faction of the English Revolution also proposed a radical education program. Their leader, Gerrard Winstanley, demanded that an elected non-specialist would teach science in every parish and that this knowledge could be applied to the problems of everyday life. But the routing of the radicals in the English Revolution cut short this program. Baconianism would prevail, and the use of science against the people became routine. A new scientific establishment was formed in the Royal Societies, partly aristocratic, partly bourgeois. As the new Organon triumphed over the old, knowledge was accumulated, if not downright stolen from the newly colonized people. Capitalism expanded, and Science was tasked with the quest to invent more efficient machines that would replace skilled workers and increase productivity. The Enlightenment was a time to celebrate reason’s role in emancipating humanity from its immaturity. But as technology became a method for de-skilling and disciplining the workforce, Rousseau would proclaim that progress was making man less free.3
The bourgeoisie was winning the battle for ideological hegemony, and the Cartesian mechanistic view of nature became a common stance. The period leading up to the French Revolution saw the publication of Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopedia, a landmark for the ascendant bourgeois Science. It was meant to change the way people thought. It actively challenged religious authority and was condemned by the Catholic church. The Encyclopedia also celebrated artisanal knowledge and sang the praise of artisans. But the twisted merger of bourgeois science repressed this side of the equation. Even as their practical knowledge was elevated, artisans themselves were excluded from the scientific community.
The French Revolution would throw the tensions between artisans and the Academy in the open. After the outbreak of the revolution in 1789, the artisans organized in free associations which challenged the Academy’s monopoly on Science. These free associations sought to democratize access to knowledge making it available for everyone. But now that the monarchy was gone the newly-freed bourgeois and aristocrats of the Academy were looking to further consolidate their powers over what was acceptable Science. This brought an inevitable conflict. The Condorcet proposal, to make the Academie an even more elitist institution, was fought tooth and nail by the sans-culotte artisans. As the revolution radicalized in 1793, the sans-culottes obtained a temporary victory. The Académie was shut down because it was rightly considered an undemocratic and aristocratic institution. Baconian science was on the run, and a popular science had its first real triumph for a brief period. Thermidor would bring an end to this, restoring the academy on even more elitist grounds.
The Thermidorian academy would accelerate specialization. Science would slowly but surely be put at the effective service of capital, while still paying lip-service to educating the lower classes. Passion, feeling, and humanism were exiled from the academy. The production of knowledge became a slave to profit while masked by scientific neutrality. However, this was just one of the possible futures. As the absolute power of the Church and the King collapsed, the French 18th century also saw rampant speculation on new world-systems and other ways of organizing knowledge. After Rousseau’s diatribe against progress, his intellectual heirs sought to recover a natural philosophy that merged all knowledge and put it to the use of mankind, rather than the use of Capital. They demanded that science must have a moral component if it was not to amount to raw weaponry in the hands of the oppressors. The common Newtonian-Cartesian paradigm of studying and understanding phenomena in total separation was in accordance with the bourgeois primacy of the individual over the collective. In opposition to this, Bernardin de-Saint Pierre best formulated an anti-reductionist science. He rebelled against the tendency to compartmentalize and specialize, highlighting the interconnectedness of the world. But his new system was coldly received by an Academy which was increasingly focused on the capitalistic use of science. Napoleon himself told him to learn calculus and to come back.
Design for a monument to Issac Newton by Etienne-Louis Boullée from the 18th century
As capital expanded, so did the working class. Utopian Socialists such as Saint-Simon attempted to alleviate the problems of capitalism by proposing a series of solutions from above. Saint-Simon saw in the industrial class the future transformers of the world, but for this to happen they would have to be properly organized. He proposed a societal organization of strict meritocracy, where scientific investigation would serve as a rational basis. Comte followed his steps and developed them further.4 His “scientific” positivism was something more akin to a total cosmovision where science would be used at all levels to organize society. Scientifically enlightened men should govern the uneducated, and provide mechanisms of societal cohesion for the universal wellbeing. In Comte’s Utopia, the intelligentsia would govern for the good of all. Science was for the People, but not by the People.
Comte’s writings attempted to avoid the fragmentation of knowledge into infinitely divided fields. But in his philosophy, there was still a gap between doctrine and practice. His complicated and ahistorical elaboration of the three stages of science was just a stopgap. Comte was unable to appropriately discuss the class implications of research programs. This would have to wait until the Marxist Philosophy of Science, inaugurated by Joseph Dietzgen’s writings and Engels’ Anti-Dühring and Dialectics of Nature. In contrast to bourgeois individuality, the workers’ movement approached things from a collective standpoint. And as the Second International took shape, Marxists widely polemicized about their cosmovisions. A full account of this is impossible, and Helena Sheehan’s Marxism and the History of Science provides invaluable details and names on the many Marxist philosophers up to the 1970s which strove to restore a holistic use of knowledge. The sanitized Cartesian-Newtonian world system was longing to be replaced so that science could advance further.
III
In the early 20th century, two Marxist authors stand out for the originality of their educational program. They both put forward the need for the proletariat to generate its own modes of thought before the revolution, centering the role of proletarian intellectuals in opposing the dominant ideology. They both saw how the bourgeoisie had formulated their own culture through Bacon and Diderot before taking power, and aspired to model the upcoming proletarian revolution in a similar manner.
While this idea is often associated with Antonio Gramsci, before him there came Alexander Bogdanov. Bogdanov was not only a physician but also a philosopher and a science fiction writer. Similar to the French revolutionaries, he formulated a two-fold program in pre-revolution Tsarist Russia based on a new form of education and a novel world understanding. One of his crowning achievements, tektology, was his proposal for organizing systems ranging from society to knowledge. His view of an interconnected and perfectly organized world was a new spin on an anti-reductionist science. Tektology went against Engels’ dialectics in some ways: Bogdanov sought to analyze how systems could remain in dynamic equilibrium instead of in constant dialectical evolution. It was a forerunner of the current systems theory and cybernetics.
Alexander Bogdanov
Bogdanov was an original thinker, laying out a comprehensive vision for a Working-Class Science. He understood that the class character of science lay in “its origin, designs, methods of study and presentation”.5 Bourgeois science was only built for the benefit of Capital, while a working-class science would emphasize collectivity. Bogdanov’s new science would be an “organized collective experience of humanity and the instrument of the organization of the life of society”.6 The workers had to develop a new epistemology, throwing out the old one, and he thought that art could be an inspiration for this. Lenin polemicized against Bogdanov in Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, considering that his focus on science as collective experience went against strict Marxist orthodoxy. But Lenin’s Materialism and Empirio-Criticism contained many crude assumptions about Nature from which he would later walk back from.
Bogdanov proposed to organize the new science in a Workers’ Encyclopedia, which would be a harmonious system instead of just a summary of concepts. The Workers’ University would provide courses on the new unified science and serve as an education point for revolutionaries. A first attempt at a Workers University took place in Capri, where a small cohort of students were lectured by Bogdanov’s intellectual group in the hopes that they would form the nucleus of a proletarian culture. This turned out to be a very top-down approach and ultimately broke down as only one group of students graduated. While a laudable program, it was disconnected from the material realities of the time.7
Even if Bogdanov was a founding member of the Bolsheviks, he came further and further apart from Lenin. Bogdanov’s primacy of cultural Revolution crashed against Lenin’s program for revolution. The difference kept on growing during the prelude to revolution, Bogdanov, and others wanting immediate revolution and no participation in the Duma while Lenin saw parliamentary work as essential in a period of revolutionary ebb. When the political differences between both ended up being too large, Bogdanov was expelled from the Bolsheviks.
After the February revolution, the ideas of Bogdanov and co-thinkers like Lunacharsky saw a revival in the form of Proletkult, an organization that would create a new proletarian culture for the new workers’ state.8 This organization sought to be completely autonomous of the party and the state, something intolerable at a time of Civil War. Eventually, it was brought under heavy control of the party and later disbanded as the Bolsheviks centralized power.
Due to his break with Lenin and expulsion from the Bolsheviks, Bogdanov has been largely forgotten by history. In another era, he would have rightly occupied a high place in the intelligentsia. But even as he formulated a working-class science and a radical new societal organization, in his practice he ended up reproducing many of the actually existing structures of the Academy. His attempts to start a Workers’ University brought workers from all over Tsarist Russia, but layed on a rigid framework. A few lecturers, him included, would provide their vision on what the workers should be doing, instead of linking the curriculum to the material needs of the students.
Proletkult was in many ways an improvement. Because it was able to organize in the open it had stronger involvement of workers, numbering at eighty-four thousand members at its peak. Because the ultimate target was the creation of a new workers’ culture through the abolition of the intellectuals, a transitional period was necessary. Even if some programs were worker led, Proletkult was predominantly guided by Bolshevik intellectuals. These provided a guiding thought what on proletarian culture was, and how ideal workers should relate to another.
Proletkult was a massive organization in a time of convulsion, and the problems within it cannot be attributed solely to Bogdanov’s prescriptions. Its rifts appeared in a period where the workers had taken power without having produced a proletarian culture. Some of these fault lines were transcended in Gramsci’s approach to the role of proletarian intellectuals. Gramsci’s philosophical program was deeply marked by being a close witness to the rise of fascism and the failure of the Italian left to take power after the factory occupations. He is well known because of his analysis on how the dominant ideology softly persuaded people in accepting the status quo, the so called “hegemony” of thought. He set out to understand how this hegemony was created, and reproduced by the intellectuals and society.
Antonio Gramsci
Gramsci understood that while the traditional intellectuals of the Academy saw themselves as an elite functioning aside from society, they were embedded in the system of production and were naturally conservative in order to preserve their privileges, even if some would defect to the workers and were proletarianized themselves. But these intellectuals were not the ones bringing the dominant ideology to the masses. Another type of intellectual existed alongside the Academy: the organic intellectuals. They were consciously embedded in the process of production because they managed and coordinated the economic system. In doing so, they propagated the world view of the ruling classes throughout the population.
To change the world, Gramsci, like Bogdanov, required the creation of a new generation of organic intellectuals from the proletariat. Gramsci saw the potential in everyone, writing that “all men are intellectuals”. They just needed to be given the means to actualize this potential. Their schooling must relate to everyday life and transform them into individuals capable of thinking, studying and ruling. These proletarian organic intellectuals would collect and systematize folk knowledge to represent the excluded groups of a society. Gramsci’s intellectuals would fight a cultural war, to generate an alternative system of perceiving the world. With Gramsci’s incapacitation through incarceration, he was never able to put his program into practice. His notebooks are incomplete, and naturally invite speculation of what he meant. We cannot speculate how his Italian Proletkult would have looked like and what problems it would have come across.
Unlike Bogdanov, who saw the task of proletarian revolution as immediate, favoring a rapid political seizure of power by a Proletarian dictatorship, Gramsci’s organic intellectuals would have a long war ahead of them, synthesizing and spreading a proletarian hegemony before the revolution. Because of Gramsci’s prediction of a long “war of position” that lay ahead, he has often been read in a reformist light. If intellectuals had to occupy more space within the existing institutions, the question of power could be indefinitely be put off. Gramsci, as Marx and many others, was tamed.
Alongside these two thinkers stands Christopher Caudwell, who did not formulate an educational program but wrote much on Science. Caudwell is an underappreciated figure, a British Marxist who died very young in the Spanish Civil War. He, like many others in his time, understood that bourgeoise science was reaching its limit, and that technological progress would mean each successive day would be more alienating, rather than empowering. Only a communist society would cure the maladies of science. His communist utopia was one where the intellectuals would learn from the workers, as much as the workers would get guidance from the intellectuals.
Christopher Caudwell
Caudwell saw science in a similar way to Bogdanov, as the historical and collected experience of production.9 But unlike Bogdanov, he did not attempt to prescribe what the culture of the workers should look like. Nor would the workers be tasked with generating a new culture, as this was already happening every day. The dominated class, which carried out the production, would slowly gather more and more experience, finding better ways to organize society and knowledge. The ruling class, which had first organized society in a progressive manner, along its own rules, would slowly see the steam fade. Cracks would appear, such as the new doctrines by Marx, as the superstructure showed itself incapable of adapting to the new methods for producing knowledge. The workers would slowly move to adopt their self-produced organizational systems as their new guiding principle, as they moved to turn the world upside down once again. Once the tension became too large a revolution would take place. The old way of organizing society would be replaced by a new one, which was both a continuity and a rupture from the previous one. But Caudwell saw that despite the revolution, there was a degree of continuity in the new superstructure. He understood that if the bridge between intellectuals and workers was not built after the revolution the cycle would continue.
The similarities between these three thinkers are immense. Bogdanov, Caudwell, and Gramsci all saw that the seeds for a new method of organizing knowledge was within the workers themselves, either as a collective, through folk tales or both. Their notions of pedagogy and the role of culture finds echoes in many decolonial thinkers such as Franz Fanon, Mao Zedong, Amilcar Cabral, and Paulo Freire, who, within their differences, formulated the need for education and the development of a national or class culture as a precondition for developing a liberatory program among the colonized and dispossessed.10
Bogdanov and Caudwell knew that a radical rethinking of science and knowledge was needed, otherwise a permanent and trained bureaucracy, wielding the powers of the State for the good of the proletariat would arise. This would be the Saint-Simonian, or Comptian utopia: a dictatorship of the technocracy, where the power of knowledge would not be radically redistributed. In more than one way, he foresaw the development of the technostructure in the Actually Existing Socialist countries. We return to Revolutionary Russia below and analyze how the first Workers’ state put into practice a revolutionary education.
IV
With Marxism in power, a unique challenge would appear. The revolutionary masses required the power of knowledge to run the country, but with the sophistication of technology, this power could only be gained after a long education. The nascent Soviet Republic was faced with a difficult disjunctive: either strike a deal with the existing technostructure, the “bourgeois specialists”, despite their questionable class loyalties, or repress them and to rapidly form a new class of experts from a proletarian origin to replace the existing specialists.
At first, Lenin was particularly conciliatory towards the bourgeois specialists.11 His policies included paying extra to specialists, but this caused resentment from the workers. He was repeatedly criticized by the Workers Opposition and other left wing groups. After all, the workers who had fought the civil war remained under the same technostructure. But Lenin repeatedly noted that without machines, without discipline, it is impossible to live in modern society. It was necessary to master the highest technology or be crushed.12 Lenin’s policy of conciliation was especially prominent during the New Economic Period, where the old technocracy occupied significant positions in the planning apparatus.
Poster from the Soviet Union, caption reads as “Knowledge for all”
Lenin never moved beyond the concept of “using” the specialists, despite the accusations of excessive conciliation. It was always a temporary evil brought about by the circumstances. And after his death, the existing specialists started to fall under the control of new “Red Directors”: workers without a significant formal education which were loyal party members. Stalin’s faction achieved greater control over the old specialists and began the process of slowly replacing them with the newly educated red specialists.
Up to 1928, there was a period of uneasy peace between workers, Red Directors and the old specialists where each faction fought for either preservation or supremacy. The first real disciplining moment for the old intelligentsia was the Shakhty affair. In 1928, fifty-three engineers and managers were arrested and put on trial for sabotage. This spectacle-cum-trial was the first instance where Stalin declared that sabotage was being used by the bourgeoisie as a method of class struggle. The full disciplining of the old Academy and the specialists would slowly follow, as Stalin would whip up class resentment against the better-paid managers.
For the Red Directors to consolidate their power over the specialists, a new generation of proletarian intelligentsia had to be educated in an accelerated manner. This debate trickled down to the admission criteria for universities. The number of places was limited, so this scarce resource somehow had to be distributed. Admissions based purely on test scores would naturally benefit those who had previous access to cultural capital and would tend to perpetuate a better-off technostructure. Class origins were made a factor depending on the year, which lowered admission requirements and at the same time forced the watering down of the curriculum. With an accelerated education, which now also required political education, narrow specialization became unavoidable. Lunacharsky, a close associate of Bogdanov, pushed for a more comprehensive and humanistic vision of education. But as Stalin’s faction came to dominate, education became focused on churning out STEM graduates. Education was “a weapon” to be wielded by the proletariat for its emancipation via the growth of productive forces. The humanistic aspect of the scientific merger was lost, and instead a more-perfect Academy was to replace the existing bourgeois one.
A second show trial in 1930, known as the Industrial Party trial, saw another group of scientists and engineers being accused of plotting a coup against the government. This was a definite watershed moment that curbed the remaining cultural capital of the old specialists. Engineers, especially those of bourgeois origin would be progressively made scapegoats for the failure to achieve unrealistic targets. This culminated in the Great Purges: a whole generation of intellectuals would be replaced by the new engineers and academicians of proletarian origin. They would be tasked with progressively more important tasks in the running of industry, and occupy the levers of power. STEM education was overemphasized to the expense of other disciplines. The ossification and rigidization of cultural studies followed suit, as the development of Marxism was considered finalized. Philosophical speculation would be reserved to Stalin himself, a philosopher-king atop the proletarian academy.
Stalin’s line became identical with the proletarian line. Nominally, class origins would determine truth. However, this was a proxy for ideological battles. The case of Lysenko, the agricultural engineer who rejected genetics in favor of acquired characteristics became emblematic of this period. Class origin became a stand-in for loyalty to the party, specifically loyalty to Stalin. Lysenko gained the upper hand not by scientific investigation, but by repression. Vavilov, the president of the Agriculture Academy was sent to die in prison, and thousands of biologists were fired from institutions. Research in genetics was completely frozen until Stalin’s death.
Lysenko in a wheat field
The proletarian technocracy grew in power, becoming more separate from the class from where it originated. In 1936, Stalin recognized the existence of a “working intelligentsia” existing alongside the peasants and the proletariat. After Stalin’s death, the Red-and-expert directors would fully flourish and run the country and military uniforms were replaced by suits. This was Bacon’s utopia, painted in red. Khruschev’s time had arrived. The old technocracy had simply been replaced by a new one, which was in many ways as elitist as the Tsarist one. Education meant specialization and a job, with which came certain privileges that were available at the end of training.
A comparable pattern took place in the cities of Maoist China. Lenin and Mao both came from a similar place: they looked West for ideas to modernize their “backward” countries and catch up. Lenin was obsessed with Taylorism and scientific management and repeatedly rallied against fideism and the orthodox church. He saw education from a perspective that did not break much with radical liberalism, where granting access to education for all was a radical reform. Mao’s political origins were in the May Fourth Movement which sought to replace China’s existing culture based on scholastic learning with something more practical. But he would progressively radicalize his program, especially after the Sino-Soviet split and his growing suspicion of the Soviet technocrats.
In 1949, the victorious People’s Liberation Army had to strike an uneasy peace with the existing intelligentsia. The capitalist development of the 20th century had created a technocracy of upper-class origin that possessed the technical knowledge required to run the country. The Chinese Communist Party was forced to be conciliatory at first as it educated its own cadres and borrowed others from the USSR. Communist China wrestled with the same Soviet problem: to generate the technocracy a new society required modernizing education. But as in the Soviet case, resources such as teachers and schools were not readily available, and the new rulers were forced to rely on the old technostructure. The scarcity of education forced tough decisions between admitting students from a lower-class background who possessed less cultural capital, or a pure “meritocracy” of test scores that benefited students from better-off backgrounds who did have access to this capital.
Up to the Cultural Revolution, education policy oscillated between radical egalitarianism and technocratic orientations depending on the faction of the Chinese Communist Party that was in the drivers’ seat. Mao relentlessly pressured to popularize education, especially as he became more and more suspicious of the new technocratically bent Soviet republic. During the Great Leap Forward, an initial attempt at reform was made. Two parallel tracks were created, the elite one designed to create the technical intelligentsia, and a popular one that would bring education to the masses. But this trend led to the replication of the old differences, now under a different guise. Many aspects of the Great Leap Forward were not very different from Stalin’s cultural revolution of the 1930s; it was mainly a top-down approach. The most infamous example is the Four Pests Campaign, a program to exterminate sparrows which ended up hurting agricultural production badly when it turned out that sparrows provided natural pest control.
Mao learned from his failures, and a second, even greater leveling experiment took place during the Cultural Revolution. In the same way as in the USSR, the desire was to produce engineers who had to be both an expert, and a red. Without going deeply into the entire history of the Cultural Revolution, more practical assignments were added to the curriculum, and class origins became an important criterion for admission. Professors were expected to merge into the masses and become part of the people, while students had to spend time in factories, or the countryside to gain practical experience and connect to the masses. Entire sections of the population became mobilized in producing and applying knowledge. Mao had learned from the failures of Lysenkoism, and scientific debate and experimentation became encouraged.13
Mao’s evolution can also be traced through his attitude towards healthcare in the countryside. At first, Mao was aware of the dire state of healthcare in the rural areas and during the Great Leap Forward a medical reform program was started where thousands of medical workers were deployed to the countryside to combat schistosomiasis. But this was not enough, as there were not enough medically-educated city dwellers for the entire countryside, and the rural countryside remained underserved. Furthermore, the doctors were not used to treating diseases common in the countryside. During the Cultural Revolution, education was provided for a new generation of “barefoot doctors” that totaled over one million. After a brief training, they would return to their villages and provide basic healthcare for the peasant commune, becoming more effective patient advocates than the medical workers of the Great Leap Forward as they were used to dealing with the diseases they were familiar with. The barefoot doctors also experimented with mixing Traditional Chinese medicine, which was less resource-draining, with Western treatments, developing indigenous treatments for diseases.
Indeed, the Cultural Revolution represents a pivotal moment in educational experiments that broke the mold. As the student-worker-soldiers set out to the countryside, new schools were built and peasants who never had the right to education saw themselves able to attend school. The movie “Breaking with old ideas” from the time is a perfect reflection of the utopia the GPCR tried to achieve: not only a class but a world of “red-and-experts”. Admission to the new universities was granted by the calluses of the hands, and the curriculum was intimately tied to the productive needs. The communist utopia would use education as a leveler. It was the culmination of the Enlightenment project, a true Science for the people.14
But these experiments would barely survive the Cultural Revolution. In the cities, the focus on generating a “Red-and-expert” technocracy would end up replicating many of the problems with the technocracy in the Soviet Union.15 Once the Cultural Revolution ebbed, the new technocracy was in a prime position to enter government. As Mao passed away and the Gang of Four were removed, Deng would use the new experts to create a technocratic China. It is hardly surprising that the Dengists were made of the same steel as the Kruschevites. Both revolutions had followed very similar paths in generating a red technocracy. And this red technocracy would be elevated to the highest position once their original patrons were gone. They would both aspire to a Red Plenty, even if the means they deployed would be different: socialist planning in alliance with the proletariat or controlled markets in alliance with a supervised bourgeoise.
“Learn from the Soviet Union and its approach to science” Chinese poster, 1958
V
Once revolutionaries take power, radical programs to increase literacy usually follow. To understand why it is so appealing, we can revisit an old story by Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, a historian who wrote on the ways Spaniards used knowledge to dominate the Incas. In his story, the foreman of a hacienda asked two Incas to deliver ten melons and a note to the Spanish Conquistador who was the owner of the farm. The foreman warned the Indians that the paper would reveal the destinatary the truth in case the melons were missing. The Incas ate two of them but did so far away from the paper in the hopes that the paper would not notice them. When they handed the eight melons to the Spaniard, he asked for the two missing ones. The Indians then stood in awe of the power of the written word and thought the Spaniards semi-divine.
In revolutions outside of the imperial core, literacy programs are a way for people to break down old barriers. Where the ruling class has used complicated legal frameworks to ensure its domination, literacy campaigns such as those conducted in Cuba, Nicaragua or Burkina Faso help in leveling the playing field and have an impact beyond a single generation. However, it is not enough to teach the dispossessed the tools of the ruling class. We have to stop and ask ourselves, what is being taught? These programs can be contained within radical liberalism, which is not to say that they are bad but insufficient. We have to understand that the roots of the public school in the imperial core, or the birth of the Autonomous Universities of Latin America, were the achievement of radical liberal programs. But programs like “Indian Boarding Schools” also fall into this category. Leveling the playing field is essential- but we must go further if we do not want to replace one system of distributing power for another one.
The fight against this elitist science is multifold because of the different actors taking place. Plebeians within a dominant community often fight for a science for the people, without questioning the existing cosmovision that organizes society and production. A good example of challenging the power structure of Science is the Health Program of the Black Panthers.16 In the late 1960s, the healthcare structure in the black community was in an extremely dire state. The Panthers set out to build people’s clinics, in an attempt to democratize the access to healthcare. If they had limited themselves to opening new clinics, staffed with doctors who learned “official medicine” from respectable schools, this program would remain outside of the control of the people. Nothing would have been done to empower them or to tap into their knowledge. The same way that the teachers of a public school still remain bound to a curriculum outside their control, the People’s doctors would remain bound to the authority of a “neutral” medicine.
But The Panthers went further and were able to transcend liberalism. Imitating Mao’s “barefoot doctors”, they allied with radical scientists and with other radical groups such as the Young Lords to form a real program of “Medicine for the People”. The Panthers would place community experts as equals to the medical experts and merge their knowledge to address the health problems of the community. They attempted to make explicit the racism of “official” medicine so they could break it. They conducted a massive campaign around Cystic Fibrosis, a disease that mainly affects people of African origin, which despite a high rate of incidence was never seriously researched. They denounced stories of racist abuse by medical professionals, such as the case of Henrietta Lacks, which made explicit the structural racism in medicine. The Young Lords would go as far as temporary occupying Lincoln Hospital in the Bronx to denounce the medical mistreatment of blacks and Latinxs. They were evicted by riot police but negotiated a space with the hospital where they set up a People’s Program for several years. As part of this program, the Young Lords set up a clinic for detox while providing political education. They assisted the doctors with interpreting services, building on their understanding of their communities’ problems. The Peoples’ Program would be put to a violent end by Mayor Ed Koch in 1978 after several years of success.
Young Lords agitprop against Lincoln Hospital
In the context of settler-colonialism, Marxism too often forgets that it was born of European Origins and that there are other ways of organizing the collective knowledge and experience of society. The knowledge produced by Euroamerican capitalism has been arranged towards two main motives: increasing the productivity and profit of capital, and the development of weapons to bring capitalism on a gunboat. This is reflected in an educational system that values technical and “hard” science above all, where Goldman Sachs executives question whether it is profitable to research the cure to certain diseases instead of treating the symptoms in perpetuity.
Programs for an emancipatory science must understand that they have to serve the entirety of those dispossessed, or will end up perpetuating the colonial structures that are ingrained in Science due to its dual role in society: both an episode in the growth of human knowledge in general, and a product of the Western capitalist societal organization. Education and Science can be used for assimilation as well as for empowerment.17 The dispossessed should not simply be assimilated into the existing framework because this will mean epistemicide. A radical education program must take into account not only the material conditions of the people it is seeking to liberate but must also ensure that their cosmovisions are respected. A decolonized science must challenge the entire cosmovision of the settler class.
As an example, Amerindian Traditional Ecological Knowledge is of real interest to Euroamerican science due to its utility in ecological management. But simply absorbing this knowledge as better ways to manage a farm or a forest into our system is trying to fit a piece in a different puzzle. First of all, knowledge isn’t granted for “safekeeping” and assimilation in a supposedly more advanced cosmovision. But even if we’re willing to ignore this, TEK is incommensurable to Western Science. We have to understand how deeply connected TEK is to the cosmovision of Amerindians, who value the connection to the land above all.18 While the West has striven towards speed and productivity assuming it can bend nature towards its will, Amerindians have organized their knowledge towards a homeostatic relationship with nature, recognizing that it is part of the world-system. In this context, it is not strange that one of the first rebels against the Cartesian science, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, was a fine botanist.
One cannot simply look at TEK and think that Western Science can absorb an entire complex cosmovision as a subcompartment of a capital-oriented science labeled ecology. Denoting Indian Science as primitive, or less advanced simply ignores the ways different people have chosen to arrange their collective experience around certain priorities. Marxists must understand that there are many ways of arranging knowledge, all subordinate to the criterion of truth-through-practice, instead of granting preference to a single one.19 We must fight, as the Zapatistas say, for a world where multiple cosmovisions fit. In Settler-Colonial lands, if we do not clearly understand the dual nature of Science, we risk occupying sacred land to build a telescope without understanding why this is wrong.
Hero twins Hunahpú and Xbalanqué play an important role in the Mayan Cosmovision outlines in the Popol Vuh
VI
Galileo did not teach much to the weaponry makers of the Arsenal, he just systematized their knowledge. Since then, science has moved far, and the gunboats stand in stark contrast with the weapons of mass destruction that have been made available in the 20th century. The nuclear bomb, if anything else, stands as a monument in the emancipation of pure science. Without equations and abstractions, without decades of work in modern physics, it would not have been possible to release such destructive force.
Such potential has of course not passed unnoticed. Today, the University in the United States maintains deep ties to the defense establishment and the military industry, being a prime recipient of military Keynesianism. Military R&D accounts for nearly half of total R&D expenditures in the United States, and they were an even higher portion during the Cold War.20 The fight for permanent technological supremacy requires the power of knowledge, and the careful cultivation of a specialized technocracy that adequately leverages the division of labor.
While some scientists refuse to work with military contractors, and radical associations can agitate the scientific community to make it aware of its collaboration with destruction, the effect is meager. Indeed, most scientists are aware that they are not working for the benefit of mankind, but end up rationalizing away their job as one more cog in the brutal system of imperialism. To quote Stafford Beer at length,
“We have to find a way by which to turn science over to the people. If we can do that, the problem of elitism disappears. For surely I do not have to convince you that the man in the white laboratory coat is human after all, and would rather use his computer to serve you than to blow the world apart? Then for God’s sake (I use the phrase with care) let us create a societary system in which this kind of service is made even possible for him, before it is too late. At the moment, the scientist himself is trapped by the way in which society employs him. What proportion of our scientists are employed in death rather than life, in exploitation rather than liberation? I tell you: most of them. But that is not their free choice. It is an output of a dynamic system having a particular organization.”
In today’s academia, very few scientists can work in what they desire to work if they are to remain employed. They are instead forced into avenues decided by funding programs or private corporations. In the age of austerity, where the pressure to secure funding is growing as fast as research budgets are decreasing, military funding provides an easy solution.
At the same time, seeds for a scientist revolt are being planted in the new class of precariously employed academics. A system where the apprentices labor and produce knowledge while the masters take the credit has been around Academia for years – Tycho Brahe’s observatory was staffed with his own workers who produced the observation tables for which he became famous. But in the present, this antagonism has become extremely exacerbated as the number of doctoral degrees awarded grows without bounds, and the amount of professorships has stagnated. It appears as if Capitalist R&D is simply subcontracted to graduate students, with everyone along the line take a cut. Knowledge production is still linked to industry and hence labor, but produced in a more exploitative way, by specialist but proletarianized scientists. Funding incentives have set up a system where a few professorial “supermanagers” accumulate the little money that is going around, permanently sub-contracting an underpaid class of graduate students and post-doctoral researchers who suffer grave problems of stress, poverty wages and high incidence of mental illness.
A class wedge is arising, where a whole layer of academics can no longer pretend to stand outside society and are instead joining the fight for unionization and for maternal leave. Associations such as Free Radicals and the revitalized Science for the People are taking up the baton dropped by previous generations of radical scientists. Transcending economism, they instead propagandize for a democratized and liberatory science, actively questioning the neutrality of knowledge. The de-ideologization of science is crucial to propagating the hegemony of the bourgeois worldview. But the “traditional intellectuals” in the Gramscian sense are being proletarianized, and are throwing their lot with the forces for change. The radicalizing surplus “overqualified and underemployed” intelligentsia is a luxury compared to the problems of the nascent Soviet republic.
Flashpoints for the organization of a new society are appearing. The scarcity of educational resources has been considerably reduced with the advent of the internet. Resources like Khan Academy provide basic education to millions around the world despite its ideological limits. The tools for a collaborative understanding of the world and a collective organization of knowledge dreamt by Caudwell and Bogdanov already exist. Wikipedia casts a light towards what is possible in a Workers’ Republic, an emancipatory tool in-waiting. Knowledge is the living memory of our collective experience as a species won through the labor of our ancestors. It is the God humans are building. Using it as power over others is the ultimate sin.
Jose Carlos Mariategui was a Peruvian Marxist, who became the founder of the precursor to the Peruvian Communist Party. He was born in 1894, in Moquegua, but he came of age in Lima and on the Peruvian coast. Plagued by health problems, Mariategui’s flame extinguished at just thirty-five years of age. The world was robbed of one of the most brilliant South American Marxists of his generation. For decades, his work remained obscure outside of Peru, and available only to those who spoke Spanish.
In this piece we present, Mariategui lays out a vision for a united front as the initial step of building the proletarians’ forces. Shadows of Sorel’s influence on Mariategui can be seen, as he constructs a myth of the united front and of the workers’ souls in longing for it. But more importantly- Mariategui’s united front was his conception of party-building. He wanted class and programmatic unity before strict theoretical unity. For years he resisted the Comintern’s wishes to build a Peruvian Communist Party that strictly adhered to the 21 theses, especially once the Comintern turned to the ultra-leftist “third period”. Instead, he started off with a newspaper, Amaunta, while collaborating closely with the weak workers’ and indigenous’ movements.
The united front was central to Mariategui’s conception of politics. Two experiences had shaken him profoundly. Mariategui was present in the Livorno congress, where the Italian Communist Party was founded. He had witnessed firsthand the failure of the Italian Socialist Party in the early 1920s to capitalize on the occupation of the factories, and how this had opened the floodgates for the later rise of Mussolini and fascism. Mariategui, like Gramsci, recognized that the Italian Socialists had no base among the Southern Peasantry, and this had hurt them substantially.
Mariategui was also shaken by the Mexican Revolution. Often ignored in the West, it took place as Europe was fighting in the trenches and the Bolsheviks made their wager for power. The Mexican Revolution was a complex social progress, with many sides to it. One of the most critical episodes took place in 1915 after the nascent bourgeoise led by Venustiano Carranza and Alvaro Obregón had defeated the semi-feudal forces of reaction. The bourgeois needed to consolidate its power against the peasant armies of Villa and Zapata, their previous allies. For this, they tragically drew from the anarcho-syndicalist workers in Mexico City’s Casa del Obrero Mundial, who willingly provided soldiers and support to destroy the “feudal and barbaric” peasant revolt of Villa and Zapata. Mexico’s revolution was interrupted as the workers delivered the state power to the national bourgeoisie.
In both of these instances, the bourgeoisie had split the dispossessed and had pitted them against each other to defeat their radical pretenses. But some leftist Peruvians actually looked up to the Mexican model. APRA, led by Haya de la Torre wanted to move beyond Peru’s “semi-feudal” system through an alliance between the proletarian and the revolutionary bourgeoisie. Mariategui wanted nothing of this losing scheme and insisted on the centrality of the united front to unite all workers and Indian peasants against the real enemy, the bourgeoisie which had no revolutionary role to play.
Mariategui fought on many fronts, theorizing a Peruvian Marxism that was both internationalist, and sensitive to the local conditions. Aside from running Amaunta, he lectured at a popular university, where he was regularly accosted by orthodox anarchists (something he refers to in the text). Mariategui was also involved in the indigenous movement, attending the third Indigenous Congress in 1923. He was one of the first Marxists to theorize the material relationship between the colonized Indians of Peru, understanding that Marxists should relate to their “question” not by declaring the inevitability of assimilation and trying to accelerate it, but by giving them control over the land.
Mariategui’s group establish the Peruvian Socialist Party in 1928 only after the final break with de la Torre, who had founded a personalist party to contest the elections. The united front would slowly break, the PSP became a Comintern-compliant party after his death and was renamed to the Peruvian Communist Party. Mariategui’s legacy is ironically claimed by such diverse parties as ARPA, which he regularly polemicized against, and Shining Path, who could not be further from Mariategui’s united front as they bombed and killed other leftists as often as they attacked the state. Mariategui is today seeing renewed interest in the Anglosphere, including the recent publication of “In the Red Corner” by Haymarket books. As today’s socialist forces reckon with a defeated and nonexistent workers’ movement, Mariategui’s united front remains as relevant as ever to rebuild our fighting forces.
Soviet May Day Poster
The United Front
May the First is a worldwide day of unity for the revolutionary proletariat, a date that gathers all the organised workers in an immense international united front. On this date, the words of Karl Marx resound, unanimously abided and obeyed: “Proletarians of all countries, unite!”. On this day, all the barriers that differentiate and separate the proletarian vanguard into several groups and several schools spontaneously fall. May 1st does not belong to a single International. It is the day of all Internationals. Today, socialists, communists, and libertarians of all shades mix and blur in a single army that marches towards the final struggle.
In short: this date is an affirmation and an instantiation that the proletarian united front is possible, that it is practicable, and that no present interest or requirement is opposed to its realization.
This international date invites many meditations. But for the Peruvian workers the most current, the most timely one is that which concerns the necessity and the possibility of the united front. Recently, there have been some sectionist attempts. It is thus urgent to understand each other, it is urgent to be concrete to prevent these attempts from prospering, preventing them from undermining and undercutting Peru’s nascent proletarian vanguard.
Since I joined this vanguard, my stance has always been that of a convinced patreon, that of a fervent propagandist of the united front. I remember declaring this at one of the opening conferences of my course on the history of the world crisis. I answered the first gestures of resistance and apprehension from some veteran and hieratic libertarians, who are more concerned with the rigidity of dogma than with the effectiveness and fecundity of action, I said then from the tribune of the People’s University: “We are still too few to divide ourselves. Let us not make an affair out of labels or titles.”
Subsequently, I have repeated these or other analogous words. And I will not get tired of repeating them. The class movement, among us, is still very incipient, very limited, for us to think about fractioning it and splitting it. Before the inevitable hour of division arrives, it falls unto us to perform plenty of common work, plenty of solidarity work. We have many long journeys to undertake together. It is up to us, for example, to awaken in the majority of the Peruvian proletariat class consciousness and class belonging. This task belongs equally to socialists and syndicalists, to communists and to libertarians. We all have a duty to sow the seeds of renewal and to spread class consciousness. We all have a duty to keep the proletariat away from the yellow unions and the false “institutions of representation”. We all have a duty to fight against reactionary attacks and repressions. We all have a duty to defend the proletarian tribune, the proletarian press, and the proletarian organization. We all have a duty to uphold the demands of the enslaved and oppressed indigenous race. And in the fulfillment of these historical duties, of these elementary duties, our paths will meet and join, whatever our ultimate goal is.
The united front does not cancel the personality, nor does it not void the affiliation of any of those who compose it. It does not mean the confusion or amalgamation of all doctrines into a single one. It is a contingent, concrete and practical action. The program of the united front considers exclusively the immediate reality outside of all abstractions and utopias. To preach the united front is not to preach ideological confusion. Within the united front each one must preserve his own affiliation and his own ideology. Each one must work for his own beliefs. But all must feel united by class solidarity, bound by the struggle against the common rival, bound by the same revolutionary will and by the same rejuvenating passion. To form a united front is to have a mindset of solidarity in the face of a concrete problem; in the face of an urgent need. It does not mean renouncing the doctrines that one serves, nor abandoning the position that one occupies in the vanguard. The diversity of tendencies and ideological nuances is inevitable in that immense human legion called the proletariat. The existence of defined and precise tendencies and groups is not an evil. On the contrary, it is the sign of an advanced period of the revolutionary process. What matters is that these groups and tendencies know how to understand themselves when facing the concrete reality of the day. Let them not be Byzantinely sterilized in reciprocal exconfessions and ex-communications. Do not drive the masses away from the revolution with the spectacle of dogmatic quarrels between their preachers. Do not use your weapons nor waste your time in hurting each other, but use them in combating the social order, its institutions, its injustices, and its crimes.
Let us warmly reach out to feel the historical bond that unites us to all the men of the vanguard and to all the patrons of renewal. The examples that come to us daily from outside are uncountable and magnificent. The most recent and poignant of these is that of Germaine Berthon. Germaine Berthon, an anarchist, accurately fired her revolver at an organizer and operator of White terror, thus avenging the murder of the socialist Jean Jaurés. The noble, heightened and sincere spirits of the revolution perceive and respect the historical solidarity of her efforts and her works. The privilege of sectarian incomprehension and egotism belong to the petty spirits, who lack horizons and wings, and the dogmatic mentalities, which desire to petrify and immobilize life inside of a rigid formula.
Among us the proletarian united front is fortunately a choice and an evident longing of the proletariat. The masses call for unity. The masses demand faith. And that is why their soul rejects the corrosive, disintegrating and pessimistic voice of those who renege and of those who doubt, and instead seeks the optimistic, warm, youthful and fruitful voice of those who assert and of those who believe.
Renato Flores argues for self-determination and reparations for Black Americans as a key part of the revolutionary struggle in the USA.
I
The uniqueness of the Black condition in the United States is hard to understand for anyone foreign to the Americas. Its complexity is often lost in semantic distinctions on whether Black Americans are a Nation or not. A typical first avenue to assess Nationhood is to mechanistically apply Stalin’s checklist: “common language, territory, economic life, and psychological make-up manifested in a common culture.”1When this is applied to the Black nation, the obvious question becomes: where is the territory?
A dismissive answer would be to say that there is no land because population migration has rendered the Black Belt thesis obsolete. This answer is not only insufficient, but it is also hardly new: it has been leveled at the Black liberation movement since its inception in different shapes. Harry Haywood, the CPUSA’s leading theoretician on the Black Nation repeatedly answered this critique in the decades between the 20s to the 60s.2 As he presciently pointed out, migratory fluxes and the passage of time had done nothing to integrate black people. Looking from the era of Trump and mass incarceration, it is clear that this point still holds: Black oppression morphs in shape, but it never disappears.
An alternative answer is the Black Belt still exists in the shape of the 60-70 counties that still have a Black population of over 50% and their surroundings. This answer is poisoned, not only because there is a limited geographical continuity between these counties, especially those outside the Mississippi basin and the plantation belt in the South, but because it implicitly accepts the settler division of this continent. It also doesn’t outline how land claims from the Black Nation are compatible with Indigenous claims. Even worse, mere accounting of people could very well be leveraged against American Indian struggles to deny their validity when they occur in territory where settlers are the majority.
Furthermore, even if one accepts that the Black Nation has its territory in the Southern states, it is hard to outline a path to self-determination while this land is held by an intensely racist ruling class. This is barely a new objection: Cyril Briggs, who pioneered the idea of a Black Nation on North American land chose the far West for his Nation to avoid this problem. The boundaries of the Black Nation were never clearly outlined by Haywood and the CPUSA, knowing that even if a black nation-state was formed, it could end up landlocked by Jim Crow states and isolated. The CPUSA insisted on the black belt hypothesis despite its impracticality because it was necessary to check off land in Stalin’s checklist. The right to a separate state requires land, which complicated self-determination. To remain faithful to the Black Belt thesis required spending significant time addressing geographical questions.
The answer to this antinomy is to move past land. One cannot fully grasp the concept of a nation materially: the persistence of Black nationalism despite internal migration means that the “idea” of a Nation is more resilient than land. Benedict Anderson defines a nation as a socially constructed community, imagined by the people who perceive themselves to be part of the group. In this sense, it is hard to deny that Blacks in the United States constitute themselves as an “imagined community”. Slogans of “buy black” or “black capitalism”, as well as black separatist groups such as the Nation of Islam are very alive today, and they speak more to the Black masses than socialists do. Those who see in them petit-bourgeois deviations are behaving like their counterparts a hundred years ago, which were hit by the realities of Marcus Garvey’s “Back to Africa” mass-movement. Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association was able to temporally attract over a million black people while communists struggled to recruit blacks at all. By looking at its aftermath, Harry Haywood acknowledged the mistakes of the communist movement and formulated the first comprehensive call for self-determination in the Black Belt.3
So what can we say about the Black nation today? And what is the minimum socialist program for Black self-determination? To begin to understand this, we must remember two things. First, that the United States was founded on (white) race solidarity, and by default excluded black self-determination. Second, that the debt of “forty acres and a mule” remains unpaid, causing a wide economic disparity between Black wealth and White wealth. Both of these problems are discussed today, but never together. Trying to answer one at a time is insufficient; we need both economic and racial justice or will end up getting neither.
II
Anti-blackness is embedded in the DNA of the United States. The exclusion of black people from the community of whiteness offers fertile ground for a Black “imagined community”. Unlike layers of Asians and Latinos, Blacks will never have the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness in the United States. That would render the whole category of whiteness obsolete. Racial solidarity, the main stabilizer of class struggle, would disappear. The persistence of whiteness explains the persistence of Black nationalism.
The way race is constructed in the United States has few parallels, but they exist. In Traces of History, Patrick Wolfe elaborates on the founding of the United States, drawing similarities between the use of antisemitism to forge nations in Europe in the early 1900s, and the use of anti-blackness to forge race solidarity in the US. The question of European Jewry was tragically resolved through the horrors of the Shoah and the ethnic cleansing of Palestine to establish the ethnostate of Israel. Following Wolfe, we can look at the debates around the Jews in the 1900s to find ways to answer the Black question.
In the early 1900s, the largest Jewish socialist organization was the Bund, located in Eastern Europe and comprising tens of thousands of Jewish workers willing to fight for their liberation.4 The Bund called for Jewish self-determination, but in a different shape from that associated with the Bolsheviks. Its prime theorist, Vladimir Medem, drew inspiration from the Austromarxist school of Karl Renner and Otto Bauer. Medem demanded Jewish “national and cultural” autonomy, with separate schools to preserve Jewish culture. His brand of nationalism was of “national neutrality”, and opposed both preventing and stimulating assimilation. He just refused to make any predictions on the future of Jews.
Otto Bauer’s writings on the national question and self-determination are more remembered today by Lenin’s polemics than on their own right. Lenin was correct to criticize Bauer for denying territorial self-determination to nations within the Austro-Hungarian empire, and restricting them to “national cultural autonomy”. But by throwing away the baby with the bathwater, a different definition of self-determination and approach to nationhood was damned to obscurity. Bauer’s historicist definition of a nation as “a community with a common history and a common destiny” remains underappreciated in the Marxist tradition, even if it has influenced people like Benedict Anderson.5 Medem drew from the Austromarxist school even if Bauer denied nationhood to the Jews on the grounds that they lacked a common destiny. By limiting his look to the Western European Jews, Bauer failed to see the power of his approach where it was adopted.
The Bolsheviks also failed to capture the intricacies of the Jewish nation. Lenin framed the Jews as something more akin to a caste than a nation. Stalin dedicated an entire chapter of his National Question to polemicize against the Bund and the Jewish nation. By contrasting the cultural autonomy demands of the Bund to the struggles of Poles and Finnish for territorial self-determination, Stalin found the Bund’s demands as insufficient under Tsarist authoritarianism and superfluous under democracy. He also claimed that Jews were not a nation because “there is no large and stable stratum connected with the land, which would naturally rivet the nation together, serving not only as its framework but also as a ‘national market.” Both Lenin and Stalin saw assimilation as the only solution and shut the doors on Medem’s middle way. This meant that even if the Bund started its history closer to the Bolsheviks, they were eventually repelled towards the Mensheviks who accepted their nationalist vision.
In the aftermath of the October Revolution, the Bund would undergo several splits and realignments. Their program for Jewish self-determination never saw full and consistent implementation. In a cruel irony, both Bolsheviks and Austromarxists were proven wrong by the Jewish version of Garvey’s return to Africa: Zionism. The return to a mythical Jewish land was able to take hold among sections of Eastern European Jews, showing that they were never fully integrated. Zionism not only matched the mass appeal of Garvey, the support of Western imperialism made it achievable. When confronted with this serious ideological rival, the Bolsheviks realized their mistake and attempted to provide a “Jewish autonomous oblast,” giving a land basis to Jewish self-determination within the USSR. But that was a large failure: at its peak, only fifty thousand Jews moved to the oblast in Eastern Siberia. When offered second-rate Zionism, why not choose the original?
III
If we read Stalin’s original criticism of the Bund, we can find many parallels to present critiques of Black nationalism. Applying his rigid framework to black people can lead us to the absurd conclusion that the Black nation, and the impossibility of racial integration in the United States, is contingent on the continued existence of a small number of sharecroppers connected to the land. Haywood was too faithful to his party to abandon the narrow confines of Stalin’s definition of nation and adopt a different one. Thus, he was forced to repeatedly argue for the persistence of sharecropping rather than abandon the Black nation. His opponents never abandoned the same framework, and the real debate became obscured by the interpretation of geographical statistics.
We must recognize that this is an absurd either-or. We can try to rescue the idea of “national personal autonomy” as a way of granting self-determination when the land basis is not sufficiently solid, and using it as a way to “organize nations not in territorial bodies but in simple association of persons”. This provides a working program for Black self-determination which avoids the question of the land. Indeed, self-determination means nothing without the right to separate, and the right to organize blacks separately has been demanded by many revolutionaries throughout history. This includes someone like Martin Luther King, who said that “separation may serve as a temporary way-station to the ultimate goal of integration” because integration now meant that black people were integrated without power.6
Socialists should not be afraid of this: Black Nationalist associations such as the Black Panther Party or the League of Revolutionary Black Workers have been amongst the most revolutionary forces of the United States. A reason they were so successful was their ability to organize separately in their initial stages, and reach out to other movements on their own terms. But it is essential to remember that separation is being demanded by those communities, and not enforced. Separation can very well be used to enforce racial injustice as shown by the use of “separate but equal” schools.7
However, self-determination alone does not address the wealth disparity between races. Experiments in black self-determination like those being conducted by the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement in Jackson, Mississippi are bound to fail due to economic constraints. Black communities lack the wealth necessary to jump-start their own structures. This is the second pillar that holds up the existence of the Negro nation: the debt owed from the legacy of slavery. When the shadow of the plantation enters, the analogy between Blacks and European Jews breaks down, and the question of reparations becomes central.
IV
The most honest case against reparations is that of Adolph Reed.8 Reed never denies that the legacy of slavery has caused Black people to be at a significant economic disadvantage. However, he denies that the demand for reparations has progressive potential, and attributes it to petit-bourgeois nationalism (sound familiar?), where the middle classes attempt to rebuild a destroyed black psyche through back-room deals, in place of mass organizing.
Reed fails to see the potential for reparations to actually coalesce in a mass revolutionary movement. But fighting white supremacy need not begin from a revolutionary point. The original demands of the Montgomery bus boycott of the 60s were as mild as first-come, first-served seating, and did not even ask for desegregated buses. But anti-racism becomes a genuinely revolutionary movement by necessity if it is to reach its endpoint. We only have to observe MLK’s slow transformation to anti-capitalism. Every revolutionary movement in the history of this country has been led by black people and anti-racist organizing, be it the Reconstruction period after the Civil War, the strikes leading to the formation of the AFL-CIO, the second Reconstruction of Civil Rights or the Black Panther Party. History tells us that any path to a radical transformation of this country must go through anti-racist, anti-imperialist organizing or it is bound to stop halfway before reaching its goals.
Contrast reparations with Medicare for all. Medicare for all has the potential to immediately transform the lives of millions of people for the better. But Medicare for all does not fundamentally challenge capitalism. Sanders regularly points to Western Europe and other “industrialized” countries as examples that universal healthcare is possible (Cuba is a notable example he never mentions). As he accidentally shows, it is a demand that is perfectly possible to accommodate within the realms of capitalist societies. Settler-colonial states such as Canada and Australia provide universal access to healthcare for the “community of the free”. These countries are no less settler-colonial if they provide their settler-citizens with healthcare. The dispossession of indigenous people continues unabated, and Australia’s notoriously racist immigrant policy still holds. If this isn’t the definition of trade-unionist, economist demands then what is?
Decommodification of essential commodities is just ordinary Keynesianism: a way for capitalism to manage the inherent contradiction between laissez-faire economics and the existence of the hopelesspoor.9 As Keynes and other economists faced down the Great Depression, the consensus became that state would mitigate the worst excesses of capitalism to save “the thin crust of civilization”. They would create poverty with dignity, incorporating the rabble into civil society by using government programs to provide them with their basic needs. The programs of the New Deal, and the creation of the post-war European welfare system are surely the largest bribes ever given to the working class, with the bill paid by the Global South. Guillotines were avoided, Keynesianism stabilized capitalism for over three decades. The proto-revolutionary proletarian rabble was turned into the social-democratic industrialized “middle” class, one that had gained an interest in preserving the system.
In 2019, neoliberalism has recreated on a massive scale the figure of the hopeless poor. Bernie and other progressives face the Long Recession with measures like Medicare for all and $15/hour minimum wage. “Democratic socialism” is the new word, twisted and redefined to mean anything. While this term means many different things for many people, the underlying ideal for Sanders is a system where we can manage the contradictions of capitalism and give it a human face through state intervention. Sanders tries to attract Trump voters by making class-based demands around which to unite the “99%”. Many socialists are trying to take advantage of Sanders’ cross-party appeal to revitalize the forces of revolutionary socialism. But as Lenin recognized, workers will not simply become revolutionaries by fighting for economist demands. Focusing on Medicare for All fails to outline a vision for a new society, and winning it could mean instead that sections of workers become disinterested in further challenging the system. The post-war era shows the limit of economist demands. Social-democratic Sweden went as far as the Meidner plan, a vision to turn the means of production into workers’ control. The Meidner plan failed, and business began its counteroffensive. Workers were too invested in the system to significantly challenge this failure, and as of today, capital has slowly chipped away at many of the historical gains of Swedish social-democracy. As Lenin stated in Left-Wing Communism, revolutions can only triumph “when the “lower classes” do not want to live in the old way”.10 In this case, the “old way” was good enough, and workers did not fight to move from “social democracy” to “democratic socialism”.
In a country like the United States, revolutionaries must fundamentally look to challenge the political structure and form a broader vision of how the system should look. Sanders’ race-agnostic politics do nothing to address domestic white supremacy or the pillaging of the Global South. Sanders is right in that universalist policies such as a $15/hour minimum wage will primarily help people of color. But this does not do anything to change systemic discrimination. We have enough evidence to show that remedies in policing do not address the institutionalized white supremacy of law enforcement. Medicare for All might transform the way white supremacy is enforced in the healthcare system, but it is naive to think that it will eliminate it.
Centering race-blind social-democratic projects as a model is not enough. The Swedish social-democratic project was based around a relatively homogeneous “community of the free”. Today it shows deep cracks due to its inability to deal with the cultural and racial diversity immigration has brought in. Universal politics assume that all subjects conform to the same standards, and believe in the same project. With the racial diversity of the US, any universalist race-blind project is doomed if it does not explicitly address the faultlines of the working class. The most marginalized sections will simply not trust economist projects to include them. There is over a century of failures to attest to this, from the failure of Eugene Debs’ Socialist Party to significantly attract black members to Sanders’ inability in 2016 to compete in the Southern states. And even if we do win universalist demands, the cracks will show up later and will be used to reverse any gains. We just have to remember how Reagan leveraged the “welfare queen” that had an explicitly racist subtext.
V
Instead of a form of subjugation that can be remedied by economic means alone, we have to recognize the political character of white supremacy. The issue of slavery is at the forefront of this election cycle. A Trump presidency is the elephant in the room: the Obama presidency did not mean that we are post-racial. The 1619 project is actively shaping how people think of the United States, tying the foundation of this country to the first shipment of slaves. Led by the New York Times, it is receiving attention from the highest spheres. Some type of cosmetic reparations will feature in a 2020 Democratic platform as an attempt to attract back the black voters the Democrats desperately need. Several candidates, the most notable of which was Marianne Williamson, have proposed comprehensive platforms on the debate floor.
An electoral platform centered around destroying whiteness through indigenous justice and reparations is of paramount importance for socialists today. Some plans are simply not worthy of the name of reparations. Black self-determination plays a key role in this platform to both decide what reparations actually mean, and what to do with the money. Tax credits do nothing to address collective injustice, while the US government coming in to repair infrastructure in majority-Black neighborhoods does not address Black self-determination.
As socialists, we should never oppose reparations, as that would mean isolating us from the Black masses. We have to remember how the Bolshevik’s refusal to address the Bundist concerns led them to the hands of the Mensheviks. A debt of forty acres and a mule is owed, and this is the whole material heart of the Black national question. We should center that it is essential for Black people to decide on what reparations mean. We should not be afraid of not having a seat at that table, because that either means that we do not have enough Black members in our parties, or that our members are not fighting for proletarian hegemony within the Black movement. A council for deciding how and where to apply reparations can be a seed to building alternative power if wielded correctly.
Reparations are not an end-goal but we can use them today to ground the fight for black self-determination and to struggle against whiteness. Ultimately, any non-reformist reform cannot remedy the US’s flaws of racism. This assumes that atonement can be reached within the confines of the current nation-state. The United States’ sins are not a choice it can reverse, they are deeply embedded in the DNA of this country. The platform to cure the character mistakes of the United States can only be fulfilled by the dismantling of the settler-colonial white supremacist structure. Even a comprehensive platform for reparations in its present state is not viable in the current political climate. The same way that “Black Lives Matter” caused a proto-fascist antithesis in the shape of “Blue Lives Matter”, a reparations movement should expect to be attacked both rhetorically and physically.
Even the most flawed reparations platform recognizes the issues of white supremacy as central to the United States and transcends economism in a way Sanders is not able to. While Sanders just wants to make an American Sweden, our movement must go much further. We need a vision for a better world, beyond wonkiness and towards a greater inspiration if we are ever to escape the confines of capitalism. Even if the first and second Reconstructions were unfinished revolutions, they changed society much more profoundly than the New Deal ever did by destroying slavery and Jim Crow.
At the same time, these anti-racist revolutions unleashed collectivized hatred in intense ways that contributed to their later failures. Fascism is capitalism in decay, and reactionary elements are inevitable in any pre-revolutionary situation. Socialists need a comprehensive economic program to pacify white reaction by offering to pay better than the wages of whiteness. Revolutions based on rural or marginalized people can succeed, like Cuba, fall short like Nepal, or fail completely like Peru, depending on their ability to attract the urban wavering classes. Ultimately, any successful socialist program in the United States must incorporate both racial and economic justice. In the first case, to center it politically, in a Leninist manner. In the second, to provide an incentive for the wavering classes to follow.
