Struggle for a New World

Nontraditional Unionism (part 1)

by Kurt Marlin

The communist movement in the United States faces no shortage of problems, but in recent years the most glaring is a lack of vision. Many left tendencies have big dreams and no qualms articulating them, but then engage in practices wildly insufficient to the world-historic tasks they claim to work toward. The theoretical connection between houseless mutual aid or tenant organizing and the mythical “revolution” or “general strike” is often no more substantive than the link between dream and waking. We cough up short term plans when we need to, for a particular campaign or movement, but long or even medium term plans resemble the get rich quick schemes we shun more than a coherent, practicable strategy that can be carried out to advance the struggle for liberation.

Many communists see this deficiency but, in a classic error of sectarianism, they too often respond with broad criticisms of the tactics or practices being employed rather than concrete criticisms of ways to do it better. Some of these so-called communists stand aloof and criticize mutual aid as “red charity” that will never lead to working class power, which fortunately shields them from ever organizing an event that puts them at risk of speaking to a worker. Others offer up the same criticisms while dutifully doing the work they criticize as not “revolutionary” enough or saying it can only be done by joining their “vanguard” with its very real authentic mass base. This leaves the masses unlucky enough to be in contact with them with the impression that communists are nothing but scolds and haters. At least the anarchists have a utopian dream; all the communists do is whine about how it’ll never work.

If any of these vanguards do truly have a road map for their political practice, they don’t do much to share it beyond the confines of their own group. Some of these are small and local enough that the apparent lack of strategy can almost be excused, but others are big enough that they must either be hiding their strategy’s deficiencies from criticism or, worse, have none, moving forward with whatever they have been doing without attempting to educate their members on the importance of understanding the struggle in its totality and working consciously toward a real goal along a solid path. This latter issue is certainly the problem for smaller formations. The general rule for this kind of organizing has been:

To work half-heartedly without a definite plan or direction; to work perfunctorily and muddle along–“So long as one remains a monk, one goes on tolling the bell.” This is a ninth type.
Mao Tse-Tung, Combat Liberalism

We speak here from a position of guilt: much of our own practical work has involved this vague sort of popular but uncritical mutual aid, or aimlessly pushing forward community organizing projects similar to what we see in other places but largely disconnected from them. We have struggled to “do the work” and we have struggled to promote an anti-revisionist communist theoretical line, but rarely do we manage to combine the two. Far easier, more comfortable, to muddle along, than to truly stare the behemoth of capital in the face and dare to struggle and defeat it, to formulate a clear, concrete, present day plan for victory and subject it to the ordeal of scientific testing in the laboratory of social practice.

Enough! We have seen a million calls for unity with no substance, for action with no thought, and a million more criticisms of the same. Developing a long term strategy for the final victory over global capitalism-imperialism requires a revolutionary vanguard party, a real one and not a cliquish pretender to the name, but we will not develop this vanguard via short term activist campaigns and endless coalitions. Only by concretely organizing among the masses with a clear, successful and articulated strategy for the medium term will we achieve this goal.

Fascism in the Contemporary US: Definition and Action

For the past four years, ever since the rise of Trump, political analysis and popular discourse in the United States has been consumed with the question of fascism. Is Trump a fascist? Is the US becoming a fascist state? Has it always been a fascist state? How do we fight fascism? What does fascism even mean? These burning questions, which have been hotly debated everywhere from the most Marxist to the most liberal circles, deserve critical discussion. What follows is our small contribution to this vital debate.

What is fascism?

The original rise of fascism in the inter-war period, first with Mussolini’s movement in Italy and later most notably with Nazism in Germany, prompted a series of debates among the radical left as the socialist and workers’ movements tried to define and contend with this new enemy. The Communist International (Comintern) played a leading role in this debate. The German communist Clara Zetkin and Bulgarian communist Georgi Dimitrov put forward two separate but interlocking analyses, which we take as our starting point.

Juneteenth and the Ongoing Rebellion

As the George Floyd/#BlackLivesMatter protests show no signs of slowing since late May, we have just observed Juneteenth, the national holiday of the Afro-American people celebrating the news of their legal emancipation from chattel slavery. The significance of this day, in light of their ongoing oppression in all parts of the US, and the historic betrayal of the Union of the people they ostensibly fought to liberate in the South in particular, can hardly be overstated.

Generally, Juneteenth is overwhelmingly celebrated by Afro-Americans, and is largely unknown by the rest of the US. Any official acknowledgement of the day has generally been confined to Texas, which is where it originated. However, in light of recent events, Juneteenth 2020 was commemorated on a massive scale. Thousands upon thousands marched from coast to coast, union dockworkers organized by the left-wing ILWU shut down every port on the West Coast, and a bill to make Juneteenth a countrywide holiday was introduced in the Senate. In this we see the tension between the powers that be and the insurgent masses. While our rulers are forced to acknowledge Juneteenth and try to turn it around and co-op it into a whitewashed summer version of MLK Day (a day for fine speeches and mattress sales), the masses tore down Confederate statues in the heart of the South and shut down a vital point of the global economy. Once again, the gap between their boardrooms and legislative chambers and our streets and communities has been shown. They attempt to pacify, but find themselves outpaced by events. We must not let them close this gap. We must continue to push the struggle forward.

Our people in New York, North Carolina, and Massachusetts have been out among the masses shouting for justice for Afro-American people in the face of police violence, the continuation of historic slave patrols. Since the initial #BlackLivesMatter protests in 2013, however, there has been a quantitative and qualitative increase in the prominence and political capital of these protests. Accordingly, now is the time to begin to speak about the implications for revolutionary organization in this country.

Statement on the Lynching of George Floyd and the Minneapolis Uprising

Struggle for a New World strongly condemns the brutal and inhumane police murder of George Floyd, committed by Officer Derek Chauvin, with the aid of other officers of the Minneapolis Police Department, on May 25, 2020. This on-camera murder of an Afro-American man, already handcuffed and on the ground, is only the latest in a long line of legal lynchings. We salute the ongoing popular resistance and community self-defense actions being carried out by the Afro-American people of Minneapolis and their allies. On May 26, thousands defied the restrictions of the coronavirus to peacefully protest George Floyd’s murder, only for the MPD to attempt to viciously repress them. These heroic protesters resisted the attacks of the police. This protest and resistance has continued now into the following days, and will not stop until police murders stop. While the bourgeois media engages in “both-sides” rhetoric and condemns “violent riots” and “looting” in the same breath as they cry crocodile tears over George Floyd, we recognize the legitimacy of resisting, in the words of Malcolm X, “by any means necessary” the attacks and repression of white-supremacist US imperialism, in this instance represented by the MPD.

Let us be clear: it is right to rebel. It is right for the people to storm a police station, as just happened on the night of the 28th. The police are an occupying army who must be kicked out of every Black community, every working class community, every community of the oppressed and exploited. It is right to storm the Targets and ever other store, to seize the capitalist institutions that suck the money out of us and give nothing but starvation wages (with wage theft) in return. Which side are on? Are you on the side of the people, or the pigs? There is no middle path.

Statement for International Workers’ Day 2020

Struggle for a New World sends revolutionary greetings to the working and oppressed peoples of the world on May 1st, 2020, the first International Workers’ Day of this decade.

We observe the holiday of the working class in unique conditions. For many of us, particularly in the US but also across the world, we will spend today inside our homes due to COVID-19. The big rallies and marches that have traditionally marked this day are on hold, as we all try to weather the pandemic and capitalism’s COVID crisis. Yet, today is still “the day we raise our voices loudest in our struggle against capitalism, imperialism, and fascism, and for socialism, peace, and democracy.” The class war has not been put on hold by the pandemic, but exacerbated by it.

With this in mind, we greet our comrades in every corner of the world: this year and decade have been rung in by US imperialism’s threat of imperialist war against Iran, and the burning fires which sweep across our society’s southern hemisphere twin: Australia. These are but two fitting reminders of capitalism’s threat of world-destroying war and climate crisis. And now we face this pandemic, which has impacted every corner of the world, a fitting reminder of our interconnectedness.

COVID-19 and Capitalism

Right now, the spread of the coronavirus (COVID-19) in the US and UK are more rapid than in any other country, despite a clear head start in China, Iran, and Italy.

This is due to the flagrant mismanagement by the Trump and Johnson governments, each of them tied to the most extreme of “market freedom” economic ideologies, which as we can see in practice, means more profits at the cost of human needs.

Feminism and Nationalism

In the wake of the fall of the Soviet Union, most of the remaining “socialist states” have been those which came into being through the explicit form of a national liberation struggle: Cuba, Laos, Vietnam, China, and Korea, all are united by the fact that a (at the time) Marxist-Leninist party led a popular front to victory against the forces of imperialism and fascism, and continue to stand as the de facto engineers of “socialist statehood”. Because of this, many people, particularly young people without any particular theoretical training, over-identify with national liberation as the defining feature of Marxism-Leninism.

From the other side, there are those, particularly left communists and Trotskyites, who accuse our entire ideology of being nothing more than a series of nationalist commitments. If one defends the national rights of the Kurdish people, one has fallen victim to “Kurdish nationalism”. In the United States, those who continue to uphold Afro-American liberation are accused of being nothing more than “Black nationalists”. The most troubling form of this comes, not from armchair critics of “nationalism” who would never say anything that could be accused of some sort of “nationalism”, but from members of the aforementioned first group, who imagine their perspective to be broadly “anti-imperialist”, but in fact use their own, unacknowledged, uninvestigated, uncriticized nationalism to attack the basic demands for rights by other nations.

In other words, the crux of our problem, as I have stated before, is how to distinguish between being a “nationalist” for oppressed peoples and simply defending oppressed nationalities.

This distinction is important, as the nationalist places at the centre of their world a nation, ignoring its internal contradictions, an error we must be very careful not to fall into. Although I am often accused of ignoring, for example, class contradictions among nations whose bourgeoisies are not hegemonic within a given state, I do consider this quite frequently, it’s simply that, in many contexts, a more powerful nation’s bourgeoisie has forced some sections of certain nation’s bourgeoisies into a progressive historical position, however temporarily.

So, given that I have spoken about this before, and noting the title at the top, the reader may wonder: what does this have to do with feminism?

On the “Deal of the Century” and the Oslo Accords

On Tuesday, January 28th, the United States announced its latest “peace plan” for the Palestinian people in a characteristic display of arrogant imperialist hubris. Like all such “peace plans” put forth by the US, the plan offered no meaningful concessions from the Israeli side. Yet the Trump administration, in typical shady salesman style, has pushed it as “the Deal of the Century”, even having the chutzpah to mock and insult the entire Palestinian people prior to their even having a chance to reject this latest non-solution.

All of this in spite of the fact that the entire conflict is the result of the Zionist state being built via settler-colonial violence against the Indigenous Palestinian population, and in spite of the fact that an apartheid state of affairs persists on their land to this day. The Palestinian people are expected to jump with joy every time the head imperialist power “offers” them “peace” in the form of total surrender to Zionist colonization, and of course are vilified for any resistance, including non-violent resistance which they are not obligated to restrain themselves to.

Where Does the Revolutionary Party Stand on the State?

In writing this piece, I’m acutely aware of my own identity as a Marxist, which starts with the assumption that to be a Marxist is to be one of the most ruthless theoretical and practical critics of “the state”, and to conceive of “the state” as an enemy which can only be defeated by revolution. In fact, in the United States, which is the focus of the website on which I’m publishing, a great number of purported “Marxists” insist that they desire no such revolutionary overturn at all. Many even mock anarchists for using just such words as the ones I chose above.

This reality, to the sincere Marxist, is evidence of the widespread nature of “revisionism” of the essential claims of Marxism, by which Marxism is distanced from revolution and transformed into a “proper” statist ideology, like social democracy.

But confusing matters when we make this claim, is the fact that since the lifetime of Marx itself, anarchist opponents took issue with Marx’s analysis of the historical emergence and likely future of the state as entity. When Marxism in practice led to the formation of new state entities and these entities could convincingly be accused of repression, ultimately even of the interests they claimed to represent (namely, a revolution which would liberate humanity from exploitation and oppression), the anarchists felt themselves vindicated that our ideology effectively produces the same results as the status quo and is accordingly not worth considering as a revolutionary alternative.

This reality, of the historical and contemporary debate between anarchists and Marxists on “the state” in the abstract and the Soviet Union (at least in its early history) in the concrete, is evidence that Marxists are indeed demarcated from anarchists on theoretical grounds that include our conception of the state.

This piece will take up this contradiction and attempt an explanation of how our sincere difference with the anarchists was transformed into a lack of difference with social democracy. The point of this, of course, is not merely to weep about a past revolution, but to rearm ourselves and reaffirm our commitment to new revolutions which will, we hope, succeed in remaking the world sufficiently to pass beyond the state. I will rearticulate the basic Marxist understanding of revolution and the state (drawing heavily on Lenin’s “the State and Revolution”), and in this context, critique our 20th century history’s approach to both: it is my claim that there are concrete limitations when state and revolution have to continue in parallel, limitations that the party was ill-prepared for, and the inevitable result was the retreat of the Soviet Union’s revolutionary commitments, and the failure even of the “anti-revisionist” trend in Albania and China.

Hands Off Iran! US Imperialism Out Of Iraq!

We condemn the U.S. assassination of General Qasem Soleimani and PMU commander Abu Mehdi al Muhendis in Baghdad. The targeting of senior military officials in this way is a clear violation of Iraqi sovereignty and a brazen act of war against Iran. As the United States approaches an election year, Trump is using this act of aggression to consolidate his support— just as Bill Clinton bombed Iraq during his impeachment, and George Bush launched wars in Iraq and Afghanistan after losing the popular vote in the 2000 election.

We cannot understand this escalation without understanding how the people of both Iraq and Iran have suffered violence, repression, and economic deprivation for decades because of U.S. attacks and intervention. From overthrowing an elected Iranian government and installing a monarchy in order to maintain Western economic interests in the country and arming Saddam Hussein and defending his atrocities throughout the Iran-Iraq war, to the years of devastating sanctions imposed on both countries, to the invasion and occupation of Iraq, U.S. actions have already lead to the deaths and suffering of millions. A new war in both countries would devastate the lives of millions more, at a time when people are still rebuilding from the aftermath of previous conflicts, and while popular movements in both countries face repression for making demands of their own governments.

Within the United States, war with Iran will lead to greater surveillance and criminalization of already-targeted Muslim and immigrant communities, just as previous wars in the region have. Police in large American cities including Los Angeles and Boston have already issued threats, asking people to report supposed ‘suspicious activity.’

It is our responsibility to stand with the working and oppressed people of Iraq and Iran, oppose any attempts to start a new war, and support an end to U.S. military involvement in the region.