On Friday, July 12, thousands of people participated in over 750 events around the country (and around the world) to protest the racist, inhumane, and fascistic US border regime, specifically the policies of the Trump administration. Two such events, in Raleigh, NC and Washington, DC were attended by Struggle for a New World writers.
Continue reading “Lights for Liberty – Raleigh, NC and Washington, DC”Juneteenth 2019 Statement
On this Juneteenth, the holiday that celebrates the end of American chattel slavery, Struggle for a New World stands with the oppressed Afro-American nation in their continued struggle for freedom. The US Empire was built using the stolen labor of African slaves, and to this day the foundations of this country rest on the backs of the oppressed Afro-American nation formed through the processes of slavery and Reconstruction. Following the failure of reconstruction, the Republican Party abandoned its radical left wing in favor of defending US imperialism against all oppressed peoples who stood in their way.
Thus, while the Republican Party and the US Empire of which it is part may hypocritically celebrate the Emancipation Proclamation, Juneteenth stands for the history from below of the Afro-American people, who still struggle for freedom from the powers that enslaved and continue to oppress them to this day. The national liberation struggle of the Afro-American people remains an unfinished revolution on the lands they have tilled, the Achilles Heel of US imperialism.
Continue reading “Juneteenth 2019 Statement”May Day 2019
Struggle for a New World greets the working and oppressed peoples of the world on May 1st, with whom we celebrate this International Workers’ Day. Today is the working class’s own holiday, a day that belongs to all the exploited and oppressed; today is the day we raise our voices loudest in our struggle against capitalism, imperialism, and fascism, and for socialism, peace, and democracy. From the U.S. to Uruguay, from the Philippines to Poland, from Italy to India, from South Africa to South Korea, from the Congo to Cuba, indeed, in every corner of the world, our class and our movement is celebrating and struggling. Greetings comrades!
Continue reading “May Day 2019”#FreeRonnieLong
On March 6th, 2019 a group of students and faculty from Winston-Salem State University, a local HBCU, as well as pastors and other community activists (including a writer from Struggle for a New World), traveled an hour and a half to the state capitol to protest the continued incarceration of Ronnie Long by the state of North Carolina. The recently elected Attorney General is the son of a longtime civil rights lawyer, and many people had hoped his election would lead to a long-overdue reevaluation of the Ronnie Long case. However, in a case coming up later this month, the state will argue against the introduction of new evidence that the defense believes will definitively prove his innocence.
In 1976, then 21-year-old Ronnie Long, an Afro-American man, was arrested and charged with raping the wealthy white widow of an executive at Cannon Mills, a textile company that had bought an old plantation to build its plant into what was still effectively a company town. The prosecution’s evidence was his identification by the victim based solely on a leather jacket, a footprint that “could” have matched his shoes and the testimony of the lead detective (who was later found to have lied under oath). The defense presented numerous alibis for his activities the night of the crime and pointed out inconsistencies in the scant physical evidence the prosecution provided. An all-white jury, four of whom either worked for Cannon Mills or had a spouse who did, deliberated for approximately half an hour and delivered a guilty verdict to a racially segregated courtroom, which nearly sparked a riot. Ronnie Long has spent the 43 years since in prison, maintaining his innocence, and after decades of legal effort and periods of street protests on his behalf, his lawyers have forced the state to slowly release forensic evidence that had been hidden from the defense during the initial trial. This new evidence, collected by the SBI, shows there were no DNA matches, no hair matches, no fingerprints – in a word, no physical evidence implicating Ronnie Long.
Continue reading “#FreeRonnieLong”International Working Women’s Day 2019 Statement
On this International Working Women’s Day, Struggle for a New World sends our greetings to all the militant women of the world in their struggle against patriarchy and gender oppression. This International Working Women’s Day comes in a time of fierce reactionary assaults on women’s rights and equally fierce, if not greater resistance and fight back on the part of women. While figures such as Donald Trump, Rodrigo Duterte, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and their counterparts spew misogynistic and sexist filth, the women of the US, the Philippines, Turkey, and the entirety of the world resist. In every country, working women continue their centuries long fight against oppression and for social justice.
Continue reading “International Working Women’s Day 2019 Statement”“Green New Deal” or Planned Green Economy?
by Güney Işıkara
The report by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released in September 2018, immediately followed by the UN COP24 climate change conference in December of the same year, immediately resulted in a flurry of discussion around the world, including within the United States. As the environmental crisis looms ever more as an existential crisis in the popular imagination, it is increasingly reflected in policy proposals. The “Green New Deal” proposed by the Green Party in the US has been taken up by the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), including some, such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who sit in prominent offices through the Democratic Party. The fact that corporate greenwashing, along with the propagation of a “green capitalism,” has been organized around the concept of sustainability should not drive the left. The main task is to frame the question in correct terms, putting our fingers on the systemic aspect of the crisis— namely capitalism as a totality.
However, this does not simply mean providing an abstract criticism of capitalism as responsible for the crisis, while standing aloof from the specifics of the environmental crisis. The initial consciousness of the system as the source of the crisis cannot be equated with the posing a concrete solution. On what grounds can Marxists analyze the environmental crisis, and what distinctive political prescriptions follow from this, that might differ from social-democratic reforms?
In this short piece, we will mainly focus on the deadlock which solution proposals that do not problematize the capitalist market mechanism find themselves in, and suggest the blueprints of a radical, socialist response that the crisis itself is calling for. Particularly taking up the question of growth vs. degrowth, we are aware that the piece leaves many important issues untouched.
Continue reading ““Green New Deal” or Planned Green Economy?”Against Bolsonaro, Against Trump
On January 24th, 2019, representatives of the Brazilian Socialism and Liberty Party (PSOL) joined the DSA at the Verso Books loft in New York City for an event titled “Against Bolsonaro, Against Trump.” One of Struggle for a New World’s writers was in the audience and wrote this report.
One DSA representative, the New York State Senator Julia Salazar, spoke first. The audience could not help but be struck by the shift in tone between the initial speech by Salazar and the women of the PSOL. Salazar spoke in relatively simple terms about how she represented people rather than profits, but defended the Democratic Party and even the Republicans as being “tolerant” of her because of the popularity of her positions. Scarcely a word was uttered about the dangerous direction the imperialist United States is heading as indicated (but by no means caused by) Trump. Indeed, all serious analysis of Trump was left to the analogies drawn by the Brazilians, displaying once again the backwardness of the more popular and politically capable elements of the US left relative to their equivalents in other countries.
Fernanda Melchionna spoke first and with the most explicit internationalist focus. Like Sâmia Bomfim, who spoke after her, she judged the Trump regime to be the result of failures of the socialist left to respond to the crisis and pose an alternative to the masses. Further, Melchionna emphasized that Clinton’s victory over Sanders likely strengthened Trump’s hand. Underlining that the struggle against capital in all its forms was international, so too must the movement against it be, she urged the US audience to draw a lesson from the rise of fascism in Brazil. Unfortunately, beyond insisting on a democratic and socialist politics distinct from the deal-making with which she characterized the PT’s pre-coup governance, she did not outline any meaningful strategy for how the PSOL would replace the PT as the leading left force in the eyes of the masses themselves, or what strategies outside of protesting fascism and running for office could actually be employed.
Sâmia Bomfim, who followed Melchionna, moved the discussion more towards the specifics of Brazilian life under Bolsonaro. Emphasizing, as did Melchionna, that corruption is endemic in Brazil even preceding PT rule, but that the PT weakened the stance of the socialist left by engaging in compromises with corrupt businesses and religious reactionaries who today work hand in glove with the Bolsonaro regime. In a striking note for the US audience, Bomfim condemned Bolsonaro’s push for gun control, stating that this would not lessen violence, since it would leave guns in the hands of the (heavily militarized) police and criminals. Beyond a Brazilian particularity, Bomfim emphasized that gun control had been shown, in its examples from other countries, to not work for the stated goal of decreasing gun violence.
Additionally, and recalling Melchionna’s argument that the Trump campaign had succeeded because of the failure of the Sanders campaign, Bomfim dwelled for some time on the point that those who voted for Bolsonaro, like those who voted for Trump, were likely overwhelmingly not any richer or more privileged for their candidate’s victory. Most of them voted for a fascist candidate out of desperation with the current state of the capitalist system in their lived experience, and are shocked to find that despite his anti-system rhetoric, Bolsonaro serves the same system in Brazil, with all its blood and corruption.
A political history was also invoked by Bomfim, as a cause for the descent of Brazil back into fascism. Bomfim emphasized that Brazil’s history includes slavery and military dictatorship, neither of which really reached a definite end, and thus were not actually overcome. The process of reemergence of the ugliest, unfinished business of Brazil’s history, Bomfim cautioned, could be seen in many other countries as well.
Finally Talíria Petrone, an Afro-Brazilian activist, took the microphone. Her impassioned speech, while seemingly the most particularly Brazilian at all, should resonate with US readers. Repeating that Brazil was the last country in the region to formally outlaw slavery, and that the relations of slavery inherited from Portuguese colonialism had not been overcome, she repeatedly called the audience’s attention to the fact that of the famous gun violence which wracks Brazil, of the murders and rapes of women and LGBT people which are the ugly reality Brazilians know from their news, the overwhelming majority take place in the favelas and other areas dominated by Afro-Brazilians. Of the Brazilian working class, it is the clear descendants of slaves who are still treated as slaves and subjected to slavery-esque exploitation and the violence that slaves were subjected to.
Petrone made the point that the majority of the Brazilian working class and people are women, and are black, and thus to stand up for black people and women is to stand up for the majority. The Afro-Brazilian poor and their neighborhoods are disproportionately the target of the violence of the militias and militarized police which Bolsonaro praises. The war on the impoverished and oppressed does not, however, merely target the urban majority, but also the Indigenous and their previously semi-protected land. Emphasizing that capitalism’s obsession with production for the profit motive meant the squandering of resources which are in a very real sense finite, Petrone warned that in addition to attacking these communities which Bolsonaro warns are not “integrated” into Brazilian society, the attack on Indigenous land for profits also threatens to make life unlivable for all Brazilians through environmental destruction, just as capitalist development on a global scale threatens the future of the planet.
Like all the speakers, Petrone emphasized the relative continuity between the years of military dictatorship and the current Bolsonaro regime. Their criticisms of the PT aside, they acknowledged that there was a period of relative democracy, but that the democracy did not really reach into the favelas, hence the ease of restoring police terror on the descendants of slaves, who never reaped the benefits of even the most “democratic” and “modern” periods of Brazil’s modernization. In a country where femicide is the fifth highest in the world, Petrone said, the victims overwhelmingly came from black neighborhoods and are coded as black. To them, the experience has been passing more or less directly from Portuguese colonialism under the banner of the Roman Catholic Church, to a neo-colonial existence sponsored by US imperialism, which imports arch-reactionary neo-pentacostal ideology to justify the violent “correction” of homosexuals (including the rape of lesbians), the murder of trans people, and the subjugation of women.
Surprisingly, given the current coup attempt in Venezuela, backed by Brazilian president Bolsonaro and US imperialism (including both the Democratic and Republican parties), it took a question during the question and answer period to even bring up what is assumed to have been on everyone’s mind: how did Brazil’s socialist left appraise events in Venezuela? Both Petrone and Melchionna answered the question, but Melchionna did so with a more specific appraisal of the PSUV and Venezuela: it was their view that Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution was right and correct under Chavez, but had “degenerated” under Maduro. Detail was not offered as to the source and form of this “degeneration”, but in spite of this, the PSOL representatives made clear that they completely opposed imperialist intervention to install yet another fascist leader in the Americas.
Other than their own word, quite left out of the discussion was the question of how, if they were to achieve more electoral support, the PSOL would avoid the compromises the PT made which are blamed for the latter’s downfall. However, the event was all in all a sober reminder of the pressing and universal need to organize all poor and oppressed against their marginalization, unite their struggles, and bring down forces of capital for whom fascism is an acceptable alternative to scaling back its rapacious development.
MLK Day Statement
On MLK Day, Struggle for a New World wishes to commemorate Martin Luther King, Jr.’s life and legacy. The Dr. King we commemorate today is not the sanitized King taught in bourgeois history books and celebrated by liberals as a man who wanted nothing more than nonviolence and integration. The King we commemorate is the militant struggler for the rights of the Afro-American people and all oppressed peoples, the fighter for justice for all of the oppressed and exploited.
Although he started his career as a civil rights leader as a heroic but ordinary representative of the Afro-American petty bourgeoisie within the Black Belt and pursued tactics and aims in consistency with this background, as the Afro-American masses moved from a nonviolent struggle for integration to a militant struggle for Black power, King advanced with them. In consistency with his pacifist beliefs, he opposed US imperialism’s bloody and genocidal war in Vietnam and condemned the US empire as “the greatest purveyor of violence on earth.” He denounced the ills of poverty at home and at the time of his death he was organizing a countrywide Poor People’s Campaign. Indeed, King was assassinated while he was in Memphis showing solidarity with an illegal strike of mostly Afro-American sanitation workers. He denounced the ills of capitalism and posed a growing threat to the stability of the US state. He even denounced the time US imperialism swindled the Afro-American people out of their 40 acres and a mule in the aftermath of the Civil War while giving out free, stolen land to white settlers in the West. And so, for all of this, he was assassinated on April 4, 1968, by a conspiracy of the US state.
Dr. King was assassinated for two reasons. The first was to rid the US state of a dangerous enemy, and the second was to get him out of the way so he could be transformed into the sanitized memory he is today, the peaceful sycophant brought out whenever necessary to attack those strugglers who continue in his footsteps. To quote Vladimir Lenin,
“During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes constantly hounded them, received their theories with the most savage malice, the most furious hatred and the most unscrupulous campaigns of lies and slander. After their death, attempts are made to convert them into harmless icons, to canonize them, so to say, and to hallow their names to a certain extent for the “consolation” of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping the latter, while at the same time robbing the revolutionary theory of its substance, blunting its revolutionary edge and vulgarizing it.” (The State and the Revolution, chapter 1).
This is the sort of treatment Dr. King has received and the sort of King that is celebrated in death in tweets from the FBI, the very same organization that in life tried to hound him into committing suicide and probably shot him. That is also the King whose memory we reject.
After Dr. King’s assassination, the Afro-American people rose up rebellion. Ghettoes across the US burned with the rage and the fury of the masses who sought revenge for his murder. They found their vengeance and are still finding it as they continue Dr. King’s struggle for Black freedom and freedom and justice for all oppressed peoples. It is to that struggle that we, on MLK day, commit to and the legacy we continue.
#FreeMaxZirngast!
On December 12th, 2018, some of Struggle for a New World’s writers attended a solidarity event in New York City for Max Zirngast. Max Zirngast is an Austrian journalist, political scientist, and socialist who has been studying and organizing in Turkey for several years. While there, he has been heavily involved in participating in and reporting on the struggle of the peoples of Turkey for democracy and human rights. At the event were two speakers from Turkey, as well as a US speaker, all of whom knew Max Zirngast personally from his work on and in Turkey, and from his outreach to socialists in other countries. In their respective talks, a consistent thread emerged: the fact that Max’s cases is not about an individual socialist, but about the much broader trends they represent.
Guney Isikara, a PhD in Economics at the New School, spoke at length about the process of Max Zirngast being taken into custody by anti-terror police and imprisoned in a maximum security prison, without even a shred of evidence implying anything that might reasonably be considered “terrorist activity” being produced.
Instead, this academic and journalist working on Turkish politics was questioned at length on why he owned so many books on Turkish politics. Finally, he was accused of membership in the TKP/KIVILCIM, an organization which a 2012 Turkish court case determined did not even exist. The real reason for his arrest was Max Zirngast’s personal political activism, entirely of a legal and peaceful nature, and his writings of political analysis, written together with Guney Isikara, for Jacobin Magazine.
Isikara emphasized that his Jacobin co-writer’s case was receiving more international solidarity and attention because of Zirngast’s national origins, but that the arbitrariness and clear political motivations behind the imprisonment were the same as with the many other political prisoners in Turkey, from the HDP co-chairs Selahattin Demirtas and Figen Yuksekdag, to other journalists such as Adil Demirci.
The next two speakers, from the CUNY Graduate Center, Yasemin Yilmaz and Daniel Barry, spoke about the broader historical context in Turkey and the world. Yasemin Yilmaz emphasized that while foreign observers might consider that a crisis in democratic legitimacy had emerged during the post-Gezi crackdowns in Turkey, that the regime of censorship and repression under Erdogan had existed from the first days of his attempts to consolidate power, and indeed had roots stretching back decades through the many coups in Turkish history. Daniel Barry emphasized the importance of international solidarity due to the interconnectedness of the ruling classes and their victims in the capitalist world system. He noted that while an Austrian political prisoner in a Turkish prison might seem a foreign cause to many US readers, that current trends in the US and around the world mean that anyone who takes a similar principled stance against the system could one day soon be a victim of such repression, and the importance of unity and solidarity against this.
Struggle for a New World’s writers were glad to attend this event and learn more about Max Zirngast’s case, and to stand in solidarity with a socialist political prisoner. We demand his immediate release from his imprisonment by the Turkish state, and seek contact and collaboration with others who are inspired by his cause.
We are inspired by solidarity between writers, academics, and journalists, who speak out for truth against the ideological apparatus of the ruling classes. Max Zirngast is a shining example of this revolutionary stance that intellectuals can take, and an internationalist spirit that we were glad to see amplified in New York City, thousands of miles away. Let us all be a voice for Max Zirngast, and expose the bogus charges against him as nothing more than punishment for honest political activity as a journalist and a socialist.
As Max Zirngast stated simply and defiantly in court: “I am a socialist, I defend universal values.” His commitment to the defense of these universal values and his work as a journalist reporting on the realities that the Turkish state wants to keep concealed from the outside world are the clear reason for his imprisonment. Let us not abandon such heroes, but bravely take up their cause and expose those same realities that all ruling classes want concealed. We must see Max Zirngast free, and we call on our readers to join the campaign to support him, as his friends and the New York City Democratic Socialists of America did. The Free Max Zirngast Solidaritätskampagne website contains more information on his case and what you can do to support him, and we encourage everyone to be in touch with them today.
#FreeMaxZirngast! Free all political prisoners!
– Struggle for a New World editorial collective
Where’s the League of Struggle*? A Response to Where’s the Winter Palace
The following essay was written and published by Struggle for a New World’s fraternal publication in the U.K., The Lever, in the summer of 2018, prior to our coming together as a collective. We are republishing it with their permission because it was one of the theoretical interventions which led to the creation of our platform. We consider this polemic to be a valuable contribution to the rearticulation of revolutionary communism in English-speaking imperialist countries, and we largely agree with it and uphold it. We hope that interested readers will be in touch with us and The Lever about the ideological and practical positions outlined therein, and in other pieces on our platform and theirs.
WHERE’S THE LEAGUE OF STRUGGLE*? A RESPONSE TO WHERE’S THE WINTER PALACE
We wish to extend our most comradely greetings to Avery Minnelli and Eliezer Levin, the authors of Where’s the Winter Palace? On the Marxist-Leninist Trend in the United States, and those behind the blog The Left Wind. We have found the analysis of US Marxism-Leninism contained within the essay to be extremely timely. We find our issues with the broadly trotskyite organised left in the UK reflected in your essay. We thus hope that through developing criticisms of your work to come to a greater understanding of our own positions, and further develop our own theory and practice. We also believe the piece to be broadly correct in it’s analysis and recommendations for moving forward. We hope to offer comradely criticism in the hopes that it will be useful for both sides in developing our ideas further, hopefully bringing us closer together.
We have kept our criticism within the boundaries of what we think is appropriate for our means and ends. We have no organising experience in the US, and are thus unable to comment directly on your points related to this. We do however have a number of issues with your work which we feel it necessary to comment on. The following paragraphs set out these criticisms.
THE PARTY AND DEMOCRATIC CENTRALISM
We welcome the criticism of sect culture which has blighted the US left in a similar way to the UK left. We particularly think it is important to understand the historical context of how party structures we associate with Leninism were understood in the process of formation, and welcome the engagement with authors who engage this history, even Trotskyites such as Hal Draper, and particularly Lars T. Lih’s work placing texts like What Is To Be Done? and the evolving Bolshevik conception of the party and Democratic Centralism. We feel that this comes at a time where many who have been drawn into the western Marxist-Leninist milleu are beginning to question – through their own involvement with these organisations or through various publicised cases of misconduct by members and the utterly appalling way that ‘Democratic Centralism’ has been used to shut down legitimate and necessary criticisms of party conduct in these matters.
In our piece Better Late than Never we have tried to articulate what such a ‘Democratic Centralist’ party may look like in practice, and what it should seek to embody:
‘To defend a politics which sees leadership and centralism as necessary for a movement of the oppressed to win, we must articulate a form of democratic centralism which sweeps away the autocratic and cultic forms which are predominantly practiced in this country today. For this to be successful, we have to develop robust methods of party democracy which sees the relationship between leadership, lower, and middle cadre as one of teaching and learning. As important as leadership is, it is incapable of leading without the organisational, theoretical, and democratic input of all cadre. Cadre are unable to provide this input without entering into an organic and dialectical relationship with the class as a whole.
A party should seek to embody an organic social trend which tends towards freedom and justice, and use the practical means at our disposal to raise this social trend to the level of a genuine social force. It should seek to articulate new social grievances as they arise. We argue for a party that is centralist in form, but democratic in essence.
We believe in the necessity to build a party not attached to some dead and stale dogma, but part a living creative tradition of liberation.’
We believe that this is something that has played a part in Leninist organising in all periods of the existence of the Leninist party, even in those periods of ‘acute civil war’ which are discussed in Where’s the Winter Palace. This has perhaps taken it’s most explicit form in the Maoist conception of the Mass Line (embodied in the phrase ‘from the people, to the people’), however, we do not see this (or Maoism in general) as a decisive break from Leninist practice before this, indeed, the dialectical relationship between the subjectivities of mass and organisation have been articulated even prior to articulations of “Leninism” as such, by such Marxist theoreticians as Rosa Luxemburg.
The piece crucially links the dogmatic and faulty application of Democratic Centralism with a dogmatic focus on ‘party line’ experienced in the US. We feel the issue of ‘line’, and the relationship to theory and practice is one in dire need of re-theorising in general, and in the US and UK in particular, and believe that your piece takes a significant step in this process of re-theorisation.
THE ISSUE OF “LINE”
“We believe the conception of “line” as an end in itself is detrimental to both theory and practice. Placing importance on “line” in this way severs theory from practice by suggesting that theory can be “correct” without practice
– Where’s The Winter Palace
Certainly, the concept of “line” as an end to itself is dangerous and damaging to the movement, particularly when combined with the sectarian approach to the party which this essay outlines so well. However, the theory/practice dynamic is twofold – just as there can be no correct theory which does not result in correct practice, so too will even the most correct practice become unmoored quickly is it does not crystallise into a correct theoretical architecture. It was with this understanding that Lenin famously said “Without a revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement.”
Our concern is that this essay places too much emphasis on developing correct practice but doesn’t recognise that the importance of the relationship between theory and practice. Furthermore, we wish to emphasise that fundamentally this relationship is dialectical. Theory and practice should be in constant tension, with developments in one informing and developing the other. The experience of the ML movement in the US is not simply one where abstract line was placed over concrete practice, by one where this dialectical process was arrested by sectarian organisations which were unable to manage the multiplicitous contradictions between theory and practice as they arose.
As such, in doing away with the sect system, organisations must also reset the balance between theory and practice. We believe that it is only an organisation operating on the principles we have outlined above has the ability to begin this process.
REVOLUTIONARY THEORY
“But what is the practical value in having to “keep quiet” on internal disagreements, especially on historical or international topics that have very little direct bearing on our practical tasks as it stands (such as whether China is socialist)? Or on relevant modern theoretical questions which do not have a definitive answer yet?”
– Where’s The Winter Palace
“Theory is the experience of the working-class movement in all countries taken in its general aspect.
– J. V. Stalin, Foundations of Leninism
We disagree that historical or international questions (such as ‘is China socialist?’) have little or direct bearing on practical tasks. At the same time, we agree with the authors that cadre should be able to have free and frank discussions about such issues, and that holding fierce battles over these questions in organising spaces (within one or between several organisations) can be distracting, even fully counter-productive in many cases. However, such nonchalance on crucial topics is typical of a lack of focus on the internationalism which should be at the core of any socialist organising.
The positions various groups take on international and historical issues show us how various organising tendencies apply the Marxist method, which is intimately linked to their day-to-day organisational practice. Whether China is socialist or not may seem like an abstraction, but it involves crucial questions that must be discussed, such as the issues of the dictatorship of the proletariat, debates on ‘productivism’, imperialism in the 21st century, and how we conceive of the contradictions of class society on a national and international level.
The fact that US Marxist-Leninists have debased the idea of internationalism and international solidarity to who they ‘uphold’ and who they denounce is indicative. International solidarity is built by fostering real connections with comrades who are struggling in many different contexts, providing them material and ideological support where possible, and with principled criticism where necessary. Ultimately, we feel that the incorrect approach to internationalism seen amongst the US ML movement and many ‘anti-imperialists’ in the UK boils down to seeing states, rather than the revolutionary international proletariat in diverse particular contexts as the motive force of revolution and history. In their defence of actually existing socialism, they have come to identify the state as the agent of revolution, rather than a form the revolution reifies as part of a process of social organisation necessitated by the current stage of historical development, which is used as a tool by the revolutionary class in pursuing and consolidating revolution, with all the risks and contradictions this engenders. To come to this conclusion, it is necessary we believe to engage in discussion and investigation on the topic of ‘revisionism’ in the 20th century Marxist-Leninist movement, not merely as a formal defence of the figures of Stalin, Mao, or Hoxha, but in terms of a real loss of the historical and dialectical materialist method outlined by Marx and solidified in practice from Lenin onwards in diverse countries, with all their successes and failures, our common heritage from which we must learn.
Here we come again to the need for the construction of a vanguard organisation which is able to stand with the people in their daily struggles and also connect those struggles to the struggles of other workers and oppressed people internationally. It is no minor thing that the slogan of our movement has always been some variation of ‘workers of the world, unite!’
It is vital at this juncture that we discuss our history and where our class stands now, both nationally and internationally. Despite all the victories of the last century, we stand here, a century after the October Revolution, utterly unable to comprehend the scale of what we have lost. We have lost practically every political structure that could support us in constructing a new revolutionary movement in either of our countries, and we must come to terms with this loss by taking a thorough account of the last century, and making an unflinching assessment of where we stand, and in which direction we are travelling. Posing as vanguards, so many who fancy ourselves communists are sectarians who are marching in radically different directions from the proletariat. Only by understanding our own failures will an organisation be able to operate as a meaningful vanguard, as the advanced detachment of the working class, as the body which the class uses to lead itself.
We believe now is the time to undertake this historical reckoning, and to instigate a thoroughgoing struggle against revisions to the Marxist method. We do not seek to rehash the petty ideological squabbles of the past, but to begin with investigation and comradely criticism and self-criticism, always with the goal of uniting our disparate forces and preparing our class for the revolutionary struggle ahead.
A REVOLUTIONARY SITUATION?
“Are we in a revolutionary period in the U.S. right now? Clearly not. One could perceive a revolutionary situation arising sometime in the next several decades, but it is hardly on the immediate agenda. It is clear that our time is very different from Stalin’s. While “proletarian revolution” is still our goal in general, it is not constitutive of our current period in the way that it was for Stalin’s, in that we are not in a period of major revolutionary upheaval.
– Where’s The Winter Palace
An important question is asked here – are we in a revolutionary period in the US right now? However, what remains unasked is the more important question – what is a revolutionary situation? Lenin stated in 1915 that:
“To the Marxist it is indisputable that a revolution is impossible without a revolutionary situation; furthermore, it is not every revolutionary situation that leads to revolution. What, generally speaking, are the symptoms of a revolutionary situation? We shall certainly not be mistaken if we indicate the following three major symptoms: (1) when it is impossible for the ruling classes to maintain their rule without any change; when there is a crisis, in one form or another, among the “upper classes”, a crisis in the policy of the ruling class, leading to a fissure through which the discontent and indignation of the oppressed classes burst forth. For a revolution to take place, it is usually insufficient for “the lower classes not to want” to live in the old way; it is also necessary that “the upper classes should be unable” to live in the old way; (2) when the suffering and want of the oppressed classes have grown more acute than usual; (3) when, as a consequence of the above causes, there is a considerable increase in the activity of the masses, who uncomplainingly allow themselves to be robbed in “peace time”, but, in turbulent times, are drawn both by all the circumstances of the crisis and by the “upper classes” themselves into independent historical action.”
Without these objective changes, which are independent of the will, not only of individual groups and parties but even of individual classes, a revolution, as a general rule, is impossible. The totality of all these objective changes is called a revolutionary situation. Such a situation existed in 1905 in Russia, and in all revolutionary periods in the West; it also existed in Germany in the sixties of the last century, and in Russia in 1859-61 and 1879-80, although no revolution occurred in these instances. Why was that? It was because it is not every revolutionary situation that gives rise to a revolution; revolution arises only out of a situation in which the above-mentioned objective changes are accompanied by a subjective change, namely, the ability of the revolutionary class to take revolutionary mass action strong enough to break (or dislocate) the old government, which never, not even in a period of crisis, “falls”, if it is not toppled over.
– V. I. Lenin, The Collapse of the Second International
It is crucial to grasp that, upon the arrival of objective conditions, there must be a corresponding subjective push to change the possibility of these conditions into a real change. But when Lenin says: “the ability of the revolutionary class to take revolutionary mass action strong enough to break (or dislocate) the old government, which never, not even in a period of crisis, “falls”, if it is not toppled over”, he emphasises a strength of subjective actors, which does not arrive out of nowhere and is not independent of the objectivity in which it operates: the truly heightened political consciousness is one that understands that our subjectivity is not only shaped by our objective conditions, but at every stage, plays a role in shaping it. We cannot will a revolution out of nothingness, but we also cannot stand idly by and allow our ideological enemies to shape the narrative and the objective conditions without any resistance from our side.
Here in the the UK, we are also not in a period where the objective conditions for a revolutionary situation yet exist. However, we believe that it is also necessary understand the tendencies of struggle by the working classes and the contradictions in society which can be directed towards such a moment, and which can challenge the hegemonic forces throughout the process.
As unlikely as it is that revolutionary situations will develop in the declining core imperialist power such as the US and the UK, the decline in their hegemony produces and is produced by an international crisis which we have not yet seen the end of, and may prove terminal. The last US election revealed deep divisions within the US ruling class. Since the election of Donald Trump as president, we have seen a nakedly xenophobic wing of US national capital gain a strong hand against the traditional tendencies of international capital in the US and their partners abroad. In spite of the actions of the majority of forces within the Democratic and Republican parties to suppress this trend as well as the upsurge in socialist rhetoric and action in the name of business as usual, the centre is eroding and the contradictions are being laid bare. This significant rift shows only signs of deepening – with ultimately the working class and oppressed nations of the US, as well as migrants, refugees and the working and oppressed peoples of peripheral and semi-peripheral countries paying the price.
However, we also see new resistances growing, whether it be against the horrors of ICE, or through a resurgent social democratic and even socialist politics within the DSA, or in the projects of Black liberation and autonomy exemplified by Cooperation Jackson in Mississippi. It is our task as revolutionaries to unify these struggles, learn from them, raise them higher, and prepare the proletariat for the possibility of a revolutionary situation. This is why we agree with the authors that there should be a focus on base building in the short and medium term. The building of the base, just like the building of a Marxist organisation, however, is no end in itself. Both are actions which must be carried out with the consciousness of higher unity in struggle by the masses themselves, and intervene on a broader and deeper scale. It is to bring the working class and oppressed peoples back onto the stage of history as the third, decisive force in our separate contexts, to topple all forces of reaction and bring a new society, where the poor and downtrodden control their own lives, into being.
***
“Where will the revolution begin? Where, in what country, can the front of capital be pierced first?
Where industry is more developed. Where the proletarian constitutes the majority Where the proletariat constitutes the majority? Where the there is more culture? where there is more democracy-that was the reply usually given formerly?
No, objects the Leninist theory of revolution, not necessarily where industry is more developed, and so forth. The front of capital will be pierced where the chain of imperialism is weakest, for the proletarian revolution is the result of the breaking of the chain of the world imperialist front at its weakest link
– J. V Stalin, Foundations of Leninism
Revolutionary situations are revealing themselves around the world at this very moment, revolutionary parties and mass movements are grappling with how lead the broadest masses to power against the oppressor ruling classes. Along with the Leninist dictum that the imperialist chain breaks at its weakest link, we see revolutionary struggles which have been decades in the making reaching new and higher levels, and facing new and more perilous challenges. The Kurdish national liberation movement in North and West Kurdistan, the Communist Party of the Philippines. Political crisis grips Turkey, where the fascist dictatorship presently headed by the AKP has governed for nearly two years by emergency decree, and changes election rules constantly while calling election after election in an attempt to push the progressive HDP out of parliament. In these areas where contradictions are sharpening, and dominant and oppressed classes come closer and closer to all out war, we see Marxist theoreticians producing theoretical output at an astounding rate to account for their own social contradictions and social developments the world over.
Parties involved on the front lines of organising in these countries are to be found in new international forums, for example the International Coordination of Revolutionary Parties and Organizations (ICOR) and both organisations named the International Conference of Marxist-Leninist Parties and Organizations (ICMLPO/ICMLPO) – to share their theoretical and practical experiences and to coordinate solidarity work. We must follow the example of these parties in seeking to unite our revolutionary organisations in new forms of international organisation.
MARXISM-LENINISM AS A HISTORICALLY CONTINGENT IDEOLOGY
“Thus, we would argue that U.S. “Marxism-Leninism” is an historically contingent ideology rather than a modern iteration of Marxism fit for our time and place. However, that does not mean that we should throw the baby out with the bathwater. The successes and failures of 20th century socialist experiments have much to teach us moving forward, from how to organize unemployed workers to how to run a planned economy. Lenin is arguably the most important Marxist since Marx, and it would do us good to learn from him and the evolution of his thought, not a mythological, prophetic version of Lenin. While we should study and learn from Leninism, we should also study other trends: autonomism & operaismo, Marxist-feminism, pre-war social democracy, and all historical anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, anti-racist, and feminist movements.
– Where’s The Winter Palace
As we have stated, we believe many of the criticisms of the US Marxist-Leninist movement are correct. However, we still believe it is important to uphold something called ‘Marxism-Leninism’, though something that is radically different from what is practiced by those revisionist organisations which dominate the theoretical discourse in the US and the UK today.
Is Marxism-Leninism a historically contingent ideology? Yes, in the broadest terms, all such ideologies are historically contingent. We do, however, hold that there is a contemporary ideology in existence today which may be described as Marxism-Leninism, a practical political theory for the era of imperialism and proletarian revolution, which continues to prove to be the most vital and revolutionary ideology today.
We agree wholeheartedly that we must read outside of a narrowly defined ‘Marxist-Leninist canon’ if we are to revitalise Marxism-Leninism in the anglophone world. But it was never the position of Marx or Lenin that our reading or our work were to be trapped within the narrow confines of party-approved thinkers. Lenin read Hegel in a time of crisis, Marx’s writings are filled with literary references. Beyond such historical references, however, we believe our ideology to express the truth in the totality strongly enough that there is of course nothing wrong with reading, engaging with, and working with persons from diverse ideological commitments. It has never been our position that anarchists and Trotskyites, for example, are “heretics”, simply that these formal labels happen to reflect a broadly different historical perspective than our own. In our practical work, however, many who identify with this traditions have proven themselves greater than many “Marxist-Leninists”, and important insights from sincere critics of the established order, even those who identify with merely as liberal democrats, may be engaged with to produced a fuller analysis. If the truth is in the totality, as dialectical thinkers believe, we will understand the social processes which produce diverse thinkers and political trends, rather than sectarianly dismiss them as heretics while rereading, with no critical eye or sincere understanding, a few works of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin as if they were sacred texts to be regurgitated to suppress critical thought.
The traditions of Marxism-Leninism which we believe are most vital are rarely seen inside the anglophone world. In Turkey, Kurdistan, Sri Lanka, India, Latin America, the resurgence of Maoism in the Philippines, India, Afghanistan, and even China. In this sense, the incorrect ideas and lines of various communists are a result not just of their sectarian behaviour, but of their inability to develop on the nascent revolutionary traditions which have developed in their own society (for example the heroic socialist Black liberation trend from the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense onwards). This has been exacerbated by the lack of contact with revolutionary traditions outside of the US since China closed itself of to revolutionaries and opened itself up to foreign capital, or since the death of Enver Hoxha (notable exceptions are the Revolutionary Organisation of Labour and the relatively new American Party of Labour, who have made active attempts to grapple with deep theoretical and practical debates happening between organisations in diverse countries). Imperial arrogance and great nation chauvinism lifts the likes of Sam Marcy in the United States, or Tony Cliff in the United Kingdom, to great theoretical leaders, and as such, any true internationalist tendencies which existed in these countries withered on the vine, meaning that now, as the need for a revolutionary communist approach to mass organisation is needed, we find ourselves without the tools we need to develop one.
CONCLUSION
There is no better time for a piece such as Where’s The Winter Palace to be published. We believe that it’s positive reception amongst many in the US and Anglophone left is indicative of its correct analysis of many of the problems of the US Marxist-Leninist movement which we believe are also applicable to the context of UK Trotskyite organisations as well. We see it as particularly important in this context, as we have seen a rise of a number of young, vocal, self-declared Marxist-Leninists on social media joining these organisations (in particular the PSL). We support the authors in their critiques of the movement as it stands, and have high hopes that through interventions such as this, a stronger, fighting proletarian movement can be built.
We level our critiques here in the spirit of proletarian internationalism and comradely criticism, and we hope they are taken as such. Our critics focus on seeing the need to unite the strong focus on new revivified forms of practice and party organisation, with an equal focus on revolutionary theory. We wish to highlight again the importance of internationalism for every and any organising effort which parties undertake, and believe we have set out the criteria needed for this to be done on a principled and effective basis to avoid the pitfalls that the authors have so effectively demonstrated in the work.
We hope that this essay is the beginning of a fruitful and productive exchange between our two publications.
In solidarity,
– The Lever Editorial Group.
* The title was chosen as a tribute both to the original League of Struggle in St. Petersburg which would go on to lay the foundations for what would become the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks) to emphasise the need for theoretical development that will complement practical work, and also for the League of Struggle for Negro Rights, an organisation from the heroic era of the Communist Party USA when they fought for Black liberation, prior to selling out Black people in the US south in 1935. We believe the name “League of Struggle for Negro Rights” was chosen as a tribute to the history of the communists in the Russian empire who fought for the liberation of so many peoples suffering under the Tsarist yoke prior to the revolution. We hope that interested US communists will appreciate this heroic moment in their own history, brief though it was.
Struggle for a New World 