By Panagiotis Sotiris

Although ‘historical bloc’ is one of the most-well known concepts associated with the work of Antonio Gramsci, at the same time not enough attention has been paid to its strategic theoretical significance. In most cases, ‘historical block’ has been taken to refer to alliances. This is most obvious in various texts from the PCI tradition.[1] Of course the identification of the concept of ‘historical bloc’ simply with social alliances can also be attributed to a surface reading of some of Gramsci’s pre-Prison writings, such as the famous text on the Southern Question where one can find Gramsci’s elaborations on the question of how to dismantle the Southern agrarian bloc and its particular intellectual bloc in order to advance the alliance of between proletariat and southern masses.[2] However, a look at Gramsci’s references to the historical bloc in the Prison Notebooks provides evidence that the concept has a broader significance for Gramsci in prison than simply a reference to social alliances.

The first reference to the historical bloc can be found in Notebook 4, in a reference to the importance of superstructures, as the terrain where people become conscious of their condition, and to the necessary relation between base and superstructure. It is there that Gramsci refers to “Sorel’s concept of the “historical bloc”.[3] It is interesting that in Sorel’s work there is no reference to the concept of ‘historical bloc’. Valentino Gerratana has suggested that Gramsci, who did not have the possibility to reread Sorel’s Reflection on Violence when in prison, had in mind Sorel’s well known references to myths, and in particular Sorel’s insistence that these images should be taken as a whole (in Italian “prenderli in blocco”), as historical forces. [4]

In Notebook 7, the concept of the historical bloc returns in Gramsci’s criticism of Croce’s philosophy. For Gramsci the concept of the historical bloc is the equivalent of ‘spirit’ in Croce’s idealist conception and it also refers to a dialectical activity and a process of distinction that does not negate its real unity.[5] In the second version of this passage in Notebook 10 the concept of historical bloc (again attributed to Sorel) is linked to the unity of the process of reality, conceived as ‘active reaction by humanity on the structure’.[6] In another passage from Notebook 7 Gramsci links the historical bloc to the force of ideology and also of the relation ideologies and material forces and insists that in reality it is a relation of organic dialectical unity, distinctions being made only for ‘didactic’ reasons.

Another proposition of Marx is that a popular conviction often has the same energy as a material force or something of the kind, which is extremely significant. The analysis of these propositions tends, I think, to reinforce the conception of historical bloc in which precisely material forces are the content and ideologies are the form, though this distinction between form and content has purely didactic value, since the material forces would be inconceivable historically without form and the ideologies would be individual fancies without the material forces.[7]

In Notebook 8 the concept of historic bloc returns and we have Gramsci’s insistence on the identity of history and politics, the identity between ‘nature and spirit’, in an attempt towards a dialectic of distinct moments (a unity of the opposites and the distincts).[8] In the second version of this passage, in Notebook 13, the reference is on the identity between ‘structures and superstructures’.[9] This conception of the historical bloc as referring to the (dialectical) unity of the social whole and in particular to the relation between material tendencies and ideological representations and the importance of such a relation between material conditions and ideologies as a condition for revolutionary praxis, also emerges in the following extract from Notebook 8. It is important to note the way this passage maintains a close dialectical relation between the social relations of production and the ‘complex, contradictory ensemble of the superstructures’ as the basis for a strategic revolutionary political orientation that is conceived in terms of ideology but also maintains the dialectical relation with social relations of production.

Structures and superstructures form an “historical bloc”. That is to say the complex, contradictory and discordant ensemble of the superstructures is the reflection of the ensemble of the social relations of production. From this, one can conclude: that only an all-encompassing (totalitario) system of ideologies gives a rational refection of the contradiction of the structure and represents the existence of the objective conditions for the revolutionising of praxis.  If a social group is formed which is one hundred per cent homogeneous on the level of ideology, this means that the premises exist one hundred per cent for this revolutionising : that is that the “rational” is actively and actually real. This reasoning is based on the necessary reciprocity between structure and superstructure, a reciprocity which is nothing other than the real dialectical process.[10]

Later in a note that first appeared in Notebook 8 but also, slightly expanded in Notebook 10 Gramsci used the concept of historical bloc as part of his criticism of Croce’s conception of the ethico-political history. In particular, for Gramsci it is exactly the conception of historical bloc as the relation of social and economic relation with ideological–political forms that enables a theoretical relevance for the concept of ethico-political history. “Ethico-political history, in so far as it is divorced from the concept of historical bloc, in which there is a concrete correspondence of socio-economic content to ethico-political form in the reconstruction of the various historical periods, is nothing more  than a polemical presentation of more or less interesting philosophical propositions, but its is not history”[11]. In a similar tone, in the summary first note of Notebook 10, Gramsci treats the concept of the historical bloc as a crucial aspect of his attempt towards a philosophy of praxis that could answer the questions that Croce’s conception of ethico-political history brought forward. Moreover, hegemony and historical bloc are theoretically linked in the most emphatic way in this passage.

Credit must therefore be given to Croce’s thought for its instrumental value and in this respect it may be said that it has forcefully drawn attention to the study of the factors of culture and ideas as elements of political domination, to the function of the great intellectuals in state life, to the moment of hegemony and consent as the necessary form of the concrete historical bloc. Ethico-political history is therefore one of the canons of historical interpretation that must be always be borne in mind in the study and detailed analysis of history as it unfolds if the intention is to construct an integral history rather than partial or extrinsic histories.[12]

The concept of historical bloc constantly returns in Gramsci’s confrontation with Crocean concepts. For Gramsci the historical bloc can offer a historical and not speculative solution to the question of the relation between the different moments of the social whole.

The question is this: given the Crocean principle of the dialectic of the distincts (which is to be criticised as the merely verbal solution to a real methodological exigency, in so far as it is true that there exist not only opposites but also distincts), what relationship, which is not that of ‘implication in the unity of the spirit’, will there exist between the politico-economic moment and other historical activities? Is a speculative solution of these problems possible, or only a historical one, given the concept of ‘historical bloc’ presupposed by Sorel?[13]

The concept of historical bloc also appears in the fragment on the relation of forces in Notebook 9 but also in the well known fragment on the structure of parties during a period of organic crisis in Notebook 13. There the main point Gramsci wanted to make was on the importance of political initiatives in order to liberate the economic and political potential of a new historical bloc, including the used of force.

An appropriate political initiative is always necessary to liberate the economic thrust from the dead weight of traditional policies – i.e. to change the political direction of certain forces which have to be absorbed if a new, homogeneous politico-economic historical bloc, without internal contradictions, is to be successfully formed. And, since two “similar” forces can only be welded into a new organism either through a series of compromises or by force of arms, either by binding them to each other as allies or by forcibly subordinating one to the other, the question is whether one has the necessary force, and whether it is “productive” to use it.[14]

The strategic character of the concept of historical bloc and its relation to accomplished hegemony can be found the famous fragment on the Passage from Knowing to Understanding and to Feeling and vice versa from Feeling to Understanding and to Knowing, from Notebook 4 and reproduced in Notebook 11. Here the emphasis is on the particular relation between intellectuals and the people-nation, but also between leaders and the led, and on the need for intellectuals not only to interpret the conjuncture in an abstract way but also to understand the ‘passions’ of the subaltern classes and dialectically transform them into a ‘superior conception of the world’. This for Gramsci is exactly the creation of an ‘historical bloc. It is exactly here that one might see the analogy between the concept of the historical bloc and a condition of hegemony. The following passage exemplifies this point.

If the relationship between intellectuals and people-nation, between the leaders and the led, the rulers and the ruled, is provided by an organic cohesion in which feeling-passion becomes understanding and hence knowledge (not mechanically but in a way that is alive) , then and only then is the relationship one of representation. Only then can there take place an exchange of individual elements between the rulers and ruled, leaders [dirigenti] and led, and can the shared life be realised which alone is a social force with the creation of the “historical bloc”.[15]

Jacques Texier was one of the theorists that have insisted on the strategic theoretical importance of the concept of the historical bloc, within Gramsci’s theoretical elaboration. For Texier the concept of the historical bloc is exactly the concept that enables us think of the unity and interrelation between economics, politics and ideology, within Gramsci’s theory of hegemony and the integral State. “Without the theory of the ‘historical bloc’ and the unity of economy and culture and culture and politics which results from it, the Gramscian theory of superstructures would not be Marxist. His ‘historicism’ would go no further than the historicism of Croce.”[16] Based upon this conception, Texier treats the concept of the historical block as a theoretical node in Gramsci’s theory of hegemony.

The point of departure must be the concept of the’ historical bloc’ Gramsci stipulates. What does this mean? To think the unity of the distinct aspects or moments of superstructural activity, the moment of force and consent, of dictatorship and hegemony and the economico-political and ethico-politicaJ moment one must begin from the basis of the organic unity of the superstructures and infrastructure in the historical bloc and recognise the ultimately determinant character of economic conditions.[17]

For Texier it is important to follow carefully Gramsci’s novel redefinition of ‘civil society’ and how this encompasses a whole series of political and ideological practices, relations, beliefs conditioned by determinate social relations of production.

In other words, what does civil society represent for Gramsci? It is the complex of practical and ideological social relations (the whole infinitely varied social fabric, the whole human content of a given society) which is established and grows lip on the base of determined relations of production. It includes the types of behaviour of homo oeconomicus as well as of homo ethiico-politicus. It is therefore the object, the subject and the locality of the superstructural activities which are carried out in ways which differ according to the levels and moments by means of the ‘hegemonic apparatuses’ on the one hand and of the ‘coercive apparatuses’ on the other.[18]

Therefore, the construction of a new historical bloc, a new articulation of economic, politics and ideology, is for Texier what is the stake in a struggle for hegemony: “the winning of hegemony is a social struggle which aims to transform the relation of forces in a given situation. A historico-political bloc has to be dismantled and a new one constructed so as to permit the transformation of the relations of production.”[19]

Also of particular importance is Texier’s insistence[20] that in Gramsci the concept of the historical bloc implies an ‘organic unity’ between the State and the economy, in sharp contrast to every form of economism. In particular, Texier has offered a forceful reading of the concept civil society, which also points towards this particular dialectic of economics and politics within the historical bloc. For Texier the concept of civil society does not refer simply to the field of political and cultural hegemony, but also to economic activities. Although Texier distinguishes the economic structure and civil society, at the same time he provides textual evidence of Gramsci’s inclusion of the crucial aspects of economic activity and behaviour within the field of civil society, especially around the crucial Gramscian notions of “homo oeconomicus” and “determinate market”. In this sense we can say that a crucial aspect of the emergence of a new historical bloc is exactly the emergence not only of a new economic structure but also of a new “homo oeconomicus” and a new configuration of civil society.[21]

Christine Buci-Glucksmann has also offered an important reading of the theoretical centrality of the concept of historical materialism. For Buci-Glucksmann Gramsci’s reference to structure and superstructure forming an historical bloc is the point to begin. The first error is the “simple identification between historical bloc and class alliances … or even the fusion … that embraces workers and intellectuals”.[22] For Buci-Glucksmann historical bloc goes beyond social alliances since it implies both a specific form of hegemonic leadership but also the development of the superstructures, “an ‘integral state’ rooted in an organic relationship between leaders and masses”.[23] Moreover, the concept of historical bloc is for Buci-Glucksmann not s a materialist position and anti-economistic answer to the relation between the different instances of the social whole; it is mainly an attempt to rethink a revolutionary strategy within the transition period.

Compared with Bukharin’s worker-peasant bloc of 1925-26, the Gramscian historic bloc demonstrates major new feature. This bloc is cultural and political as much as economic, and requires an organic relationship between people and intellectuals, governors and governed, leaders and led. The cultural revolution, as an on-going process of adequation between culture and practice, is neither luxury nor a simple guarantee, but rather an actual dimension of the self-government of the masses and of democracy.[24]

For Buci-Glucksmann Gramsci’s conception of revolutionary strategy as construction of a new historical bloc[25] leads to a “reformulation of the entire Marxist problematic of the withering away of the State as a passage to a regulated society, where political society is reabsorbed by civil society”.[26] Therefore, it is much more than a simple reference to a social alliance that manages to capture political power, since it entails the construction of new hegemonic apparatuses, new social, political, ideological and economic forms                                           . In opposition to a simple ‘bloc in power’, the historical bloc “presupposes the historical construction of long duration of new hegemonic system, without which classes become only a mechanical aggregate, managed by the State or a bureaucracy”.[27]

From the above elaboration it is obvious that historical bloc is a strategic not a descriptive or an analytical concept. It defines not an actual social alliance, but a social and political condition to be achieved. Historical bloc does not refer to the formation of an electoral alliance or to various social strata and movements fighting side by side. It refers to the emergence of a different configuration within civil society, namely to the emergence, on a broad scale, of different forms of politics, different forms of organization, alternative discourses and narratives, that materialize the ability for society to be organized and administrated in a different way. At the same time it refers to a specific relation between politics and economics, namely to the articulation not simply of demands and aspirations but of an alternative social and economic paradigm. Therefore, a new historical bloc defines that specific historical condition when not only a new social alliance demands power but is also in a position to impose its own particular economic form and social strategy and lead society. It also includes a particular relation between the broad masses of the subaltern classes and new intellectual practices, along with the emergence of new forms of mass critical and antagonistic political intellectuality, exactly that passage from knowledge to understanding and passion. Regarding political organizations, it refers to that particular condition of leadership, in the form of actual rooting, participation, and mass mobilization that defines an ‘organic relation’ between leaders and led, which when we refer to the politics of proletarian hegemony implies a condition of mass politicization and collective elaboration. It also implies the actuality of the new political and economic forms, and the full elaboration of what can be defined as a ‘dual power’ strategy conceived in the broadest sense of the term.

In this sense, it is obvious that the concept of the historical bloc, when used in relation to the politics of the subaltern classes, refers to a strategy of (counter)hegemony. A potential hegemony of the forces of labour, namely their ability to become actually leading in a broader front, that would make possible a process of social transformation, means exactly creating the conditions for a new historical bloc. This means a new articulation between social forces, alternative economic form[28]s in rupture with capitalist social relations of productions, new political forms of organization and participatory democratic decision-making. The struggle for hegemony means a struggle for the formation of a new historic bloc.

That is why the concept of the historical bloc is more than ever pertinent to contemporary discussions within the Left. The reasons for this are above all political and have to do with the dynamics of the conjuncture. The long retreat of the Left through as the combined result of the triumph of neoliberalism and the collapse of “actually existing socialism” for a long time seemed to make questions of strategy unimportant. What seemed to be necessary was the unity around basic struggles and movements of resistance. Strategic discussion was left either to theoretical elaborations or was postponed for a better day. Even after the return of mass protest movements after Seattle 1999, the return of the strategic questions Daniel Bensaïd talked about in 2006,[29] has yet to produce some specific strategic recommendations.

However, recent developments have made us all realize the urgency of these questions. The developments include the global economic crisis of the end of the 2000s, the crisis of neoliberalism, the impressive return of mass protest politics, from 2011 until now, and the evidences of an open hegemonic crisis in various “weak links” of the imperialist chain, a crisis that can be described in Gramscian terms.

And the content is the crisis of the ruling class’s hegemony, which occurs either because the ruling class has failed in some major political undertaking for which it has requested, or forcibly extracted, the consent of the broad masses (war, for example) , or because huge masses (especially of peasants and petit-bourgeois intellectuals) have passed suddenly from a state of political passivity to a certain activity, and put forward demands which taken together, albeit not organically formulated, add up to a revolution. A “crisis of authority” is spoken of: this is precisely the crisis of hegemony, or general crisis of the State.[30]

At the same time, we have the possibility that the Left can lead an impressive reversal in the political balance of forces in countries such as Greece, and face the possibility of arriving at governmental power.

I would like to insist that the debate is more urgent than before. Recent developments, such as the Gezi Park protests in Turkey have shown that what would be called the new age of insurrections is far from over. However, especially the developments regarding the developments within what has been termed the ‘Arab Spring’ has shown that when mass popular insurrections cannot be ‘translated’ politically into autonomously defined democratic and emancipator political projects, then the results can be tragic. At same time, regarding the crisis of neoliberalism and the current authoritarian, disciplinary turn of neoliberal governance, the only contribution the dominant elites can make is to only prolong the crisis. This situation is similar to one described by Gramsci.

What makes things worse, is that it is about a crisis for which the elements of its resolution are prevented from being developed with the necessary speed; those that are dominant can no longer resolve the crisis but have the power (to impede) others from resolving it, namely they have the power only to prolong the crisis.[31]

This means the need to think in terms of the necessary renewal of a revolutionary strategy. The fact that there are perhaps no ‘ideal types’ for revolution, does not mean that we do not need revolutionary changes. A new historical bloc refers exactly such a revolutionary process.

In light of the above, a strategy for a new ‘historical bloc’ suggests that we must elaborate upon an alternative productive paradigm, in a non market and non profit-oriented direction, an alternative non capitalist developmental path (as an aspect of the dialectics of economy and politics within the historical bloc). We refer to a developmental paradigm neither in the sense of quantitative growth, nor in the sense of an alternative capitalist development, but in the sense of a new conception of how to make good use of collective social productive capabilities and resources. This could include new forms of democratic social planning along with a new emphasis on self-management, reclaiming currently idle productive facilities, creating non commercial networks of distribution, regaining the public character of goods and service that are currently under the threat of the tendency for ‘new enclosures’.  It could also include a new emphasis on self-reliance and decreased dependence upon international flows of commodities and resources, along with a break with consumerist conceptions of well-being.

Such a thinking of the ‘economic program’ of process of transformation, as part of a strategy for a new historic bloc, should not be seen as an attempt to simply devise or think of alternative economic forms. In reality, it is a process of collective experimentation based upon the emergence of alternative economic forms within movements, collective struggles and resistances to the commercialization of social goods. From the defence of public services and the new forms of solidary economy, to the new forms of self-management and worker’s control (from occupied factories in Argentina to Public Television in Greece), we have many important experiences. These have not been simply “resistances” but also collective experimenting sites that can help us understand how things can be organized in a different non-capitalist way. In a way, it means taking hold of the ‘traces of communism’ in actual movements and social resistances to the violence of capital and the markets. The Left should not consider these experiences to be simply “movements” and think of economic policy only in terms of non-austerity macroeconomics, however important these are.

Moreover, thinking in terms of a new “historical bloc”, means that the Left attempts to elaborate on the possibility of an alternative narrative for society, in an attempt exactly for the forces of labour to be leading (dirigente). And in this we must also think how the very experience of today’s’ forces of labour, despite their fragmentation into multifarious employment situation and prospects, with their unity undermined by precariousness, offers the basis for such a (counter)hegemony. Today’s collective labour force is not only more fragmented, it is also more educated, with more access to knowledge and communication recourse, and in an ability to voice its grievances in a more articulate way. Moreover, all over the advanced capitalist societies, those social strata that traditional sociology describes as middle class, in reality segments of intellectual labour or what Poulantzas described as the salaried new petite-bourgeoisie,[32] are under attack by stagnant wages, increased barriers to ‘upward social mobility’, private debt burden, workplace precariousness. Consequently, they have seen the class divide with various segments of the capitalist class grow, and have moved closer to working class demands and aspirations. All these developments are also reflected in the mass unemployment (and precariousness) of youth an element that has produced social explosions, and probably will in the future. This brings together, in mass collective practises, all those social forces that, one way or the other, depend upon selling their labour power to make ends meet. This offers not the only the material ground for social alliances, exemplified in the co-presence of all these strata in contemporary protests from the Indignados to the Syntagma to Occupy!, but also of collective experiences, aspirations and demands. New forms of “public spheres’ emerge that enable not simply tactical cooperation within protest movements, but the potential of collectively elaborating a new vision and perspective beyond “actually existing neoliberalism”.

This means that today rethinking socialist and revolutionary politics is not only about ‘injecting’ socialist consciousness into the movement – however necessary the defence of the socialist and communist tradition might be in a period of ideological erasure. It is also about elaborating upon collective aspirations, demands and ideological representations that emerge from the very materiality of today’s condition and struggles of the forces of labour. Creating conditions for a new historical bloc is not only about articulating a political project; it is about working upon actual social and historical tendencies and dynamics, in order to create new political forms that would enable a new dialectical relation between ‘structure’ and ‘superstructures’.

This gives a new importance to the question of the program. Contrary to the tendency to ignore the program in the name of a simple unity around the negation of austerity, it is important to insist that a strategy for a new historical bloc requires articulating an alternative narrative for society, not just a sum of grievances and demands. Such a program should not restrict itself to income redistribution, increased public spending and nationalization. It should also include experiments with new productive forms and relations based upon self-management, new forms of workers’ control, and alternative forms of economic coordination and planning, in sum a collective to move beyond the capitalist logic.  This is in contrast to the ‘pragmatist turn’ of some parties of the European Left that make a distinction between an anti-austerity politics aiming at ‘saving society from austerity’ and social transformation. On the contrary, it is now time to think of the transition program as offering at the same time an exit from austerity and the beginning of a process of transformation in sharp break not only with neo-liberalism but also with aspects of capitalist relations. This is today one of the most crucial aspects of a potential revolutionary strategy today.

In an era of increased forms of capitalist internationalization, this also means taking a stand regarding a country’s place in the international plane. In this sense, recent debates within the European Left, such as the ones pertaining to the relation to the Eurozone and the European Union should be read in a strategic manner. Breaking away from the Eurozone and the European Union, for the peripheral countries of the European South, such as Greece, is not simply about monetary sovereignty (which per se is a necessary aspect of regaining democratic control of economic policy). It is about the forces of labour offering an alternative orientation for society, especially since in countries such as Greece, the bourgeois ‘historical bloc, based both its strategy and its legitimacy, upon the ‘European Road’ as a road to capitalist modernization.

Moreover, a politics of a potential new ‘historical bloc’ means exactly aiming at political power, both in the sense of a left wing government but also and mainly in the sense of a change in actual social power configuration. If we are fully aware that it will be part of a long and contradictory process of transition and transformation and struggle ‘from above’ and ‘from below’, then a ‘government of the Left’ can be indeed be part of a modern revolutionary strategy. This would require making use of both governmental power (the radicalization of current institutional and constitutional framework) and forms of ‘popular power’ from below, without underestimating the constant confrontation with the forces of capital. This has been an open question in the communist movement, from the ‘Workers’ Government’ described in the 4^th Congress of the Communist International,[33] to Gramsci’s proposal for a ‘Constituent Assembly’ of the anti-fascist forces,[34] to Poulantzas’ confrontation with a possible ‘democratic road to socialism’,[35] to the contradictions of contemporary experiments in left governance such as the one in Bolivia. However, without a strong labour movement, without radical social movements, without the full development of all forms of people’s power and self-organization, any government of the Left will not manage to stand up to the immense pressure it will get from the forces of capital, the EU and the IMF. That is why it is necessary to experiment with new forms of social and political power from below and to create new forms of social practice and interaction based on solidarity and common work, new forms of direct democracy.

In this sense, a strategy for a new historical bloc also requires a new practice of politics, new social and political forms of organization beyond the traditional Party-form, beyond traditional trade unionism and beyond the limits of traditional parliamentary bourgeois politics. This corresponds exactly to the need for new forms of civil society organizations, in the broad sense that Gramsci gave to this notion. In a way, Louis Althusser pointed to this direction of the political forms associated with a potential historical bloc in his intervention in the debates of the 22^nd Congress of the French Communist Party.

In the best of cases, it is conceivable that the union of the people of France may become something quite different from the means to a new electoral balance, but is rather aimed, over and above the organizations of the Left, at the popular masses themselves. Why address the popular masses in this way? To tell them, even if still only as a hint, that they will have to organize themselves autonomously, in original forms, in firms, urban districts and villages, around the questions of labour and living conditions, the questions of housing, education, health, transport, the environment, etc.; in order to define and defend their demands, first to prepare for the establishment of a revolutionary state, then to maintain it, stimulate it and at the same time force it to ‘wither away’. Such mass organizations, which no one can define in advance and on behalf of the masses, already exist or are being sought in Italy, Spain and Portugal, where they play an important part, despite all difficulties. If the masses seize on the slogan of the union of the people of France and interpret it in this mass sense, they will be re-establishing connections with a living tradition of popular struggle in our country and will be able to help give a new content to the political forms by which the power of the working people will be exercised under socialism.[36]

Moreover, it is exactly this combination of popular power from below and new forms of self-management, workers’ control and alternative forms of economic coordination that can create the conditions for a modern form of ‘dual power’, namely the actual emergence of new, non capitalist social and political forms. Both Lenin and Gramsci thought that there can be no process of social transformation without a vast social and political experimentation, both before and after the revolution, which will guaranty that within the struggles we can already witness the emergence of new social forms and new ways to organize production and social life.

It is not going to be an ‘easy road’. It would require a struggling society actually changing values, priorities, narratives. It would also require a new ethics of collective participation and responsibility, of struggle and commitment to change, a transformed and educated common sense. In this sense, the promise of Left-wing politics cannot be a simple return to 2009, not least because it is materially impossible, but because we want to go beyond confidence to the markers and debt-ridden consumerism. In such a ‘world-view’ public education, public health, public transport, environmental protection, non market collective determination of priorities, and quality of everyday sociality, are more important than imported consumer goods and cheap credit.

At the same time, a strategy for a new historical block also implies an attempt towards a re-appropriation and redefinition of the very notion of the people. This refers to the complex process, political, ideological and social, through which the people can re-emerge in a situation of struggle, neither as the abstract subject of the bourgeois polity, nor as the ‘imagined community’ of the ‘nation’, but as a potentially anti-capitalist alliance of all those social strata that one way or the other depend upon their labour power in order to make ends meet. This also means a new form of people’s unity, especially against the dividing results of racism and the varieties of neofascism.[37]

Such a process can (and should…) also be a knowledge process, both in the sense of using the knowledge accumulated by people in social movements (who can run better a hospital or a school? Appointed technocrats or the people actually working and struggling there) and also in the sense of struggle, solidarity and common practices being forms that help people acquire knowledge, learn how to do things differently and collectively re-invent new forms of mass intellectuality and a new cultural hegemony. Moreover, if political organizations cannot learn from actual experiences, if they are not themselves collective processes of learning and transforming the experiences from the struggles into political strategy, then they cannot contribute to a process of social transformation.

Such a strategy (and dialectic of strategy and tactics) can transform current emerging alliances, changes to the relations of representation, struggles, resistances and proposals for ‘concrete utopias’, into a new and highly original ‘historical block’, the necessary condition for an open-ended process of social transformation. It is an attempt to actually rethink revolutionary strategy, not as phantasy but as an open – ended sequence of transformation and experimentation. Talking today about socialism cannot be simply about “catch phrases” on worker’s power and worker’s control or worker’s democracy, however necessary it is to revisit in a self-critical manner the socialist experiences of the 20^th century. Talking about socialism today means building upon the dynamics of struggles, upon the new forms of democracy and popular sovereignty from below emerging within struggles, upon the attempt at re-appropriating public space and creating new public spheres, upon what Althusser described as ‘virtual forms of communism in contemporary movements and aspirations.[38]

Finally, all these also require a fresh thinking of the collective political subject. All recent developments have shown the importance of front politics. Contrary to the metaphysics of the Party as a guarantor of truth and the correct line, we need a more broad conception of the left political front that is not only unity but also dialectical process, a terrain of struggle itself, a collective democratic process, and a laboratory of ideas, projects and sensitivities.

One should stress the importance and significance which, in the modern world, political parties have in the elaboration and diffusion of conceptions of the world, because essentially what they do is to work out the ethics and the politics corresponding to these conceptions and act as it were as their  historical ‘laboratory’. [...] The relation of theory and practice becomes even closer the more the conception is vitally and radically innovatory and opposed to old ways of thinking. For this reason one can say that the parties are the elaborators of new integral and all-encompassing intellectualities and the crucibles where the unification of theory and practice, understood as a real historical process, takes place. ^[39]

Contrary to a traditional instrumentalist conception of the political organization based on a distinction between ends and means, a revolutionary strategy must be based on the identity of means and ends, and this means that the democratic form of this front must also reflect the social relations of an emancipated society.

To conclude recent developments have shown the potential for political change and breaks with “actually existing neoliberalism”. For the first time after a long time the forces of the Left are facing the challenge of political power and hegemony. We do not have the luxury of avoiding the discussion on a revolutionary strategy and a socialist perspective for the 21^st century. Concepts such as Gramsci’s historical bloc offer us the possibility to rethink politics in a strategic way.

References

Althusser, Louis 1977, “On the Twenty-Second Congress of the Communist Party”, www.marxists.org/reference/archive/althusser/1977/22nd-congress.htm (Accessed 30 October 2013).

Althusser, Louis 1998, Solitude de Machiavel, Paris: Actuel Marx / PUF.

Bensaïd, Daniel 2006, “On the return of the politico-strategic question”, http://www.marxists.org/archive/bensaid/2006/08/polstrat.htm#p5 (Accessed 30 October 2013).

Berlinguer, Enrico 1977, Historical Compromise, (In Greek). Athens: Themelio.

Buci-Glucksmann, Christine 1980, Gramsci and the State, London: Lawrence and Wishart.

Comintern 1922, “Theses on Comintern Tactics” (Fourth Congress). http://www.marxists.org/history/international/comintern/4th-congress/tactics.htm (Accessed 30 October 2013).

Gramsci, Antonio 1971, Selections from Prison Writings, London: Lawrence and Wishart.

Gramsci, Antonio 1978, Selections from Political Writings 1921-1926, London: Lawrence and Wishart.

Gramsci, Antonio 1978-1994, Cahiers de Prison. 5 vols. Paris : Gallimard.

Gramsci, Antonio 1995, Further Selections from the Prison Notebooks, London: Lawrence and Wishart.

Gramsci, Antonio ²1977, Quaderni di Carcere. Edited by Valention Gerratana, Rome: Einauidi.

Lisa, Athos 1933, Discusion political con Gramsci en la carcel, http://www.gramsci.org.ar/8/53.htm (Accesses 30 October 2013.)

Poulantzas, Nicos, 1975, Classes in Contemporary Capitalism, London: NLB.

Poulantzas, Nicos 1980, State, Power, Socialism, London: Verso.

Sorel, Georges 1999, Reflections on Violence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Sotiris, Panagiotis 2013, “The Dark of Greek Neo-fascism”, Overland 210.

Texier, Jacques 1979, “Gramsci, theoretician of the superstructures”. In Chantal Mouffe (ed.), Gramsci and Marxist Theory, London: Routledge, pp. 48-79.

Texier, Jacques 1989, “Sur le sense de “societé civile” chez Gramsci”. In Actuel Marx 5, pp. 0-68.

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China’s planning and state enterprises overcame 2007-2009 world capitalist crisis

Without state planning in the economy, China might have been dragged down by the 2007-2009 economic crisis. In June 2013, this author wrote an article entitled, “Marxism and the Social Character of China.” Here are some excerpts:

“More than 20 million Chinese workers lost their jobs in a very short time. So what did the Chinese government do?”

The article quoted Nicholas Lardy, a bourgeois China expert from the prestigious Peterson Institute for International Economics and no friend of China. (The full article by Lardy can be found in “Sustaining China’s Economic Growth after the Global Financial Crisis,” Kindle Locations 664-666, Peterson Institute for International Economics.)

Lardy described how “consumption in China actually grew during the crisis of 2008-09, wages went up, and the government created enough jobs to compensate for the layoffs caused by the global crisis,” this author’s emphasis.

Lardy continued: “In a year in which GDP expansion [in China] was the slowest in almost a decade, how could consumption growth in 2009 have been so strong in relative terms? How could this happen at a time when employment in export-oriented industries was collapsing, with a survey conducted by the Ministry of Agriculture reporting the loss of 20 million jobs in export manufacturing centers along the southeast coast, notably in Guangdong Province? The relatively strong growth of consumption in 2009 is explained by several factors.

“First, the boom in investment, particularly in construction activities, appears to have generated additional employment sufficient to offset a very large portion of the job losses in the export sector. For the year as a whole the Chinese economy created 11.02 million jobs in urban areas, very nearly matching the 11.13 million urban jobs created in 2008.

“Second, while the growth of employment slowed slightly, wages continued to rise. In nominal terms wages in the formal sector rose 12 percent, a few percentage points below the average of the previous five years (National Bureau of Statistics of China 2010f, 131). In real terms the increase was almost 13 percent.

“Third, the government continued its programs of increasing payments to those drawing pensions and raising transfer payments to China’s lowest-income residents. Monthly pension payments for enterprise retirees increased by RMB120, or 10 percent, in January 2009, substantially more than the 5.9 percent increase in consumer prices in 2008. This raised the total payments to retirees by about RMB75 billion. The Ministry of Civil Affairs raised transfer payments to about 70 million of China’s lowest-income citizens by a third, for an increase of RMB20 billion in 2009 (Ministry of Civil Affairs 2010).”

Lardy further explained that the Ministry of Railroads introduced eight specific plans, to be completed in 2020, to be implemented in the crisis.

According to Lardy, the World Bank called it “perhaps the biggest single planned program of passenger rail investment there has ever been in one country.” In addition, ultrahigh-voltage grid projects were undertaken, among other advances.

Socialist structures reversed collapse

So income went up, consumption went up and unemployment was overcome in China — all while the capitalist world was still mired in mass unemployment, austerity, recession, stagnation, slow growth and increasing poverty, and still is to a large extent.

The reversal of the effects of the crisis in China is the direct result of national planning, state-owned enterprises, state-owned banking and the policy decisions of the Chinese Communist Party.

There was a crisis in China, and it was caused by the world capitalist crisis. The question was which principle would prevail in the face of mass unemployment — the rational, humane principle of planning or the ruthless capitalist market. In China, the planning principle, the conscious element, took precedence over the anarchy of production brought about by the laws of the market and the law of labor value in the capitalist countries.

Socialism and China’s standing in the world

China has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. According to a United Nations report, China alone is responsible for the global decline in poverty. China’s universities have graduated millions of engineers, scientists, technicians and have allowed millions of peasants to enter the modern world.

Made in China 2025

In 2015, Xi Jingping and the Chinese CP leadership laid out the equivalent of a ten-year plan to take China to a higher level of technology and productivity in the struggle to modernize the country.

Xi announced a long-range industrial policy backed by hundreds of billions of dollars in both state and private investment to revitalize China. It is named “Made in China 2025” or “MIC25.” It is an ambitious project requiring local, regional and national coordination and participation.

The Mercator Institute for Economics (MERICS) is one of the most authoritative German think tanks on China. It wrote a major report on MIC25 on Feb. 7, 2019. According to MERICS, “The MIC25 program is here to stay and, just like the GDP targets of the past, represents the CCP’s official marching orders for an ambitious industrial upgrading. Capitalist economies around the globe will have to face this strategic offensive.

“The tables have already started to turn: Today, China is setting the pace in many emerging technologies — and watches as the world tries to keep pace.”

The MERICS report continues, “China has forged ahead in fields such as next-generation IT (companies like Huawei and ZTE are set to gain global dominance in the rollout of 5G networks), high-speed railways and ultra-high voltage electricity transmissions. More than 530 smart manufacturing industrial parks have popped up in China. Many focus on big data (21 percent), new materials (17 percent) and cloud computing (13 percent). Recently, green manufacturing and the creation of an “Industrial Internet” were given special emphasis in policy documents, underpinning President Xi Jinping’s vision of creating an ‘ecological civilization’ that thrives on sustainable development.

“China has also secured a strong position in areas such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), new energy and intelligent connected vehicles. …

“Chinese state-owned enterprises (SOEs) continue to play a critical role for the development of strategic industries and high-tech equipment associated with MIC25. In so-called key industries like telecommunications, ship building, aviation and high-speed railways, SOEs still have a revenue share of around 83 percent. In what the Chinese government has identified as pillar industries (for instance electronics, equipment manufacturing, or automotive) it amounts to 45 percent.”

Breakup of U.S.-China relationship inevitable

The tariff war between the U.S. and China has been going back and forth. It may or may not be resolved for now or may end up in a compromise. The Pentagon’s provocations in the South China Sea and the Pacific are unlikely to subside. The witch hunt against Chinese scientists is gaining momentum.

The U.S. has just appropriated $2.2 billion for arms to Taiwan. National Security Adviser and war hawk John Bolton recently made a trip to Taiwan. The president of Taiwan, Tsai Ing-wen, made a recent stopover in the U.S. on the way to the Caribbean and is scheduled to make another one on the way back.

All these measures indicate the end of rapprochement between Beijing and Washington. This breakup between the two powers is not just the doing of Donald Trump. It flows from the growing fear of the predominant sections of the U.S. ruling class that the gamble they took in trying to overthrow Chinese socialism from within has failed, just as the previous military aggression from 1949 to 1975 also failed.

High technology is the key to the future

Since as far back as the end of the 18th century, the U.S. capitalist class has always coveted the Chinese market. The giant capitalist monopolies went charging in to get joint agreements, low wages, cheap exports and big superprofits when China “opened up” at the end of the 1970s.

But the stronger the socialist core of the PRC becomes, the more weight it carries in the world and, above all, the stronger China becomes technologically the more Wall Street fears for its economic dominance and the more the Pentagon fears for its military dominance.

The example of the stifling of international collaboration on cancer research is a demonstration of how global cooperation is essential not only to curing disease, but also to the development of society as a whole. International cooperation is needed to reverse the climate disaster wrought by private property — none of this can be carried out within the framework of private property and the profit system. Only the destruction of capitalism can bring about the liberation of humanity.

Marxism asserts that society advances through the development of the productive forces from primary communism, to slavery, feudalism and capitalism. Marx wrote: “The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill society with the industrial capitalist.” (“The Poverty of Philosophy,” 1847) And now the revolution in high technology lays the basis for international socialism.

The bourgeoisie knows that the society that can advance technology to the highest degree will be triumphant in shaping the future. This is why imperialism, headed by the U.S., imposed the strictest blockade of the flow of technology to the Soviet Union, as well as the Eastern Bloc and China. This was done by COCOM, an informal organization of all the imperialist countries, which was created in 1949 and headquartered in Paris.

The main targets were the USSR and the more industrialized socialist countries, such as the German Democratic Republic, the Czech Republic, etc. Detailed lists were drawn up of some 1,500 technological items that were forbidden to export to these countries.

Marx explained that developed socialist relations depend upon a high degree of the productivity of labor and the resulting abundance available to the population (“Critique of the Gotha Program,” 1875).

However, as Lenin noted, the chain of imperialism broke at its weakest link in Russia — that is, the revolution was successful in the poorest, most backward capitalist country. The result was that an advanced social system was established on an insufficient material foundation. This gave rise to many, many contradictions. The countries that revolutionaries correctly called socialist, were in fact really aspiring to socialism. Their revolutions laid the foundations for socialism. But imperialist blockade, war and subversion never allowed them to freely develop their social systems.

The great leap forward in technology in China today has the potential of raising the productivity of labor and strengthening the socialist foundations. It is this great leap forward that is fueling the “new cold war” with China and the real threat of hot war.

Check out operator in a Tesco supermarket. ‘We should break the spurious link between our critique of the family wage and flexible capitalism by militating for a form of life that de-centres waged work and valorises unwaged activities, including – but not only – carework.’ Photograph: Robert Convery/Alamy

A movement that started out as a critique of capitalist exploitation ended up contributing key ideas to its latest neoliberal phase

By Nancy Fraser
The Guardian

October, 2013 – As a feminist, I’ve always assumed that by fighting to emancipate women I was building a better world – more egalitarian, just and free. But lately I’ve begun to worry that ideals pioneered by feminists are serving quite different ends. I worry, specifically, that our critique of sexism is now supplying the justification for new forms of inequality and exploitation.

In a cruel twist of fate, I fear that the movement for women’s liberation has become entangled in a dangerous liaison with neoliberal efforts to build a free-market society. That would explain how it came to pass that feminist ideas that once formed part of a radical worldview are increasingly expressed in individualist terms. Where feminists once criticised a society that promoted careerism, they now advise women to “lean in”. A movement that once prioritised social solidarity now celebrates female entrepreneurs. A perspective that once valorised “care” and interdependence now encourages individual advancement and meritocracy.

What lies behind this shift is a sea-change in the character of capitalism. The state-managed capitalism of the postwar era has given way to a new form of capitalism – “disorganised”, globalising, neoliberal. Second-wave feminism emerged as a critique of the first but has become the handmaiden of the second.

With the benefit of hindsight, we can now see that the movement for women’s liberation pointed simultaneously to two different possible futures. In a first scenario, it prefigured a world in which gender emancipation went hand in hand with participatory democracy and social solidarity; in a second, it promised a new form of liberalism, able to grant women as well as men the goods of individual autonomy, increased choice, and meritocratic advancement. Second-wave feminism was in this sense ambivalent. Compatible with either of two different visions of society, it was susceptible to two different historical elaborations.

As I see it, feminism’s ambivalence has been resolved in recent years in favour of the second, liberal-individualist scenario – but not because we were passive victims of neoliberal seductions. On the contrary, we ourselves contributed three important ideas to this development.

One contribution was our critique of the “family wage”: the ideal of a male breadwinner-female homemaker family that was central to state-organised capitalism. Feminist criticism of that ideal now serves to legitimate “flexible capitalism”. After all, this form of capitalism relies heavily on women’s waged labour, especially low-waged work in service and manufacturing, performed not only by young single women but also by married women and women with children; not by only racialised women, but by women of virtually all nationalities and ethnicities. As women have poured into labour markets around the globe, state-organised capitalism’s ideal of the family wage is being replaced by the newer, more modern norm – apparently sanctioned by feminism – of the two-earner family.

Never mind that the reality that underlies the new ideal is depressed wage levels, decreased job security, declining living standards, a steep rise in the number of hours worked for wages per household, exacerbation of the double shift – now often a triple or quadruple shift – and a rise in poverty, increasingly concentrated in female-headed households. Neoliberalism turns a sow’s ear into a silk purse by elaborating a narrative of female empowerment. Invoking the feminist critique of the family wage to justify exploitation, it harnesses the dream of women’s emancipation to the engine of capital accumulation.

Feminism has also made a second contribution to the neoliberal ethos. In the era of state-organised capitalism, we rightly criticised a constricted political vision that was so intently focused on class inequality that it could not see such “non-economic” injustices as domestic violence, sexual assault and reproductive oppression. Rejecting “economism” and politicising “the personal”, feminists broadened the political agenda to challenge status hierarchies premised on cultural constructions of gender difference. The result should have been to expand the struggle for justice to encompass both culture and economics. But the actual result was a one-sided focus on “gender identity” at the expense of bread and butter issues. Worse still, the feminist turn to identity politics dovetailed all too neatly with a rising neoliberalism that wanted nothing more than to repress all memory of social equality. In effect, we absolutised the critique of cultural sexism at precisely the moment when circumstances required redoubled attention to the critique of political economy.

Finally, feminism contributed a third idea to neoliberalism: the critique of welfare-state paternalism. Undeniably progressive in the era of state-organised capitalism, that critique has since converged with neoliberalism’s war on “the nanny state” and its more recent cynical embrace of NGOs. A telling example is “microcredit”, the programme of small bank loans to poor women in the global south. Cast as an empowering, bottom-up alternative to the top-down, bureaucratic red tape of state projects, microcredit is touted as the feminist antidote for women’s poverty and subjection. What has been missed, however, is a disturbing coincidence: microcredit has burgeoned just as states have abandoned macro-structural efforts to fight poverty, efforts that small-scale lending cannot possibly replace. In this case too, then, a feminist idea has been recuperated by neoliberalism. A perspective aimed originally at democratising state power in order to empower citizens is now used to legitimise marketisation and state retrenchment.

Reconnecting to solidarity

In all these cases, feminism’s ambivalence has been resolved in favour of (neo)liberal individualism. But the other, solidaristic scenario may still be alive. The current crisis affords the chance to pick up its thread once more, reconnecting the dream of women’s liberation with the vision of a solidary society. To that end, feminists need to break off our dangerous liaison with neoliberalism and reclaim our three “contributions” for our own ends.

First, we might break the spurious link between our critique of the family wage and flexible capitalism by militating for a form of life that de-centres waged work and valorises unwaged activities, including – but not only – carework. Second, we might disrupt the passage from our critique of economism to identity politics by integrating the struggle to transform a status order premised on masculinist cultural values with the struggle for economic justice. Finally, we might sever the bogus bond between our critique of bureaucracy and free-market fundamentalism by reclaiming the mantle of participatory democracy as a means of strengthening the public powers needed to constrain capital for the sake of justice.

The Manifesto

Review of The Desire for Mutual Recognition: Social Movements and the Dissolution of the False Self, by Peter Gabel, Routledge.

By Martha Sonnenberg

Peter Gabel’s new book, The Desire for Mutual Recognition: Social Movements and the Dissolution of the False Self, is at once a startlingly new and groundbreaking contribution to critical social theory, and a call to action for all who desire to be a part of transformative movement beyond a current world of alienated fearfulness, oppression, economic and spiritual deprivation, misogyny, racism and xenophobia. His book provides a refreshing perspective, and one necessary, in my opinion, to save a young progressive movement from the one dimensional thought which has characterized both the old and new left, and all revolutionary movements before and after. At a time when thousands of young people are exploring notions of “socialism” (Democratic Socialists of America, DSA, now reports its membership at upwards of 50,000), when the bastions of patriarchy are being rattled by the voices of #MeToo , this book offers an opportunity for these movements to avoid the flaws and failures of previous movements for change.

Gabel’s precursors may be the cultural Marxist critical theorists of the Frankfort School of Social Research in 1920’s Germany, most notably Herbert Marcuse, who became somewhat of a cultural guru for the New Left of the 1960’s, as well as the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, and others (Georg Lukacs, Wilhelm Reich) And while Gabel also draws from Marx and Freud (among others) he pushes beyond the limits of all of them, to show how and why each of us has both a “false self” created by the fear of the humiliation of rejection by others, and an authentic self which yearns for expression and which emerges when we can mutually recognize each other and let ourselves be truly known.

Gabel’s essential thesis is that our basic drive as human beings is our longing for mutual recognition of our authentic selves, and towards a loving connectedness with one another. The fear of the rejection of that longing (fear of “ontologic humiliation”) leads us to the creation of “false selves,” behind which our innermost desires are hidden and suppressed. Gabel’s discussion of the creation and maintenance of the false self is reminiscent of Gramsci’s notion of “cultural hegemony” and can be understood as a deepening exploration of how hegemony functions to maintain dominant authority. But Gramsci understood that people can be capable of creating “counter-hegemony” or a “contradictory consciousness” in a movement for self-transformation. Thus Gabel, like Gramsci, presents us with a profound and contemporary dialectic notion of “being” in that he sees people as agents of their own self-transformation even while inhabiting their false selves. The push toward authenticity, despite the power of the false self and despite fears of rejection, cannot be completely suppressed—it manifests itself, it expresses itself when we feel safe, loved…and when we are in the midst of social movement.

For anyone who has been a part of a social movement, the antiwar movement, the labor movement, the civil rights movement, the women’s movement, the movement for LGBTQ liberation—all movements which challenge the apparent hegemonic definition of reality–that feeling of being connected with others, of feeling that one’s being was meaningful and purposeful and appreciated is something that will never be forgotten. Gabel refers to this feeling as “the ricochet of mutual recognition.” He gives the example of Rosa Park’s action and the resulting Montgomery bus boycott— how her action became meaningful because of all the precedent small acts of civil disobedience, the culture and songs of the civil rights movement. Her action “had opened up a new possible space, as yet not fully revealed before Park’s action…the notion that “the colored section” might not be a fact, and by extension, that all such racial segregation might not also be “the way things are.” A new perceptual universe is opened.

Gabel states that his theory calls for a “spiritualized politics”, with an analysis that does not deny the importance of economics, but does not restrict itself to economics. The desire for mutual recognition, for that “vibrant life force that unites us,’ requires that we push beyond the limits of an economic transformation of society to allow a “psychospiritual strategy that elicits from each of us the capacity to sustain mutual recognition.” And this is where Gabel moves beyond Marcuse, Gramsci, and yes, Marx too, in that his critical theory is not for the use of leaders, or a vanguard, to reach and mobilize or educate a mass movement—rather, this critical theory is for the leaders themselves as well as those who make up the rank and file of a movement—it is for all of us to confront our fear-dominated heritage, in order to create what Gabel calls a “spiritually redemptive socialism.” If we do not attend to this psychosocial and spiritual dimension of our existence, if we remain tied only to the material and external aspects of society, we will be unable to sustain the “ricochet of mutual recognition” and our movements will, as they have, succumb to inertia, pessimism, cynicism, and a loss of their redemptive and transformative spirit.

There is ample historical evidence for Gabel’s point. We need only look at the model of the Russian Revolution, from its dynamic and creative beginning, in 1917, with art, poetry, theater, feminism stimulated by revolutionary élan, succumbing to the suffocating stranglehold of Stalinism. The same can be seen in the Chinese revolution, ending with the oppressiveness of the Cultural Revolution. The economic struggle was not enough. As each of these revolutions faced external challenges, the mutuality of presence that had been there in the beginning gave way to the alienated status quo of authoritarian control, with its attendant fear of the other.

We, of the 60’s generation, have witnessed the same process in our own movements as they dissolved, frantically pursuing an external task, becoming more and more dogmatic, relying on leaders who became increasingly autocratic, suppressing dissenters, degenerating into sects, undermining group confidence. The decline of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in the late 60’s and early 70’s, as described by Mark Rudd, offers a chilling example of what happened: “We de-organized SDS while we claimed we were making it stronger; we isolated ourselves from our friends and allies as we helped split the larger antiwar movement around the issue of violence…Gone permanently was the sense of experimentation and openness of the early SDS.” And later, “If it was going to be a war between Marxist factions, we would not shrink from the battle of correct words and ideas.” (My Life with SDS and the Weather Underground, 2009) As Michael Lerner recalled of those times, “Watching the competing factions tear the organization apart at its June 1969 convention was a heartbreaking experience” Millions of activists, Lerner remembers, lost all confidence and felt “they had accomplished nothing” and that the only “real” struggle would be one modeled after the Soviet seizure of power, or the revolutions led by Fidel Castro, Ho Chi Minh, or Mao Tse Tung.”(“Reflections on NAM”, Works and Days, 2010)

It is distressing that we can already see some of these tendencies emerging in the fledgling movement of today. Michael Hirsch described his perceptions of the 2018 DSA convention in New York, noting that most of what we see in the major positions of DSA , Medicare for All, free education, rent control, while important, do not go beyond a limited economic analysis, offering moderate ethical reforms, at best. And he noted the beginning of in-fighting: “A lot of discussion at the NY DSA convention seemed to be battling shadows. Some chastised others for being insufficiently Marxist…Others treated Marxist categories as so much empty rhetoric that got in the way of real organizing.” (Michael Hirsch, “Connecting Reform and Revolution: Socialists in the Mist”, New Politics, 2018) Further, women are becoming concerned about gendered divisions of labor within DSA chapters, noting that the “inability of men to listen to womens’ feedback…threatens the success of the entire progressive movement.” (“Statement on Women in DSA Leadership”, Rosie Bz and Annie DF, @bread and roses, 2018)

Gabel addresses these issues–why movements lose confidence, why so many of these movements deteriorated into soulless and hierarchical organizations, or worse, into in-fighting and vitriolic dissolution. They succumb to the fear of that which wages war against them. And those forces are real—as we experience daily the assaults of Trumpism on people of color, women, immigrants, gay, lesbian and transgender groups. To avoid these historic pitfalls in face of such assaults, Gabel calls for a spiritualization of political and social activism, in ways that are thought provoking, creative, and above all doable. He writes:

“…if we are to transcend our alienation so as to actually “change society”, we must heal and repair the life-world that we ourselves are living, rather than fix it as if it were something outside of us. This means that social activism must be…a transformation and elevation of social space that brings us into authentic contact with each other, and makes us present to each other while also enabling us to know that this is occurring and gradually become what we are intending.”

To “become what we are intending”–This is a profound declaration, and one that really makes Gabel’s theory revolutionary in ways not anticipated by his precursors. Here, he is closest to the thinking of Grace Boggs’ humanitarian Marxism, when she said, “To make a revolution, people must not only struggle against existing institutions. They must make a philosophical/spiritual leap and become more “human” human beings. In order to change, transform the world, they must change/transform themselves” (Grace Boggs, Living for Change, University of Minnesota Press, 1998)

Gabel challenges us to transform ourselves. He challenges us to understand our own internal contradictions between desire and fear, to confront our own false selves. He challenges us, even in the degrading midst of a Trumpist world, not to lose confidence in our abilities to create alternative social spaces that negate the apparent reality of “what is.” And finally, he challenges us to evoke and live to the best of our abilities in our vision of the world to which we aspire, to avoid anger filled “us vs. them” discourse and dehumanization of others struggling with us, lest we “flatten out” the world we want to create. How we behave, Gabel says, toward ourselves, toward others in our lives, in our movement, as well as toward those who may oppose us, is as critical, may be more critical, to social transformation as the goal we are trying to achieve. I hope that The Desire for Mutual Recognition, is carried around in the backpacks of DSAers, that it will be promoted, read and discussed by this newer generation of activists, (and by the older generation as well!) , because this book can help activists consciously understand what it means to be a part of a movement. This book can provide insights about the transformative changes they are realizing and experiencing, and hopefully, help them avoid the demoralizing effects the legacy of fear can have in undermining social movements. In these times dominated by small mindedness, fear, racism, chauvinism, injustice and inequality, Peter Gabel’s book provides an inspiring reminder that while the current situation may be real, it is not inevitable, and that social transformation is possible.

Higher education has historically been a bulwark against authoritarianism — or its pawn. What’ll it be this time?

By Jason Stanley

The Chronicle Review 

Sept 02, 2018  – In recent years, several countries across the world have been overtaken by a certain kind of far-right nationalism; the list includes Russia, Hungary, Poland, India, Turkey, and the United States. The task of generalizing about such phenomena is always vexing. But such generalization is necessary now, when patterns have emerged that suggest the resurgence of fascist politics globally. Increasingly, attacks on universities and conflicts over their policies are a symptom of this phenomenon.

I use the label "fascism" to describe any ultranationalism — ethnic, religious, or cultural — in which the nation is represented by an authoritarian leader who claims to speak for the people. As Donald J. Trump declared in his Republican National Convention speech in July 2016, "I am your voice." In particular, my interest is in fascist politics as a mechanism to achieve power. Once those who employ such tactics come to power, the regimes they enact are in large part determined by particular historical conditions. What occurred in Germany was different from what occurred in Italy. Fascist politics does not necessarily lead to an explicitly fascist state, but it is dangerous nonetheless.

Honest politics needs intelligent debate. One of the clearest signs of fascist politics, then, is attacks on universities and expertise — the support systems of discussion and the sources of knowledge and facts. Intelligent debate is impossible without access to different perspectives, a respect for expertise when one’s own knowledge gives out, and a rich enough language to precisely describe reality. When education is undermined, only power and tribal identity remain.

This does not mean that there is no role for universities in fascist politics. In fascist ideology, only one viewpoint is legitimate. Colleges are meant to introduce students to the dominant culture and its mythic past. Education therefore either poses a grave threat to fascism or becomes a pillar of support for the mythical nation. It’s no wonder, then, that cultural clashes on campuses represent a true political battleground and receive national attention. The stakes are high.

For at least the past 50 years, universities have been the epicenter of protest against injustice and authoritarian overreach. Consider, for example, their unique role in the antiwar movement of the 1960s. Where speech is a right, propagandists cannot attack dissent head-on; instead they must represent it as something violent and oppressive (a protest therefore becomes a "riot"). In 2015 the Black Lives Matter movement spread to university campuses. Given that Black Lives Matter gained strength after Michael Brown was killed in Ferguson, Mo., it is no surprise that the first campus it touched was the University of Missouri at Columbia. The Missouri student movement was named Concerned Student 1950, after the year in which the University of Missouri was desegregated. Among its aims was to address the incidents of racial abuse faced by black students on a regular basis, as well as to change curricula that represented culture and civilization as the product solely of white men. The media largely ignored those motivations, and, representing protesting black students as an angry mob, used the situation as an opportunity to foment rage against the supposed liberal excesses of the university.

Fascist politics seeks to undermine the credibility of institutions that harbor independent voices of dissent. One typical method is to level accusations of hypocrisy. Right now, a contemporary right-wing campaign is charging universities with hypocrisy on the issue of free speech. Universities, it says, claim to hold free speech in the highest regard but suppress any voices that don’t lean left. Critics of campus social-justice movements have found an effective method of turning themselves into the victims of protest. They contend that protesters mean to deny them their own free speech.

These accusations also extend into the classroom. David Horowitz is a far-right activist who has been targeting universities since the 1980s. In 2006 he published a book, The Professors, naming the "101 most dangerous professors in America," a list of leftist and liberal professors, many of whom were supporters of Palestinian rights. In 2009 he published another book, One Party Classroom, with a list of the "150 most dangerous courses in America."

In fascist politics, universities are debased in public discourse, and academics are undermined as legitimate sources of knowledge and expertise.

Horowitz has started numerous organizations to promote his ideas. In the 1990s, he created the Individual Rights Foundation, which, according to the conservative Young America’s Foundation, "led the battle against speech codes on college campuses." In 1992 he founded the monthly tabloid Heterodoxy, which, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, "targeted university students whom Horowitz viewed as being indoctrinated by the entrenched Left in American academia." Horowitz is also responsible for Students for Academic Freedom, which was called the Campaign for Fairness and Inclusion in Higher Education when it was introduced in 2003. The goal of Students for Academic Freedom is to promote the hiring of professors with conservative worldviews, an effort marketed as promoting "intellectual diversity and academic freedom at America’s colleges and universities," according to Young America’s Foundation.

Some will argue that a university must have representatives of all positions. Such an argument suggests that being justified in our own positions requires regularly grappling with opposing ones (and that there was no room for those views in the first place). Anyone who has taught philosophy knows that it is often useful to confront cogent defenses of opposing positions, and universities unquestionably benefit from intelligent and sophisticated proponents of positions along the political spectrum. Nevertheless, the general principle, upon reflection, is not particularly plausible.

No one thinks that the demands of free inquiry require adding researchers to university faculties who seek to demonstrate that the earth is flat. Similarly, I can safely and justifiably reject ISIS ideology without having to confront its advocates in the classroom or faculty lounge. I do not need to have a colleague who defends the view that Jewish people are genetically predisposed to greed in order to justifiably reject such anti-Semitic nonsense. Nor is it even remotely plausible that bringing such voices to campus would aid arguments against such toxic ideologies. More likely, it would undermine intelligent debate by leading to breakdowns of communication and shouting matches.

Universities should supply the intellectual tools to allow an understanding of all perspectives. But the best way to achieve that is to hire the most academically qualified professors. No method of adjudicating academic quality will be free from controversy. But trying to evade that difficulty by forcing universities to hire representatives of every ideological position is a particularly implausible fix, one that can perhaps be justified only by a widespread conspiracy theory about academic standards being hijacked by, say, a supposed epidemic of "political correctness."

For decades, Horowitz was a fringe figure. Now his tactics and aims, and even his rhetoric, have moved into the mainstream, where attacks on "political correctness" on campuses have become commonplace. Jesse Panuccio, acting U.S. associate attorney general, began his remarks at Northwestern University in January by declaring campus free speech "a vitally important topic, and, as you are probably aware, one that Attorney General Sessions has made a priority for the Department of Justice. It is a priority because, in our view, many campuses across the country are failing to protect and promote free speech." Since then the Department of Justice has filed suits against universities for their alleged failure to protect the free-speech rights of right-wing speakers. Top officials, including the attorney general and the secretary of education, have appeared as featured speakers at a Turning Point USA conference, an organization that keeps "watch lists" of supposedly dangerous leftist professors, hardly a hallmark of free-speech advocacy.

Trump’s presidential campaign is sometimes described as one long attack on "political correctness." It is not accidental that the rhetoric of the Trump administration overlaps with the talking points of some of the well-funded institutions that have arisen to attack and delegitimize universities as bastions of liberalism. These broad criticisms have real impacts on academic careers and academic freedom. In January 2017, Missouri State Representative Rick Brattin, a Republican, proposed banning tenure at all of Missouri’s public universities. After calling tenure "un-American" in an interview with The Chronicle, Brattin added, "Something’s wrong, something’s broken, and a professor that should be educating our kids, should be concentrating on ensuring that they’re propelling to a better future, but instead are engaging in political stuff that they shouldn’t be engaged in. Because they have tenure, they’re allowed to do so. And that is wrong." When Brattin was asked whether he was concerned that eliminating tenure would damage academic freedom and lead to professors’ losing their jobs for political reasons, he responded, "In what area do you have protection of your job for whatever you say, whatever you do, you’re protected? You don’t have that."

In the classic style of demagogic propaganda, the tactic of attacking institutions standing up for public reason and open debate occurs under the cloak of those very ideals.

Within universities, fascist politicians target professors they deem too political and often denounce entire areas of study. When fascist movements are underway in liberal democratic states, certain academic disciplines are singled out. Gender studies, for instance, comes under fire from far-right nationalist movements across the world. Professors in these fields are accused of disrespect to the traditions of the nation.

The nation is the top priority of fascist education, and fields that don’t align with the nation’s identity are typically denounced as "Marxist indoctrination," the classic bogeyman of fascist politics. Used without any connection to Marx or Marxism, the expression is employed to malign the equality represented by even small amounts of space being given to marginalized perspectives. Fascism is about a hierarchy ordered by the dominant perspective, and so, during fascist moments, there is strong support for figures who denounce disciplines that teach perspectives other than the dominant ones — such as gender studies, or, in the United States, African-American studies or Middle Eastern studies. The dominant perspective is often misrepresented as the truth, the "real history." Attempts to allow space for traditionally nondominant perspectives are used to foment panic about an attack on tradition; when English departments add Ngugi wa Thiong’o to the curriculum, it is represented as an attack on Shakespeare.

Fascist opposition to gender studies, in particular, flows from fascism’s patriarchal ideology. National Socialism, for example, targeted women’s movements and feminism generally; for the Nazis, feminism was a Jewish conspiracy to destroy fertility among Aryan women. In fascist attacks on universities, the universities play the role of the Nazis’ "Jewish conspiracy" behind the women’s movement.

According to fascist politics, universities subvert masculinity and undermine the traditional family. In Russia, Vladimir Putin has gone on the offensive on this issue, repurposing universities into ideological weapons directed against the supposed Western excesses of feminism. In her 2017 book, The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia (Riverhead Books), Masha Gessen describes how Russia’s antigay, antifeminist university agenda emerged out of a 1997 conference in Prague called the World Congress of Families, organized by Allan C. Carlson, then a professor of history at the "ultraconservative Hillsdale College in Michigan." The conference attracted a large audience. Gessen writes, "Inspired by the turnout, the organizers turned the World Congress of Families into a permanent organization dedicated to the fight against gay rights, abortion rights, and gender studies."

As one example of policies inspired by the conference, the Russian government persecuted the European University at St. Petersburg for its liberal inclinations; Russian authorities had been trying to close it down for years and finally succeeded in 2016, when its teaching license was suspended. According to the university, "the inspections were instigated by an official complaint from Vitaly Milonov," a member of the Russian parliament for Putin’s United Russia Party. Milonov, who is responsible for some of Russia’s antigay legislation, has expressed concern about the teaching of gender studies at the university: "I personally find that disgusting, it’s fake studies, and it may well be illegal," he told The Christian Science Monitor.

In Hungary and Poland, gender studies has also been a flash point of political controversy, drawing the ire of political leaders seeking to paint universities as bastions of liberal indoctrination. As Andrea Peto, a professor of gender studies at Central European University, relates in her study "Report From the Trenches: The Debate Around Teaching Gender Studies in Hungary," the undersecretary of the Hungarian Ministry of Human Resources, Bence Rétvári, compared gender studies to Marxist-Leninism (again, the standard bogeyman of fascist regimes).

Attacking gender studies is also an explicit tactic of the far right in the United States. In 2010 the state legislature of North Carolina was taken over by Republicans affiliated with the Tea Party movement. Together with the Republican governor, Pat McCrory, they went after the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. A newly appointed Board of Governors of the university dismissed its widely admired progressive president, Tom Ross. Governor McCrory said in an interview that public universities should not teach courses in "gender studies or Swahili" (Swahili is spoken by 140 million people as a first or second language). He added, "If you want to take gender studies, that’s fine, go to a private school and take it."

In fascist ideology, the function of the education system is to glorify the mythic past, obscuring the perspectives and histories of those who do not belong. In a process sometimes tendentiously called "decolonizing" the curriculum, neglected perspectives are incorporated, thereby ensuring that students have a full view of history’s actors. In the fight against fascism, adjusting the curriculum in this way is not mere "political correctness." It is an essential means of protection against fascist myth.

Higher education can either stand as a bulwark against fascist politics or be a weapon of fascist politicians.

Governor McCrory did not stop with his suggestion that some courses should be removed from the public curriculum. He also called on the university to focus more on the type of skills-based education that employers supposedly need, to the detriment of subjects like sociology, which aid students in becoming better citizens. He was backed up by what was then the John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy, run and funded by Art Pope, a powerful and wealthy Republican donor. The Pope center has successfully urged the University of North Carolina to raise its tuition. This move will lead more students away from humanities and social sciences and into majors that will give them "business skills."

At the same time that it denigrates subjects that would enable a greater understanding of human cultural diversity, the Pope center (now known as the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal) also urges the teaching of a "great books" curriculum, which emphasizes the cultural achievements of white Europeans. The priorities here make sense when one realizes that in antidemocratic systems, the function of education is to produce obedient citizens structurally obliged to enter the work force without bargaining power, and ideologically trained to think that the dominant group represents history’s greatest civilizational forces. Conservative figures pour huge sums into the project of advancing right-wing goals in education. In 2017 the Charles Koch Foundation alone spent $100 million at around 350 colleges and universities.

When universities restrict their required offerings to European cultural touchstones, they risk suggesting that white Europeans constitute the core of human civilization. Our universities must not be complicit, even unwittingly, in promulgating such a myth.

When universities restrict their required offerings to European cultural touchstones, they risk suggesting that white Europeans constitute the core of human civilization.
Across time and place, as fascism rises, so too do figures who call for stacking colleges with professors more sympathetic to nationalist or traditionalist ideals. What has been happening in Hungary is a classic example. When Viktor Orban assumed power, he condemned universities as sites for liberal indoctrination. The best university in Hungary is Central European University, which retains independence from the Hungarian state. Orban presents CEU as a foreign institution that seeks to displace local Hungarian schools, spreading liberal universalist values such as pro-immigration sentiment. In April 2017, the Hungarian parliament attached legislation to an anti-immigration bill seeking to strip CEU of its ability to operate as an American university in Hungary and regulating the movement of its faculty and students for national-security reasons.

Similar efforts to shape curricula to nationalist ends are underway around the world, including in Turkey, where one of the first actions that President Recep Tayyip Erdogan undertook after the attempted coup against him in 2016 was to dismiss more than 5,000 deans and academics from their posts on suspicion of pro-democratic or pro-leftist sentiments. Many were also imprisoned. In an interview with the Voice of America, Ismet Akca, a political-science professor who was removed from his position at Yildiz Technical University, in Istanbul, said, "These people being purged are not just democratic left-oriented people, they are very good scientists, very good academicians. By purging them, the government is also attacking the very idea of the higher education, the very idea of the universities in this country."

The replacement of a varied curriculum with a narrowly proscribed one is a renunciation of knowledge and expertise. Rush Limbaugh has made this explicitly clear on his radio show, denouncing "the four corners of deceit: government, academia, science, and media. Those institutions are now corrupt and exist by virtue of deceit. That’s how they promulgate themselves; it is how they prosper." Limbaugh provides a perfect example of how fascist politics targets expertise, mocking and devaluing it. In a liberal democracy, political leaders are supposed to consult with those they represent, as well as with experts and scientists who can most accurately explain the demands of reality on policy.

Instead, fascist politicians call upon universities to bolster their preconceived messages rather than to inform and shape policy. Across the world right now, we see right-wing movements attacking universities for spreading "Marxism" and "feminism" and failing to give a central place to far-right values. Even in the United States, home to the world’s greatest university system, we see Eastern European-style attacks on universities. Student protests are misrepresented in the press as riots by undisciplined mobs, threats to the civil order. In fascist politics, universities are debased in public discourse, and academics are undermined as legitimate sources of knowledge and expertise. Instead they are represented as radicals spreading a leftist ideological agenda under the guise of research. By debasing institutions of higher learning and impoverishing our joint vocabulary, fascist politics reduces debate to ideological conflict, thereby occluding reality.

History suggests that when the central government targets universities in ways we are now witnessing in the United States, it is a signal of encroaching authoritarianism. We would do well to take such signals both literally and seriously, if we are to preserve what history teaches is a bulwark against authoritarianism — a vibrant, robust, and independent university system.

Jason Stanley is a professor of philosophy at Yale University. He is the author of the new book How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them (Random House), from which this essay is adapted.

By Bill Gallegos

Over the last several weeks, the Trump Administration has ramped up its ethnic cleansing campaign aimed at the forced removal of more than 11 million undocumented workers in the US. While the overwhelming majority of this population is Mexican@, it also includes significant numbers of Centro American@s, Asian, and African peoples. It even includes about 500,000 undocumented European immigrants.

But what especially outraged the souls of most people in the US and the world is the humanitarian crisis caused by the kidnapping and incarceration of 3000 children from Latin@ families seeking refugee asylum, fleeing the danger of criminal violence or domestic violence. Jeff Sessions, the outrageously racist US Attorney General, has instructed the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to no longer honor asylum requests based on such violence. With no planning, children ended up in holding centers on the other side of the country sometimes in dog-kennel like facilities, where no one spoke their language (many spoke indigenous languages) or, in the case of babies, they could not talk at all, only cry. There was no plan as to how to re-match these children with parents after the indefinite incarceration period as if that was not important.

After several months of separation, a federal court ordered the Administration to restore the children to their families post haste. But even after the July 10 deadline for children under 5, many are still misplaced, or their parents already deported. Trump’s avowed aim with this cruel policy was to discourage Latin@s from seeking refuge in the US. This is state political terror: threatening to harm a child if the adult does not cooperate. The imprisoned children are held hostage to Trump’s demands for a border wall, greater militarization of the border, and massive reduction of legal immigration. The Party of Christian and “family values,” like the slave owners of the past, do not believe non-white families are fully human.

These horrendous violations of human rights have inspired broad and sustained resistance throughout the US., spearheaded by Chican@-Mexican@s and Latin@s, but including a broad cross-section of the US population, from Black Lives Matter, to elected officials, to media personalities, to labor unions, Indigenous networks, and even the Prime Minister of Canada, who has said that Canada would accept these refugees. Literally, thousands of resistance actions have taken place throughout the US since the kidnapping began.

But while this is just the most egregious of immigration policies, and while xenophobia has found open expression and action in Trump’s administration, the detention and deportation of immigrants, often causing family separation, is not new. The Left must fight for an end not just to the kidnapping of children, but all of the injustices embedded in our immigration and refugee policies. At bottom, it is a fight against hatred, fear, and selfishness. We will win through unity, courage, and acting on our knowledge that an injury to one is an injury to all.

10 Points of Analysis

1. White supremacy is “in,” vociferous, open, encouraged, rewarded. New- Confederate ideology is dominant; that is, a belief that this is a white country, that Black and Brown lives don’t matter, and that everything and anything must be done to keep America white and unequal. This includes repression of citizens of color, making it lengthy, difficult, and expensive for legal immigrants to gain citizenship, tracking and deporting all without papers, using harsh measures such as the snatching of the children to make immigration as terrible as the situations in the home country, and stopping the entry of people seeking asylum due to documentable threats of violence from political or social oppression.

2. The Black Freedom Movement is still the primary target of Trump and the Right, but the Chican@-Mexican@ fight for immigrant rights is an important target as well. While mass incarceration has had its most devastating impacts on the Black population, it has also had a massive impact on the Latin@ population. While the focus has been on border security, most detentions and deportations are still taking place in the interior (since pre- Trump but amped up since his election), where ICE is raiding workplaces, homes, buses; and starting deportation proceedings on people when they go to court, to the hospital, to visit their soldier sons on military bases, to regular INS check-ins. Often, fathers or mothers are deported, leaving their citizen children behind. ICE and the Border Patrol are now the largest domestic federal law enforcement apparatus in the country, dwarfing even the FBI, DEA, and the NSA. Ethnic cleansing is getting rid of as many Latin@s as possible; they are now the largest population of color in the US, (over 40 million); if their numbers increase at the current rate, then the U.S. will be majority non- white by 2045.

3. There was a time when the Republican Right made some efforts to divide Black and Brown communities, conducting outreach programs and lauding Latin@s for “family values” and their “work ethic” (as contrasted with a Black community that they believed lacked such values). , however, these efforts were unsuccessful as a more openly racist wing gained control of the Republican Party and began a campaign of demonization and repression against Chican@s and Latin@s. In California, the backlash from the Chican@-Latin@ population resulted in the near- marginalization of the Republican Party, which, at the statewide level, cannot get elected dogcatcher. Those setbacks have motivated the New-Confederate Right to ramp up their attacks on both citizens and non-citizens: suppressing voting rights, minimizing political representation through gerrymandering, pursuing English-only laws, outlawing Chican@-Latin@ studies, ending immigration for family reunification, and now, the mass incarceration of babies.

4. Mexican immigration to the US has been motivated mostly by US economic domination of Mexico, which has contributed to that nation’s massive poverty. NAFTA is a clear example of this domination. Within a few years, after NAFTA went into effect in 1998, more than 3 million Mexi- can@s were driven out of the Mexican agricultural sector by US agribusinesses like Con-Agra and Archer Daniels Midland which decimated most of the small and medium-sized farm operations in Mexico. Mexico’s economy is unable to absorb all of these workers who then have no other option but to be “pushed” out of Mexico to head North. In the US, agribusiness, retail, and service industries have been more than willing to employ undocumented immigrants who are denied most basic civil and labor rights. This is the “pull” of the “push-pull” dynamic that drives immigration from Mexico.

5. The US shares a 2000-mile border with Mexico, the most important nation in the US “backyard” because of proximity, Mexico’s enormous oil and gas reserves, massive US investments there, and the linkages that exist between Chican@-Mexican@s in the US and those in Mexico. These include linkages between social movements, artists, unions, and intellectuals as well as family ties. US ruling class domination of Mexico and “control” of the border has been an important element of US ruling class strategy for decades. A new threat to this domination is the recent overwhelming election of the left-leaning Andres Manuel Lopez-Obrador (AMLO) as President, the election of members of his political party Morena to a majority of seats in the Mexican Congress, and the victories of thousands of Morena candidates to seats in local and regional governments. Mexico’s strategic importance to the US has heavily influenced US immigration policies, never more so than now.

6. Immigration from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras can be directly linked to US support in the 1980’s for right-wing governments, the military, and right-wing death squads in those countries. With US (and Israeli) support, these forces in El Salvador and Guatemala murdered tens of thousands of workers and peasants, created hundreds of thousands of refugees, devastated their economies, and crushed all efforts at land and wealth re-distribution. A similar situation occurred more recently in Honduras as the US government, under President Obama, supported a coup against a progressive, democratically elected president who wanted to institute democratic and economic reforms. The poverty, crime, and violence that now dominates in those nations and compels people to migrate to the United States can be traced to US government policies.

7. Drug trafficking and gang violence are claimed by Trump to be one of the main reasons for the crackdown. In Mexico, the drug wars have wreaked terrible carnage, and this is a major issue for the Mexican people. Contrary to Trump’s assertions, Mexico and the U.S. have long cooperated in stemming the tide. In Central America, youth gangs that have taken hold originated in the U.S. and were exported to El Salvador when young people arrested for felonies were deported. According to Human
Rights lawyer Jennifer Harbury, people flee Guatemala and El Salvador to escape the violence of the drug cartels led by former military thugs, trained at the School of the Americas, from the US-supported dirty wars against popular forces in the 1980’s. In other words, the US created the refugee crisis – and is now, illegally, treating asylum seekers as criminals and denying them the right to enter and to ask for asylum.

8. Jeff Sessions whining about the danger of “open borders” is totally bogus. The US-Mexico border was drawn in blood after the United States invaded Mexico in the 1840’s and stole its Northern territories, including the modern-day US Southwest and California. In fact, all US borders have a blood history rooted in the genocide and displacement of Indigenous peoples, the colonization of Puerto Rico, the annexation of Hawai’i. As the great Chican@ theater artist Luis Valdez has said about Chican@-Mexican@s in the US, “we did not cross the border, it crossed us.” When the US needs a supply of easily exploited labor, the US-Mexico border is quite “open.” When an economic crisis or political and social benefits derived from scapegoating immigrants, the border is closed.

 
9. US capitalism is white racist capitalism rooted in a history of genocide, enslavement, annexation, and colonization. That history includes the forcible annexation of Northern Mexico, territories that include some of the most fertile agricultural lands in the world, enormous oil, gas, and coal deposits, as well as deposits of other important minerals, and broad coastal access to trade from the Pacific Rim. Control of these territories has helped enable US capitalism to become the wealthiest country in the world.

10. A system of white privilege has helped the US ruling elite to secure the support of a broad section of the white population. Whites have greater wealth, higher incomes, political, social rights, and cultural and language dominance, than do oppressed people of color. These privileges help ensure votes and political support for the policies and programs of the ruling Right, including economic policies that mainly benefit the 1%, and that hurt the very people voting for these policies. Scapegoating immigrants detracts attention from the real problems white working class and middle-class white Americans face. Trump paints the majority of Latin@ immigrants as rapists and murderers at worst and freeloaders at best, and promises to “deport them all.” He uses fear to convince whites to lock the doors against newcomers, even those banging on the door to cry out for help, even children who have braved the desert crossing alone. “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself” – and now, Trump is building a base on fear.

Ten Point Program of Resistance: Our Strategy

1. Internationalism must be our strategy. Chican@-Mexican@ organizations and activists and the Left must build ties with social movements in Mexico as a critical element of strategy for freedom and self-determination for Chican@s- Mexican@s in the US, as well as to support the movement for genuine independence and social change in Mexico. As we rejoice in the victory of Lopez-Obrador in Mexico, we know that the U.S. will not sit idly by and allow socialist reform there; we must be ready to work across the border to help the Morena Party succeed. Similarly, we must strengthen the Central American Solidarity movement that still exists in the form of CISPES, School of the Americas Watch, Witness for Peace and more. The issues, like families, reside and are connected on both sides of the borders; solutions must include changes in both the US and Latin America.

2. Workers (of the world) Unite! Ethnic cleansing is a workers issue. The labor movement can –indeed it has to—play an active and aggressive role in the immigration fight. Not only do unions have significant numbers of Latin@ members, but strengthening workers’ rights abroad stops the global race to the bottom. In 2000 the national labor federation, the AFL-CIO, reversed a hundred years of anti-immigrant activity and since then has played a more progressive role. Some unions have reached out aggressively to bargain contract language to protect undocumented members from termination (Unite-HERE), fought for sanctuary for its members seized by ICE (Painters – IUPAT), mobilized large-scale naturalization and voter registration efforts (Orange County Central Labor Council, Texas AFL-CIO), and built rapid-response networks to support and defend families broken up by raids (teachers and others). Direct actions, such as the West Coast longshoremen shutting down docks to enforce a boycott of South African products to help end apartheid, or the 2015 ‘Day without an Immigrant’ strike shows the potential for labor action across many economic sectors. Leftists in the labor movement need to understand that labor’s future will largely be determined by our approach to white supremacy, and today that requires practical and political responses to the immigration crisis like those mentioned above.

3. Build Black-Brown unity. Separating families has consistently been white supremacist U.S. policy: Native Americans (forcible removal of children to schools designed to knock the Indian out of them), African Americans (selling husband, wives, and children separately), Asians (in some cases putting just the fathers in the internment camps during WWII) and Latin@s as we are now witnessing in horror. Together, the Black and Brown populations in the US represent more than 80 million people in areas of historical concentration in the US South and the US Southwest. A “Sunbelt Strategy” that unites our two social movements could anchor a united front of all oppressed people of color and a significant minority of white working people. A joint campaign against the mass incarceration of Black people and the ethnic cleansing of Latin@s could be a major launching point for melding these forces into the foundation, the beating heart, of the United Front that can lead the working class out of capitalist barbarism.

4. Build unity on the Left. Left and socialist organizations should be finding more ways to unite against the Trump ethnic cleansing campaign. This is at once a working class, women’s, and oppressed peoples’ issue. The moral outrage and the political strategy behind this campaign should motivate left organizations to meet, to talk, to strategize, and to collaboratively support the growing and massive resistance movement that has developed around these issues. In many communities, the Sanctuary movement has united a broad range of people in the name of protecting their neighbors and friends. This takes many forms, from campaigns to pass Sanctuary legislation to civil disobedience at ICE facilities to disruption of raids and establishment of literal sanctuary churches and homes where people at risk of detention or deportation can be protected. This could be an important first step towards building the broader Left unity we need to truly transform this country and achieve socialism.

5. Build a united front NOW against the extremist New-Confederate Right, which is constructing a dangerous path to fascism. They are eliminating the right to vote for tens of millions of people of color; demonizing the media; putting forward falsehoods, praising dictators, gutting trade union rights, women’s rights, and civil rights; mobilizing an openly racist, white nationalist, neo-Nazi social base, all aimed towards creating an apartheid country. Time is of the essence. We must unite all who can be united in a broad united front that even includes neoliberal Democrats to confront this common enemy and build a new majority committed to justice and self-determination.

Our Demands:

6. An immediate end to the policy of arresting and criminalizing asylum applicants and incarcerating their children. While the government should pay the cost for reuniting children with their families, the actual work of and resources for doing so should be done by respected immigrants rights organizations, the faith community, community-based organizations.

7. Abolish ICE. It is the modern-day Gestapo and should be immediately closed down. The resources now committed to ICE and the Border Patrol should be directed instead to immediately processing all asylum applications, the reunification of separated families, and speeding decisions on hundreds of thousands of other legalization applications.

8. Immediate and unconditional residency for all DREAMERS, and a simple path to citizenship. These young people were brought to the US as children and are undocumented; they have spent most of their lives here, and do not remember or identify with their country of origin.

9. Just and democratic immigration policies. Immigrants usually leave home due to US military, economic, and political policies; we on the Left say they should, therefore, be granted full legal, civil, and labor rights. But beyond the political rationale, just immigration policies are based on the moral sentiment engraved on the Statue of Liberty: to give refuge and freedom to those suffering from want. Our policies now do not welcome – they punish: they cause immigrants to die near the border, to be deported to face violence and death from which they are fleeing, to live in constant fear of deportation, to survive in the shadows of the society they desperately seek to join. The US must reduce and retrain the Border Patrol in humanitarian practice; stop migra raids in our communities; get the US military off the US-Mexico border. We have resources, we have room, we have compassion based on our own immigrant histories: we demand that the US grant immediate and unconditional residency for all undocumented immigrants. If there is free flow of capital across borders, there should also be free flow of labor.

10. Hands off Mexico. Trump and company want to make NAFTA worse?! US bilateral relations with Mexico must be based on respect for Mexico’s sovereignty, genuine mutual trade reciprocity, and an end to the War on Drugs which has contributed significantly to the rise of the narco-cartels in Mexico. We must also oppose all US efforts to politically, economically or militarily pressure the new Morena government to disrupt AMLO’s agenda for greater social and economic equity.

The ultimate goal of Trump and his New-Confederate supporters is to institutionalize an apartheid system in the United States. We already have a highly racially oppressive and unequal society. But we do not have apartheid, a racially based system where a white minority exercises political, economic, and cultural dominance over a non-white majority population. We will inevitably become a majority people of color nation, and that’s when apartheid could be thoroughly institutionalized. The white supremacists in power are preparing for that day. Maintaining supremacy will require a massive repressive apparatus, and that is being put in place; the agenda of the Right is to de-fund social programs while increasing expenditures on policing and the military.

It also requires the dismantling of democratic processes. The attacks on voting and other civil rights explicitly targeting people of color is laying down more prerequisites to apartheid. The dehumanization and demonization of people of color is another essential ingredient, and hatred and fear are potent weapons in the arsenal of the racist Right. The carrot element of the carrot-and-stick strategy to pacify people of color has been abandoned, as is painfully evident with the Trump/Right ethnic cleansing campaign. The radical Right is ascendant, and now we are getting the stick: they mean us grave harm.

But as people of color become a majority, we are going to be a very angry majority. A majority situated strategically economically and politically. A majority with immense potential networks in the global South. A majority with vast experience of struggle in virtually all arenas. Unless the ruling class completely abandons all pretense of democratic governance, for example outlawing elections, the electoral arena will become an even more highly contested arena of struggle. Our populations are young. Increasingly large sections of our population can vote. We are situated in crucial areas of the South and Southwest, as well as other areas. The Asian Pacific Islander populations are the fastest growing of all, with significant concentrations in the Southwest and South. We are undoubtedly a threat. The choice between barbarism and socialism is more evident than ever, as barbarism is the order of the day particularly for Blacks and Browns. For all who love peace and believe in human dignity, the time is now.

Bill Gallegos is a member of Freedom Road Socialist Organization and a veteran activist in the Chican@ Liberation Struggle and the Environmental Justice Movement.

“All revolutions go down in history, yet history does not fill up; the rivers of revolution return to whence they came, only to flow again.” – Guy Debord¹

By Paul Saba

July 19th, 2018

Will the ongoing revival of American socialism stimulate interest in one of its lesser known antecedents? Verso Books certainly hopes so. That’s why they’ve reissued Max Elbaum’s Revolution in the Air, originally published in 2002, now with a new foreword by Alicia Garza, co-founder of #BlackLivesMatter. The book chronicles the history of the US “new communist movement” (NCM) from the late 1960s through the 1980s, when thousands of young activists, radicalized by the Vietnam War, the Chinese Cultural Revolution and liberation movements in communities of color at home and abroad, embraced Marxism-Leninism and committed themselves to changing the world.
When Revolution in the Air was written, George W. Bush was President and 9/11 and the “war on terror” were still in the future. The American left was in disarray and on the defensive. Behind it were a long series of defeats – the neo-liberal transformations inaugurated by Reagan and Thatcher, the collapse of the Soviet Union and its allied regimes, China and Vietnam’s increasing adoption of capitalist forms of economic development, the retreat of liberation movements across the Third World.

Nearly two decades later, the international balance of forces still favors the right, but the prospects of the US left appear to have significantly improved. Bernie Sanders’ electoral campaign saw millions of Americans voting for a candidate who openly called himself a socialist. Thousands of young people have swelled the ranks of DSA. Workers are organizing and striking. Class struggle is back on the agenda.

Elbaum wrote Revolution in the Air in 2001 to reclaim the lessons of the new communist movement for contemporary militants who, like their early sixties’ predecessors, became activists when the radical left was fragmented and weak. How relevant is this history and the lessons he draws for us now, in this new period of left upsurge?

I. Revolution in the Air’s Strength: A Clear Chronological Narrative

The greatest strength of Revolution in the Air is its compelling chronological narrative of the origins, rise and proliferation of various NCM groups and their subsequent crises and decline. Elbaum carefully tracks the arc of NCM history from the initial burst of energy that birthed the first organizations, to the stillborn unity initiatives of the early 1970s, to the growing difficulties and splits of the mid- and late-1970s, to the decline/collapse of many groups and the movement as a whole in the 1980s.

Elbaum does a good job of identifying the NCM’s strong points:

The movement’s strengths centered on three crucial issues that – albeit in altered form – remain pivotal to any future attempt at left renewal: commitment to internationalism and anti-imperialism; the centrality of the fight against racism; and the urgency of developing cadre and creating organizations capable of mobilizing working people and the oppressed.²

The NCM combined ‘60s moral fervor with a degree of ‘30s political realism. Its anti-imperialism “led to practical activity that materially and politically aided popular movements in other lands and that benefited oppressed people in the US by weakening the common enemy.” It “put the fight for equality at the center of its politics,” “insisted that challenging the oppression of peoples of color lay at the heart of the revolutionary project,” and “stressed the importance of winning whites to self-conscious opposition to racism.” The NCM demonstrated a dogged commitment to developing cadre and forming disciplined organizations. Emphasis on the vanguard nature of its organizational forms “encouraged activists to think in broad, long-range terms; to ponder all dimensions of the class struggle; to take their work and themselves seriously; to assume a great deal of responsibility and push themselves to their limits.³

These strengths enabled the NCM to both significantly influence the broader left milieu of its time and to “maintain a militant, anti-capitalist current for longer than most other tendencies that came out of the upheavals of the 1960s.”⁴

But Elbaum is alert to the movement’s weaknesses as well – its ultra-leftism, dogmatism and sectarianism – and its fragility. The NCM was continuously buffeted by centripetal and centrifugal tendencies. Organizations sought to come together in unifying party-building initiatives and were driven apart by numerous political and ideological differences, with many smaller groups resisting the pull of both dynamics. Of necessity in a book of this length, the focus is on the major NCM formations and their initiatives. However, something of the genuine breadth and diversity of the movement as a whole is lost in the absence of more attention to the less well known, out-of-the-way groups.

The NCM preached the importance of building multi-national organizations. Yet for much of its history, groups of white communists and communists of color evolved on separate but parallel tracks – the first primarily emerging out of student, anti-war and anti-draft movements; the second out of liberation movements in the Black, Chicano, Puerto Rican and Asian American communities. The very different origins of the movement’s two components had profound repercussions for their long-term prospects.

For all groups, the challenge was to create and maintain stable and growing organizations while implanting themselves in the working class and/or local communities. Often these tasks were summed up in the slogans “unite Marxist-Leninists; win the advanced to communism.” Both tasks proved to be extremely difficult, in no small part due to the ways militants undertook to implement them.

Every serious group, no matter how small, considered itself a new communist party in embryo (or at least a part thereof). Hence the need to formulate positions on all important issues. But the more issues a group had a position on, the more opportunities existed for differences and disagreements to arise over them – internally, in relation to other groups, and in relation to the “advanced” they were trying to recruit. Elbaum puts much of the blame for the resulting disputatiousness on the NCM’s Maoism but this is a problem that has plagued every branch of the communist movement, as anyone familiar with the fissiparous history of Trotskyism can attest.

The early NCM groups strongly identified with the Chinese revolution and the Chinese Communist Party (CPC), just as the first communist parties at the dawn of the twentieth century had strongly identified with the Bolshevik revolution and the new Soviet state – and for the same reasons. The Chinese line seemed to offer the best chance of defeating imperialism and promoting world revolution, and China’s prestige and attractiveness to revolutionaries worldwide was expected to rub off on its American supporters.

Had the NCM seriously studied the lessons of the first communist parties’ unwavering adherence to Soviet policy they might have avoided the pitfalls of this model. In the early 1930s, particularly in the depths of the Great Depression, capitalism seemed to be faltering while the USSR’s economy was taking off. The Soviet example drew many Americans to communism (“I have seen the future and it works” – Lincoln Steffens) and to the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA). Likewise, the Soviet Union’s militant anti-fascist policies attracted opponents of developments in Italy and Germany who might otherwise have shown little interest in the communist experiment.

But as the 1930s wore on, Soviet prestige began to wane under the impact of internal purges and great power politics. The low point was reached in the 1939 with the Soviet-German non-aggression pact and the concomitant demand that the Communist International abandon its anti-fascist priorities. A close association with the Soviet Union now turned from an asset into a liability. Soviet prestige was briefly restored during the war years, but, with the onset of the Cold War, the CPUSA’s ties to the USSR became an enormous millstone around the Party’s neck, one that almost finished it off when Khrushchev’s 1956 secret speech on the Stalin period became public.

A similar process occurred over the life of the NCM. China’s championing of world revolution in Africa, Asia and Latin America, and the example of the Red Guards – millions of Chinese young people taking history into their own hands – initially thrilled American leftists, many of whom were being radicalized in the fight against US imperialism in Vietnam. Here, unlike the post-Stalin Soviet Union, was a country ready and willing to confront the “main enemy of the peoples of the world.”

But all too soon, things began to change. In 1974, when China first put forward its “Theory of Three Worlds,” few recognized the implications for Chinese foreign policy or the impact it would have on the NCM. Step one was elevating the USSR to a “social-imperialist superpower” on the same level as US Imperialism. From there it was only another small step to characterizing the USSR as the “more dangerous” of the two superpowers, the one against whom the main fire of revolutionaries had to be concentrated. The consequences of these formulations were profound. China, whose prestige had been tied to its anti-imperialist, revolutionary stance, was now backing reactionary regimes and movements around the world if they took up anti-Soviet positions and moving toward a de facto alliance with the United States.

These policy changes, together with the fall of the “Gang of Four” after Mao’s death and the CPC’s subsequent repudiation of the Cultural Revolution, tarnished China’s revolutionary credentials internationally and sparked an increasingly acrimonious debate, not only within the broader American left milieu, but within the ranks of the NCM itself. At issue was the extent to which the movement could continue to describe itself as Maoist or maintain its allegiance to CPC positions.

What began as debate soon became a crisis, manifesting itself in different ways in different organizations. One of the largest groups – the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) – underwent a debilitating split. Other groups, forsaking the CPC, looked for an alternative leading center for the world communist movement. When China and Albania had a falling out, some found it in Tirana. Still others, identified as “anti-dogmatist/anti-revisionists,” seized on the crisis to challenge the NCM to rethink its basic allegiances and its theoretical foundations. Line of March, Elbaum’s own former group, progressively abandoned its anti-revisionist identity and moved toward openly pro-Soviet positions. Other organizations, like the Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist) (CPML), remained loyal to China and tried to carry on as if no crisis existed.

Had this crisis erupted at a time when NCM groups were otherwise enjoying successes in recruitment and base building its impact might have been less severe. However, in this realm, too, many organizations were beginning to experience a crisis of a different character. This one was generated by the cumulative effects of their own organizational weaknesses and isolation. Disillusionment with a lack of progress was setting in, memberships were falling, and confidence in old certainties was beginning to wane.

These twin crises hit the predominantly white NCM organizations harder than those groups composed primarily of people of color. As noted earlier, white communists in the main came out of the student, anti-war, and anti-draft struggles. These were all conjunctural struggles, born of a particular moment in history and largely disappearing once that moment had passed. By the late 1970s the two main predominantly white groups – the CPML and the RCP – were feeling the combined effects of the melting away of the mass base from which they had emerged and their lack of real successes in building a new one in the working class.

The CPML, which, of all the Maoist groups, had secured the “China franchise” from CPC leaders, was most affected by the crises.⁵ In 1980 it entered a terminal decline and expired the following year. The RCP, already much weakened as a result of the 1977 split, pinned its hopes on championing Mao’s legacy and defending the Gang of Four against the post-Mao Chinese leadership. But, forsaking the working class for youth and lumpen elements, its practice quickly degenerated into a series of ultra-left campaigns and media-events. Membership declined, and a growing focus on the writings of Chairman Bob Avakian pointed toward the leader-cult groupuscule the RCP would soon become.

By contrast, the dominant NCM organization of people of color – the League of Revolutionary Struggle (LRS) – survived for another full decade (until 1990) and seemed to avoid the twin crises. LRS was created out of the merger of groups whose leaders and members had been active in African-American, Chicano and Asian-American liberation movements. These included I Wor Kuen (IWK), the August 29th Movement (ATM), the Revolutionary Communist League (M-L-M) (RCL) (formerly the Congress of Afrikan People) and several smaller organizations.

There were a number of reasons for the LRS’s success. Unlike the predominantly white communist organizations that came out of conjunctural struggles, these groups arose from struggles generated by a fundamental structural dynamic of US capitalism – the continuing exploitation and oppression of national and ethnic communities within the United States. While the conjunctural struggles passed with the passing of the ‘60s era, the struggles which birthed communists of color and their organizations, while ebbing and flowing, were constantly being renewed by the operations of the system itself. Abuses and injustices followed one upon another, generating new sites of resistance – fertile ground for base building and recruiting additional militants.

Moreover, many communist activists of color successfully negotiated their transition into the NCM without losing their ties to the communities and movements from which they emerged. This was true of activists like General Baker and his comrades in the Detroit auto plants who transitioned from the League of Revolutionary Black Workers to the Communist League. It was also true of many of the militants in the LRS’s predecessor organizations. Respected activists in the Chinese communities in San Francisco, New York and Boston joined IWK; leading Chicano militants founded ATM; Amiri Baraka of RCL was a nationally respected leader in the Black Liberation Movement. Coming together in LRS, these individuals and groups maintained and built on the extensive community networks and personal relationships they had forged before becoming a part of the NCM.

LRS’s handling of two other issues also enabled it to put off for a full decade the day of reckoning that devastated the CPML and RCP. First, as Elbaum notes, it was able to avoid the frequent line struggles that bedeviled or split other groups by downplaying doctrine and ideological rigidity:

New members were expected to put numerous hours into disciplined political work, but ideologically it was sufficient to express a general desire for revolution; their education in Marxism-Leninism was to be conducted once they were inside the organization. In practice this education was uneven, and for most new recruits party building remained distant from their core political identity, which was more bound up with LRS’s immediate practical work.⁶

Second, the LRS had what Elbaum describes as a “more grounded perspective on strategy and tactics” for this practical work (although he fails to specifically describe or name it).⁷ This perspective originated in LRS’s predecessor groups, and from the start it was a controversial viewpoint. Attention was first drawn to it in the early 1970s when one of these

groups, IWK, participated in the National Liaison Committee (NLC), a party-building initiative with the Revolutionary Union (RU) and other organizations.⁸ In the internal struggles that ultimately doomed the initiative by May of 1974, RU charged that the IWK was guilty of a fundamental deviation from Marxism-Leninism: Bundism.⁹

RU had its own reasons for leveling this charge – it wanted to draw attention away from the serious white chauvinist errors its members had committed in their participation in the NLC and on other issues. But there was more than a modicum of truth in what the RU was saying. The IWK’s perspective on work in national minority communities (and later that of the LRS) did demonstrate a certain affinity with the one advocated by the Jewish Workers Bund, a Social Democratic Party in Czarist Russia and Poland before 1917.¹⁰

What was this perspective? LRS understood that national oppression adversely impacted all classes in a national minority community (albeit not equally). Communists, it believed, had to be the champions of oppressed nations and national minorities, not just their working classes, fighting against all forms of national and ethnic oppression and discrimination. As a result, talk of “national identity,” “national rights,” and “national culture,” was a significant part of its discourse and figured strongly in its practical demands. Consider this headline that appeared in the LRS’s Unity newspaper: “Asians fight loss of minority status for small business loans.”. It’s hard to imagine such an article being published in any other major NCM periodical.¹¹

Pointing out the affinities between this perspective and Bundism is not to suggest that LRS leaders were meeting in secret, poring over old Bundist documents, much less that they thought they were deviating from Marxism-Leninism. Their perspective evolved organically out of the concrete circumstances of their mass work. As their practice in radicalized strata of national and national minority communities – where nationalist ideologies were widespread and strongly held – evolved, these leaders responded, strategically and tactically, to the demands, desires, and dreams of the people with whom they were interacting. They affirmed allegiance to Marxism-Leninism, but the pull of nationalist ideology was strong. The problem with this dynamic became clear in the 1980s when the politics of these nationalists shifted to the right and pulled the LRS rightward as well.

Illustrative of the ideological dissonance of the ATM/LRS line was their position on the Chicano national question. Both groups repeatedly reaffirmed their commitment to Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy on the subject of nations and national minorities and how they were defined. Above all, this meant deference to Stalin’s writings on these issues.¹² Yet, consistent with the dominant ideology of the Movimiento Estudiantil Chicanx de Aztlán (MEChA) and other radical Chicano groups in which they were active, both ATM and LRS argued for the existence of a Chicano nation in the American southwest. Unacknowledged was the fact that, by any reasonable measure, Chicanos did not meet the specific criteria for a nation enumerated by Stalin.¹³

This adaptation to nationalism, the adoption of a neo-Bundist approach to work in African-American, Chicano and Asian-American communities where the LRS was strongest, “worked” inasmuch as it was one of the main reasons for the group’s successes in organizing and recruitment. It helped sustain the LRS through the NCM’s crises when other groups were collapsing around it. But it also demonstrated the extent to which, as Asad Haider has recently written, “the political crisis of the New Communist Movement” was “overdetermined by semi-nationalist remnants.”¹⁴

Elbaum devotes considerable attention to the involvement of the last remnants of the NCM in a major political development of the 1980s – Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition and his two presidential election races of 1984 and 1988. The Rainbow Coalition’s progressive agenda, ability to galvanize people of color, and genuine electoral clout generated a favorable terrain for revolutionary activism and ideology. Elbaum shows how organizations like LRS, LOM the Proletarian Unity League, and other smaller collectives quickly recognized the radical potential inherent in this movement and committed their cadre to the effort. As Elbaum says, these groups ultimately didn’t “win leadership of the broad masses,” but they did, for a brief time, play an important role in a genuine mass radical formation, nationally and locally.¹⁵

The NCM groups’ commitment to an anti-racist, multi-sectoral agenda, discipline, organizing skills, and expertise in agitation and propaganda were valuable contributions to the Rainbow Coalition. And the Coalition’s willingness to accept and even welcome their involvement offered them an entré into mass mobilizations not seen since the early 1970s. The hope was that the Rainbow Coalition would ultimately disengage itself from the Democratic Party and evolve into a powerful independent political force in its own right, one which could be moved in an increasingly more radical direction by participating communists.

However, NCM groups underestimated two critical factors that ultimately would doom the Rainbow Coalition experiment. First, despite all its non-electoral organizing and mobilizing components – from social-justice oriented trade union efforts which crossed industrial and rural divides, evolving links with the peace, anti-imperialist, and environmental movements on issues of military intervention, nuclear weapons, and energy sources,  as well as a continued emphasis on “multinational” alliances between oppressed groups – the Rainbow Coalition was primarily an electoral vehicle, tied to the election cycle, delegate selection processes, vote-getting and Democratic Party politics.¹⁶ In the end, the former components were subordinate to and dependent upon the latter and failed to take on a life of their own. Second, in spite of all efforts to make it a bottom-up, democratic movement, the Rainbow Coalition was dominated and controlled by Jesse Jackson and his key acolytes.  When, in the aftermath of the 1988 election, Jackson cut a deal with the Democratic Party establishment and decided to wind the whole thing up, the Rainbow left was powerless to stop him.

Perhaps this outcome was inevitable and nothing revolutionaries could have done would have changed it. But the failure of NCM groups to adequately theorize the Rainbow Coalition phenomenon, to grasp its limitations and strategically prepare to address them, reduced their effectiveness and didn’t prepare them for an outcome that left them rudderless.¹⁷ In the current period, with left-wing electoral campaigns proliferating and drawing in increasing number of activists, there is a warning here for contemporary militants.

II. Revolution in the Air: Historical and Theoretical Weaknesses

If Revolution in the Air’s strength lies in its compelling narrative of the rise and fall of the NCM, its weaknesses are to be found in the historical/theoretical context in which this narrative is embedded. Here I want to touch on four issues: the notion of “Third World Marxism;” the significance of the Sino-Soviet split in the early 1960s; the question of whether the NCM was founded on false premises; and the question: is there a Marxist tradition worth defending?

The Notion of “Third World Marxism”

Elbaum repeatedly designates the ideology that inspired the revolutionaries who joined the NCM as “Third World Marxism.”¹⁸ He finds it in the writings of the Chinese and Vietnamese Communist Parties, Che, Fidel and the Cuban revolution, and Amilcar Cabral and Marxist-led liberation movements in Africa.¹⁹

But was there really ever a discrete entity we can call “Third World Marxism”? Of course, no one would deny that there were distinctive revolutionary processes – powerful movements for national liberation and socialism – unfolding in the Third World in the 1960s and 1970s. Nor that they had a tremendous influence on many US revolutionaries. But revolutionary processes are one thing, and a distinct form or variant of Marxism is another. Separately (except for the Chinese Revolution) or taken together, these Third World revolutionary processes never generated a distinct independent form of Marxism, the way Maoism did. Elbaum himself is compelled to acknowledge this fact, writing:

…although the Cuban Revolution – as well as the Vietnamese CP and African revolutionaries such as Amilcar Cabral – displayed great creativity and more consistent internationalism than either China or the USSR, they neither offered or claimed to offer a comprehensive framework for the international left.²⁰

So why the insistence on this notion of “Third World Marxism” as a critical framing device in Revolution in the Air? One is forced to conclude that it’s because its presence functions to supersede the most obvious alternative frames. Those alternatives are the ones that the NCM itself most frequently used to describe its chief ideological influences, the ones associated with the Chinese Communist Party, namely, “anti-revisionism” and Marxism-Leninism Mao Zedong Thought (or more simply, “Maoism”).

Elbaum’s intellectual honesty prevents him from erasing these alternatives entirely. More than once he admits that the NCM came into being with groups “intent upon constructing a specifically Maoist trend and making Maoism the cornerstone of a new communist party.”²¹ But Revolution in the Air nonetheless downplays the ideological centrality of Maoism and anti-revisionism through its repeated use of the “Third World Marxism” formulation.

One more point related to this issue. The inclusion of Che Guevara in the book’s subtitle: “Sixties Radicals Turn to Lenin, Mao and Che” is particularly inapposite when talking about the new communist movement. “Che mania” was a phenomenon of the broad New Left which helped give birth to the NCM, not the NCM itself. In moving away from the New Left and toward the NCM activists were turning away from Che, not toward him.

The Significance of the Sino-Soviet Split in the Early 1960s

Elbaum’s assessment of the Sino-Soviet split in the early 1960s that helped birth the NCM is a second point where his historical framing of NCM history falters. He reduces the split to little more than a tragedy, writing: “…the Sino-Soviet split was a disaster for the entire global alignment against Western imperialism[.]”²²

If this line of argument has a familiar ring to it, it should. After World War I, Social Democracy said exactly the same thing about the split in the international working class movement resulting from the creation of the Communist International and the first communist parties.²³ Dividing the movement in this way, they charged, was a disaster that could only benefit the capitalists and imperialists.

Of course, there is a kernel of truth in what the Social Democrats – and Elbaum – said. A kernel, but not the whole truth.

The emergence of the world communist movement out of the crisis of Social Democracy did produce numerous divisions and weaken many proletarian organizations. Was the process an ideal one? Of course not. Were ultra-left errors made by many new communist parties that impeded united working class action and helped the bourgeoisie re-stabilize capitalism in the immediate post-World War I years? Clearly, there were. Lenin was so concerned about the problem that he wrote an entire book to address it: “Left-Wing” Communism: An Infantile Disorder. The split in the workers’ movement did weaken it, did make it easier for capitalism to recover. And the continued divisions between Communists and Social Democrats and their inability to work together did make it easier for Nazism to come to power in Germany in 1933. Yes, a tragedy. Yes, a disaster. All this is undeniable.

But does it mean that the creation of the communist movement was a mistake; that, for the sake of unity, communists should have remained inside the Social Democratic parties and within the theoretical-political limits of Social Democracy? Those of us who identify with the tradition of international communism would unhesitatingly answer in the negative. By its betrayal of the working classes in supporting World War I, by its betrayal of the colonial peoples through its failure to fight imperialism, by its rejection of revolution in the mass upsurge of the “Red Years” 1919-1921, Social Democracy proved itself incapable of carrying forward Marxism’s revolutionary dynamic. The emergence of the world communist movement out of the crisis of Social Democracy was an historical necessity.

The question is: can the same be said of the birth of the NCM in the US and similar movements in other countries in the 1960s? In order to answer this question we need to recall the state of the world communist movement on the eve of the Sino-Soviet split.

That movement was in crisis. Beginning in the late 1920s, as a result of the victory of the Stalin group in the USSR, the Marxism of the communist movement had progressively become a caricature of itself. Instead of guiding practice, Marxist theory was reduced to the justification after the fact of policy decisions adopted independently and for other reasons by Stalin and his circle. As Althusser described it:

It was in the thirties that Marxism – which had been alive, living from its own contradictions – became blocked, entrenched in “theoretical” formulae, within a line and in practices imposed by the historical control of Stalinism. In resolving the problems of Marxism in his own way, Stalin imposed ‘solutions’ whose effect was to block the crisis which these solutions had themselves provoked and reinforced.²⁴

Over time, these “theoretical” formulae of Soviet Marxism became less and less useful in explaining the significant changes unfolding in both capitalist and socialist social formations. They also became less and less useful in guiding the practice of communists and other revolutionaries around the world. The crisis of Marxism was increasingly becoming a crisis of the international communist movement.

Moreover, Soviet policy operated on the premise that the primary guarantor of the future of socialism lay with the safety and security of the USSR rather than with potentially dangerous confrontations between the capitalist and socialist worlds or revolutionary struggles in Africa, Asia and Latin America. For Khrushchev and the Soviet leadership revolts, rebellions, and mass protests represented crises to be “defused” not insurgencies to be welcomed.

An initial, inadequate acknowledgement of the crisis in the communist movement was offered in 1956, with the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) and Khrushchev’s secret speech on Stalin and the Stalin period. But Khrushchev and the CPSU were unable to identify the real sources of the crisis, let alone produce an adequate theoretical response to it. Instead, they provided a superficial analysis of the Stalin years from the right, based not on Marxist concepts, but on bourgeois ideological notions, most famously, “the cult of the personality.” Here, too, an attempt to impose inadequate “solutions” could only further exacerbate the crisis.

Moreover, the Soviet Union insisted on the existence of a monolithic international communist movement with the CPSU at its head. In demanding that all other communists accept its pseudo-solutions to the crisis it also made determined efforts to block the production of alternative ones. “…Pravda once more explained that all the problems of the Communist world” could only be resolved through “loyalty to the Soviet Union’s aims, to the acceptance of its tactics and its international strategy.”²⁵

This was the situation on the cusp of the 1960s: a socialist system experiencing growing economic and political contradictions confronting a capitalist system facing a growing tide of resistance and rebellion, especially in the Third World; a Soviet Union determined to work with Western imperialism to keep international “hot spots” from exploding; a world communist movement dominated by a party incapable of addressing the crisis of Marxism sapping its vitality.

Only one communist party had sufficient power and prestige to challenge this state of affairs – the Chinese. It broke the artificial consensus imposed on the world communist movement. It demanded a debate on a whole series of fundamental problems: the nature of war in the nuclear age; the policies of “peaceful coexistence” and “peaceful transition”; the significance of Third World revolutionary struggles; the problem of modern revisionism.

Thus began the great debate over “the general line of the international communist movement.”²⁶ The Chinese Communist Party initially raised difficult issues and called attention to the extent to which ideas alien to Marxism had become a growing part of world communist ideology. Over time, however, the quality of their polemics declined. The carefully reasoned texts of 1962-1965 were all too soon replaced by the crude abuse and mechanical formulations of the Cultural Revolution period. These in turn were followed by the “Theory of Three Worlds.” In the end, Maoism, too, did not produce a successful solution to the crisis of Marxism. In the language of Althusser quoted earlier, we can say that Maoism, to a considerable extent, remained “entrenched in ‘theoretical’ formulae, within a line and in practices imposed by the historical control of Stalinism.” In seeking to resolve the problems of Marxism which they themselves had called attention to, the Maoists ended up attempting to impose ‘solutions’ whose effects were to perpetuate the crisis, not overcome it.²⁷

But the fact that the Chinese contributions to the great debate ultimately led to a theoretical dead-end in no way negates the enormous positive impact their initial launch occasioned. The Chinese Communist Party helped inaugurate a new period, creating a breach in the monolith, exposing the communist crisis to the light of day, opening the floodgates for discussion and debate, and stimulating the conditions under which other, long suppressed, Marxist voices could once again be heard. In Althusser’s famous words, the new period, “…restored to us is the right to assess exactly what we have, to give both our wealth and poverty their true names, to think and pose our problems in the open, and to undertake in rigor a true investigation.”²⁸

Around the world, Marxist revolutionaries took up this challenge, began their own debates, and the resulting liberation and revitalization of Marxist theory has continued down to our own day. Reducing the breach in international communism inaugurated by the Sino-Soviet split to “a disaster,” as Elbaum does, misses this critical historical dimension. No less than the birth of the first communist parties out of the crisis of Social Democracy, the Chinese challenge to Soviet monolithism was an urgent historical necessity.

Was the NCM Founded on False Premises?

The Sino–Soviet dispute helped frame the basic premises on which the NCM was founded. Elbaum notes them as follows:

• The CPSU and its allied parties (including the CPUSA) had abandoned Marxism-Leninism for revisionism.
• As a result of this betrayal, they had relinquished their role as vanguard for the working class and oppressed peoples, abandoned their commitment to the revolutionary destruction of capitalism, failed to adequately support liberation struggles against imperialism, and were failing to recognize, let alone address, fundamental problems in the world communist movement.
• Revisionism and opportunism in theory and practice needed to be repudiated and new parties created to return the communist movement to its revolutionary path.

Elbaum questions the legitimacy of each of these premises in a variety of ways. He minimizes the issues at stake, characterizing differences between the “Old Left” and NCM militants as a “clash of generations” or a matter of people talking “right past each other.”²⁹ He repeatedly suggests that the entire anti-revisionist framework was a mistaken one, pointing out that his own former group, Line of March, “withdrew the claim that the CPSU and CPUSA were revisionist.”³⁰

The contrast between how Elbaum writes about Chinese lines and policies (which he is quick to condemn) and how he describes Soviet ones (which he is careful to avoid criticizing too sharply) likewise calls into question the NCM’s demarcation with the CPSU/CPUSA. Elbaum uses unequivocal language in relation to the CPC. It was “clear,” he says, that “China was willing to ally with any force, no matter how reactionary, that opposed the Soviet Union.”³¹ He also objects to a “cavalier attitude toward the use of nuclear weapons” which he claims “characterized the Chinese Party’s outlook.”³² Maoism, he says, did “the most damage” to the NCM.³³

But when it’s a matter of the Soviet Union and the CPUSA, his language is noticeably different. Instead of saying the Soviet Union wasn’t a socialist model to be emulated, he says, “Most young radicals rejected Soviet society as a desirable socialist model” as if this was a matter of opinion rather than fact.³⁴ He refers to the Soviets’ seemingly half-hearted support of national liberation movements, as if there was some doubt about the issue.³⁵ He even feels the need to present a defense of the Soviet Union’s détente policy against NCM criticism, chiding the NCM for its “one-sided” view of the policy and for failing to “appreciate” the dilemmas facing the Soviet leadership as targets of the US nuclear arsenal.³⁶ Taken together, all these formulations minimize the anti-revisionist, anti-opportunist premises upon which the NCM was founded and suggest that they were shaky at best, if not fully mistaken.

The picture Elbaum paints of the CPUSA likewise calls into question the NCM’s founding premises. Flatly denying that CPUSA policies stemmed from any revisionist abandonment of Marxism-Leninism, he finds reasons to praise them. He notes that “scores of talented people” joined the CPUSA in the sixties (neglecting to mention how quickly most exited shortly thereafter).³⁸ He cites its insistence on the centrality of trade unions in left strategy and its valuing of connections with a layer of labor officialdom, its “large” membership of Black activists, and its “sense of the long haul.” To the extent he can bring himself to criticize the Party at all, his comments are perfunctory. He notes its blind loyalty to the USSR, its opposition to radical African-American nationalism, its cultural conservatism and its hostility to sixties radicalism.³⁹

Elbaum reduces CPUSA policy in these years to some kind of tragic missed opportunity:

…the CPUSA failed to engage the new radical generation as a partner-in-struggle, refused to entertain the notion that it had something to learn as well as to teach, defended Soviet actions that were backward, if not indefensible, and walled itself off from the new movements in sectarian complacency.⁴⁰

In actual fact, we now know that the CPUSA’s problems during this period were much more serious and fundamental. Far from being off-base, the NCM’s assessment of the Party was, if anything, insufficiently critical.

The consolidation of Gus Hall’s leading role in the CPUSA, beginning in 1959, had far-reaching effects on every aspect of Party life. Theoretical poverty, ideological conformity and anti-intellectualism were the hallmarks of the Hall regime and independent thinkers were soon shown the door. Far from welcoming the mass radicalization that characterized the ‘60s, the Party viewed it with suspicion and disdain, actively seeking to neutralize or destroy any independent left formation it could not dominate. Hall’s absolute control and the Party’s extensive public face were made possible by the massive annual Soviet financial subsidies he secretly received, brought to him from the USSR by a bagman who also happened to be an FBI agent.⁴¹ Hall treated these subsidies as his private slush fund, refusing to account for the money or how it was being spent, even to other top leaders. He used it to buy expensive residences and race horses for himself and live in high style, while withholding it from Party activists and members out of favor. Financial corruption and Hall’s authoritarian leadership significantly contributed to the CPUSA’s general political degeneration and resulted in a major organizational split in 1991.⁴²

These features of the Party’s internal life were not generally known at the time. But revolutionaries were well aware of the CPUSA’s Soviet flunkeyism, pie-in-the-sky Marxism, right-of-Norman-Thomas strategy, and caricature of Leninist political practice.⁴³ The hostility to the Party on the part of the overwhelming majority of the NCM was not some generational clash or a “failure to communicate.” It was a clear-eyed rejection of a deformed and bankrupt political entity. But this was not everyone’s perspective. Line of March, Elbaum tells us, “held out hopes for some kind of shift in CPUSA policy that would result in merging the two organizations.”⁴⁴

Is There a Marxist Tradition to be Defended?

Ultimately, however, Elbaum’s rejection of the NCM’s anti-revisionist premises may rest on a basic ideological disagreement. If there’s no such thing as a Marxist tradition to be defended from revisionism, then the very idea of “anti-revisionism” as a founding premise or line of demarcation loses its meaning. In summing up the lessons of the NCM Elbaum expresses his own views on Marxism and the Marxist tradition. He says:

Advocates of all these perspectives [within the NCM] accepted the notion that there was one and only one revolutionary tradition and that there existed a single Marxism-Leninism that embodied its accumulated wisdom…A great deal can be learned from previous left experience… But it is an unwarranted leap from there to belief in a single and true Marxist doctrine with an unbroken revolutionary pedigree from 1948 to the present.⁴⁵

Formulating the problem in this way, it’s hard to disagree with Elbaum. But what if there is another way to understand what’s at issue here? Such an alternative can be found in Charles Bettelheim’s multi-volume Class Struggles in the USSR.⁴⁶ These books examine how the Bolsheviks, having seized state power in November 1917, fought to continue the revolution and construct a socialist society. Essential to his analysis is the way Bettelheim theorizes the worldview guiding them, what he calls the Bolshevik ideological formation.

Bettelheim argues that this ideological formation was a contradictory reality “within which a constant struggle went on between revolutionary Marxist thinking, Marxism as constituted historically, and various ideological currents which were alien to Marxism.”⁴⁷ This formulation emphasizes the distinction between revolutionary Marxism, or Marxist scientific thought, and various forms of historically constituted Marxism – the Marxism of the Second International at the end of the nineteenth century, the Marxism of the Third International under Lenin, the Marxism of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, etc. – on the other.

Within each historically constituted Marxism, Bettelheim says, revolutionary Marxism has a variable place – sometimes more determinant, sometimes less. In volume two of Class Struggles in the USSR, for example, he shows how the rise of the Stalin group after 1925-26 was accompanied by changes in the Bolshevik ideological formation that “contributed to the reinforcement of ideological elements [within it] that were alien to revolutionary Marxism.”⁴⁸

Bettelheim further contends:

The process of transforming revolutionary Marxism and the process of transforming Marxism as historically constituted in each epoch are not “parallel” processes. The former is the development of a science, whereas the latter is the transformation of an ideology which has a scientific basis.⁴⁹

Bettelheim’s alternative formulation on the question of the Marxist tradition enables us to do a number of things. It helps us disentangle what Elbaum has conflated. It allows us to agree with him that there isn’t “one and only one revolutionary tradition” with an “unbroken revolutionary pedigree from 1848 to the present.” Instead, it affirms that our movement has had a complex, hybrid and discontinuous history since 1848, that there’s been a multiplicity of historically constituted Marxisms, each with its own respective strengths and weaknesses.

Holding fast to the notion of a single revolutionary tradition pretty much limited the NCM’s horizons to the “big five” [Marx-Engels-Lenin-Stalin-Mao], the Paris Commune and the Russian and Chinese revolutions. As Elbaum suggests, we no longer need to don that ideological straightjacket. Now we’re free to examine our movement’s entire history with a critical eye. And we’re also now free to study and learn from a host of long suppressed or marginalized Marxists, such as José Carlos Mariátegui, Mary Inman, August Thalheimer and M. N. Roy.

But Bettelheim’s alternative formulation also enables us to maintain that there’s another tradition, separate and discrete – what Bettelheim calls revolutionary Marxism or Marxist scientific thought. This is the tradition of the knowledge-producing theoretical system and its “accumulated wisdom,” of which Marx “only laid the cornerstones” to use Lenin’s phrase. It’s what Engels was talking about when he said, “Marx’s whole way of thinking is not so much a doctrine as a method. It provides, not so much ready-made dogmas, as aids to further investigation and the method for such investigation.”⁵⁰ Given the ideological eclecticism of much of the growing new American left, now more than ever it is necessary to stress the critical importance of this tradition and the political necessity of defending it from the numerous ideological currents hostile to it.

III. The NCM’s Poverty of Theory

Speaking of defending revolutionary Marxism, it’s a sad irony that the NCM, which sharply criticized the CPSU and CPUSA for their theoretical deviations, ultimately did such a poor job of integrating Marxist theory into its own ideological formation. NCM militants may have memorized Lenin’s statement: “without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement,” but Lenin himself would certainly have been chagrined by how poorly they understood him.

Elbaum does a good job of describing the NCM’s theoretical poverty. He cites its “never-ending quest for orthodoxy and a constant suspicion of heresy at the very center of the movement’s outlook.”⁵¹ This resulted, he argues, in a dominant mindset that “suggested that all truly important theoretical questions had already been resolved;” one that “betrayed a certain fear that too much exploration of new theoretical terrain would lead inexorably toward a revisionist betrayal of revolutionary principle.”⁵² The NCM’s theoretical paucity is manifest in the ways that most groups studied theory and the ways they applied it.

How the NCM Studied Theory

When the Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist) – long among the largest and best organized of all NCM organizations – was entering its terminal crisis, one of its leaders, Dan Burstein, produced a remarkable document reflecting on the group’s many problems and their underlying causes.⁵³ His description of the CPML’s flawed approach to theory could equally apply to the majority of NCM groups. “Our tendency,” he wrote, was “to look on Marxism-Leninism more as a religion than a science,“ taking “all the writings of the “Big Five” of Marxism to be gospel truth.”⁵⁴

These writings were not read to learn how the authors used theory to come to their conclusions so militants could then apply the same methods in their own work. Instead, they were read to ferret out a pertinent quote that would put a definite end to any and all discussion. The language of the “classics of Marxism-Leninism” was invoked to provide “the answer” to a contemporary question, or “the solution” to an urgent conundrum. As Burstein wrote:

We have tried to build a movement around principles enunciated by Marx, Lenin or Mao in other times and places under vastly different circumstances, without ever going through a process of scientifically determining which of these principles are applicable to our struggle, which are partially applicable but need development, which are inapplicable and which new principles are dictated by our own situation.⁵⁵

The consequences of this flawed approach were several and mutually reinforcing:

• The training of most NCM cadre was limited to an introduction to the general principles of Marxism and little else. According to Burstein, “basic knowledge of the world and the class struggle” was limited. Even “many leading members of the party,” he complained, remained “much more familiar with Mao than with anything else from Marxism, and much more familiar with Marxism” than “with American history, economy, or other questions.”⁵⁶
• Lack of theoretical training meant that the movement was, in Elbaum’s words, “unable to accurately assess the conditions it faced – either initially or after a few years of inevitable mistakes and misjudgments.”⁵⁷ As Asad Haider recently put it, “a certain dogmatic catastrophism… prevented communists from formulating a strategy suited to their period.”⁵⁸ Over and over again cadre were promised a new capitalist crisis (“the ‘80s economic crisis will make the ‘30s great depression look like a picnic”) or a new revolutionary upsurge, neither of which materialized.
• NCM groups did “very little organized theoretical or analytical work.” As a result, they had “few answers to the most pressing questions posed by the people’s struggles except in broad generalizations on such questions as the economic crisis, energy, taxes, health care, etc.”⁵⁹
• The lack of theoretical work led to the mechanical adoption of a whole series of practices, organizational forms and styles of work borrowed from foreign or past models without regard to their appropriateness, the classical version of “democratic centralism” being perhaps the best example. “Out of time, place and step in our basic principles with the conditions we are working under,” Burstein says, “it is no wonder that we fell prey to a wide variety of ultra-left lines of thought, policies, tactics and forms.”⁶⁰

How the NCM Applied Theory

The NCM generated numerous theoretical journals and related documents. Yet, for all the ink that was spilt, little of lasting theoretical value was produced. The movement’s forte was polemics, agitation and propaganda, and pedagogical defenses of orthodoxy.

A combination of factors contributed to this situation. Theory often took a back seat to mass activity. In 1980 Burstein complained that, for the CPML, “intellectual and cultural work was practically prohibited early on by the exclusive concentration on factory work, and to this date, has only achieved a small and unofficial niche in the party’s work.” The fear of heresy mentioned earlier also played a role. The doctrinarism of the CPML, Burstein wrote, meant “substituting the theoretical and analytical work done by Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, the Comintern or the old CPUSA for the work we must do and fearing that to creatively develop theory based on our own practice is synonymous with ‘revisionism’ or ‘American exceptionalism.’”⁶¹

Another inhibiting factor is the reality that theoretical work, particularly of the Marxist kind, is enormously difficult. As Karl Marx remarked, “there is no royal road to science, and only those who do not dread the fatiguing climb of its step paths have the chance of gaining its luminous summits.”⁶² Genuine Marxist theoretical work is a specific form of practice – theoretical practice. It involves the transformation of raw materials (basic data, primary and secondary source materials, etc.) into a final product (knowledge) through the setting into motion of theoretical means of production (methodology, a conceptual system). It’s how Marx produced Capital, how Lenin produced Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism. It’s how Gramsci worked, under enormously difficult conditions of confinement, to produce his Prison Notebooks.

Each one of these identified a set of critical problems in urgent need of analysis. None knew at the beginning where his theoretical practice would lead him or what the final product would look like. But each contributed to establishing essential tenets of Marxist theoretical practice:

1. Only the “cornerstones,” the “guiding principles,” of Marxist theory have been laid. Their continuing development, correction and refinement are an absolute necessity.
2. Revolutionary theory is not produced as an end in itself (“theory for theory’s sake.”) It is produced to provide usable knowledge to guide the struggle for socialism.
3. It is necessary not just to develop Marxist theory in general, but to develop its particular applications in accordance with every concrete instance or issue.
4. Marxist theoretical practice requires the broadest freedom of criticism and scientific investigation.⁶³

How at variance with these tenets was the “practice” of theory in the NCM! In most cases it began with an “answer,” a “conclusion,” or “solution” provided in advance by orthodoxy or an organization’s own political line or program. This could be anything from “the restoration of capitalism in the USSR” to the “impermissibility of factions in a Leninist Party” to the “Afro-American nation in the Black Belt south” to “the PRRWO has degenerated into a Neo-Trotskyite Sect.” Taking this pre-given outcome as the starting point, an entire ideological framework was then constructed around it to “prove,” “defend,” or “legitimate” it. The classics of Marxism-Leninism were scoured to find apt quotes that might apply; facts were cherry-picked to confirm the points to be made. Anything that might call the outcome into question was duly ignored. In the end, a case had been made, a conclusion had been “proven” – but theoretical practice this is not.

That’s why the NCM produced so little theoretical work of lasting value. There were no ready-made answers to all the really difficult questions facing the movement: what is the direction of development of US capitalism?; which sections of the ruling class are ascendant and what is their agenda?; what are the principal impediments to the development of class consciousness among American workers and how can they be overcome?, etc., etc. And few and far between were the groups willing to take up the challenge posed by these and similar questions for fear of being accused of “a revisionist betrayal of revolutionary principle” because of “too much exploration of new theoretical terrain.”

Perhaps no lesson from the NCM for the burgeoning new American left is more important than the necessity to avoid a repetition of this theoretical poverty, of these flawed practices. The left today needs comprehensive knowledge of the world we live in in order to change it; Marxist theory is indispensable to its production. As Althusser says, “without any hesitation we are convinced that the development of Marxist theory, in all its fields, is a necessity of the greatest urgency in our times, and an absolutely essential task for communists.”⁶⁴

IV. Concluding Thoughts

When the NCM was born, there were a number of grizzled veterans of prior anti-revisionist formations around to offer advice and support to the newly emerging groups. Some of what these veterans had to offer was of real value; some was not. There were young people willing to listen to what the veterans had to say and others who saw them as little more than relics of a failed past with simplistic answers to questions no one was asking anymore.

We have left behind the world that saw the initial publication of Revolution in the Air. A new upsurge of leftism is occurring in this country and Max Elbaum is among the grizzled veterans standing by with advice and support as this left attempts to find its way forward. The reissue of his book is an important contribution to that effort.

This review began with a quote from Guy Debord on the permanence of revolution in human history. Revolution was in the air when the new communist movement was born. Sooner or later, revolution will return. Many in the NCM considered themselves too busy making history to spend much time studying history’s lessons. As a result, mistakes were made, wrong directions taken, that otherwise might have been avoided.

Revolution in the Air and the analyses of other NCM veterans reflect on the passage of a few people through a rather brief moment in time. The next left will have to chart its own course, make its own choices. And all the history-studying in the world won’t stop it from making its own mistakes. But if lessons drawn from the experience of the NCM can make the next left’s way forward a little easier, then in some small measure the movement’s legacy will continue to share a place in the river of revolution’s flow.

1. Guy Debord in his book Panegyric, quoted in Greil Marcus, The Dustbin of History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), 78. ↩
2. Max Elbaum, Revolution in the Air: ‘60s Radicals Turn to Lenin, Mao, and Che (New York: Verso, 2002), 326. ↩
3. Ibid., 326, 328, 33-34. ↩
4. Ibid., 236. ↩
5. In 1977 the CPC appeared to recognize the CPML as its favored “sister party” in the US. See “Unity between Chinese and U.S. Communists: CP(M-L) Delegation Meets with Chairman Hua,” The Call, Vol. 6, No. 30, August 1, 1977. ↩
6. Elbaum, Revolution in the Air, 272. ↩
7. Ibid. ↩
8. For documents relating to the National Liaison Committee, including from the various parties involved (like the RU and the IWK), see the collection available at the Encyclopedia of Anti-Revisionism Online (EROL). ↩
9. For a discussion of the line struggle in this party building initiative (the National Liaison Committee) see the Black Workers Congress, “Criticism of ‘National Bulletin #13’ and the Right Line of the RU,” in Red Papers 6. ↩
10. On the Bund see Henry J. Tobias, The Jewish Bund in Russia from its Origins to 1905 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1972); Prophecy and Politics. Socialism, Nationalism, & the Russian Jews, 1962-1917 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Enzo Traverso, The Marxists and the Jewish Question, trans. Bernard Gibbons (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1994). ↩
11. “Asians fight loss of minority status for small business loans,” Unity, Vol. 2, No. 13 (June 29-July 12, 1979). ↩
12. “The National Question,” Marxist-Leninist Study Series,” Unity, Vol. 4, No. 5 (March 20-April 2, 1981). ↩
13. August 29th Movement, Fan the Flames. A Revolutionary Position on the Chicano National Question, 1976 ; League of Revolutionary Struggle, “The Struggle for Chicano Liberation,” Forward #2 (August 1979). ↩
14. Asad Haider, Mistaken Identity. Race and Class in the Age of Trump (London: Verso, 2018), 79. ↩
15. Elbaum, 269. ↩
16. A strong account of the historical forces bound up in Jackson’s 1984 campaign, the viability of the “Rainbow Program,” and the possibilities of independent socialist action going forward, remains Manning Marable, “Jackson and the Rise of the Rainbow Coalition,” New Left Review I/149 (January-February 1985): 3-44. ↩
17. There were certainly attempts to grasp the larger strategic significance of the Rainbow Coalition from within, and the impact of communists and socialist activists might have: see for instance, the interview with Jack O’Dell – one of Jackson’s more radical advisers – in the LRS newspaper, Frontline: “Reflections on the Rainbow,” Frontline, October 15, 1984. ↩
18. Elbaum, Revolution in the Air, 2. ↩
19. Ibid., 3. ↩
20. Ibid., 323. ↩
21. Ibid., 93. ↩
22. Ibid., 89. ↩
23. See Albert S. Lindemann, The “Red Years”: European Socialism vs. Bolshevism, 1919-1921 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974); and International Communism in the Era of Lenin: A Documentary History, ed. Helmut Gruber (New York: Fawcett Publications, 1967). ↩
24. Louis Althusser, “The Crisis of Marxism,” in Power and Opposition in Post-Revolutionary Societies, trans. Patrick Camiller and Jon Rothschild (London: Ink Links, 1979), 230. ↩
25. Quoted in K. S. Karol, China, The Other Communism, trans. Tom Baistow (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967), 420. ↩
26. See, for example, Central Committee, Communist Party of China, A Proposal Concerning the General Line of the International Communist Movement, 1963. ↩
27. These remarks refer to China’s positions on the international communist movement. Maoism did make important contributions to Marxist theory on the class struggle and inequality under socialism. See Richard Curt Kraus, Class Struggle in Chinese Socialism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981). ↩
28. Louis Althusser, For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster, (New York: Pantheon Books, 1969), 30. ↩
29. Elbaum, Revolution in the Air, 48. ↩
30. Ibid., 274. ↩
31. Ibid., 207. ↩
32. Ibid., 49. ↩
33. Ibid., 321. ↩
34. Ibid., 48. ↩
35. Ibid. ↩
36. Ibid., 49. ↩
37. Ibid., 51. ↩
38. Ibid., 50. ↩
39. Ibid., 49-50. ↩
40. Ibid., 51. ↩
41. John Barron, Operation Solo: The FBI’s Man in the Kremlin (Washington DC: Regnery, 1996). ↩
42. For a detailed discussion of what the CPUSA was like in this period see Gary Murrell, “The Most Dangerous Communist in the United States” A Biography of Herbert Aptheker (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2015). ↩
43. Alice Jerome and Mort Sheer, “New Program of the Communist Party U.S.A .(A Draft): ‘Pretty Pictures of Singing Tomorrows,’” Progressive Labor, Vol. 5, No. 4 (June-July 1966). ↩
44. Elbaum, Revolution in the Air, 274. ↩
45. Elbaum, Revolution in the Air, 323-324. ↩
46. Charles Bettelheim, Class Struggles in the USSR, First Period: 1917-1923, trans. Brian Pearce (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1976), Second Period:1923-1930, trans. Brian Pearce (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1978). ↩
47. Bettelheim, Class Struggles in the USSR. Second Period, 501. ↩
48. Ibid., 507. ↩
49. Ibid., 503. ↩
50. Quoted in Tristram Hunt, Marx’s General. The Revolutionary Live of Friedrich Engels (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2009) 364. ↩
51. Elbaum, Revolution in the Air, 323. ↩
52. Ibid., 130. ↩
53. Dan Burstein, “Political Report (Working Draft),” 1980. ↩
54. Ibid. ↩
55. Ibid. ↩
56. Ibid. ↩
57. Elbaum, revolution in the Air, 320. ↩
58. Haider, Mistaken Identity, 79. ↩
59. Burstein, “Political Report.” ↩
60. Ibid. ↩
61. Ibid. ↩
62. Quoted in Louis Althusser, Etienne Balibar, Reading Capital, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Pantheon, 1970), 9. ↩
63. Adapted from the article Louis Althusser, “The Importance of Theory,” in Theoretical Review #20, (January-February 1981). A slightly modified translation of this text was later published as “Theory, Theoretical Practice, and Theoretical Formation: Ideology and Ideological Struggle,” trans. James H. Kavanagh, in the collection The Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists and Other Essays, ed. Gregory Elliott (New York: Verso, 1990), 1-42. ↩
64. Ibid. ↩

The Communist Manifesto foresaw the predatory and polarised global capitalism of the 21st century. But Marx and Engels also showed us that we have the power to create a better world.

By Yanis Varoufakis

The Guardian

April 20, 2018 -For a manifesto to succeed, it must speak to our hearts like a poem while infecting the mind with images and ideas that are dazzlingly new. It needs to open our eyes to the true causes of the bewildering, disturbing, exciting changes occurring around us, exposing the possibilities with which our current reality is pregnant. It should make us feel hopelessly inadequate for not having recognised these truths ourselves, and it must lift the curtain on the unsettling realisation that we have been acting as petty accomplices, reproducing a dead-end past. Lastly, it needs to have the power of a Beethoven symphony, urging us to become agents of a future that ends unnecessary mass suffering and to inspire humanity to realise its potential for authentic freedom.

No manifesto has better succeeded in doing all this than the one published in February 1848 at 46 Liverpool Street, London. Commissioned by English revolutionaries, The Communist Manifesto (or the Manifesto of the Communist Party, as it was first published) was authored by two young Germans – Karl Marx, a 29-year-old philosopher with a taste for epicurean hedonism and Hegelian rationality, and Friedrich Engels, a 28-year-old heir to a Manchester mill.

As a work of political literature, the manifesto remains unsurpassed. Its most infamous lines, including the opening one (“A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of communism”), have a Shakespearean quality. Like Hamlet confronted by the ghost of his slain father, the reader is compelled to wonder: “Should I conform to the prevailing order, suffering the slings and arrows of the outrageous fortune bestowed upon me by history’s irresistible forces? Or should I join these forces, taking up arms against the status quo and, by opposing it, usher in a brave new world?”

For Marx and Engels’ immediate readership, this was not an academic dilemma, debated in the salons of Europe. Their manifesto was a call to action, and heeding this spectre’s invocation often meant persecution, or, in some cases, lengthy imprisonment. Today, a similar dilemma faces young people: conform to an established order that is crumbling and incapable of reproducing itself, or oppose it, at considerable personal cost, in search of new ways of working, playing and living together? Even though communist parties have disappeared almost entirely from the political scene, the spirit of communism driving the manifesto is proving hard to silence.

To see beyond the horizon is any manifesto’s ambition. But to succeed as Marx and Engels did in accurately describing an era that would arrive a century-and-a-half in the future, as well as to analyse the contradictions and choices we face today, is truly astounding. In the late 1840s, capitalism was foundering, local, fragmented and timid. And yet Marx and Engels took one long look at it and foresaw our globalised, financialised, iron-clad, all-singing-all-dancing capitalism. This was the creature that came into being after 1991, at the very same moment the establishment was proclaiming the death of Marxism and the end of history.

Of course, the predictive failure of The Communist Manifesto has long been exaggerated. I remember how even leftwing economists in the early 1970s challenged the pivotal manifesto prediction that capital would “nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere”. Drawing upon the sad reality of what were then called third world countries, they argued that capital had lost its fizz well before expanding beyond its “metropolis” in Europe, America and Japan.Empirically they were correct: European, US and Japanese multinational corporations operating in the “peripheries” of Africa, Asia and Latin America were confining themselves to the role of colonial resource extractors and failing to spread capitalism there. Instead of imbuing these countries with capitalist development (drawing “all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilisation”), they argued that foreign capital was reproducing the development of underdevelopment in the third world. It was as if the manifesto had placed too much faith in capital’s ability to spread into every nook and cranny. Most economists, including those sympathetic to Marx, doubted the manifesto’s prediction that “exploitation of the world-market” would give “a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country”.

As it turned out, the manifesto was right, albeit belatedly. It would take the collapse of the Soviet Union and the insertion of two billion Chinese and Indian workers into the capitalist labour market for its prediction to be vindicated. Indeed, for capital to globalise fully, the regimes that pledged allegiance to the manifesto had first to be torn asunder. Has history ever procured a more delicious irony?

Anyone reading the manifesto today will be surprised to discover a picture of a world much like our own, teetering fearfully on the edge of technological innovation. In the manifesto’s time, it was the steam engine that posed the greatest challenge to the rhythms and routines of feudal life. The peasantry were swept into the cogs and wheels of this machinery and a new class of masters, the factory owners and the merchants, usurped the landed gentry’s control over society. Now, it is artificial intelligence and automation that loom as disruptive threats, promising to sweep away “all fixed, fast-frozen relations”. “Constantly revolutionising … instruments of production,” the manifesto proclaims, transform “the whole relations of society”, bringing about “constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation”.

For Marx and Engels, however, this disruption is to be celebrated. It acts as a catalyst for the final push humanity needs to do away with our remaining prejudices that underpin the great divide between those who own the machines and those who design, operate and work with them. “All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned,” they write in the manifesto of technology’s effect, “and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind”. By ruthlessly vaporising our preconceptions and false certainties, technological change is forcing us, kicking and screaming, to face up to how pathetic our relations with one another are.

Today, we see this reckoning in millions of words, in print and online, used to debate globalisation’s discontents. While celebrating how globalisation has shifted billions from abject poverty to relative poverty, venerable western newspapers, Hollywood personalities, Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, bishops and even multibillionaire financiers all lament some of its less desirable ramifications: unbearable inequality, brazen greed, climate change, and the hijacking of our parliamentary democracies by bankers and the ultra-rich.

None of this should surprise a reader of the manifesto. “Society as a whole,” it argues, “is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other.” As production is mechanised, and the profit margin of the machine-owners becomes our civilisation’s driving motive, society splits between non-working shareholders and non-owner wage-workers. As for the middle class, it is the dinosaur in the room, set for extinction.

At the same time, the ultra-rich become guilt-ridden and stressed as they watch everyone else’s lives sink into the precariousness of insecure wage-slavery. Marx and Engels foresaw that this supremely powerful minority would eventually prove “unfit to rule” over such polarised societies, because they would not be in a position to guarantee the wage-slaves a reliable existence. Barricaded in their gated communities, they find themselves consumed by anxiety and incapable of enjoying their riches. Some of them, those smart enough to realise their true long-term self-interest, recognise the welfare state as the best available insurance policy. But alas, explains the manifesto, as a social class, it will be in their nature to skimp on the insurance premium, and they will work tirelessly to avoid paying the requisite taxes.

Is this not what has transpired? The ultra-rich are an insecure, permanently disgruntled clique, constantly in and out of detox clinics, relentlessly seeking solace from psychics, shrinks and entrepreneurial gurus. Meanwhile, everyone else struggles to put food on the table, pay tuition fees, juggle one credit card for another or fight depression. We act as if our lives are carefree, claiming to like what we do and do what we like. Yet in reality, we cry ourselves to sleep.

Do-gooders, establishment politicians and recovering academic economists all respond to this predicament in the same way, issuing fiery condemnations of the symptoms (income inequality) while ignoring the causes (exploitation resulting from the unequal property rights over machines, land, resources). Is it any wonder we are at an impasse, wallowing in hopelessness that only serves the populists seeking to court the worst instincts of the masses?

With the rapid rise of advanced technology, we are brought closer to the moment when we must decide how to relate to each other in a rational, civilised manner. We can no longer hide behind the inevitability of work and the oppressive social norms it necessitates. The manifesto gives its 21st-century reader an opportunity to see through this mess and to recognise what needs to be done so that the majority can escape from discontent into new social arrangements in which “the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all”. Even though it contains no roadmap of how to get there, the manifesto remains a source of hope not to be dismissed.

If the manifesto holds the same power to excite, enthuse and shame us that it did in 1848, it is because the struggle between social classes is as old as time itself. Marx and Engels summed this up in 13 audacious words: “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”

From feudal aristocracies to industrialised empires, the engine of history has always been the conflict between constantly revolutionising technologies and prevailing class conventions. With each disruption of society’s technology, the conflict between us changes form. Old classes die out and eventually only two remain standing: the class that owns everything and the class that owns nothing – the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.

This is the predicament in which we find ourselves today. While we owe capitalism for having reduced all class distinctions to the gulf between owners and non-owners, Marx and Engels want us to realise that capitalism is insufficiently evolved to survive the technologies it spawns. It is our duty to tear away at the old notion of privately owned means of production and force a metamorphosis, which must involve the social ownership of machinery, land and resources. Now, when new technologies are unleashed in societies bound by the primitive labour contract, wholesale misery follows. In the manifesto’s unforgettable words: “A society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells.”

The sorcerer will always imagine that their apps, search engines, robots and genetically engineered seeds will bring wealth and happiness to all. But, once released into societies divided between wage labourers and owners, these technological marvels will push wages and prices to levels that create low profits for most businesses. It is only big tech, big pharma and the few corporations that command exceptionally large political and economic power over us that truly benefit. If we continue to subscribe to labour contracts between employer and employee, then private property rights will govern and drive capital to inhuman ends. Only by abolishing private ownership of the instruments of mass production and replacing it with a new type of common ownership that works in sync with new technologies, will we lessen inequality and find collective happiness.

According to Marx and Engels’ 13-word theory of history, the current stand-off between worker and owner has always been guaranteed. “Equally inevitable,” the manifesto states, is the bourgeoisie’s “fall and the victory of the proletariat”. So far, history has not fulfilled this prediction, but critics forget that the manifesto, like any worthy piece of propaganda, presents hope in the form of certainty. Just as Lord Nelson rallied his troops before the Battle of Trafalgar by announcing that England “expected” them to do their duty (even if he had grave doubts that they would), the manifesto bestows upon the proletariat the expectation that they will do their duty to themselves, inspiring them to unite and liberate one another from the bonds of wage-slavery.

Will they? On current form, it seems unlikely. But, then again, we had to wait for globalisation to appear in the 1990s before the manifesto’s estimation of capital’s potential could be fully vindicated. Might it not be that the new global, increasingly precarious proletariat needs more time before it can play the historic role the manifesto anticipated? While the jury is still out, Marx and Engels tell us that, if we fear the rhetoric of revolution, or try to distract ourselves from our duty to one another, we will find ourselves caught in a vertiginous spiral in which capital saturates and bleaches the human spirit. The only thing we can be certain of, according to the manifesto, is that unless capital is socialised we are in for dystopic developments.

On the topic of dystopia, the sceptical reader will perk up: what of the manifesto’s own complicity in legitimising authoritarian regimes and steeling the spirit of gulag guards? Instead of responding defensively, pointing out that no one blames Adam Smith for the excesses of Wall Street, or the New Testament for the Spanish Inquisition, we can speculate how the authors of the manifesto might have answered this charge. I believe that, with the benefit of hindsight, Marx and Engels would confess to an important error in their analysis: insufficient reflexivity. This is to say that they failed to give sufficient thought, and kept a judicious silence, over the impact their own analysis would have on the world they were analysing.

The manifesto told a powerful story in uncompromising language, intended to stir readers from their apathy. What Marx and Engels failed to foresee was that powerful, prescriptive texts have a tendency to procure disciples, believers – a priesthood, even – and that this faithful might use the power bestowed upon them by the manifesto to their own advantage. With it, they might abuse other comrades, build their own power base, gain positions of influence, bed impressionable students, take control of the politburo and imprison anyone who resists them.

Similarly, Marx and Engels failed to estimate the impact of their writing on capitalism itself. To the extent that the manifesto helped fashion the Soviet Union, its eastern European satellites, Castro’s Cuba, Tito’s Yugoslavia and several social democratic governments in the west, would these developments not cause a chain reaction that would frustrate the manifesto’s predictions and analysis? After the Russian revolution and then the second world war, the fear of communism forced capitalist regimes to embrace pension schemes, national health services, even the idea of making the rich pay for poor and petit bourgeois students to attend purpose-built liberal universities. Meanwhile, rabid hostility to the Soviet Union stirred up paranoia and created a climate of fear that proved particularly fertile for figures such as Joseph Stalin and Pol Pot.

I believe that Marx and Engels would have regretted not anticipating the manifesto’s impact on the communist parties it foreshadowed. They would be kicking themselves that they overlooked the kind of dialectic they loved to analyse: how workers’ states would become increasingly totalitarian in their response to capitalist state aggression, and how, in their response to the fear of communism, these capitalist states would grow increasingly civilised.

Blessed, of course, are the authors whose errors result from the power of their words. Even more blessed are those whose errors are self-correcting. In our present day, the workers’ states inspired by the manifesto are almost gone, and the communist parties disbanded or in disarray. Liberated from competition with regimes inspired by the manifesto, globalised capitalism is behaving as if it is determined to create a world best explained by the manifesto.

What makes the manifesto truly inspiring today is its recommendation for us in the here and now, in a world where our lives are being constantly shaped by what Marx described in his earlier Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts as “a universal energy which breaks every limit and every bond and posits itself as the only policy, the only universality, the only limit and the only bond”. From Uber drivers and finance ministers to banking executives and the wretchedly poor, we can all be excused for feeling overwhelmed by this “energy”. Capitalism’s reach is so pervasive it can sometimes seem impossible to imagine a world without it. It is only a small step from feelings of impotence to falling victim to the assertion there is no alternative. But, astonishingly (claims the manifesto), it is precisely when we are about to succumb to this idea that alternatives abound.

What we don’t need at this juncture are sermons on the injustice of it all, denunciations of rising inequality or vigils for our vanishing democratic sovereignty. Nor should we stomach desperate acts of regressive escapism: the cry to return to some pre-modern, pre-technological state where we can cling to the bosom of nationalism. What the manifesto promotes in moments of doubt and submission is a clear-headed, objective assessment of capitalism and its ills, seen through the cold, hard light of rationality.

The manifesto argues that the problem with capitalism is not that it produces too much technology, or that it is unfair. Capitalism’s problem is that it is irrational. Capital’s success at spreading its reach via accumulation for accumulation’s sake is causing human workers to work like machines for a pittance, while the robots are programmed to produce stuff that the workers can no longer afford and the robots do not need. Capital fails to make rational use of the brilliant machines it engenders, condemning whole generations to deprivation, a decrepit environment, underemployment and zero real leisure from the pursuit of employment and general survival. Even capitalists are turned into angst-ridden automatons. They live in permanent fear that unless they commodify their fellow humans, they will cease to be capitalists – joining the desolate ranks of the expanding precariat-proletariat.

If capitalism appears unjust it is because it enslaves everyone, rich and poor, wasting human and natural resources. The same “production line” that pumps out untold wealth also produces deep unhappiness and discontent on an industrial scale. So, our first task – according to the manifesto – is to recognise the tendency of this all-conquering “energy” to undermine itself.

When asked by journalists who or what is the greatest threat to capitalism today, I defy their expectations by answering: capital! Of course, this is an idea I have been plagiarising for decades from the manifesto. Given that it is neither possible nor desirable to annul capitalism’s “energy”, the trick is to help speed up capital’s development (so that it burns up like a meteor rushing through the atmosphere) while, on the other hand, resisting (through rational, collective action) its tendency to steamroller our human spirit. In short, the manifesto’s recommendation is that we push capital to its limits while limiting its consequences and preparing for its socialisation.

We need more robots, better solar panels, instant communication and sophisticated green transport networks. But equally, we need to organise politically to defend the weak, empower the many and prepare the ground for reversing the absurdities of capitalism. In practical terms, this means treating the idea that there is no alternative with the contempt it deserves while rejecting all calls for a “return” to a less modernised existence. There was nothing ethical about life under earlier forms of capitalism. TV shows that massively invest in calculated nostalgia, such as Downton Abbey, should make us glad to live when we do. At the same time, they might also encourage us to floor the accelerator of change.

The manifesto is one of those emotive texts that speak to each of us differently at different times, reflecting our own circumstances. Some years ago, I called myself an erratic, libertarian Marxist and I was roundly disparaged by non-Marxists and Marxists alike. Soon after, I found myself thrust into a political position of some prominence, during a period of intense conflict between the then Greek government and some of capitalism’s most powerful agents. Rereading the manifesto for the purposes of writing this introduction has been a little like inviting the ghosts of Marx and Engels to yell a mixture of censure and support in my ear.

Adults in the Room, my memoir of the time I served as Greece’s finance minister in 2015, tells the story of how the Greek spring was crushed via a combination of brute force (on the part of Greece’s creditors) and a divided front within my own government. It is as honest and accurate as I could make it. Seen from the perspective of the manifesto, however, the true historical agents were confined to cameo appearances or to the role of quasi-passive victims. “Where is the proletariat in your story?” I can almost hear Marx and Engels screaming at me now. “Should they not be the ones confronting capitalism’s most powerful, with you supporting from the sidelines?”

Thankfully, rereading the manifesto has offered some solace too, endorsing my view of it as a liberal text – a libertarian one, even. Where the manifesto lambasts bourgeois-liberal virtues, it does so because of its dedication and even love for them. Liberty happiness, autonomy, individuality, spirituality, self-guided development are ideals that Marx and Engels valued above everything else. If they are angry with the bourgeoisie, it is because the bourgeoisie seeks to deny the majority any opportunity to be free. Given Marx and Engels’ adherence to Hegel’s fantastic idea that no one is free as long as one person is in chains, their quarrel with the bourgeoisie is that they sacrifice everybody’s freedom and individuality on capitalism’s altar of accumulation.

Although Marx and Engels were not anarchists, they loathed the state and its potential to be manipulated by one class to suppress another. At best, they saw it as a necessary evil that would live on in the good, post-capitalist future coordinating a classless society. If this reading of the manifesto holds water, the only way of being a communist is to be a libertarian one. Heeding the manifesto’s call to “Unite!” is in fact inconsistent with becoming card-carrying Stalinists or with seeking to remake the world in the image of now-defunct communist regimes.

When everything is said and done, then, what is the bottom line of the manifesto? And why should anyone, especially young people today, care about history, politics and the like?

Marx and Engels based their manifesto on a touchingly simple answer: authentic human happiness and the genuine freedom that must accompany it. For them, these are the only things that truly matter. Their manifesto does not rely on strict Germanic invocations of duty, or appeals to historic responsibilities to inspire us to act. It does not moralise, or point its finger. Marx and Engels attempted to overcome the fixations of German moral philosophy and capitalist profit motives, with a rational, yet rousing appeal to the very basics of our shared human nature.

Key to their analysis is the ever-expanding chasm between those who produce and those who own the instruments of production. The problematic nexus of capital and waged labour stops us from enjoying our work and our artefacts, and turns employers and workers, rich and poor, into mindless, quivering pawns who are being quick-marched towards a pointless existence by forces beyond our control.

But why do we need politics to deal with this? Isn’t politics stultifying, especially socialist politics, which Oscar Wilde once claimed “takes up too many evenings”? Marx and Engels’ answer is: because we cannot end this idiocy individually; because no market can ever emerge that will produce an antidote to this stupidity. Collective, democratic political action is our only chance for freedom and enjoyment. And for this, the long nights seem a small price to pay.

Humanity may succeed in securing social arrangements that allow for “the free development of each” as the “condition for the free development of all”. But, then again, we may end up in the “common ruin” of nuclear war, environmental disaster or agonising discontent. In our present moment, there are no guarantees. We can turn to the manifesto for inspiration, wisdom and energy but, in the end, what prevails is up to us.

Adapted from Yanis Varoufakis’s introduction to The Communist Manifesto, published by Vintage Classics on 26 April

It’s a standard assumption in the West: As a society progresses, it eventually becomes a capitalist, multi-party democracy. Right? Eric X. Li, a Chinese investor and political scientist, begs to differ. In this provocative, boundary-pushing talk, he asks his audience to consider that there’s more than one way to run a successful modern nation. A rising public intellectual, Eric X Li argues that the universality claim of Western democratic systems is going to be “morally challenged” by China.