Library:The Revolutionary Science of Marxism-Leninism

The Revolutionary Science of Marxism-Leninism
Author	J. Sykes
First published	2023

Foreward by Mick Kelly

The publication of this book, The Revolutionary Science of Marxism-Leninism, by J. Sykes, comes at a turning point in this country. Times have changed. There is a renewed and resurgent communist movement in the U.S. Not since the rise of the new communist movement in late 1960s and early 70s have we seen such large numbers of people arriving at the conclusion that monopoly capitalism is a failed system, and that revolution and socialism are necessities. Many new revolutionaries are making the leap and helping to build revolutionary organization. The remarkable wave of growth being experienced by Freedom Road Socialist Organization is testament to this new political environment.

The decline of U.S. imperialism is accelerating, and every contradiction in U.S. society is sharpening. The fires ignited in the great rebellion after the police murder of George Floyd illuminate the road to the future. From Palestine to the Philippines, powerful movements for national liberation are striking blows against the U.S. empire. And the socialist countries are thriving, providing beacons of hope to the world’s peoples.

This book addresses some real and felt needs that have arisen in this new political context. The Revolutionary Science of Marxism-Leninism systematically addresses the basics of scientific socialism in a popular, concise manner that does not shy from addressing complex issues. The chapters of this book, which originally appeared in the newspaper Fight Back!, address the building blocks of red theory, such as the elements of dialectical and historical materialism, along with political economy. Other chapters deal with problematic bourgeois ideological currents like post-modernism, Sakai’s take on settler colonialism, and pragmatism. There is also great material on revolutionary strategy, and the problems and promise of socialism.

Building a revolutionary movement in this country is not a simple thing. Our approach needs to be a scientific one. Capitalism is a governed by laws that we can understand and make use of. For example, exploitation is not a thing that some bad capitalists do—it is something that all capitalists partake in. Workers go to work; we create more far more value than we are paid for in wages; the difference—the surplus value appropriated by the corporate owners—is a measure of exploitation. Popularizing these scientific truths is a part of what it takes to build a revolutionary movement. Theory can become a growing material force if it is grasped and taken up by an expanding movement to transform society.

Revolutionary theory does more than analyze oppression, it helps us understand how society can be changed. Part of this comes from knowing the laws that guide social development, but another extremely important area of knowledge is understanding the lessons that can be learned from the efforts of revolutionaries in the past. Communists have led successful revolutions in China, Russia, Cuba and a host of other places. These experiences, summarized and crystallized into Marxist-Leninist theory, are powerful weapons for change.

Marxism-Leninism has its critics to be sure. Social democrats, Trotskyists, and petty bourgeois radicals are among them. One thing that unites these critics is their sorry track record of failure. Every successful revolution that has placed the working class in power has been led by Marxist-Leninists. There are no exceptions to this. The opponents of Marxism-Leninism have never led a socialist revolution. And the laws of social development indicate they never will.

The great revolutionary Mao Zedong once remarked, “In class society, everyone lives as a member of a particular class, and every kind of thinking, without exception, is stamped with the brand of a class.” In the U.S. today, politics, ideology and organized thinking of all kinds are stamped with the brand of one of two classes —proletarian or bourgeois.

One of the many strengths of this work, The Revolutionary Science of Marxism-Leninism, is that it consistently integrates Marxism-Leninism with practice. A shortcoming in the communist movement is that some people treat Marxism as a sort of religion, where odd quotes from Marx, Lenin, Stalin or Mao are used to explain one’s political practice and there is no real attempt to understand or apply revolutionary theory to the tasks at hand. A related shortcoming is to think theory is for someone else, and if the revolutionary activist reads a book or two every once and a while that is just fine. This book is an antidote to these narrow approaches to Marxism-Leninism.

Freedom Road Socialist Organization has published this book as a means to promote and propagate Marxism-Leninism. There might be disagreement on this or that concept in the book, but that’s just fine, because Marxism is a living science that is constantly being enriched. A book on revolutionary theory is not the same thing as a political program.

Freedom Road Socialist Organization is a Marxist-Leninist organization, and we are working to build a new communist party. Part of those party building efforts must include promoting Marxism-Leninism as a science that can guide the effort to transform society. This means a fusing or bringing together Marxism-Leninism with the workers movement.

Long ago Mao made the point, “If there is to be revolution, there must be a revolutionary party. Without a revolutionary party, without a party built on the Marxist-Leninist revolutionary theory and in the Marxist-Leninist revolutionary style, it is impossible to lead the working class and the broad masses of the people in defeating imperialism and its running dogs.” This was correct then and it is correct now.

All thinking is not equal. The science of social change, Marxism-Leninism, is better that all the bourgeois schools of thought put together. The working class is the only class in human history that has a core interest in eliminating itself as a class by eliminating classes altogether and with it, oppression of every kind. Capitalist ideologies serve to keep us where we are.

Marxism-Leninism is the partisan science of the working class —a class that is moving from being a class in itself to a class for itself. Workers are studying Marxist books all over the world. For workers in the U.S., oppressed people and others who are sick of capitalism, The Revolutionary Science of Marxism-Leninism provides some excellent reading.

Section I: Introduction to Marxism-Leninism

Chapter 1: What Is Marxism-Leninism?

The chapters of this book were initially published by Fight Back! News as the Red Theory series on Marxism-Leninism. This book collects the whole series in one volume in the interest of fusing Marxism with the workers' movement. Marx stressed that the purpose of theory is to understand the world so as to change the world, and this series hopes to help give activists in the people’s struggles a better grasp of these theoretical tools. But let’s begin with an overview: when we say we are Marxist-Leninists, what does that mean? What is Marxism-Leninism, and why is it important?

In the essay Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism, Vladimir Lenin, the great leader of the Bolshevik Revolution, argued that Marxism grew out of the most advanced theory of its time. It drew from the most advanced thinking in British political economy, especially from Adam Smith and David Ricardo; from German philosophy in G.W.F. Hegel and Ludwig Feuerbach; and from the most advanced ideas of French socialism.

Marx and Engels took each of these sources to a higher level and developed their critique of capitalism, the philosophy of Dialectical and Historical Materialism, and the theory of Scientific Socialism. These ideas were tested and refined through International Workingmen’s Association, the First International, where they helped to lead the struggles of workers around the world, particularly in Europe and the United States.

Marxism didn’t spring from the heads of these two thinkers. It was built upon a foundation of theory and practice that came before it, and was tested and refined through the summation of the practical experiences of the international working class. This is why it is often called the “science of revolution.” As this series progresses, we will dive deep into these three component parts of Marxism. We’ll break down the elements of Marxism in political economy, philosophy, and scientific socialism so that we can use these theoretical tools to analyze our conditions and find the best path forward.

It is important to note, however, that Marxism isn’t some kind of dogma. We don’t accept anything just because someone said it. Practice is the sole criterion of truth. Revolutionary theory is a guide to action, and it changes and develops as the world changes and develops, building upon itself just as Marx and Engels built upon the advanced theory of their time. In the early part of the 20th century, Vladimir Lenin and the experience of the October Revolution and socialist construction in the Soviet Union further developed the science of revolution in many ways. Lenin’s analysis of the further development of capitalism into monopoly capitalism led to his development of the theory of Imperialism and the importance of anti-imperialist struggles for national liberation.

The first socialist state was founded by Lenin and the Bolsheviks in October 1917. Marxism-Leninism became the Marxism of the age of imperialism and proletarian revolution. Stalin, who went on to lead the USSR through socialist construction and the defeat of fascism in the Second World War, used Marxism-Leninism to take the Soviets from horse-drawn plows to one of the most advanced countries in history in just 30 short years. Likewise, Mao Zedong and the Communist Party of China used and developed Marxism-Leninism in the experience of the socialist revolution in China, and in the process bettered the lives of a billion people.

If we want to transform society, end exploitation and build socialism, we need Marxism-Leninism. Certainly we need to study the ideas of the principal theorists of the science of revolution: Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong. But that’s not the end of revolutionary science. The revolutionary struggles in this country likewise produced theory through the summation of practical experience that can help guide us as we build revolutionary consciousness and organization today. The socialist and communist movements of the past here in the U.S. are rich with lessons we can draw upon. For that reason, we should likewise study the writings of those who came before us here in the United States – revolutionaries like William Z. Foster, Mother Bloor, Harry Haywood, Claudia Jones and many others. We can learn a great deal from these movements and without a doubt their struggles are a source of inspiration for revolutionaries who want to transform this country. Ours is a living science. We are continuing to build and develop revolutionary theory through practice today.

What Mao Zedong once said merits repeating: “If there is to be revolution, there must be a revolutionary party. Without a revolutionary party, without a party built on the Marxist-Leninist revolutionary theory and in the Marxist-Leninist revolutionary style, it is impossible to lead the working class and the broad masses of the people in defeating imperialism and its running dogs.”

We want what Mao wanted. We need revolution, and we therefore need revolutionary theory. Our hope is that the chapters in this book will serve to give advanced activists in the people’s struggles the foundation in Marxist-Leninist theory upon which to advance their study so that they can apply it to the many urgent tasks at hand, just as all successful revolutionaries who came before us did.

Chapter 2: The historical emergence of Marxism

Let's examine how Marxism emerged, and the struggles it grew out of.

Marxism-Leninism didn’t spring fully grown from the heads of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and Mao. It developed historically as a result of the struggles that were taking place as it emerged. This is because revolutionaries needed to understand the world in order to change it. In the time that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were working, they took the most advanced theory in philosophy, political economy and socialist thought and brought them to a higher level according to the needs of the working class movement. In philosophy, they took the idealist dialectic of Hegel and put it on a materialist basis. In political economy, they took the ideas of Smith and Ricardo and pushed them to their logical conclusions, revealing the inner workings of the capitalist system. And in socialist theory, they built upon the successes and struggled against the shortcomings of the utopian socialists to make socialist theory scientific. They did this in the context of the bitter inequality of the early Industrial Revolution and the resulting growth of the international workers movement, which they helped to lead. It was in the crucible of the class struggle that Marxism was forged.

The revolutions of 1848 swept through Europe while Marx and Engels were in Brussels, Belgium. Marx was expelled and went to Paris, joined by Engels. From there they went to Germany where they led the Communist League (for which they wrote the Communist Manifesto) and published the newspaper Neue Rheinische Zeitung. The 1848 Revolution was defeated in Germany and Marx was again expelled and returned to Paris, while Engels was able to remain in Germany as a soldier in the revolutionary army until its final defeat. Marx was expelled from Paris in 1849 when he finally settled down in London.

The defeat of the revolutionary upsurge of 1848 set the revolutionary movement into disarray, and therefore required analysis and summation. Marx set to work drawing theoretical lessons from that set of practical experiences in order to see the way forward. It was in this period that he wrote Class Struggles in France: 1848 to 1850 and The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. These experiences helped to clarify the relationship between classes at the time and allowed Marx to discern who were the friends and who were the enemies of the proletariat in the struggle to transform society.

In 1864 the International Workingmen’s Association was formed. Marx helped found the First International, wrote its program, and came almost immediately to lead it. However, the First International reflected the ideological disarray of the post-1848 revolutionary movement, and within it Marxism had to struggle against both the utopian socialists and the anarchists, preventing the revolution from being led down these blind alleys. The Utopian Socialists and Anarchists advanced pie-in-the-sky theories of what a socialist society would look like and combined this with idealist notions of how to get there. The Utopians’ theory was not grounded in practice or in the practical needs of the workers movements and had no way to see their admirable ideas realized.

In 1871 the experience of the Paris Commune further clarified these questions and sharpened these ideological struggles and Marx wrote The Civil War in France to sum up the tremendous revolutionary experience of the Communards, the first instance of working-class state power, which Marx called “the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.” Marx's famous work, the Critique of the Gotha Program, addressed some of the same issues, in the context of revolutionary strategy. All of these interventions were instrumental to the growth of the revolutionary working-class movement and helped to propel it forward.

As the struggle against idealism in the working class movement progressed, Engels wrote a brilliant pamphlet, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific. In this important text, Engels helped to popularize Marxism and explain the differences between it and the thought of the Utopians Saint-Simon, Fourier, and Robert Owen, who all had followers in the First International. He explained the basis of Marxist Dialectical and Historical Materialism and how these theoretical tools allowed the revolutionary movement to advance past utopian idealism and put the revolutionary movement on a materialist foundation.

All the while, Marx had been deeply engaged in the intense study of political economy that would finally bear fruit in the publication of Volume 1 of his great work, Capital, in 1867. In this mammoth study Marx gave the working-class movement a rigorous critique of capitalism, how it arose historically, how it functions, why exploitation and economic crisis are at its core, and an understanding of how capitalism could be overcome.

It is impossible, of course, to do justice to all of these ideas here. This is but an overview to help give context to Marxism and show its development through struggle. In the following chapters, we will show how Marxism continues to develop in the era of imperialism and proletarian revolution, and we will then go deeper into all of the ideas we have covered here.

Chapter 3: Leninism: The Marxism of the current era

So far, we’ve looked at the historical emergence of Marxism. But by the time Marx finished writing Capital, capitalism was still developing and changing. The fundamental characteristics of the capitalist mode of production haven’t changed. Commodity production and exploitation of workers’ surplus value by the capitalists remain the driving force of the capitalist system. And it remains a system plagued by regular cycles of crises of overproduction, pushing poor and working-class people further down while the rich get richer and richer. But by the beginning of the 20th century the internal motion of capitalism’s contradictions led to its advancement to a higher stage: monopoly capitalism, also known as imperialism.

As capitalism developed to this higher stage, Marxism needed to advance to come to grips with the demands that imperialism placed upon the international working class, theoretically and practically. By and large, the mainstream Marxists of the time had begun to treat Marxism as a dogma rather than a living science. They failed to understand this shift and proved inadequate to the demands that imperialism placed on the working class. The leader of the Russian revolution, Vladimir Lenin, took up this task of understanding this new stage and on the basis of that understanding developed the strategy and tactics of proletarian revolution.

Huge strides were made in the Great October Revolution of 1917 in Russia, where the Bolsheviks established the first socialist state, the Soviet Union. Through the course of the October Revolution and socialist construction, the leaders of the Bolsheviks, especially Lenin and Stalin, further developed Leninism as the Marxism of the era imperialism and proletarian revolution.

Let’s break down the contributions of Leninism to Marxism here before we go into greater detail in forthcoming chapters in this book.

First, Lenin clarified the terrain of struggle in developing his analysis of the current stage of capitalism, especially in his Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism. He said that imperialism had five basic characteristics:

(1) the concentration of production and capital has developed to such a high stage that it has created monopolies which play a decisive role in economic life; (2) the merging of bank capital with industrial capital, and the creation, on the basis of this “finance capital,” of a financial oligarchy; (3) the export of capital as distinguished from the export of commodities acquires exceptional importance; (4) the formation of international monopolist capitalist associations which share the world among themselves, and (5) the territorial division of the whole world among the biggest capitalist powers is completed.

Based on this, Lenin understood that imperialism is capitalism in decay, that the imperialist powers could extract super-profits through the exportation of capital to the oppressed nations and the super-exploitation of the people there to hold off the system’s own inevitable demise. Lenin thus understood that capitalism developed unevenly. The monopoly capitalist states were able to grow very advanced at the expense of the rest of the world, which was held in a lower stage of development due to imperialist exploitation. Based on this analysis, Lenin recognized the tremendous revolutionary importance of the anti-imperialist struggles for national liberation in the oppressed nations, and gave central importance to the right of nations to self-determination as a cornerstone of proletarian internationalism.

Stalin, himself from one of the oppressed nations of the Russian empire, played a pivotal role in developing the Leninist understanding of the National Question. His essay Marxism and the National Question is the cornerstone to the Leninist understanding of the role of the oppressed nationalities and the demand for national self-determination.

This analysis of imperialism was epoch-defining. According to Stalin, the rise of imperialism brings forward three fundamental contradictions, or defining struggles of the current era: the contradiction between labor and capital, the contradiction between the imperialist countries amongst themselves, and between the imperialist countries and the oppressed nations. The socialist revolutions would create a fourth contradiction, between the socialist and the imperialist countries. Stalin explained in The Foundations of Leninism that because imperialism represents a new stage of capitalism the contributions of Lenin are universally applicable, and that Marxism-Leninism is the Marxism of the current era.

In organizing the revolution in Russia, this theory of uneven development also played an important role. Many Marxists once thought revolution would first happen in the most advanced capitalist countries. Lenin argued that the imperialist stage of capitalism meant that revolution should first develop in the “weak links” of the capitalist chain, and he believed that Russia was just such a weak link. History proved Lenin correct.

In his pamphlet, What is to be Done? Lenin also put forward the theory of the Party of the New Type, a Communist Party of professional revolutionaries in the vanguard of the working class – cadres organized according to the principles of democratic centralism, who would work shoulder to shoulder in the mass movements of working and oppressed people. In practice this meant fusing Marxism with the movements of workers and peasants in Russia through the class struggle, and building the Communist Party through that struggle.

Importantly, Lenin also developed the theory that the revolution in semi-feudal countries like Russia should develop in stages. The working class and their party could and should lead the revolutionary movement directly from the bourgeois-democratic revolution to the proletarian-socialist revolution.

First, the overthrow of semi-feudal society requires a broad people’s democracy, led by the working-class in alliance with the peasantry. In Russia, this stage lasted from 1903 to February, 1917, and had as its objective the overthrow of Tsarism and the remnants of medievalism. The book Foundations of Leninism sums up this stage well. Stalin points out that the main force at this first stage was the proletariat relying on the entire peasantry as the reserve force, and that the revolution was directed at isolating the liberal-monarchist bourgeoisie who sought compromise with Tsarism. The firm alliance between the proletariat and peasantry was crucial to prevent the peasantry (as a basically petty-bourgeois, or small-time capitalist, class) from being won over to this idea of compromise.

Then, after the overthrow of the Tsar, the revolution entered its second stage. This stage spanned from March to October, 1917, with the objective of overthrowing imperialism and withdrawing from the imperialist war. The core of this stage was the alliance of the proletariat with the poor peasants, to defeat the bourgeoisie and prevent the peasantry and other petty-bourgeois strata from going over to the side of the imperialists. The establishment of socialism depended on the success of this second stage, and during both stages the leadership of the working class was essential. After this it became possible to establish the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, consolidate socialism in one country and use that country as a base area from which the international communist movement could battle against imperialism more broadly.

Stalin’s Foundations of Leninism, along with the 1938 History of the CPSU (Bolsheviks) – Short Course, by summing up the process of the revolution in Russia and breaking down clearly the stages of its advance, serves as a master-class for the application of Leninism’s universal lessons for revolutionaries all over the world. This theoretical understanding of revolutionary stages has proved tremendously important for revolutionaries in countries as diverse as Cuba, Vietnam and China.

Lenin further understood that the old, bourgeois state machinery couldn’t be used to build socialism. Socialism couldn’t be achieved by reforming the bourgeois state, but rather it must be smashed and replaced by the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat. As the African American poet Audre Lorde later put it, “the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house.” On this basis Lenin led the struggle against opportunists and revisionists in Russia and in the international communist movement as a whole and led the Soviet people in the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat, that is, the establishment of working-class state power, in the largest country in the world.

Led by the only class with no material interest in the exploitation of others, the elimination of all exploitation becomes possible. On this basis, the Soviet Union gave the international working class a base for the first time in world history and was a beacon and an inspiration to people all over the world for more than 70 years. In his pamphlet The State and Revolution, Lenin argued that after the consolidation of socialism and the progressive elimination of the reasons for its existence, the Dictatorship of the Proletariat would eventually wither away as it deliberately and methodically developed the forces of production, eliminated capitalist relations of production, and transitioned step-by-step to a classless, stateless society – Communism. Then the material conditions would be in place for Marx’s slogan of “from each according to their ability, to each according to their need” to be truly realized.

Up to this point, we've covered the historical emergence of Marxism and its development into its current stage, Marxism-Leninism. Next we will look more deeply at the philosophy at the center of Marxism-Leninism. In the next several chapters we will look at the Marxist-Leninist theory of knowledge, which stands at the very core of the science of revolution.

Section II: Philosophy

Chapter 4: How we learn: Theory and Practice

At this point, it would serve us well to zoom in on the process by which practice becomes theory, and vice versa. Stalin said that “theory is the experience of the working-class movement in all countries taken in its general aspect.” This is a good summation, but what does that really mean?

We can learn a lot by reading books and articles or by watching videos that break down and explain things. But that’s only part of how we learn. First and foremost, we learn through experience – through observation and participation, especially through our participation in the production of the fulfillment of our material needs. In his lecture On Practice, the leader of the Chinese revolution, Mao Zedong, breaks this process down into stages: first there is basic sense perception. We observe the world around us. Then, based on these observations, we form conceptual knowledge. In other words, we start to understand things based on their relationships to one another, and we are able to make judgements and inferences. Based on these judgments and inferences regarding the things we perceive in relation to one another, we act upon the world so as to shape the material world according to our practical needs. We can then turn a critical eye towards our experience, adjust our theory accordingly, and proceed again.

According to Mao, “If you want to know a certain thing or a certain class of things directly, you must personally participate in the practical struggle to change reality, to change that thing or class of things, for only thus can you come into contact with them as phenomena; only through personal participation in the practical struggle to change reality can you uncover the essence of that thing or class of things and comprehend them.” This is true in the process of material production, class struggle and scientific experiment.

As we engage in this process, we make observations, judgments and inferences. We sum up our experiences, draw lessons from those experiences, and then apply those lessons as we move forward. We can imagine our knowledge advancing in a spiral fashion, moving upward from theory to practice and then to a more advanced theory, and then to a more advanced practice. Ever up and onward. This is, essentially, the Marxist-Leninist theory of knowledge. In philosophy, this is called epistemology, which basically means an account of knowledge. The Marxist epistemology is this process of practice-theory-practice. We formulate a theory and test it in practice. Then we draw conclusions from that practice to improve our theory, which we test again. This process is never complete. There is no limit to what we can learn.

Class struggle in particular has a huge influence on our thinking. Class consciousness, our knowledge of our place in society in relation to other social classes, is formed through class struggle. This is true of our class, the proletariat, and of the class of exploiters, the bourgeoisie. Through the class struggle, first against feudalism, and then against the rising working-class movement, the bourgeoisie has become ever more aware of their interests as a class and have developed theory and practice to achieve their class interests. Everyone who has participated in working-class struggles knows this firsthand. Our thinking is defined by our class, “stamped” as Mao says, “by the brand” of a class. It grounds our perspective and shapes our ideology.

Until working and oppressed people become class conscious, the ideology of the dominant class, the ruling class, is left alone to shape their thinking and place its own limits on what is possible. The ruling class achieves this through culture, movies, media, education, news organs, and many other means at their disposal. Through class struggle, and the fusion of Marxism with the movements of workers and oppressed nationalities, the hold of bourgeois ideology on the minds of the people is broken, and people begin to see the material reality of a world previously veiled by the fog of the false consciousness of bourgeois ideology.

Marxist-Leninists are materialists rather than idealists. The idealists would have us believe that idealism means we care about high-minded things while to be a materialist means we only care about material gain. But that’s not what these terms mean philosophically. We care deeply about ideals like justice, but we know that if our ideals aren’t made into a material reality through real material processes, then our ideals are worthless. So, we start with material reality as the basis of our understanding, and apply that understanding to changing material reality. For example, idealists say that a just society is impossible because of “human nature.” But so-called “human nature” is an idealist concept meant to hide and obscure the true nature of reality. “Human nature” they say is greedy and self-serving at its core. But this is the ideology of capitalism describing itself. “Human nature” thus described isn’t some fixed, unchangeable thing. This view of humanity is shaped by the material reality of capitalism, and it can and must be overcome as the society that shapes it is revolutionized.

This is what we mean when we say that revolutionary theory is “the experience of the working-class movement in all countries taken in its general aspect.” Marxist-Leninists the world over are continually gathering experience through practical struggle, using Marxist-Leninist theory to sum up those experiences, and drawing lessons from them. Conditions are different everywhere, but by sharing our experience and summation, we can still use our judgment and inference to draw general lessons from those particular experiences that will prove helpful as we work to apply Marxism-Leninism to our own conditions.

In the next chapter we’ll look more closely at how this plays out in terms of revolutionary organizing and revolutionary organization, by examining the process that the Chinese revolutionaries called the Mass Line.

Chapter 5: Learning together: The Mass Line

In the last chapter, we looked at the process of cognition from a dialectical materialist point of view. In this chapter we’re going to look at how this plays out from an organizational and practical perspective. Theory and practice are linked together, both for us as individuals and for revolutionary organizations and mass organizations in popular struggles.

Marxists talk a lot about the importance of “correct ideas” or “correct political line.” But what makes them correct? How do we know they are correct?

All successful communist revolutionaries have always relied on the principles of what Mao Zedong called “the mass line,” but it was Mao who explained the mass line both as a method of leadership and as an integral part of the Marxist theory of knowledge. In Some Questions Concerning Methods of Leadership, Mao said,

“In all the practical work of our Party, all correct leadership is necessarily “from the masses, to the masses”. This means: take the ideas of the masses (scattered and unsystematic ideas) and concentrate them (through study turn them into concentrated and systematic ideas), then go to the masses and propagate and explain these ideas until the masses embrace them as their own, hold fast to them and translate them into action, and test the correctness of these ideas in such action. Then once again concentrate ideas from the masses and once again go to the masses so that the ideas are persevered in and carried through. And so on, over and over again in an endless spiral, with the ideas becoming more correct, more vital and richer each time. Such is the Marxist theory of knowledge.”

In the process of struggle and summation, the masses of the people learn, and the revolutionary organization also learns. Just as we saw in the last chapter, there is a process of practice-theory-practice, where, together, our knowledge is elevated to ever higher levels. This process raises the consciousness of the masses and elevates the understanding of the revolutionary organization as it advances the struggle forward. “From the masses, to the masses,” is the core of the mass line.

It is important to distinguish the mass line from the idea that the masses come to a correct analysis “spontaneously.” Some people argue that leadership and revolutionary science aren’t necessary and that mass struggles don’t need leadership or theory. But the ideology of the dominant mode of production, capitalism, will guide people’s thinking in the absence of proletarian ideology, and bourgeois ideas like anarchism or reformism will lead the movements down their own blind alleys. Without medical science we wouldn’t be able to deal with the diseases that affect our society, and likewise without revolutionary science we can’t deal with the problems posed to us by capitalism.

In any situation there is a complex array of contradictory forces. Dialectical Materialism gives us the tools to analyze which of those contradictions are primary, or determining, and which are secondary. Likewise it allows us to analyze which aspect of a particular contradiction is the dominant aspect. There’s a lot to be said about contradiction later in our series, but for now the important thing to understand is that revolutionary theory gives us a tool from which to analyze these contradictions in society in order to understand where to apply pressure, just as geometry and physics allows us to understand how we can use a fulcrum and leverage to amplify force.

So beginning with the principle of “from the masses, to the masses” we see that we have a basic principle for applying the Marxist theory of knowledge to practical struggles. First we start with where people are at. We can look to the advanced fighters in the mass movements that we work alongside of, listen to the demands raised about the masses’ felt needs (for things like better wages, an end to police violence, and similar things), and, using Marxism-Leninism, analyze the contradictions at play to determine what is primary and to apply leverage at the most strategic fulcrum points. Then we can sum up the successes and failures of the struggle together with these advanced mass organizers to build unity around the way forward, collectively raise our understanding, win over the broad, intermediate elements, and defeat or isolate the backwards who stand opposed to progress.

The mass line is the epistemological and organizational link that allows the mass organizations and the Marxist-Leninist revolutionaries to advance together, for truly neither one can get anywhere without the other. It is also the key to the fusion of Marxism with the workers movement – the tool by which the working class can develop its class consciousness and learn Marxism through practice. In order to build a revolutionary movement capable of taking on the monopoly capitalists who rule this country, in order for the working class and oppressed nationalities to take political power and build socialism, the mass line is absolutely essential, and nothing can be accomplished without it.

If you want to go more deeply into the mass line, we encourage you to look at the pamphlet Some Points on the Mass Line (available on frso.org in the Theory section). In the next chapter we’ll look at the differences between idealism and materialism as we start to break down the nuts and bolts of dialectical materialism.

Chapter 6: Idealism or materialism: Two approaches to the world

When we talk about the philosophy that forms the basis of Marxism-Leninism, we say that that philosophy is dialectical materialism. At this point in our series on the theoretical concepts of Marxism-Leninism, we are going to focus on the materialism of dialectical materialism and try to come to a clear understanding of what that means. And to do that, we’re going to also look at materialism’s philosophical opposite: idealism.

Ultimately, materialism and idealism are two opposing ways of approaching every question that we might take up. Many might consider this too abstract a point for revolutionaries to wish to pay attention to, or they may mistake this for some sort of moral judgment about people. The common understanding of these terms would lend itself to such a view. The everyday view is that an idealist is a person concerned with high-minded ideals whereas a materialist is someone concerned with accumulating or possessing material things. Philosophically this isn’t what the terms mean at all, as we shall see. We need to dispel this view and understand what these terms mean philosophically. They actually connect in a very important way with what we’ve previously talked about in the chapters on how we know and how we learn (epistemology).

The battle between idealism and materialism in fact divides the history of human thought into two camps. A materialist is someone who says being is primary over thinking. An idealist says the opposite: that thinking is primary over being. In other words, a materialist thinks that being determines thinking, while an idealist thinks the opposite, that thinking determines being. Similarly, idealism is dualistic, separating ideas from matter as two fundamental metaphysical substances. Materialism is monistic, uniting ideas and matter as two components of one social reality. This is the main distinction, though it is still very abstract. We might simplify it by saying that a materialist starts with things the way they are, while an idealist starts with the way they want things to be. But that doesn’t give us the whole picture. Let’s take each one by one, starting with idealism.

Beginning with ancient religious thinking, and even before that, faced with a complex and turbulent existence, human beings tried to understand why things happened as they did. When there was a storm, the failure of crops, a military victory, or a great tragedy, people wanted to understand why these things happened. With no scientific understanding of nature, often the recourse was to say, “it is as the gods will it,” or perhaps it was “fate” or “karma” that caused things to happen as they did. People tried to understand what it was that made up the world around them.

Early idealist philosophers weren’t satisfied with religious explanations and so speculated that reality didn’t exist apart from the mind, and that the ideas that made up reality had their own existence apart from the material world, and that it is these ideas that shape what reality is. This tradition in philosophy leads from the ancient Greeks like Socrates and Plato to modern philosophers such as Kant, Hegel and Berkley. The world was created from ideas, in some way or another. Idealism reigned supreme in the ancient slave societies and under feudal social relations, when the temples and the church were the main ideological levers of the ruling class. The king ruled because it was God’s will. One suffered because it was one’s fate. If you were born into a lower caste it was karma and you were being punished for the misdeeds of your past lives. This kind of thinking served the needs of the slave societies and feudal lords well.

But even among the ancients, early attempts at materialism were made. Ancient Greek and Indian philosophy separately developed philosophies of atomism. They posited that there were basic atoms that made up the world. Some said that basic elements like earth, air, water or fire, or some combination of these elements, made up the world. Modern materialists like Hobbes, Diderot and Feuerbach brought materialism into the modern, scientific age. To materialists, ideas arose from nature, as human thought arises from our material existence.

Nevertheless, materialism didn’t really take hold as a dominant position in ideology until the Enlightenment, with the rise of the bourgeoisie. This is why the French Revolution at the end of the 1700s was so emphatic about secularism. The overthrow of feudalism also required the overthrow of the ideological domination of the church. Not only was the political power to be moved out of the hands of the feudal lords into the hands of the rising bourgeoisie, but the ideology of the divine right of kings had to be struck down as the basis of that claim to power.

Scientific thinking and secularism were required to push forward the productive forces of society and develop modern industry. Newtonian physics saw the world as functioning like a great machine operating according to natural laws. Everything was in its place and every effect could be traced to a definite material cause. This mechanical or metaphysical materialism didn’t see this great systematic machine as dynamic and changing as a result of its internal contradictions, but as fixed, immutable and unchanging. Natural Law is enshrined as the reason things are as they are. Everything, to the mechanical materialist, is exact, distinct and repeatable, like clockwork.

Mechanical materialism, however, rests on a number of dogmatic assumptions. The British Marxist philosopher Maurice Cornforth enumerates them as follows in his book Dialectical Materialism: First, all change is based on permanent things with stable and fixed properties. Second, change only occurs due to external causes. Third, all change can be reduced to the mechanical motion of particles. And fourth, things exist in separation from other things as independent units.

While the rise of modern, metaphysical materialism was a step in the right direction, we are still a long way away from the dialectical materialism developed by Marx and Engels, which advanced materialism beyond these dogmatic assumptions listed above. It did this by divorcing materialism from the metaphysical method of analysis and by uniting materialism with dialectics. Having looked at what distinguishes materialism from idealism, in the next chapter we’ll look at the difference between dialectics and metaphysics. From this we should be able to get a clear picture of what dialectical materialism is and what it means for us as revolutionaries.

Chapter 7: Dialectics or metaphysics, two methods of analysis

In the last chapter we saw that Marxism-Leninism bases itself on a materialist worldview. But we saw, at the same time, that materialism as it came to be understood with the rise of bourgeois society was still metaphysical in its method of analysis. At this point, let’s look at the difference between the metaphysical and dialectical method. Then we can better understand how Karl Marx established the philosophical basis of revolutionary science, dialectical materialism.

Metaphysics is a subject of philosophy that really begins, at least in the West, with Aristotle in ancient Greece, and is intended to look at that which lies “beyond the senses” or outside the realm of perceptual experience. Friedrich Engels, in his book Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, calls metaphysics “the old method of investigation and thought…which preferred to investigate things as given, as fixed and stable, a method the relics of which still strongly haunt people’s minds.”

This might seem very abstract, but actually we encounter metaphysical thinking all the time, haunting people’s minds in our movements and forming the basis of all kinds or blind alleys, strategic and tactical missteps, and opportunistic tendencies. For example, reformist thinking is based on a view that social progress can be a process of peaceful, quantitative growth and that no qualitative leap is necessary. This is the view of both bourgeois liberals and the so-called democratic socialists. At the same time, reactionaries of all stripes believe that nothing can, or should, fundamentally change. We encounter lots of folks who peddle the idea that things are the way they are just by accident, rather than as the result of a historical process that brought us to where we are, therefore obscuring the root causes of the current state of things. And of course, many people don’t understand how internal contradictions drive a given process, and thus find themselves unable to navigate those contradictions as they unfold. The dialectical method sweeps aside metaphysical thinking on all of these points and gives us the tools we need to combat it.

Engels goes into all of this at length in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific. “To the metaphysician, things and their mental reflexes, ideas, are isolated, are to be considered one after the other and apart from each other, are objects of investigation fixed, rigid, given once for all. He thinks in absolutely irreconcilable antitheses. …For him, a thing either exists or does not exist; a thing cannot at the same time be itself and something else. Positive and negative absolutely exclude one another; cause and effect stand in a rigid antithesis, one to the other.”

Engels goes on to say that “dialectics, on the other hand, comprehends things and their representations, ideas, in their essential connection, concatenation, motion, origin and ending.” We see then that metaphysical materialism stops short of seeing how contradictory forces, both within and without, can change a given thing and even cause things to transform into their opposite. It ignores how matter and ideas affect one another, and indeed can transform into one another, for ideas can become a material force in history when taken up by the masses. We have already seen how this works in the previous chapters on the Marxist theory of knowledge and the mass line. Marxist-Leninist epistemology is not only materialist, but is fundamentally dialectical.

So much for metaphysics. Let’s look more closely at dialectics. Like metaphysics, dialectics too has its roots in ancient philosophy. Socrates and Plato were both famous for their dialectical method. They believed that when two contradictory arguments were set against each other, reason could allow for a higher understanding to be reached. Later, the German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel took this idea further in developing his philosophy of dialectical idealism. It was Hegel who first systematized the dialectic. To put it as simply as possible, Hegel argued that there was a dialectical process of historical progression toward Reason where one thing is contradicted by another, leading to their sublation, or overcoming. Often this is described in terms of Thesis – Antithesis – Synthesis, with the synthesis carrying forward some remainder as the thesis and antithesis are both overcome in something qualitatively new.

Marx and Engels understood that within Hegel’s dense, idealist system, there was an important key to understanding historical and social change. Hegel understood contradiction to be inherent to progress. Marx took the Hegelian dialectic and put it on a materialist basis: “With him it is standing on its head. It must be turned right side up again, if you would discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell.”

The materialist inversion of the Hegelian dialectic means that Marx and Engels started with the material conditions of human beings as they worked to satisfy their material needs. Human society, they saw, has always been organized around its tools, and the productive relations arising from that. From that they understood the historical development of classes and of class struggle as the motive force of history. They illuminated how classes and class struggle drive forth the contradictions in any given historical period, leading towards revolution and advancement towards a new and higher stage, leading to new contradictions, ever onward.

Finally, this brings us to another important point. It should be noted that Hegel’s idealist dialectic is teleological, which means it has a fixed end or “final cause” that everything is being drawn towards. For Hegel this is the actualization of God in the world through Reason, the “End of History.” The materialist dialectic of Marxism has no such teleological end. From a dialectical materialist viewpoint, there is no reason to believe that there will ever be a time when all contradictions are resolved and there is no more struggle and thus no more progress.

By applying the “rational kernel” of the Hegelian dialectic to modern materialism the laws that govern social and historical change are finally revealed. Engels lists these laws of the dialectic as follows: the law of the unity and struggle of opposites, the law of the transformation of quantity into quality, and the negation of the negation. All of these may be summed up as particular aspects of dialectical contradiction. In the forthcoming chapters we will examine each of these in greater detail before advancing to an analysis of Historical Materialism, which is Marx’s application of the materialist dialectic to history.

Chapter 8: Contradiction, the kernel of dialectics

Friedrich Engels lists three laws of dialectics, but, as we shall see, the most important is the law of contradiction, which he calls the law of the interpenetration of opposites. Before we discuss the other two (the transformation of quantity into quality, and the negation of the negation), let’s look closely at contradiction.

Many of the great theorists of Marxism-Leninism wrote about dialectics in general and contradiction in particular. Mao Zedong extrapolated from the writings of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin, along with the direct experience of the Chinese revolution, a systematic theory of materialist dialectics, particularly in his essay “On Contradiction.” He was the first to explain dialectics in terms of the uneven development of contradictions, of principal and secondary contradictions, and, within that, of principal and secondary aspects of those contradictions.

What, then, is a contradiction? When we talk about a contradiction, we are talking about two opposing forces within any given concrete process. Contradiction is universal. The interaction of opposing forces takes place within all phenomena. Lenin said, “The splitting in two of a single whole and the cognition of its contradictory parts is the essence of dialectics.” Marx’s great work, Capital, is an analysis of the particular contradictions at work, from top to bottom, within bourgeois society. Through looking at those contradictions Marx was able to demonstrate the laws of motion that govern capitalist society.

Capitalism is a complex process. Thus, in capitalism, there are many contradictions at work at the same time. There is the contradiction between the ruling class of exploiters (the bourgeoisie) and the class of exploited (the working class, or proletariat). But capitalism also brings with it monopolies, imperialism, national oppression, and so on. There are numerous classes and social groups with their own interests and struggles. Even among the various strata of a particular class there are different contradictions. But if we look closely at all of these contradictions, we find that capitalism is at the root of all of them.

In his analysis of capitalism, Marx found that the basis of the class struggle within the capitalist mode of production is the contradiction between the social character of production and the private character of accumulation.

Millions of people work in a complex division of labor to produce the wealth of society, while that wealth is accumulated in the hands of a small minority of people who own the means of production. In other words, production is social, but profit is private. This contradiction is the basis of the class struggle and the driving force behind the cycles of capitalist crisis. Mao says this contradiction is fundamental and points out that even as capitalism developed into its current stage, imperialism, this fundamental contradiction at the core of capitalism itself remained. As long as capitalism continues to exist, this fundamental contradiction continues to sharpen. The eventual resolution of this contradiction through proletarian revolution will mark the end of capitalism and the beginning of a new process, that of socialist construction.

While the fundamental contradiction between social production and private accumulation is basic to what capitalism is, there are still many other contradictions at work in such a complex process, and these contradictions can play lesser or greater roles at different times and under different conditions. The principal, or determining, contradiction within that can also change, given the dynamics of the situation. Mao argues that “in capitalist society the two forces in contradiction, the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, form the principal contradiction.” However, Mao argues that in national liberation wars against imperialism, the principal contradiction is different, as the class conflicts within that nation take a back seat to the struggle for liberation. We can expand or reduce the scope of our analysis, to look at contradictions operating on a global scale, down to the contradictions operating on a very small, local scale.

Currently, we live in the era of imperialism. Imperialism, led by the United States, strives to dominate the world, politically, militarily and economically, and the principal contradiction on a global scale is the contradiction between imperialism and the oppressed nations. To say that other contradictions are secondary isn’t to diminish their importance, but rather to say that these contradictions are influenced and determined by the principal contradiction. We can’t deal with principal or secondary contradictions if we don't know which is which. For this reason Mao stresses that “Once this principal contradiction is grasped, all problems can be readily solved.”

Likewise, contradictions develop unevenly. In any given contradiction, one side of that contradiction is the principal, or dominant, aspect. The principal aspect of the contradiction is what plays the leading role within that contradiction, and the nature of a thing is determined by the aspect which plays this leading role. But the principal and secondary aspects also can exchange places. For example, in capitalist society the bourgeoisie and the proletariat exist side by side, but the bourgeoisie plays the leading role. In socialist society the proletariat will take over the leading role to dismantle capitalist productive relations and build socialism. So we see then that when the principal and secondary aspects of a contradiction exchange place it causes a qualitative change in the situation.

This understanding of how contradictions operate in complex processes gives us a deeper understanding of the laws of motion that govern that process. For this reason, dialectical materialism is a powerful tool for revolutionaries to break down a complex process and determine where and how to act.

It is on the basis of this dialectical analysis of the terrain of struggle in the United States that we talk about a united front against monopoly capitalism, under the leadership of the working class and its party, with the strategic alliance of the multinational working class and the movements of oppressed nationalities as its core. This is a strategy for revolution, based on the concrete analysis of our concrete conditions, which takes into account the complex matrix of principal and secondary contradictions, both within the imperialist United States and on a global scale.

This method of analysis also functions on a tactical level, in particular, on the ground struggles. We can use dialectical materialism to find the principal and secondary contradictions at work in a given struggle, such as in a union contract negotiation or in struggles against police brutality, and use that analysis to look at the interests of the different forces at work, how they interact, and where to aim our blows.

In the next chapter we will proceed to look more deeply at the identity and struggle of the aspects of a contradiction, and then at the question of the role played by antagonism in a contradiction. This will further help us to understand how to apply this method, especially when it comes to questions of different ways of handling contradictions between the masses and the enemy and contradictions among the masses of the people themselves.

Chapter 9: On identity and antagonism in contradiction

In the previous chapter we looked at some of the core concepts of dialectical materialism. We broke down the meaning of contradiction, and we looked at how contradictions develop unevenly in complex processes, into principal and secondary contradictions. We also looked at how any given contradiction has its own principal and secondary aspects, with the principal aspect playing the dominant role. Now let's look more closely at identity in contradiction and the role of antagonism in resolving contradictions of different types.

In “On Contradiction” Mao Zedong writes, “In speaking of the identity of opposites in given conditions, what we are referring to is real and concrete opposites and the real and concrete transformations of opposites into one another.”

In one sense, identity means that the two aspects of a given contradiction are also conditions for each other's existence. The bourgeoisie cannot exist without the proletariat, and vice versa. The class of exploiters depends entirely on the existence of a class of exploited from whom they draw their wealth and over whom they wield their power. Without the class of exploiters, the exploited too would not exist as a class. In this contradiction, the capitalist class plays the dominant role. They control the means of production along with the superstructure of the state and its repressive and ideological apparatuses.

However, the two aspects of this contradiction can exchange places. As Mao puts it, “by means of revolution the proletariat, at one time the ruled, is transformed into the ruler, while the bourgeoisie, the erstwhile ruler, is transformed into the ruled and changes its position to that originally occupied by its opposite.” From this qualitatively new position, the proletariat can wield state power in the socialist transition to eliminate exploitation, thereby eliminating the conditions for the existence of both itself and the bourgeoisie as classes.

One way to think about this is to say that identity is what holds things together. In other words, identity represents the real, concrete relationships that bind these opposing forces to each other. In the case of the working class and capitalists, these are the real, concrete relations of production. The capitalists own the means of production, and workers have to sell their labor to the capitalists to survive. Nevertheless, Lenin makes an important point here. “The unity (coincidence, identity, equal action) of opposites is conditional, temporary, transitory, relative. The struggle of mutually exclusive opposites is absolute, just as development and motion are absolute.” This is crucial for revolutionaries to grasp. Struggle and change are both constant and necessary.

So, to sum up, identity is the concrete relationship between contradictory aspects. On the one hand, it means that the two aspects of a contradiction are interdependent. On the other hand, it means that they can exchange places between which aspect is principal and which is secondary.

But what role does antagonism play in the identity and struggle of opposites? Mao says that “antagonism is one form, but not the only form, of the struggle of opposites.” In his essay “On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People,” Mao divides contradictions into two categories: those between the masses of the people and the enemy, and those among the people themselves. Contradictions between the people and the enemy are antagonistic. Contradictions among the people are non-antagonistic. For example, under capitalist society, the contradiction between the capitalists and the working class is an antagonistic contradiction. The capitalists derive their wealth through the exploitation of the workers. They get rich from the surplus value produced by workers, that is, the difference between the value added by living labor and the amount the capitalists pay the workers for that labor power. Over the long run, the more wealth the capitalists accumulate, the less the workers are able to take home in pay, and vice versa. This means the material interests of these two classes are directly and irreconcilably opposed to one another. One benefits only at the expense of the other.

But there also exist contradictions among the masses of the people themselves. These contradictions are not antagonistic, not irreconcilably opposed to one another. Non-antagonistic contradictions are resolved through a process of unity-criticism-unity. This is a peaceful and democratic method of resolving non-antagonistic contradictions that means “starting from the desire for unity, resolving contradictions through criticism or struggle, and arriving at a new unity on a new basis.” This is the way communists should seek to resolve contradictions among themselves and among the broad masses of the people.

This brings to a close our preliminary discussion of the primary law of dialectics, the law of contradiction, which Engels called the law of the interpenetration of opposites. It is one of our most powerful and important theoretical tools and deserves serious and ongoing study, well beyond the limitations of these short chapters. From here we understand how contradiction operates well enough to proceed, and so in the next chapter we will look more closely at how contradiction operates in the transformation of quantity into quality.

Chapter 10: The leap from quantity to quality

Now that we’ve gone into some detail on contradiction, let’s look at the question of the transformation of quantity into quality.

In his book Dialectics of Nature, Engels names three dialectical laws: the law of the interpenetration of opposites, which we’ve already dealt with; the transformation of quantity into quality and vice versa; and the negation of the negation.

However, it is noteworthy that Mao Zedong argues that contradiction is the primary law of dialectics. The other two laws are either, merely an instance of the law of contradiction (in the case of the transformation of quantity into quality), or a metaphysical carryover of Hegelian idealism (in the case of the negation of the negation). It is worthwhile to examine this in some detail. Here we’ll look at the question of how qualitative leaps are in fact instances of the law of contradiction.

In what way is the leap from quantity to quality actually an instance of the law of contradiction? Mao makes short work of this in his “Talk on Questions of Philosophy,” stating that the transformation of quantity into quality is simply a matter of the unity of the opposites, quantity and quality. In fact, what takes place, dialectically, is that quantitative accumulation eventually causes a shift in the uneven development of contradictory forces, and the previously secondary aspect of a contradiction becomes primary, or dominant, within the process, manifesting as a qualitative leap.

Metaphysical thinking would have it that change is only a change in quantity. This vulgar-evolutionist approach to change fails to account for the dialectical leap from quantity to quality. Often this is expressed as a kind of reformism in the movements in which we work.

Liberal reformists believe that we can create a just society through a series of incremental changes, and that revolution isn’t actually necessary. Social democrats commit a similar error. They misunderstand the transformation of quantity into quality because they don’t understand that it is a function of dialectical contradiction. They believe that if enough social democratic reforms are accumulated, then the capitalist state can be transformed into a socialist state without a proletarian revolution to overthrow the power of the bourgeoisie.

These reformists misunderstand not only the place of antagonism in the class struggle, but also the way that principal and secondary aspects of contradiction exchange places. It isn’t a question of the incremental accumulation of reforms, but of the accumulation of force, of power, that determines which aspect of a contradiction is dominant.

What we actually see when we look at the history of social change, over and over again, is that a series of small changes eventually leads to a revolutionary leap, after which things are fundamentally different and the situation is qualitatively new. For example, we may see that a series of quantitative steps, such as increasing exploitation in our workplace, can build, alongside workers frustration. Workplace actions may build up in a quantitative way, through meetings, leafleting and the eventual move towards indirect shop floor tactics like slowdowns, or “work to rule.” Eventually, the principal and secondary aspects of the contradiction at work change places resulting in a qualitative leap, into a direct confrontation between the workers and bosses, and the workers strike.

As we have already seen in our study of contradiction, qualitative change occurs when the principal and secondary aspects of a contradiction exchange place. Look at this passage from Mao’s essay “ On Contradiction.”

“But this situation is not static; the principal and the non-principal aspects of a contradiction transform themselves into each other and the nature of the thing changes accordingly. In a given process or at a given stage in the development of a contradiction, A is the principal aspect and B is the non-principal aspect; at another stage or in another process the roles are reversed–a change determined by the extent of the increase or decrease in the force of each aspect in its struggle against the other in the course of the development of a thing.”

Let’s examine Mao’s argument here by returning to our example of the workers’ struggle. As the struggle progresses, the workers escalate their tactics applying greater and greater pressure. Class struggle develops consciousness and organization, and the quantitative accumulation of these things leads to a qualitative leap in the struggle. The strike will be won or lost depending on the accumulation of force by the workers, and whether or not the workers have accumulated the force necessary to become the principal aspect of the contradiction in this particular struggle, that is, the dominant force in the process. If the workers haven’t built up their forces, escalated their tactics step by step to raise the consciousness of the broad rank and file, and built their strike fund, then their relative lack of power will make it a difficult struggle to win. If this quantitative accumulation of force has taken place, however, then and only then is a qualitative leap possible, such that the workers become the dominant force in the process and on that basis can seize the time, appropriately advance their tactics, and win the strike.

So we see then the way in which dialectical materialism accounts for qualitative change. Mao is correct to say that the transformation of quantity into quality is an instance of the law of contradiction. In the next chapter we will examine the third law of dialectics as presented by Engels, the negation of the negation.

Chapter 11: On the negation of the negation

In our study of the three laws of dialectics presented by Engels, we’ve examined the law of contradiction and the law of the transformation of quantity into quality. Finally, Engels says that the third law of dialectics is the “law of the negation of the negation.”

We have seen that Mao Zedong has argued that the law of contradiction is the primary law of dialectics. In the last chapter we looked at how the transformation of quantity into quality was, in fact, an instance of the law of contradiction. Here, we will examine Mao’s argument against the negation of the negation as a dialectical law.

First, what does the negation of the negation mean, and why have Marxists thought of it as a worthwhile way to explain dialectical progress? The concept comes from the most advanced philosophy of the time in which Marx and Engels were working: Hegel’s dialectical idealism. It describes a process in a sequence of steps, starting with an affirmation, followed by a negation that arises as a result of that affirmation, and then followed by a negation of that negation. Hegel was talking about ideas, and so talked about this in terms of thesis, antithesis and synthesis.

Engels makes use of this Hegelian language in referring to the negation of the negation as a dialectical law, but this has the potential to create some confusion among Marxists that we would benefit from sorting out.

Materialist dialectics is concerned with material reality, not just ideas. So to illustrate this sequence, let’s consider capitalism as our first affirmation. Marx says the bourgeoisie creates its own gravediggers. In other words, bourgeois society creates its own negation, the proletariat, a class born out of capitalism itself. Capitalism itself gives rise to the necessity of socialist revolution. The proletariat, through socialist revolution, therefore negates the bourgeoisie, capitalist relations, and so on, step by step. But in doing so, the proletariat also eliminates the conditions for its own existence as a class. This is what Lenin describes in The State and Revolution as socialism’s “withering away,” which allows for a stateless and classless society – communism – to come forth. This is the second negation, the negation of the negation, by this way of looking at it.

Taken step by step we see that first we have the original affirmation, the thesis. This is capitalism in our illustration. This is followed by an antithesis, which arises from and negates the original thesis. This is the first negation: socialism. Finally we have the synthesis, which negates the antithesis that had negated the original thesis: communism. Thus the final synthesis is the negation of the negation. Essentially, in this progression of thesis – antithesis – synthesis, the final synthesis serves to negate the antithesis that itself negated the original thesis, while also preserving elements of both in a new unity or identity.

In this process, the “law of the negation of the negation” is what accounts for the “spiral development” that makes progress, rather than mere repetition, possible. This synthesis carries forward something from both the original affirmation and the first negation, synthesizing them, that is uniting them, into something qualitatively new. This new unity becomes a new thesis, or a new affirmation, and the sequence begins again, but at a higher level than before.

This conception of the dialectic accounts for progress by describing how this step-by-step process leads from one thing to the next, based on resolving the contradictions that arise from the process. Of course this isn’t entirely incorrect, but it is inaccurate. This inaccuracy can lead to some confusion as to what is really taking place, dialectically. The “law of the negation of the negation” is helpful to a point, but we have to go further. Revolutionary science can’t rest with simple explanations.

The thinking behind the “law of the negation of the negation” confuses the issue in two interrelated ways. First, it gives us too linear an understanding of dialectics, which doesn’t account for the complex processes where multiple contradictions are at work at the same time, which we’ve described in the previous chapters on contradiction. And second, by starting and ending with identity, it enshrines identity, or unity, as primary over contradiction, or struggle.

To truly put the dialectic on a materialist basis also means, as Mao says in his “Talk on Questions of Philosophy,” to understand that “every link in the chain of events is both affirmation and negation.” In other words, thesis, antithesis and synthesis aren’t separated from each other in a metaphysical way. Affirmation and negation are present at every moment of any given process.

In his essay “On Contradiction,” Mao made a great contribution to the Marxist-Leninist philosophy of dialectical materialism by clearly explaining that the materialist dialectic cannot be understood as a simple, linear sequence, but as a complex structural matrix of many unevenly developed contradictions all at work simultaneously. It is important to note that if we ignore the complexity of contradiction in favor of a simple, linear sequence, we risk taking a mechanical approach to solving problems by failing to recognize the significance of secondary contradictions in the situation. People who claim that everything that isn’t pure class struggle is a distraction are guilty of this error.

Furthermore, the “law of the negation of the negation” preserves a Hegelian metaphysical framework. The Hegelian dialectic begins and ends with identity, mediated by struggle. This first identity is the “thesis” of Hegel’s triad, the original affirmation, and the Hegelian “synthesis” (the negation of the negation) is a new identity, with struggle (“antithesis”) acting merely as a bridge between them. This is an important point: in the Hegelian sequence contradiction exists primarily between identities rather than within them. Here identity is absolute and struggle is relative. In reality, on the contrary, contradiction is present within and essential to every moment of the process. Bourgeois society contains a multitude of contradictions (affirmations and negations), as does socialism, and so will communism. Struggle is inherent in every part of the process. Every identity is teeming with contradictions. If we don’t grasp this point we will think that external contradictions should be the focus of our attention, rather than internal contradictions that tend to drive things forward.

The law of contradiction, as Marxism-Leninism understands it, means that the main thing in dialectics is division, rather than identity. To sum this up, the Chinese revolutionaries put forward the slogan “one divides into two,” against the Hegelian “two fuse into one,” emphasizing the primary place of contradiction. Struggle isn’t just a bridge between the old identity and the new. No, in fact, identity without contradiction cannot exist: everything divides into two.

This may seem like an overly philosophical point, but it is important for revolutionaries to grasp to avoid errors based in metaphysical thinking. The “law of the negation of the negation” would have it that dialectics is a continuous movement towards unity, or synthesis. Mao Zedong argues, on the contrary, that “the life of dialectics is the continuous movement towards opposites.” The Hegelian sequence leaves us with a dialectic that sees unity as absolute, and contradiction as relative, temporary, and conditional. On the contrary, affirmation and negation exist within every moment of every process. Contradictions exist within the very essence of things, not just between them, and it is those internal contradictions that are the primary motivators of change.

Qualitative change doesn’t result from a drive towards synthesis, but from the transformation of the principal and secondary aspects of a contradiction into their opposites. It isn’t by uniting two contradictory things that we make historical progress, but by dividing them. We don’t make socialist revolution by uniting with the bourgeoisie. It is true that socialism carries forward elements of capitalist relations of production in the transition to communism, but the main thing isn’t to preserve those elements, but to destroy and uproot them piece by piece. Qualitative change results from the quantitative accumulation of force which changes the balance of power.

In privileging identity over struggle, the “law of the negation of the negation” can also put Marxists at risk of a kind of fatalism, where Communism exists as the “final cause” at the End of History, drawing everything towards it as the final identity where everything is ultimately resolved. Communism isn’t a final identity without any contradictions. Contradictions will exist within communism as well. Change and progress will continue. History will never end.

Again, the “law of the negation of the negation” is useful to a point, but if we don’t take it farther we are left open to metaphysical errors. It gives us too linear a description of the dialectical process, and it separates affirmation and negation in a metaphysical way that privileges identity. As Marxism-Leninism has advanced it has advanced the philosophy of dialectical materialism beyond the metaphysical, linear framework of Hegelianism. Mao accomplished this by theorizing the concepts of the principal contradiction, principal and secondary aspects of contradictions, and the uneven development of contradictions within a process. Mao’s writings on dialectical materialism give us a powerful weapon to analyze the forces at work in the complex processes we face.

In the next section, we’ll look at how these processes shape history. In the following chapters we’ll look at the categories and concepts of the materialist conception of history, that is, historical materialism, and what they offer Marxist-Leninists as theoretical tools for changing the world.

Chapter 12: Marxism against pragmatism

Marxist-Leninists are practical people. This has been true since Marx wrote his famous Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.” Many Marxists might even consider themselves “pragmatists.” But Marxism and pragmatism, though there may be some superficial similarities, are, in fact, fundamentally opposed. So, let’s look more closely at this. What is pragmatism?

To be a pragmatist means a lot more than just being a practically-oriented person concerned with organizing. Pragmatism is a philosophy, born in the 19th century in the United States, that basically says, “whatever is useful is true.” Ultimately, it is a methodology rooted in subjective idealism.

Subjective idealism says that only our minds and mental conceptions exist. Things only exist to the extent that they are perceived. This subjective idealism is the starting point of pragmatism. For the pragmatist there is no shared, objective material reality with universal laws. Nothing is objectively true, but only becomes true through the subjective act of inquiry. Because objective truth and necessity are inaccessible at best, any claim to objective truth gives way to whatever is useful to believe.

In the 1870s, pragmatism originated from a group in the United States called the Metaphysical Club, which included many prominent professors in the fields of philosophy, psychology, law and theology. Charles Pierce, Oliver Wendell Holmes, John Fiske, and Williams James were the most notable pragmatists to come from this club, with John Dewey coming later.

Pragmatism in practice generally leads to a kind of eclecticism, taking a bit of this and a bit of that, mixed together in whatever combination is considered useful. Thus, many who have called themselves pragmatists have held a range of views. But for now, let's focus on the point common to all of them: the idea that what is true is “whatever works” for the pragmatist. William James called this the “instrumental view of truth,” or “truth’s cash value.”

An obvious objection to this is that some truths may in fact be useless, but nonetheless true. Likewise, it is very clear that unscrupulous people often find falsehoods to be very useful. But that only makes sense if we accept that there is an objective reality independent of our subjective experience and beliefs. This is no problem for the pragmatists, who care only about expediency, only what serves self-interest. They can’t be bothered by objectivity. The pragmatist is satisfied with whatever is useful for them to believe. All that matters is what gets the job done. We see that when pragmatism says that whatever is useful is true, this begs the question: useful to whom, and for what? For the capitalist ruling class, of course, “the job” just so happens to be whatever keeps capitalism running smoothly and efficiently.

If we look at things from the point of view of historical materialism, we see that the mode of production of society gives rise to a dominant ideology that reinforces it. Every mode of thinking is stamped by the brand of a class, and pragmatism is no exception. Pragmatism arose after the Civil War had swept away the slave economy of the South and consolidated the power of northern industrial capital over the country. This was also the period when competitive capitalism was giving way to monopoly capitalism. Religious philosophy and theology were no longer sufficient as ideological weapons of the bourgeoisie. Pragmatism arose to take up this role and became the dominant philosophical expression of the ideology of imperialism and the monopoly capitalist class. Old, traditional ways of thinking were being swept away, and “whatever works” became the motto of the monopolies as they devoured the economy and set out to seize markets the world over.

In the terrain of the capitalist superstructure, the ideology of the ruling class is dominant, and proletarian ideology is secondary. This means capitalist ideology is always exerting pressure upon our thinking. Since the dominant ideology in the superstructure reinforces the economic base, if we don’t challenge pragmatist ideology, it is easy to allow it to weasel its way into our thinking and methodology, where it can undermine our practice.

Harry K. Wells, in his book Pragmatism: Philosophy of Imperialism, identifies four features of pragmatism as a methodology: empiricism, individualism, spontaneity, and expedient opportunism. It is important to look at each of these and see how even well-intentioned revolutionaries could make these errors, and how one leads to the next.

Beginning with empiricism, pragmatism goes all in on practice and despises theory. Pragmatism holds that reality is nothing but our perceptions, and so we can only know what we have directly observed and experienced. It rejects any claim that we can draw universally applicable theoretical lessons from our experiences. Instead it advocates pluralism and relativism. In other words, what is “useful” (and therefore “true”) for me may not be for you.

Therefore, individualism is an obvious outgrowth of this. Since pragmatism thinks only our direct perceptions give us access to knowledge, we are left only with our unique, particular, individual experiences. Thus, pragmatism rejects social practice, collective summation, and organizational discipline, especially when they don’t align with our individual experiences. Strategic unity of action becomes unthinkable.

From there, spontaneity takes the place of planning and strategy. The dialectical relationship between theory and practice is broken and the focus is narrowed to only the local, immediate work. Long term goals are sacrificed for the “pragmatic” demands of our day-to-day work. Instead of working with a plan, we’re now just doing things, focused on “whatever works” for the task at hand. This spontaneity fits perfectly with the capitalist anarchy of production.

Finally, pragmatism leads us to expedient opportunism. This view holds that it doesn’t matter if we adhere to our principles, as long as we get results. Without an analysis built upon the laws of dialectical and historical materialism, and without a sense of historical progress, there is nothing to prevent pragmatism from transforming Marxism into opportunism as Marxist principles are compromised for “whatever works.” But to oppose principles to results is a false dichotomy, of course. And it is actually one that sets us up for failure. Our Marxist-Leninist principles are truly the keys to our success.

Let’s look at an example of how this could play out. A revolutionary in the labor movement may correctly say that the immediate tasks of organizing are important, but incorrectly say that the long-term task of party building and winning over the advanced workers from these labor struggles to Marxism isn’t practical. They do the hard work of organizing but intentionally avoid talking to their coworkers about Marxism. Certainly, our work should aim to win all that can be won and strike blows against the enemy. But if we aren’t building revolutionary organization and winning the advanced to Marxism-Leninism, then we are sacrificing our long term goals for the immediate tasks in the name of being pragmatic. Similarly, because they think it is expedient, they may make concessions on matters of principle in order to build broad unity, tailing behind the backwards. Such an approach concedes leadership to these backwards elements. Instead, revolutionaries should be relying upon the advanced forces to help win over and mobilize the intermediate masses and challenge backwards ideas.

In this way, pragmatism is a right-opportunist error, and often it is an error made with the best of intentions. We want to get things done, after all. But left unchecked, “whatever works” can lead us to abandon revolutionary theory, to abandon revolutionary organization, to abandon our long term goals, and to abandon our principles.

Marxism does not agree with pragmatism. When Marxists say that practice is the sole criterion of truth, we don’t mean that theory should be set aside. We mean that through social practice we can know the world and understand its laws of motion. We can study the laws that govern material processes and formulate strategies and tactics with a long term view. We can use that knowledge to change the world for the better through further practice. This is the only way to revolutionize society and eliminate exploitation and oppression once and for all.

Chapter 13: Marxism against postmodernism

In the ideological terrain today, Marxism must struggle against postmodernism. What is postmodernism? In The Postmodern Condition, the French philosopher Jean Francois Lyotard summed up the postmodern view as the rejection of “metanarratives.” By “metanarratives” Lyotard means any theory that claims to be able to explain the totality of social, historical and cultural phenomena. This includes the Enlightenment and Marxism. In other words, postmodernism opposes the idea that the world can or should be objectively and rationally understood. The idea that the world as a whole is rational and comprehensible is thus deemed “modern” and postmodernism claims to have gone beyond modernism.

Because it is opposed to these kinds of “totalizing discourse,” postmodernism can be hard to pin down. It concerns itself with literary theory, art and architecture, and similar cultural, ideological and superstructural ideas. These aren’t unimportant questions for revolutionaries to grasp, and, indeed, Marxism can, and should, address them. Postmodernism also deals with political questions, but it does so based on theories of “difference” and “power” that are separated from and opposed to any notions of class struggle. Here, postmodernism’s main theorists have been Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, among others. And while some on the far right would equate postmodernism with Marxism, they do so only to confuse people. Postmodernism and Marxism are fundamentally opposed to one another.

Let’s begin with how postmodernism arose, ideologically, and why. There are two events that are of particular importance: first, the horror of the second World War, and second, the Cold War and the collapse of socialism in the USSR and Eastern Europe. First, in the aftermath of WWII, many philosophers in Europe took the view that it was rationalism and Enlightenment thinking itself that led to the rise of fascism and the holocaust. They correctly understood that fascism is an outgrowth of capitalism, but they also bought into the rampant anticommunism of the period and so saw no alternative way forward. They accepted the liberal bourgeois lie that fascism and communism were two sides of one “totalitarian” coin. Then, from the end of the war through the 1980s we have the Cold War, culminating in the restoration of capitalism in the Soviet Union in 1991 after decades of external imperialist pressure and internal revisionist degeneration.

The postmodernists accepted the neoliberal lie that “there is no alternative” to capitalism. This fundamental pessimism arose from the failure to correctly analyze these historical events, and it led to the rejection, whole cloth, that reason could comprehend history and be used to drive social progress.

This confusion was no accident, however. Postmodernism was, in fact, a CIA psychological operation. In her book Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War, Frances Stonor Saunders exposes the role of U.S. intelligence in funding and encouraging postmodernism. They spent millions of dollars promoting front organizations, museum exhibitions, literary and theoretical magazines, and other cultural fronts to promote postmodern ideas. They realized that they could further exacerbate and exploit the confusion within the left that was created by Nikita Khrushchev’s revisionist attack at the 20th Congress of the CPSU on Stalin. In this way they were able to turn a lot of influential intellectuals away from Marxism. Imperialism pursued this cultural cold war as part of a two-pronged strategy, while simultaneously financing and organizing counter-revolutionary movements, from the counter-revolutions in socialist Eastern Europe to the Mujahideen in Afghanistan. In this way, postmodernism was an essential element and outgrowth of the imperialists overall cold war strategy against communism.

Today, postmodern ideas are still tremendously influential, even among some on the left. Some further confuse people by calling themselves “post-Marxists” or “neo-Marxists.” They thus try to insert postmodernism into Marxism while actually rejecting and opposing Marxism. Postmodern theory is notoriously dense and academic, so we won’t get into the weeds of all of that here. Instead, let’s break down a few of the points that linger among the broader left.

The central point is the rejection of rationality in favor of relativism and subjective idealism. For the postmodernist, truth is relative, contingent, subjective, and based upon language and “discourse” rather than objective material conditions. As stated in Post-Modernism Today, postmodernism “spreads a linguistic net to destroy the basis of all rational understanding and all experiences attained over centuries by mankind and arrogantly declares that we and our thoughts are the creations of language.”

Postmodernism seeks to discredit Marxism by saying that any rational theory that attempts to understand and account for all social, historical, and cultural phenomena is destined for “totalitarianism.” It therefore champions the isolation and balkanization of all criticism of the current social order. Because “metanarratives” are rejected, every question is separated off into its own “discourse.” Every form of oppression is isolated from the dialectical and material relationships they have to one-another in a metaphysical and idealist way. And while each of these makes progressive contributions that we can learn from, their strategic power is stripped away.

Because they are isolated from one another in theory and practice, they are unable to develop a comprehensive program to address the principal contradiction of capitalism at the root of patriarchy and racist, national oppression. “Intersectional” attempts to bridge this gap fail in the same way, by seeing class exploitation as just another form of oppression among many, as the materialist reality of capitalism that ties oppression together is rejected. Attempts to define principal and secondary contradictions are discarded as “reductionist.” But without grasping which contradiction is the principal contradiction that determines the others none of them can be fundamentally resolved.

As Anuradha Ghandy says in her important book, Philosophical Trends in the Feminist Movement, “To advocate organization according to [the postmodernist] understanding means to reproduce power – hierarchy, oppression.” Struggle is individualized, and so subjective experience rather than objective analysis takes over. In the final analysis, this metaphysical approach leads to confusion of who are our friends and who are our enemies. Without a dialectical and historical class analysis, postmodernism fails to resist the ideological pressure of ruling class interests within oppressed groups. In this way the postmodernist rejection of “metanarratives” in favor of “difference” hinders and obstructs the Marxist analysis necessary to unite these movements behind a strategic program for revolution, liberation, and socialism.

We are Marxist-Leninists because we understand that Marxism-Leninism can provide us with the theoretical analysis, strategy, and tactics needed to end the exploitation and oppression of all people. Marxism has the tools that are required for women’s liberation, LGBTQ liberation and national liberation in the real world. Postmodernism is designed to fragment and isolate these struggles. We can and must unite them under the bright red banner of socialist revolution.

Section III: Historical Materialism

Chapter 14: What is historical materialism?

Now that we have talked about the Marxist theory of knowledge and examined the meaning and function of dialectical materialism, let’s look at how that is applied to studying the historical development of society. Marx called this “the materialist conception of history,” or historical materialism. It is historical materialism that demonstrates the link between dialectical materialism and political economy. Here we have dialectical materialism applied to history.

Before we get into all of the details of historical materialism, let’s take an introductory look at some of the key concepts. This way we can understand how they fit together. After this we can look more closely at them each piece by piece.

In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels famously proclaimed that “the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle.” This is the main point of historical materialism, but there is a lot to unpack in that statement, and we should spend some time understanding how Marx and Engels arrived at that conclusion and what it means for revolutionaries.

Engels summed it up like this in his speech at the grave of Karl Marx in 1883:

“Just as Darwin discovered the law of development of organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of development of human history: the simple fact, hitherto concealed by an overgrowth of ideology, that mankind must first of all eat, drink, have shelter and clothing, before it can pursue politics, science, art, religion, etc.; that therefore the production of the immediate material means, and consequently the degree of economic development attained by a given people or during a given epoch, form the foundation upon which the state institutions, the legal conceptions, art, and even the ideas on religion, of the people concerned have been evolved, and in the light of which they must, therefore, be explained, instead of vice versa, as had hitherto been the case.”

As we’ve said before, Marxism is monistic rather than dualistic, meaning it doesn’t separate matter and thought, but recognizes thought as arising from and dependent upon matter. Our material being determines our consciousness. Before we can think, we must eat. Basically, Marxism understands that human society has always been organized around its tools in the production of its material needs. Each historical period is characterized materially by its forces of production and relations of production. Together these make up the material and economic base of society, the mode of production.

Forces of production include everything we use to fulfill human needs. This includes everything from tools, to factories, alongside land, raw materials, logistical infrastructure, warehouses, offices, retail facilities, restaurants, and so on. The tools and factories make up the instruments of production. The raw materials and resources make up the objects of production. The means of production consist of the instruments and objects of production together. The forces of production also include the living labor of the workers, the agents of production. In early human society, these productive forces were limited mainly to things like stone arrowheads and spear tips for hunting. Now they include highly complex technologies and methods.

Relations of production are the definite social relations that people enter into in order to organize the production of their needs. Production is a social process, based on some degree of a division of labor, and, following the end of primitive communal societies and the rise of the ancient slave societies, division of ownership, or class division. In class society, the means of production and the agents of production are separated, such that a minority of people own the means of production while a much larger majority of people work as the agents of production.

For now, let’s just emphasize that in the contradiction between the forces and relations of production, the forces of production tend to be the principal, or determining aspect. It is the forces of production, that is, the instruments of production together with living labor, acting upon nature, that plays the leading role. However, at times the relations of production may be the principal aspect, hastening or slowing the development of the productive forces.

Corresponding to this economic and material base of society there is also a superstructure of society, made up of a set of repressive and ideological apparatuses whose function is the reproduction of the mode of production. This includes legal systems, the courts and the police, but it also includes cultural institutions, schools, the media, religion and the broad political and philosophical ideas that characterize society. For now, let’s just emphasize that in the contradiction between the base and superstructure, the base is typically the principal aspect. The superstructure arises from the material base, though the superstructure also acts upon the base and reinforces it.

Each historical mode of production is defined by the level of the development of its productive forces and the corresponding relations of production. As the productive forces develop to higher levels, eventually the relations of production that at first encouraged and accelerated their development begin to hold them back, and those relations of production must be changed in order for the productive forces to be able to develop further.

Marx sums this up most succinctly in his preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy:

“At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or – this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms – with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure.”

As society’s productive forces developed, so too did the relations of production develop from primitive communalism to the ancient slave societies, and on to feudalism, then capitalism, and from capitalism to socialism. These are the relations of production Marx and Engels identified from their analysis of how they had developed in Europe and how they would continue to develop based on their laws of motion that they drew from that analysis. Each change from one mode of production to the next meant the advancement of the productive forces and the revolutionizing of the relations of production. These changes also created great shifts in the legal, political and ideological superstructure to reinforce the base, demanding changes in legal structures, education, family relations and so on.

Historical materialism exposes the great lie of bourgeois ideology, that capitalism is eternal. It shows us that, on the contrary, it wasn’t always like this, that things have come to be this way as a result of a historical process, and that we can and must change things fundamentally and for the better. Historical materialism is a vast subject, and it will take us some time to do it justice. This chapter can only serve as a brief introduction to the elements of historical materialism. In the upcoming we will go more deeply into each of these.

Chapter 15: The role of labor in human society

The cornerstone of historical materialism is class struggle as the motor driving historical change. So, what is the role of labor in historical development?

In Dialectics of Nature, Engels argues that what truly distinguishes humanity from other animals is that we seek to change our environment, rather than merely use it as it is given to us. In other words, what distinguishes humanity is our construction of tools, the instruments of production which we use to affect the world. But we don’t get to arbitrarily choose these instruments. We inherit them from the society that we are born into, and gradually build upon and improve them. The early production of tools represents the beginning of labor, and the further development and improvement of the tools and the technique of their use allows for the further development of human society.

At first the instruments of production were very simple and consisted of things like hunting and fishing implements. According to Engels, this led to the mastery of fire and the early domestication of animals:

“Agriculture was added to hunting and cattle raising; then came spinning, weaving, metalworking, pottery and navigation. Along with trade and industry, art and science finally appeared. Tribes developed into nations and states. Law and politics arose, and with them that fantastic reflection of human things in the human mind – religion.”

Engels argues that the dominant conception of history privileges the workings of the mind rather than the work of laboring hands because of the division that arose between mental and manual labor: “The mind that planned the labor was able, at a very early stage in the development of society (for example, already in the primitive family), to have the labor that had been planned carried out by other hands than its own.”

Thus, social progress was deceptively ascribed to the function of the ideas of great thinkers instead of to our material activity in production. It wasn’t until Marx and Engels developed their materialist conception of history that this misconception of historical development was corrected. It isn’t the ideas of great thinkers that play the primary role in changing the material world, but the material world and our activity in it that shapes our ideas.

This division between mental and manual labor is important, and the various divisions of labor generally are a cornerstone of how labor functions in history. We’ll talk more about this division of labor later, but for now let’s emphasize that we are talking about the separation and specialization of tasks in production. In The German Ideology, Marx and Engels write, “How far the productive forces of a nation are developed is shown most manifestly by the degree to which the division of labor has been carried.” In other words, the more advanced the productive forces, the more complex the division of labor.

Early forms of human society had relatively simple productive forces. Because the productive forces were not very advanced, they did not require an advanced division of labor. As the productive forces were developed further and they became more and more complex, so too did the division of labor become more complex. But this division of labor is also the source of the development of classes. As Marx and Engels put it, “The various stages of development in the division of labor are just so many different forms of ownership, i.e. the existing stage in the division of labor determines also the relations of individuals to one another with reference to the material, instrument, and product of labor.” The division of labor leads at a certain point to the means of production – that is the instruments and objects of labor, i.e., the tools and natural resources – being separated from those who do the work, as the ownership of the means of production are concentrated in the hands of only a few members of society.

With capitalism the division of labor is extremely complex, and the contradiction between social production and private accumulation at the heart of it leads to ever deepening crises of overproduction, and ever sharpening class antagonism between the capitalists and the workers. The only way forward is proletarian revolution.

This brings us to a crucial point: the decisive role of the masses in history. Mao Zedong put it succinctly when he said, “the people, and the people alone, are the motive force in the making of world history.” Within the forces of production themselves, as the agents of production who wield the instruments of production, the masses play the decisive role. And likewise, when the relations of production become decisive over the productive forces, that is, when they become fetters on their further advancement and a revolutionary situation is at hand, then too the conscious activity of the masses plays a decisive role. Che Guevara said this another way: “The revolution is not an apple that falls when it is ripe. You have to make it fall.” Therefore, Marxist-Leninists must understand that the most important aspect of their work is organizational, ideological and educational work, utilizing the mass line among working and oppressed people, for the overthrow of capitalism and imperialism.

Whenever the relations of production hinder the development of the productive forces an economic crisis results. The economic crisis itself isn’t enough to change society. The exploited classes must fight to revolutionize the relations of production, that is, the class relations of society.

When a capitalist crisis intensifies, the economic crisis will become a political crisis when the working class realizes that it cannot live in the old way and the ruling class realizes it can no longer rule in the old way. But in order to take advantage of this revolutionary moment, working and oppressed people must develop their class consciousness and organization. This means building a new Marxist-Leninist communist party, capable of leading unions and mass organizations, and developing the united front against monopoly capitalism with the strategic alliance of the multinational working class and oppressed nationalities at its core. Only this way can we seize the time.

This is the essence of the role of labor in human history. We work to fulfill our material needs, creating and developing tools to help us change the world around us. As our tools, and the techniques with which we wield them, become more advanced, so too must our division of labor advance to match. Class struggle follows from this basic materialist fact. The symbol of communism is the hammer the sickle because these are the tools of the workers and the peasants, the tools that built the old society, the weapons that will dismantle it, and the tools that will build the new society. This is the historic mission of the working class: to overthrow capitalism, and by building socialism, to end all exploitation.

Chapter 16: The role of the forces in production

Up to now we have studied dialectical materialism and given a general overview of its application to history, historical materialism. Now let’s look more closely at some of the core concepts that make up Marxism’s materialist conception of history, starting with the forces of production.

Any social system, whether we are talking about capitalism, socialism, feudalism, or what have you, has a particular mode of production upon which it is based. What do we mean by a mode of production? Simply put, it is a way of producing. A mode of production is the historically constituted way in which production is carried out.

The mode of production is a complex structure made up of two contradictory aspects: the forces of production, and the relations of production. Here let's look closely at the forces of production, what they consist of and the role they play in this contradiction.

Fundamentally, the forces of production consist of the agents of production on the one hand, and the means of production on the other. The means of production consist of the instruments of production, that is, the tools, factories, and so on, along with the objects of production, that is, the raw material and natural resources that are transformed through the labor process into goods. The agents of production are the workers themselves, who work to transform the objects of production (raw materials, etc.) through their use of the instruments of production (tools, equipment, etc.). The main thing is the people. Without their labor the hammers don’t hammer, the machines don’t run, and the fruits and vegetables spoil in the fields.

Each mode of production has productive forces that are unique to that historical mode, and that have come to exist historically, as the result of what came before it. The productive forces don’t appear out of thin air but are built upon the productive forces that preceded them. This means that we can’t jump around, just as we couldn’t have simply decided to develop steel without first having learned to smelt iron.

Why is the development of the productive forces important? Basically, the productive forces coincide with the productive capacity of society. Thus, the development of the productive forces represents the growth of society’s productive power. In other words, their advancement means an increase in the ability of society to eliminate scarcity. As the productive forces advance, so too does the social division of labor, meaning less labor on the part of individuals can produce more overall. This division of labor brings with it certain relations of production. The relations of production are the concrete relations that people enter into in the activity of production, and in class society these are property relations. They are relationships of ownership and power.

The contradiction between the forces of production and the relations of production is at the heart of any given mode of production. Typically, the forces of production play the principal, determining role. However, the productive forces can advance only so far under particular relations of production, and since those in power will not willingly alter the relations of production, the system as a whole is driven into crisis. At this point the relations of production play the determining role and must be revolutionized to alleviate the crisis and allow the forces of production to continue to advance. This is what we see take place whenever there is an era of social revolution that brings us from one mode of production to the next.

Marx and Engels explain the determining role of the forces of production in their book, The German Ideology.

“It is only possible to achieve real liberation in the real world and by employing real means, … slavery cannot be abolished without the steam-engine and the mule and spinning-jenny, serfdom cannot be abolished without improved agriculture, and … in general, people cannot be liberated as long as they are unable to obtain food and drink, housing and clothing in adequate quality and quantity. ‘Liberation’ is an historical and not a mental act, and it is brought about by historical conditions…”

This is certainly true, but it is essential that this not be understood in a metaphysical way. Many have been led astray by believing that socialism could only ever follow after the forces of production were fully developed by capitalism. This vulgar historicism formed the philosophical basis of the opportunism that came to dominate the Second International and led them to deny the progressive character of anti-colonial struggles and to insist that socialism had to arise in the developed capitalist countries first. For them, Marxism had lost its scientific character and had become a dogma. This also formed the basis of Trotskyism’s claim that socialism couldn’t possibly be consolidated in the Soviet Union, but that it depended on the revolutions in Western Europe for its success. Looking back at this cornerstone of Trotskyism today, it seems laughable.

The fact is, this vulgar, Eurocentric interpretation of Marxism entirely misses the point. For Marx and Engels, the object of their study was capitalism and its genesis in Western Europe. But that doesn’t mean that every society should proceed everywhere in the same linear way, through the same set of metaphysically distinct, predetermined stages. Such a view runs contrary to materialist dialectics and the necessity for the concrete analysis of concrete conditions. In the real world different modes of production exist unevenly, side by side, and, in fact, influence each other in complex ways. Capitalism, though it began in Europe, quickly became a system of exploitation whose talons reached all over the globe. Capitalism forces itself onto the underdeveloped world through the export of capital by imperialism, and the use of the weapons of war.

Lenin’s analysis of the rise of imperialism made one point crystal clear: it has the effect of locking the productive forces of the oppressed nations into a state of underdevelopment, dependency and stagnation. Therefore, Lenin analyzed that imperialism created a situation where the “weak links” in the imperialist chain, that is, the underdeveloped nations, were ripe for revolutions. These nations were “weak links” precisely because these revolutions would undermine the strength of the monopoly capitalists who relied on the super-exploitation of the oppressed nations as a life-support system for capitalism in its state of chronic crisis and decay. Indeed, these were pressure points where the dialectical identity of imperialism as an all-encompassing global system could be ruptured. Then, having broken the fetters of imperialist underdevelopment, newly formed socialist countries in the developing world could, through socialist construction, work to methodically advance their newly liberated productive forces. By doing this they created the conditions necessary to revolutionize the relations of production step by step. This is precisely the process we’ve seen take place in countries like Cuba, China, and many others, where Marxist-Leninists have led and consolidated victorious socialist revolutions.

This is essentially the historical role of the forces of production. The development of the productive forces drives forward the advancement of the social division of labor and forms the basis of the development from one mode of production to the next. In the next chapter we’ll look at the other aspect of the mode of production. We will examine the relations of production, and the ways in which they can hasten or hinder the development of the productive forces.

Chapter 17: The relations of production

Now that we’ve nailed down what we mean by forces of production, let’s talk about the other aspect of the mode of production: the relations of production. Remember that the forces of production are comprised of the means of production (the instruments of production, such as factories and tools, and the objects of labor, like raw materials, land and natural resources) and the agents of production (the workers themselves and their techniques of labor).

The relations of production, on the other hand, refers to the concrete relations people enter into in the process of production. In other words, the division of labor and the way that production is organized, the ownership of the means of production, and the distribution of the products of labor.

Historical materialism uses these concepts to show how we got from pre-capitalist society to the current historical period we find ourselves in, capitalism. By doing this, Marxism lays bare the true class relations at the core of every aspect of our lives, and the materialist laws that govern them. These relations of production, in class society, are property relations. They are therefore governed by who owns the means of production, and as a result who dictates how the products of labor are distributed. The capitalists don’t own the means of production merely because they decided to, however. Things are the way they are because of a long historical process.

In pre-class society, when the instruments of production consisted of tools for hunting, fishing and gathering food, the only real divisions of labor corresponded to gender and age. As the productive forces developed in pre-class society, the first great social division of labor occurred: the separation of the pastoral, cattle-raising tribes from the other clan groups around them. The pastoral tribes, by developing animal husbandry and domestication, were able to form a basis for exchange. As the pastoral tribes developed agriculture they settled into definite, separate communities. The development of agriculture led some families to produce more than others on the basis of the fertility of the land they held. This allowed for the accumulation for the first time of a surplus.

Along with these developments came the development of private property, patriarchal family structures to secure the inheritance of property from generation to generation, and class society. These separate communities formed the basis of exchange as well as conflict. With the conquest of one community by its neighbors, along with forced labor to cover debts and punish crimes against properties, also came the introduction of slavery, the first great class division between masters and slaves. Thus the ancient slave societies for the first time developed within the superstructure the “state” as a tool of class rule.

Meanwhile, tools for working the land were fashioned in stages, out of more and more durable materials, as people learned to shape stone, then to smelt metals. In this way, agriculture and handicrafts became separated. This was the second great social division of labor. This separation was required by the technological specialization of metallurgy. The division of production into these two basic branches, agriculture and industry, in turn leads to the production of commodities, that is, the production of goods purely for exchange. With the development of handicrafts and commodity production comes the formation of towns as centers of handicraft production and trade.

As Friedrich Engels writes in The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, “Civilization consolidates and intensifies all these existing divisions of labor, particularly by sharpening the opposition between town and country (the town may economically dominate the country, as in antiquity, or the country the town, as in the middle ages), and it adds a third division of labor, peculiar to itself and of decisive importance: it creates a class which no longer concerns itself with production, but only with the exchange of the products – the merchants.”

We see, then, that the early development of the productive forces brought with it three great divisions of labor in the development of class society: 1) the division of the pastoral tribes from the other, non-cattle-raising tribes, which is the genesis of private property and class society; 2) the division of agriculture from the handicraft industry, which brings with it the separation of town and country, and finally, 3) the division of production from commerce.

As the division of labor developed, the class relations of society changed along with them. Once private ownership and accumulation of wealth were established, slavery was just around the corner. Slavery pushed forward mining and agriculture, facilitating the rise of the ancient city-states. Further advances in the forces of production eventually demanded that the relations of production be revolutionized in order for the productive forces to develop further. With the rise of feudalism, slavery was no longer suitable, so it was forced to give way to serfdom, which in turn, eventually was overthrown by the bourgeoisie in favor of wage labor. Each of the changes in the relations of productions was demanded by the development of the productive forces. As Marx put it, the relations of production became “fetters” on the productive forces, driving the system to stagnation and crisis. Whenever this happens, social revolution inevitably follows.

Of course, within the complex contradictions of any given mode of production, more than one type of production relation may exist at a time, but one type of productive relations will be dominant. The rise of feudalism in Europe saw a turn away from slavery in favor of serfs, who were themselves invested in the land, their tools, and the handicrafts that developed from that. As capitalism arose and brought with it the industrial revolution, serfdom became a fetter on modern industry, which required a different division of labor with a more technical and skilled workforce concentrated around the factories. But capitalism was also born from colonialism, as the age of exploration led to what Marx called “primitive accumulation,” where the capitalist colonists plundered the Americas, Africa and Asia, engaging once more in enslavement and genocide of the people in the lands that they colonized. The enslavement of Africans, in particular, was pivotal to developing capital during the early stage of capitalism. In the United States, from its founding up until the Civil War, developing industrial wage-labor existed alongside the enslavement of Africans. The Civil War only partially resolved the contradiction between Northern industrial capitalism and the Southern slave economy. Once Radical Reconstruction was overthrown, African Americans in the South were locked into semi-feudal relations of production as one of U.S. imperialism’s oppressed nations.

In capitalism, the dominant relations of production are defined by wage-workers who are no longer bound as serfs and who possess the skill and education required to operate machinery. The productive forces and the division of labor that goes along with them have developed to such an extent that once again the relations of production have become fetters upon their development, leading to stagnation and crisis. In the forthcoming chapters on political economy, we’ll go deeply into the nature of capitalist exploitation, how the capitalists steal their wealth from the surplus labor of the workers, by only paying them for a portion of the labor power they expend, and through this appropriation of surplus-value, generate their profits and their wealth at the workers’ expense. And we will explain how this contradiction between social production and private appropriation leads to chronic cycles of crises of overproduction when the workers can no longer afford to buy what they produce. In the next chapters, we’ll look more closely at the divisions of labor in society and the contradictions that they bring with them, beginning with the division between mental and manual labor.

It should be reiterated that the determining role of the productive forces over the relations of production means that the relations of production arise from, accelerate, and eventually limit, the process of the development of the productive forces historically. If we think of the productive forces as a railroad track that guides progress through history, then, as Marx said in The Civil War in France, “revolutions are the locomotives of history.” The revolutionary struggle of the exploited against the exploiters is what changes the relations of production and allows the productive forces to advance. Only this way can we move beyond capitalist misery and build socialism.

This is the power of dialectical and historical materialism. The ideologists of capitalism would have us believe that capitalism is human nature and that it has always existed and will always exist. On the contrary, Marxism shows us how all this exploitation and misery has arisen historically, and likewise how we can be rid of them. Marxism-Leninism gives us a revolutionary weapon that exposes the true exploitative nature of the capitalist system that the ruling class tries to obscure behind smoke and mirrors, and teaches us the laws that will lead to capitalism’s ultimate demise.

Chapter 18: The contradiction between mental and manual labor

Since the very origin of class society, when the productive forces developed to the point of producing some surplus beyond bare subsistence, the contradiction between mental and manual labor has been a characteristic of productive relations. Broadly speaking this means that the majority of people toil away physically, while a small minority conducts intellectual labor, such as science and art or planning and administration. Historically, this contradiction arose alongside the contradiction between town and country, specifically when the cities of the ancient slave societies came to dominate society.

However, it isn’t the case that this division between mental and manual labor only exists between the exploiting and exploited classes. From the very beginning, in ancient societies, many slaves were given mental tasks, and even today this contradiction persists between “blue collar” and “white collar” workers. More and more of the labor force in advanced monopoly capitalist states is engaged in mental labor, especially as capital is exported to the oppressed nations. And, as the productive forces advance and the instruments of production become more technically complex, the technical knowledge required of workers increases as well.

To say that labor is manual shouldn’t be taken to suggest that it is unskilled or uncomplicated. But generally speaking, when we are talking about mental labor in the U.S., we’re talking about jobs ranging from clerical workers and teachers, to scientists, technicians, programmers, and engineers. Often these are jobs that take place behind a desk. When we talk about manual labor, we are talking about jobs consisting of everything from factory workers and farm laborers, to construction workers, truckers, cooks, warehouse workers, retail and service workers, and so on. Often these workers are on their feet all day.

For an example of how this plays out, today we see the question of reopening and working from home as one element of how this contradiction unfolded during the COVID-19 pandemic. Many workers doing mental labor have been able to work from home and are now being forced to return to the office, whereas those who do manual labor never worked from home. For mental workers, remote work has meant a reduction in travel time and expense and more time spent with family, but also longer hours, a blurring between work life and home life, and isolation from their fellow workers. For manual workers there have been greater infection rates as they weren’t able to isolate from each other during the peak of the pandemic, along with greater economic pressures, especially in retail and the service sector, driving a push from some to reopen.

So, this contradiction is a source of confusion and an obstacle to working class unity. This comes partly from a failure to understand that class is fundamentally about our material relationship to the means of production. It is not uncommon for those engaged in manual labor to see themselves as the “real workers” and to misidentify mental workers as a part of the exploiting classes. This works both ways as “white collar” workers often tend to identify themselves with the so-called “middle class” even though they don’t own any means of production and are exploited just the same as their “blue collar” siblings. Class isn’t about income, but about exploitation. This is one of the many ways that the ruling class divides the working class against itself. Unionization, and therefore class struggle, helps to break down these divisions and teaches broad working-class solidarity through practice. Class struggle creates class consciousness.

It is important to note that the contradiction between mental and manual labor has existed throughout class society. It will continue to exist as a non-antagonistic contradiction under socialism as well. Marx and Lenin both held the view that as socialism advanced to communism, the antagonism between mental and manual labor would be eliminated.

One result of the development of the productive forces is the reduction of the amount of physical labor required to meet the needs of society. In capitalist society, this brings with it crises of overproduction and economic stagnation, as more is produced by less labor and the workers cannot afford to buy all that has been produced. To make this more concrete, consider the issue of automation. As things stand, automation basically means that robots are replacing human workers. Capitalists like this because they can reduce labor costs. But this has the effect of increasing unemployment and depressing wages, meaning that people can’t afford to buy what is being produced by increased automation, feeding into overproduction and economic crisis.

In the early days of the industrial revolution this problem was acutely felt by the working class. Some workers took to sabotage and the destruction of the machinery because they saw the role mechanization and automation were having on driving unemployment. The Luddites in the textile industry in 19th century England devoted themselves to destroying the machines that they feared would displace them. But breaking the forces of production is a futile effort in the end, as it fails to address the principal contradiction that is at the root of the problem.

In fact, this is a problem caused by capitalist relations of production. When those relations are revolutionized the productive forces will be freed from the fetters placed upon them by the concentrated, private accumulation of wealth. Socialist distribution will allow for the advanced productive forces not only to reduce the amount of physical labor necessary to fulfill society’s needs, but they will do so without causing crises of overproduction.

Automation should free people from toil, and under socialist relations of production it will do exactly that. More people will not be thrust by automation into unemployment, but will instead be freed to pursue higher levels of education, become doctors, artists and engineers. It will have the effect of gradually reducing manual labor in society at large, but without destroying the livelihood of the workers themselves. We are able to produce much more than we as a society need. It is merely hoarded by the rich or simply destroyed. Socialism means that as the necessity for manual labor is reduced by the advance of the productive forces, social distribution of wealth will mean the step-by-step elimination of this contradiction.

Chapter 19: The contradiction between town and country

Much is made of what is often referred to as the urban/rural divide. There is a fundamental disconnect, we are told, between the people from the cities and the rural population. Marx and Engels called this contradiction the division between town and country. Marxism-Leninism can help us understand this contradiction, how it arose historically, and how it can be overcome.

When we think of this contradiction, a lot of things come to mind. We may think of the distinction between more conservative “red states” and more liberal “blue states.” We think of disparities in terms of education and infrastructure. We may think of the geographic location of agriculture and industry. Indeed, it is a complex issue. First, as Marxists, let’s use historical materialism to see how this contradiction has come to be. Understanding its origin and development will help us understand why and how to address it.

This contradiction, like the contradiction between mental and manual labor, originates at the very beginning of class society. In The German Ideology, Marx and Engels write, “The greatest division of material and mental labor is the separation of town and country. The antagonism between town and country begins with the transition from barbarism to civilization, from tribe to State, from locality to nation, and runs through the whole history of civilization to the present day.” In that text, they cut right to the heart of the matter when they state, “The town already is in actual fact the concentration of the population, of the instruments of production, of capital, of pleasures, of needs, while the country demonstrates just the opposite fact, isolation and separation. The antagonism between town and country can only exist within the framework of private property.”

Under different relations of production different aspects of this contradiction have been principal or secondary. In slave society, the city was dominant over the countryside, while in feudal society the countryside was dominant over the towns. Under capitalism, the urban centers again dominate the rural areas.

The feudal towns became the basis of the power of the rising bourgeoisie against the feudal lords based in their country estates. And as the enclosures of the commons forced more and more displaced peasants into the towns from the countryside, the conditions for the advance from handicraft production to manufacturing was established. Peasant revolts in the countryside were common during the feudal period, and the urban-based bourgeoisie united with the peasants in the overthrow of the feudal aristocracy. In the socialist revolutions that have taken place in semi-feudal countries such as Russia and China, the worker-peasant alliance similarly proved essential to success both in the overthrow of the exploiting classes and in the process of socialist construction.

There is almost no peasantry in the modern imperialist countries, including the United States, but nevertheless there is a contradiction between town and country that is at times acutely felt. The rural countryside is the seat of agriculture, while the cities are where more mental labor and heavy industry have been historically centered. Overall, while there are large, oppressed nationality populations in rural areas, the rural population tends to be whiter and more conservative than the cities. A successful revolution in the United States will have to be able to unite with and lead workers and oppressed people in both the countryside and the urban centers. This means using the mass line to respond to their unique felt needs and being able to analyze and leverage the different contradictions at work in different areas. Only in this way can we unite all that can be united to strike blows against capitalism and raise the level of consciousness and organization of the masses.

Under socialism the correct handling of the contradiction between town and country is essential. In Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR, Stalin writes, “The economic basis of this antithesis is the exploitation of the country by the town, the expropriation of the peasantry and the ruin of the majority of the rural population by the whole course of development of industry, trade and credit under capitalism. Hence, the antithesis between town and country under capitalism must be regarded as an antagonism of interests. This is what gave rise to the hostile attitude of the country towards the town and towards ‘townfolk’ in general.” Note here, as Stalin points out, as always, our ideas and attitudes arise from and are based upon our material reality.

Stalin argued that this contradiction had been eliminated in the Soviet Union, but it would be more correct to say that it had been transformed. Through the socialist removal of the “antagonism of interests” imposed by capitalism, socialism changed the material reality, and transformed this contradiction from an antagonistic to a non-antagonistic one. This “antagonism of interests is replaced by cooperation on the basis of mutual benefit.

We can see then that the contradiction between town and country has played an important role throughout the history of class society, from the initial formation of classes through the construction of socialism. For this reason, any organization in the United States that hopes to lead a socialist revolution needs to pay particular attention to the problem in order to be successful.

Chapter 20: The contradiction between base and superstructure

In our exploration of the fundamental concepts of historical materialism so far, we have looked closely at the economic and material base of society. We’ve talked about the forces and relations of production that make up a mode of production. But every mode of production which forms the base of society has a superstructure that arises from it and in turn reinforces it. So, let’s look now at what the superstructure is and the relationship between it and the base.

As we’ve said before, an essential point of Marxist materialism is that it is monistic rather than dualistic, meaning it doesn’t view consciousness and matter as separate and distinct, but rather it sees consciousness as arising from matter. We’ve talked about how our ideas arise from social practice, but let’s expand upon that as we look at the superstructure of society.

What is the superstructure? Basically, the superstructure consists of the ideas, institutions and apparatuses of a given society. But we can better understand it if we divide it into two parts. The Italian Marxist-Leninist Antonio Gramsci discussed this in terms of civil and political aspects. The civil aspect of the superstructure is cultural and ideological, while the political aspect is legal and repressive. But they share the same function: reinforcing and maintaining the mode of production.

These are the levers by which the state manages its affairs, and as Lenin argues in The State and Revolution, “The state is a product and a manifestation of the irreconcilability of class antagonisms.” The state is always and everywhere a dictatorship of one particular class.

The slave societies, from the theocracies like Mesopotamia and Egypt to the “democracies” of Greece and Rome, were class dictatorships of slavers. The kingdoms and principalities of the Middle Ages were class dictatorships of the noble lords over the toiling peasants. Capitalism is the class dictatorship of the capitalists over the working class, while capitalist “democracy” is only democracy for the rich. And socialism is the class dictatorship of the proletariat over the overthrown bourgeoisie, whereby the working class wields the state to uproot all oppression.

What are the cultural and ideological apparatuses of the state? In ancient and feudal societies these were the temples and the church which justified the power of the priests, emperors and kings through “divine right.” With the rise of the bourgeoisie these were replaced by the universities and the secular ideas of “natural right,” such as “life, liberty, and the pursuit of property,” according to the chief philosopher of bourgeois liberalism, John Locke. And note the word “property,” there. This phrase is later used in the U.S. Declaration of Independence, but the word “property” is replaced by “happiness.” For the “founding fathers” these were, of course, synonymous. It is clear that the bourgeois revolutions only intended for these rights to be held by white men with land and property, not by women, slaves or other oppressed people. It was only through struggle that these rights were extended. The apparatuses the capitalist state uses to enforce and develop its culture and ideology are things like religion (having broken the power of Catholic Church through the Protestant Reformation), the schools, the media and so on, all of which it uses its legal apparatuses, and its money, to dominate.

What are the legal and repressive apparatuses of the state? These are the state’s laws, courts, police and military. Throughout the whole history of exploitative class society these have been used to protect the class in power and their material interests at the expense of the exploited. All working and oppressed people understand very well who the police and the courts in capitalist society serve, and at whose expense. The laws and the police protect, first and foremost, property, at the expense of workers and oppressed people. Meanwhile, the military supports the material interests of the imperialists abroad in their maneuvers to export capital, dominate resources, control markets and prop up the super-profits that monopoly capitalism bleeds from the oppressed nations.

Dialectical materialism can help us understand all of this more clearly by looking at how principal and secondary aspects of contradictions interact and transform into one another. First, to be clear, in the contradiction between the base and the superstructure, the base is typically the principal, determining aspect. The superstructure arises from the base and serves the base.

Second, as we know, in any mode of production one class is dominant. In the contradiction between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat under capitalism, the bourgeoisie is currently the dominant class. So it is the principal, or determining, aspect of that contradiction. And therefore its ideology is likewise dominant. But proletarian ideology arises from the class struggle in bourgeois society. We should therefore understand that while bourgeois ideology is dominant, proletarian ideology also exists, secondarily, alongside it.

When, as a result of social revolution, the proletariat takes the dominant role over the bourgeoisie, so too will the ideology of the proletariat take on the leading role in society, allowing the proletariat to transform the entire superstructure, to meet its needs. Socialist revolution will smash the state apparatuses of the capitalists and create a new socialist state. It will revolutionize the entire superstructure, culturally and politically, in order to fully transform society and overcome bourgeois ideas that encourage reaction and counter-revolution.

This is basically the relationship between base and superstructure. The superstructure arises from the base and in turn reinforces it. But the proletarian state, while still belonging to a particular class, has a different goal than the states of the exploiting classes that came before it. While the pre-socialist states wanted to preserve the rule of their class and exploitative relations of production that were at their foundation, the socialist state, on the contrary, seeks the abolition of all classes and all exploitation. This is because the proletariat is the first class in history with no material interest in exploiting others.

In The State and Revolution Lenin argues, “The supersession of the bourgeois state by the proletarian state is impossible without a violent revolution. The abolition of the proletarian state, i.e., of the state in general, is impossible except through the process of ‘withering away’.”

This “withering away” of the socialist state is an essential point. As we’ve seen, the state arises from and reinforces a particular mode of production, and therefore particular relations of production. The purpose of socialism is to transition from an exploitative class society to a society without classes, and a society without classes doesn’t require a state as an instrument of class rule. With no antagonistic classes within or imperialist threat without, the repressive state will have no more material basis.

Section IV: Political Economy

Chapter 21: The revolutionary significance of Marx's critique of capitalism

Thanks to Marxism, we know that ideological superstructure of society arises from and supports the material, economic base of society. What we think is shaped primarily by our practical activity in production, class struggle and scientific experiment. Furthermore, Marx was fundamentally a revolutionary organizer, interested in helping the working class to understand and overthrow its exploitation. This is why Marx devoted the bulk of his theoretical work to an analysis of political economy.

Marx’s historical materialism explains how any given mode of production arises historically, based on dialectical and material processes. His critique of political economy examines the inner workings of capitalism itself. It explains where capital comes from and how exploitation functions, as well as why this exploitation is fundamental to what capitalism is. It also explains how the contradictions inherent in capitalism lead to crisis and social revolution.

In this chapter and the following chapters, we are going to look more closely at Marx’s critique of capitalist political economy. But first, we need to understand what political economy is. The Soviet Political Economy textbook from 1954 gives us a good definition. It says, “political economy is the science of the development of the social productive, i.e., economic, relations between men.” If we want to frame it in the terms of historical materialism, we might say that Marx’s critique of political economy is the study of the capitalist mode of production, especially capitalist relations of production. In this way it is very different from academic, bourgeois economics, which seeks instead to justify and manage capitalist profit.

Marxist-Leninist political-economic theory explains the stages of capitalism’s development, the law of value, the role of commodity production, surplus value as the secret of capitalist exploitation, and how inevitable overproduction leads to crisis as a feature of capitalism itself. It also explains how monopoly capitalism developed from early competitive capitalism, and how this inevitably leads to national oppression and imperialist war.

Bourgeois economists likewise insist that capitalist relations of production are “natural,” in a metaphysical sense. That is, they are unchanging and fixed. Not only the way things are, but the way things should be. This is how bourgeois political economy before Marx obscured the true nature of capitalism. In The Poverty of Philosophy, Marx writes, “When the economists say that present-day relations – the relations of bourgeois production – are natural, they imply that these are the relations in which wealth is created and productive forces developed in conformity with the laws of nature. These relations, therefore, are themselves natural laws independent of the influence of time. They are eternal laws that must always govern society.” But Marx shows that this is not the case. Capitalism occupies a point in history. It arises from what came before it and it has an end that will necessarily arise from the contradictions within it.

In his critique of political economy, Marx shows how capitalism has developed, how the capitalists generate profit at the expense of the working class, and how the contradictions inherent in this process lead to capitalist crisis.

For Marx, the key to understanding capitalist relations of production is understanding surplus value. This is the trick that capitalists play on the workers, and it is the source of their profit. Lenin explains it like this: “The worker spends one part of the day covering the cost of maintaining himself and his family (wages), while the other part of the day he works without remuneration, creating for the capitalist surplus value, the source of profit, the source of the wealth of the capitalist class.”

We’ll get into surplus value in detail later. But this is a crucial point to understand what Marx was getting at. All value comes from the labor that the workers perform. The capitalist contributes nothing. The only reason they are able to profit from the process is because of an unequal power relationship masked as an equal exchange. The capitalist dictates the terms of employment, because the worker must sell their labor to survive.

Meanwhile, the capitalists are driven by competition amongst themselves to keep their profits high and costs low, meaning they must keep wages down while pushing production levels higher and higher. Those capitalists who fail to do this sufficiently will be swallowed up by those who are ruthless enough to succeed. The formation of capitalist monopolies only pushes this to further extremes. This means that there is a contradiction between capitalist and worker that is fundamentally antagonistic. The capitalist profits at the workers’ expense, and for the workers to get any more than a subsistence level wage, they must organize and fight for it.

Next, we’ll look at this historical emergence of capitalism out of mercantilism and the role of what Marx called “primitive accumulation” in jump-starting the capitalist mode of production. Then, in the chapters that follow we will carefully break capitalism down, point by point. We will examine what commodities are, and why Marx thought they were fundamental to understanding the way capitalism functions. We’ll look at value in all of its different forms, and we’ll examine how it is determined. Then we will break down surplus value and overproduction, before getting into the nuts and bolts of monopoly capitalism, or imperialism.

Chapter 22: The historical emergence of capitalism

Despite what bourgeois economists, the priests of property and profit, would have us believe, capitalism isn’t the eternal way of things. It had a beginning, and it will have an end. As we begin our discussion of political economy, let’s draw upon historical materialism to examine how capitalism arose.

Capitalism didn’t arise out of nowhere, and it wasn’t born from the minds of Adam Smith or David Ricardo. It emerged historically and materially from the womb of feudalism, and like any mode of production is limited and conditioned by what came before it. There are several phases in its history, from agrarian to mercantile capitalism, and then to industrialization and on to its current, monopoly stage.

An important characteristic of capitalism’s early development emphasized by Marx in Capital is what he called “primitive accumulation.” What is primitive accumulation? Marx calls it the “original sin” of how capital came to be in the first place. Marx explains the myth of the origin of capital like this: “In times long gone-by there were two sorts of people; one, the diligent, intelligent, and, above all, frugal elite; the other, lazy rascals, spending their substance, and more, in riotous living. (...) Thus it came to pass that the former sort accumulated wealth, and the latter sort had at last nothing to sell except their own skins.” But of course this is just another lie the capitalists tell to justify their rule. The truth, Marx says, is much uglier: “The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signaled the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief moments of primitive accumulation.”

The capitalists originally accumulated their vast wealth by stealing it outright, through colonialism, genocide and enslavement. This primitive, or original accumulation, though fiercely resisted, has never really stopped. Despite the end of chattel slavery after the Civil War in the United States, national oppression still continues to form the basis of super-profits extracted from the oppressed nations within the U.S. while imperialism continues to wage wars to plunder the underdeveloped countries the world over.

In broad terms, early capitalism grew out of the collapse of the manorial system in Europe, followed by the enclosure of the commons beginning in the 16th century. The enclosure of common land and the clearing of the estates, primarily for grazing by sheep to profit from the market in wool, drove poor peasants off the land and into the towns. In chapter 27 of Capital, Marx refers to this as “the prelude of the revolution that laid the foundation of the capitalist mode of production.”

Poor peasants more and more were compelled to become “free workers,” with nothing but their own labor power to sell, leading to the early development of the working class. The towns became centers of handicraft industry, commodity production, and trade, and thus became the growing centers of power for the rising mercantile bourgeoisie against the feudal estates in the countryside. In the towns the early mercantile capitalists began to build their wealth through the production and trade in commodities, or products made solely to sell, along with colonial plunder, including everything from mineral wealth, spices, coffee and tobacco, to enslaved human beings.

The coastal cities of Europe, and later America, became the power centers for the merchant capitalist class, whose ports traded between Europe and its colonies. This period was characterized by violent class struggle between the rising bourgeoisie and the feudal lords, whose hereditary wealth and power were based upon the continuance of the feudal mode of production. Many of the modern, capitalist nation-states were formed in this period from the revolutionary defeat of the feudal principalities and kingdoms, as the capitalists seized and consolidated state power based on territories encompassing communities of economy, language and culture.

Having smashed the power of the feudal lords and established their own state power, the bourgeoisie was able to change the relations of production to suit their needs, clearing the way for the tremendous advancement of the productive forces in the industrial revolution and the development of the modern industrial proletariat.

There’s an important point to be made here that is often misunderstood. Marx and Lenin both said that capitalism was a progressive historical force, and they said this knowing full well what horrors of exploitation and oppression capitalism brought with it. So what does it mean to say that capitalism was progressive? At its core, historical progress is a scientific concept, not a moral one, and it is measured in two ways according to historical materialism. First, by the development of the productive forces, and second, by the expansion of democracy.

In terms of the advancement of the productive forces, capitalism freed the productive forces from the fetters of feudal productive relations. This allowed for the development of modern industry and a more advanced division of labor.

Advancement in the productive forces reduces the socially necessary labor to produce human needs, thereby reducing scarcity and paving the way, materially, for the possibility of more equitable distribution of the products of labor. In terms of the expansion of democracy, the social revolutions that established the rule of the bourgeoisie overthrew feudalism and took power from the small class of hereditary lords and put it into the hands of the larger class of the bourgeoisie. By both criteria, capitalism was progressive by leaps and bounds over feudalism, which was inferior in terms of both the superstructure and the economic base. Simply put, the feudal mode of production took more work to produce less for the benefit of fewer people. By further developing the productive forces, capitalist relations of production establish the material conditions necessary for socialism. This is the progressive side of capitalism, according to Marxism.

This isn’t to say that capitalism doesn’t have a reactionary and oppressive side as well. It certainly does. For working and oppressed people that has always been how capitalism has been experienced – as a system of misery, poverty, oppression and exploitation. As we shall see more and more in the chapters that follow, capitalism contains its own exploitative and oppressive contradictions that must also be overcome. In doing so socialist revolution will likewise remove from the productive forces the fetters of capitalist relations of production and create a system that is far more democratic, “a million times more democratic,” as Lenin said, by taking power from the relatively small ruling class of capitalists and putting it into the hands of the working class for the benefit of the broad masses of the people.

Chapter 23: What is a commodity?

Karl Marx begins his critique of political economy in the great work, Capital, with an analysis of commodities. He writes, “The wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails, presents itself as ‘an immense accumulation of commodities,’ its unit being a single commodity. Our investigation must therefore begin with the analysis of a commodity.” So, what is a commodity, and why is it that Marx begins here?

First, we will define what a commodity is, and then we’ll break it down. A commodity is something that fulfills some need or want, and that is produced by labor in order to be sold on the market.

In other words, it is something that has some value to us, both in terms of some kind of usefulness, and in terms of exchange. Furthermore, it isn’t something that’s just lying around, like raw materials, but is something produced by labor. So, for example, water in a stream isn’t a commodity, but water bottled to sell is. Marx, therefore, divides the value of a commodity into two: it has use-value and exchange-value.

Regarding a commodity’s use-value, Marx says, “The utility of a thing makes it a use value,” which is simple enough. If something is neither needed nor wanted, then it is of no use to anyone. For something to have use-value, it must satisfy some need or want. We can think of use-value as the qualitative aspect of value. Regarding a commodity’s exchange-value, Marx says that it is “the exchange relation of commodities.” In other words, a commodity’s exchange value must be understood quantitatively. How many units of commodity A have the same value as commodity B?

So, a commodity combines these two aspects, use-value and exchange-value. Someone might, in preparation for the winter, make for themselves a warm wool coat. This obviously serves a need, but since it is made for personal use, it isn’t a commodity. Something useful, like a coat, only becomes a commodity when it is produced for the sake of exchange.

Marx brings up an interesting point here: “As use values, commodities are, above all, of different qualities, but as exchange values they are merely different quantities, and consequently do not contain an atom of use value.” It is hard to see, from here, how we are supposed to determine the value of one commodity in relation to another. What if, for example, a capitalist wants to exchange coats for coffins? How many coats are worth how many coffins? They’re made of different materials and serve different purposes. And certainly, the capitalist himself can only use one of each at a time. But their exchange value surely isn’t one for one. How do we compare them? These things are so dissimilar, comparing them is like comparing apples and oranges. Since exchange value is purely quantitative, we need, therefore, some quantitative commonality that all commodities share. As we will see, such a quantitative commonality does, in fact, exist.

In a speech that Marx gave to the International Workingmen’s Association, later published as the pamphlet Value, Price, and Profit, Marx explains in a clear and concise way how this all comes together.

According to Marx,

“As the exchangeable values of commodities are only social functions of those things, and have nothing at all to do with the natural qualities, we must first ask: What is the common social substance of all commodities? It is labor. To produce a commodity a certain amount of labor must be bestowed upon it, or worked up in it. And I say not only labor, but social labor. A man who produces an article for his own immediate use, to consume it himself, creates a product, but not a commodity. As a self-sustaining producer he has nothing to do with society. But to produce a commodity, a man must not only produce an article satisfying some social want, but his labor itself must form part and parcel of the total sum of labor expended by society. It must be subordinate to the division of labor within society. It is nothing without the other divisions of labor, and on its part is required to integrate them.”

Marx, therefore argued, that commodities are “crystallized social labor.” The value of a commodity is therefore determined by “the quantity of labor bestowed upon its production.”

In other words, if we want to exchange coats for coffins, the only thing we can use to measure a common quantitative value between them is the socially necessary labor time it takes to produce them. So, for example, if it takes, on average, one hour for a worker to make a coat for their capitalist boss, and six hours for a worker to make a coffin for their capitalist boss, then six coats have the same exchange value as one coffin.

Since the commodity is “crystallized social labor,” it can be used as the basic “atom” or fundamental unit of the capitalist mode of production. Understanding how commodities function in capitalist society will allow us to understand and analyze, in the forthcoming chapters, not only value, but also wages, prices, and how capitalists derive their profits.

Chapter 24: Marxism and the law of value

In the previous chapter we looked at what a commodity is and examined use-value and exchange-value. This discussion of value is a cornerstone of Marx’s critique of political economy. The value of any commodity is equal to the socially necessary labor time required to produce that commodity. This is the Law of Value, and it is essential to understand if we are to really grasp what is revolutionary about Marx’s critique of capitalism.

In Capital, Marx writes, “That which determines the magnitude of the value of any article is ... the labor-time socially necessary for its production. Each individual commodity, in this connection, is to be considered as an average sample of its class. Commodities, therefore, in which equal quantities of labor are embodied, or which can be produced in the same time, have the same value. The value of one commodity is to the value of any other, as the labor-time necessary for the production of the one is to that necessary for the production of the other. ‘As values, all commodities are only definite masses of congealed labor-time.’”

In other words, since exchange-value is based on quantitatively exchanging things that are qualitatively different, then we need some quantitative commonality between these qualitatively different things. That commonality is the socially necessary labor time required to produce them.

But what do we mean by socially necessary labor time? Let’s break it down.

First, labor time is the time required by labor to produce a commodity. But we have to talk about labor time in terms of “socially necessary” labor time, because production is socialized. In other words, there is a division of labor in society that has to be taken into account. While someone could produce a commodity from start to finish by themselves (as in the period of handicraft production), they will not be able to do so with the speed and efficiency that the capitalist division of labor creates. Instead, as the Soviet textbook Fundamentals of Marxism-Leninism says, “value is determined by the average amount of labor expended by society for the production of the given type of commodity.” In this way, because it is really an average, the socially necessary labor that determines exchange-value is abstract, unlike the concrete labor that determines use-value.

But most exchange isn’t done in terms of direct exchange of one normal commodity for another. Nobody goes to the market and trades crates of hammers for their weekly groceries. We use a special commodity to make this exchange instead. This special commodity is money. Money stands in as a measure of the value of all other commodities and is the medium of commodity circulation. When we use money to express the value of a commodity, that value is its price.

The Law of Value in capitalist society takes on three functions.

First, it regulates the distribution of labor-power and the means of production within the society. The Law of Value causes the prices of commodities, based on supply and demand, to gravitate towards their value, even though the anarchy of production causes them to constantly fluctuate. If the market price exceeds the value of a commodity, production will increase, increasing with it the supply. Similarly, if the price is below the value of a commodity, production will decrease, decreasing the supply. Supply and demand can cause fluctuations in price around a commodity’s value.

Second, it serves as a motivator for technical progress. Development of the productive forces makes production more efficient. If a capitalist is able to use the most advanced machinery and techniques available, they are better able to produce at a cost below the socially necessary amount. They can use machinery to reduce the amount of labor required for production below the socially necessary average, thereby increasing their profit. Meanwhile, those who cannot compete, those who cannot keep up, are driven under by the more powerful capitalists.

Third, it develops the capitalist relations of production. This is precisely why they wrench up exploitation of labor to maximize their profits. Since there is an average social labor cost for producing any commodity, their ability to maximize profits is also dependent on how much they exploit their labor force. If a capitalist is able to have a commodity produced at a cost lower than this social average, then they’ll make an additional profit above the market price. If, on the contrary, they produce the commodity at a cost above this social average then they take a loss on the market price. And since the competition between capitalists themselves leads to the ruin of those smaller producers who cannot keep up, the means of production are further and further concentrated into the hands of fewer and fewer capitalists, as those few get richer and richer.

This is the essence of the Law of Value. It is important to note here that when the bosses speed up production, rely more and more on automation and mechanization of production, and demand higher production quotas, they are able to have more commodities produced in less time, thereby extracting a greater profit. In our next chapters we will look more closely at the forms that capital takes, and how capitalist exploitation takes place through production of surplus value.

Chapter 25: Constant and variable capital

To understand Marx’s critique of capitalism, it is essential to understand capital dialectically. We see again and again in Capital itself that Marx breaks things down into their contradictory aspects. We’ve already seen this with value, which considers both use-value and exchange-value. Now, as we look at capital itself, we will see Marx’s dialectical method of analysis at work again, as Marx shows how capital is divided into constant and variable capital.

Let’s dig a little deeper into the value of a commodity. Remember that the value of a commodity is determined by the socially necessary labor time that is required to produce it. This was dealt with in our last chapter on the Law of Value. Marx’s conception of constant and variable capital helps make this clearer.

According to Marx, “Capital is dead labor, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks.” The relationship between capital to labor is parasitic, and this parasitic relationship is well-illustrated by this relationship between constant and variable capital.

Constant capital is what the capitalist spends on raw materials and fuel consumed in production, the machinery used, and the factory buildings. The capitalist builds, buys, maintains and repairs the factory, pays for materials, supplies, and the fuel needed to power the machinery. All of these things make up part of the value of the commodity. The cost of this capital investment is transferred into the commodities produced as they're worn out or used up in the production process. These things are called constant capital because they don’t add any new value to the commodity. The quantity of value isn’t changed by these things – it is constant.

Variable capital, on the other hand, is what the capitalist spends on the workers themselves, on purchasing their labor-power. The capitalist hires workers, agreeing to pay them a wage based on the socially necessary labor time that will allow them to go on living and working. Variable capital is called variable because it grows in the production process. It creates new value through creating a surplus, over and above what the worker is paid for. This is surplus value, which we’ll get into in detail later. For now, let’s give an example of how this works, as simply as possible.

Let’s say a worker is making a coffin for his capitalist boss, who owns a coffin factory. The worker earns a daily wage of $100, and uses $1000 worth of materials to make a coffin over the course of the work day. The capitalist then sells the finished coffin for $1200. The $1000 represents the constant capital that the capitalist has invested in machinery, tools, raw material and fuel. The $100 is the variable capital that is invested in labor power. The result of the process is the $100 surplus above both forms of capital invested, which the capitalist takes as profit.

Now, remember that a daily wage of $100 is paid to the worker. If the capitalist can get the worker to produce two coffins instead of one over the course of the day, then the capitalist will have invested $2000 in constant capital between the two coffins, and $100 in variable capital for the wage of the worker. Again, the capitalist then sells the coffins for $1200 each, totaling $2400 for both of them. Now the capitalist is ahead not by $100 per coffin, but by $150 per coffin.

Basically, what all of this means is that if a certain quantity of constant capital and variable capital are invested by a capitalist in a process of production, then by the end of that process these values will have reproduced or renewed themselves in the final product. However, if the labor power of the worker has exceeded the socially necessary labor time required for the worker to go on living and working, then there will be a surplus created which the capitalist pockets.

The profit, in this illustration, is made by increasing the intensity of the labor, by reducing the amount of labor time required to produce the commodity. Marx called this relative surplus value. The other method of increasing surplus value is lengthening the working day, which Marx called absolute surplus value. In either case, the capitalist is gaining from the unpaid labor of the worker. In the next we’ll break down exactly how surplus value works in more detail.

Chapter 26: surplus value, the secret of capitalist exploitation

When we enter into employment, our bosses are trying to play a trick on us. They want us to understand the process one way, when, in fact, something else is happening. They want us to think that we have agreed, as equals, upon a deal, where they pay us an agreed upon hourly wage, and we, in turn, do some agreed upon labor for them. They make a profit and we get paid, and everyone gets what they agreed upon. At least, that’s how they want us to understand the process.

But what is really going on here? In the end, they’ve somehow got all of the money and we did all of the work. The capitalist bosses are like stage magicians, using misdirection to draw our attention away from what is really happening: that they are fleecing us. This fleecing of the working class by the capitalists is the source of all of their profits. It is the reason they are getting richer and richer, and we’re struggling to keep our heads above water. According to Marx’s analysis in Capital, the method of this basic exploitation is the production of surplus value.

Remember, in our previous chapters we talked about commodities, and how they combine within themselves both use-value and exchange-value. That is, they are produced to fulfill some use, need, or want, but they are also produced for the sake of exchange on the market. We also talked about the Law of Value, which means the value of any commodity is equal to the socially necessary labor time required to produce that commodity. Finally, in the last chapter, we talked about constant and variable capital, and we examined how, if a certain quantity of constant capital and variable capital are invested by a capitalist into the production process, then by the end of that process these values will have reproduced or renewed themselves in the final product. But, if the labor power of the worker has exceeded the socially necessary labor time required for the worker to go on living and working, then there will be a surplus created, which the capitalist pockets as profit. That surplus is what Marx called surplus value.

Let’s break this down a little more. In a note to the Communist Manifesto, Engels defines the two main forces of the class struggle, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, like this: “By bourgeoisie is meant the class of modern capitalists, owners of the means of social production and employers of wage labor. By proletariat, the class of modern wage laborers who, having no means of production of their own, are reduced to selling their labor power in order to live.”

The working class sells their labor power to the capitalists in order to live. Whether you work on an oil rig, in a tobacco field, a warehouse, shipping and delivering packages, or making coffee at a cafe, you’re selling your labor power to the capitalist in order to live. Everyone who works for a living understands this. We work for the capitalists because we need a wage to live. Life is already hard, but if we don’t work, life gets harder and much more precarious. The capitalists act like this is a free choice, but it isn’t. It is a choice made under duress: work or starve.

So, as Marx says in Value, Price, and Profit, “What the working man sells is not directly his labour, but his labouring power, the temporary disposal of which he makes over to the capitalist.” Labor power becomes a commodity, sold by the worker to the capitalist. But what is the value of this commodity? According to Marx, “Like that of every other commodity, its value is determined by the quantity of labour necessary to produce it.” In other words, the base value of labor power is the cost of living.

As we pointed out in the last chapter, capital invested in labor is variable, because it can not only reproduce itself, but also produce a surplus in the labor process. Labor-power is a special commodity because the capitalists are able to use it to produce value exceeding its cost.

Lenin explains it like this: “The owner of money buys labor power at its value, which, like the value of every other commodity, is determined by the socially necessary labor time requisite for its production (i.e., the cost of maintaining the worker and his family). Having bought enough labor power, the owner of money is entitled to use it, that is, to set it to work for a whole day – 12 hours, let us say. Yet, in the course of six hours (“necessary” labor time) the worker creates product sufficient to cover the cost of his own maintenance; in the course of the next six hours (“surplus” labor time), he creates “surplus” product, or surplus value, for which the capitalist does not pay.”

This is the point where our capitalist stage magician uses sleight of hand to misdirect us. It appears, because the worker is paid an hourly wage, that they are being paid for all of their time, but this sleight of hand disguises the fact that part of it is really going unpaid. In other words, during the first part of the day, the capitalist makes enough money from your labor power to pay for your wages for the whole day, and so for the rest of the day you’re working for free.

The capitalist can increase the rate of surplus value in two ways. First, they can increase the length of the working day. If six hours covers the cost of our daily maintenance, and the next six are surplus labor, then the capitalist can obviously get more surplus labor by increasing the length of the working day. Now if the working day is two hours longer, that’s two more hours of surplus labor. Marx called this absolute surplus value. However many hours you add to the day beyond the necessary labor time is surplus labor. The only limit is that there are only 24 hours in a day. And in the beginnings of industrial capitalism, the capitalists did just that, extending the working day as much as they possibly could. The working class saw through this trick and struggled tooth and nail to limit the length of the working day. Thanks to the blood of the labor movement, we now have an eight-hour day in the U.S., overtime protections and so on, though the bosses continue to push back against this.

However, this isn’t the only way the capitalist can increase the rate of surplus value. The second method, which Marx called relative surplus value, involved intensifying production, or increasing the intensity of labor. This means getting the workers to produce more in the same or less time. They achieve this by improving technology, increasing efficiency, speeding up the machinery, increasing production quotas, and so on. In this way, in a 12-hour day, the worker is able to spend, say, four hours, rather than six, in necessary labor time. The worker produces enough to pay for their whole day’s pay in four hours, rather than six, leaving eight hours of surplus labor.

As Joe Burns puts it in his book Class Struggle Unionism, “The billionaires call this profit. Class struggle unionists call it theft.” That’s the basics of surplus value, and it is the source of the vast and ongoing accumulation of wealth by the capitalist class, stolen, by sleight of hand, from the workers themselves. This surplus value is the basis for the fundamental class antagonism between the working class and the capitalist class. Their profit only comes at our expense. Their profit is money that we earned but were never paid for, and as a result, they prosper while we suffer. Only socialist revolution, where the working class takes power and seizes the means of production from the capitalists, can change this basic fact and set things right, so that we are each paid according to our work and so that we can rebuild society to take care of everyone’s needs.

Chapter 27: Capitalist accumulation and overproduction

It is a fact of historical materialism that the development of the productive forces reduces the amount of labor required by production. As technology and techniques improve, the amount of work required to meet human needs is reduced. This should be a fact that liberates humanity from toil, freeing us to pursue our interests, hobbies, goals of self-development, and so on.

But that’s not what has happened, and there is a material reason why that hasn’t happened. In fact, under capitalism, it cannot happen. The capitalist relations of production – the relations of class, division of labor and ownership – stand in the way of that. Because the means of production are concentrated in the hands of a small group who get rich at the expense of those who do the work, expropriating for themselves the wealth the workers produce, instead of liberating us, technical advancement under capitalism furthers inequality and sharpens class struggle.

These technical and technological improvements in industry and agriculture mean that the number of workers needed for production is reduced. In other words, as the capitalists invest more constant capital into technology, the variable capital invested in labor power is reduced. The result of this is that the demand for living labor is decreased by the development of industry as technology plunges millions into unemployment, while those still employed live precariously under threat of unemployment.

In other words, the general law of capitalist accumulation is that it accelerates the working class being supplanted by machinery, while those cast into unemployment act as a reserve army of labor for capital, driving down wages overall as a result of the large supply of workers in need of employment.

The workers, of course, organize and fight back to resist this – to raise wages and improve working conditions, counterbalancing this somewhat. But nevertheless, as a general tendency the worsening position of the working class in the capitalist mode of production holds true. We can see this very well in the ever-increasing wealth inequality between the working and oppressed people on the one hand, and the rich on the other hand.

The result of all of this is crisis. The capitalists are compelled by competition amongst themselves to achieve the highest rate of profit. The nature of this competitive drive is that those capitalists who cannot achieve this are crushed by their more ruthlessly efficient competitors. So, they must always update and develop the productive forces in order to increase efficiency, expand production and extract as much surplus value from the workers as they can. But demand is limited by the purchasing power of the masses of the people, who are being squeezed tighter and tighter. The wages of the working class cannot afford to buy all that is produced, leading to overproduction.

Simply put, these crises of overproduction mean that commodities are produced far in excess of effective demand, resulting in difficulties in finding markets for those commodities, falling prices and then restriction of production. This leads the economy into a period of contraction, stagnation, recession and even depression. Currency manipulation, speculation and bank failures can worsen these crises and change some of the particulars, even leading to problems of inflation as they scramble to find ways out of the crisis.

But since the crisis of overproduction generally causes prices to fall, the capitalists will take this opportunity to replenish and replace obsolete machinery, update technology and position themselves to overtake their competitors. The big capitalists will consume the enterprises of the smaller capitalists, and over time the economy will begin to recover. But this recovery will be at the expense of the waste and destruction of the excess commodities and productive forces, and the further destitution of millions. And these cycles of boom and bust repeat themselves again and again.

Dialectically, these crises are rooted in the fundamental contradiction at the heart of the capitalist mode of production: the contradiction between social production and private accumulation. The social character of production, the division of labor, specialization and efficiency lead to ever expanding production, while the accumulation of profit and wealth by the capitalist class at the expense of the workers means the working class simply cannot afford to purchase what is produced.

The reality is that these crises of overproduction demonstrate to everyone the limits of the capitalist system. They show exactly how the capitalist relations of production act as fetters, as chains, binding the development of the productive forces. If not for these fetters – the relationship of ownership of capitalist society – the expansion of production would be a force to eliminate scarcity and toil. Capitalism’s productive relations stand in the way of that. As long as things continue like this, we will never be free from these objective laws of capitalist crisis. Only socialist revolution, turning this system upside down, can put an end to these destructive cycles of crisis and ruin and create the basis for a new, just, society.

Chapter 28: Imperialism, or monopoly capitalism

Now that we’ve spent some time looking at the basic concepts of Marx’s critique of political economy, let’s move on to Lenin’s analysis of imperialism. Toward the end of the 1800s, the internal laws of motion of capitalism caused it to enter a new and final stage in its development – monopoly capitalism. In the essay “Imperialism and the Split in Socialism,” Lenin defines it like this:

“Imperialism is a specific historical stage of capitalism. Its specific character is threefold: imperialism is monopoly capitalism; parasitic, or decaying capitalism; moribund capitalism. The supplanting of free competition by monopoly is the fundamental economic feature, the quintessence of imperialism. Monopoly manifests itself in five principal forms: (1) cartels, syndicates and trusts—the concentration of production has reached a degree which gives rise to these monopolistic associations of capitalists; (2) the monopolistic position of the big banks—three, four or five giant banks manipulate the whole economic life of America, France, Germany; (3) seizure of the sources of raw material by the trusts and the financial oligarchy (finance capital is monopoly industrial capital merged with bank capital); (4) the (economic) partition of the world by the international cartels has begun. There are already over one hundred such international cartels, which command the entire world market and divide it “amicably” among themselves—until war redivides it. The export of capital, as distinct from the export of commodities under non-monopoly capitalism, is a highly characteristic phenomenon and is closely linked with the economic and territorial-political partition of the world; (5) the territorial partition of the world (colonies) is completed.”

Lenin goes on to point out, “Imperialism, as the highest stage of capitalism in America and Europe, and later in Asia, took final shape in the period 1898–1914. The Spanish-American War (1898), the Anglo-Boer War (1899–1902), the Russo-Japanese War (1904–05) and the economic crisis in Europe in 1900 are the chief historical landmarks in the new era of world history.”

It is important to stress that, as Marxist-Leninists understand it, imperialism and monopoly capitalism are identical. You can’t have one without the other.

In The Poverty of Philosophy, Marx writes that monopoly arises dialectically from competition. Marx argued that, by the process of capitalism’s own internal laws of motion, capital becomes more and more centralized, more and more concentrated, into the hands of fewer and fewer capitalists. But it was Lenin who saw the practical results of this process and properly understood the relationship between imperialism and the proletarian revolution.

Every modern industry is currently dominated by only a handful of monopolistic companies. The big banks have become intertwined with industry, creating finance capital and with it a financial oligarchy. They exploit workers both at home and abroad. These financial oligarchs have come to dominate bourgeois states, using their money to manipulate the media and buy politicians, and thereby use the imperialist military to partition and repartition the world according to their own economic interests. This has led to two world wars for the sake of the imperialist re-division of the world.

A main feature of imperialism is national and colonial oppression. We’ll go into more detail on this later, but for now, it is important to understand that national oppression is a product of monopoly capitalism. Seeking relief from the chronic crises of capitalism, the monopoly capitalists seek to dominate markets and export capital around the globe. They rob and pillage from the so-called Third World and bring the spoils of super-profits back home. This process locks down and enforces semi-colonial and semi-feudal relations in those countries, stunting their development. U.S. imperialism lives parasitically on the oppression of whole nations and peoples. The U.S. holds colonies in the Caribbean like Puerto Rico and the Pacific such as Guam and the Marshall Islands. Within its own borders, imperialism likewise uses national oppression to dominate the Hawaiian nation, the Chicano nation in the Southwest, and the African American nation in the Black Belt in the South.

By the end of World War II, the United States arose as the dominant imperialist power. However, it has since racked up a series of military defeats against the rising national liberation struggles, notably Vietnam in the 1970s, which marked the beginning of U.S. imperialism’s decline. The rise of the socialist countries contributed greatly to that decline. And while the U.S. currently stands at the forefront of the imperialist powers, inter-imperialist rivalry still exists, and other imperialist blocs, such as the European Union and Japan, also seek to dominate world markets.

Currently, however, the principal contradiction on the world scale is the contradiction between imperialism on the one hand and the movements for national liberation on the other. It is the anti-imperialist struggles of the masses of the oppressed nations that are the major force against imperialism today.

Wars of national liberation that weaken imperialism are progressive. As Stalin said in Foundations of Leninism, “The struggle that the Emir of Afghanistan is waging for the independence of Afghanistan is objectively a revolutionary struggle, despite the monarchist views of the Emir and his associates, for it weakens, disintegrates and undermines imperialism.” Revolutionaries in imperialist countries should be what Lenin called “revolutionary defeatists,” opposing and seeking the defeat of their own countries in imperialist wars.

Modern imperialism has a lot of tools at its disposal. It relies upon and maintains a massive web of military bases and military alliances such as NATO, imposes sanctions, and resorts to economic coercion and blackmail through institutions like the IMF, WTO and World Bank. It uses direct military intervention and instigates coups for the purposes of destabilization and regime change, or pours billions of dollars into proxy wars through states like Israel and Ukraine. Because it is in decline, it grows more belligerent and desperately looks for any way it can to shift the balance of power back into its favor.

Marxist-Leninists analyze imperialism because we want to put that analysis to work. We need to understand who our friends and enemies are, and we need to understand how and why our enemies do what they do so that we can act most effectively to bring the imperialist monster of slaughter and plunder down once and for all.

Chapter 29: The national question in the era of imperialism

Imperialism means monopoly capitalism, but it brings along with it war and national oppression. Because of the peculiar dynamics of imperialism in the era of proletarian revolution, the national question takes on a particular importance, and, concretely, must be understood and dealt with practically in ways that differ from the pre-imperialist period of competitive capitalism.

What do we mean by the “national question” and why is this important? Essentially, Marxist-Leninists, when referring to the national question, are referring to the analysis of the problems posed to the revolutionary movement by the materialist process by which nations form and develop, and the role that plays in revolutionary change.

The Second International failed the test posed by the national question. Founded under the guidance of Marx’s collaborator, Friedrich Engels, the Second International helped to lead the international workers movement at the turn of the 20th century, from 1889 to 1916. But after Engels’s death in 1895, the leaders of the Second International found that they were not up to the task, and unable to grapple with the problems posed to the workers’ movement by the rise of imperialism, and their analysis and leadership gave way to revisionism and opportunism.

To Karl Kautsky and Eduard Bernstein, who came to dominate the Second International, socialism was something for Europeans, while imperialism was expected to develop the productive forces of the colonies. This opportunist and social-chauvinist position was correctly condemned by Lenin and was a primary reason for the break with the Second International and the formation of the Third, Communist International.

The opportunists of the Second International committed two errors regarding imperialism and the national question. First, they believed that imperialism would lead to peace and development among nations and lay the groundwork for a peaceful transition to socialism. Kautsky called this ultra-imperialism, where all the imperialist powers would merge under one global economic interest. This led them to their second error, which was to fail to grasp how imperialism changed the nature of the national question itself.

There are two periods in the development of the national question. In the earlier, pre-imperialist period of capitalism, nations were formed through bourgeois-democratic revolutions out of the remnants of feudalism. This is the way the nations of western Europe came into being. In Marxism and the National Question, Stalin outlined the definition by which Marxist-Leninists would from then on understand what a nation is: a stable community of people formed on the basis of a common territory, language, economic life, and psychological makeup, manifested in a common culture. The revolutionary class at the forefront of the formation of these nations in this first period was the bourgeoisie.

In the second period of the development of the national question, the era of imperialism and proletarian revolution, the national question becomes a national-colonial question. Imperialism develops unevenly, and the imperialist powers, having grabbed up as much of the world as they can, freeze the oppressed nations into a semi-feudal state. The aspects of nationhood are not free to develop on their own, as they are oppressed by the imperialists. Their common territory is plundered and occupied, marred by artificially imposed boundaries. Their language is suppressed, their economic life stunted, and their culture stolen and trampled upon.

Because imperialism means that the world is divided up among the imperialist powers, then the question of bourgeois-democratic revolutions is taken off the table for the colonized people. The national liberation struggle thus often begins as a national-democratic revolution, uniting the broad masses with the national bourgeoisie against the imperialists and their domestic agents, the comprador class. But unless it proceeds to the stage of proletarian-socialist revolution, the national bourgeoisie will almost certainly be bought off to replace the pro-imperialist compradors. In this way nominal independence, short of socialist revolution, has been met with semi-colonialism, or neo-colonialism, and the monopoly capitalists continue to assert their control through economic pressure, and by installing and propping up pro-imperialist governments.

Thus, in this second period of the development of the national question, imperialism limits the possibility of a bourgeois-led, democratic revolution, and the national question becomes solvable within the context of, and as a part of, the proletarian revolution. The revolutionary class at the forefront of the formation of the national liberation struggles in this second period must therefore be the proletariat of the oppressed nation, in alliance with the broad anti-imperialist classes.

Stalin, in his work Foundations of Leninism, addressed the issue of opposing national oppression and the fight for socialism:

“Leninism has proved, and the imperialist war and the revolution in Russia has confirmed, that the national question can be solved only in connection with and on the basis of the proletarian revolution, and that the road to victory of the revolution in the West lies through the revolutionary alliance with the liberation movement of the colonies and dependent countries against imperialism. The national question is a part of the general question of the proletarian revolution, a part of the question of the dictatorship of the proletariat.”

We see then that there are two tendencies regarding the national question at work under imperialism. On the one hand, imperialism seeks to unite vast territories under its control, for the purposes of the super-exploitation of their lands, peoples and resources, and for the export of capital in the form of factories, infrastructure, military aid and predatory loans. However, imperialism can only accomplish this by way of violence and oppression. This gives rise to the second tendency, which is expressed in the struggle of the oppressed nations to liberate themselves from imperialism. Under imperialism, these two tendencies are utterly irreconcilable, and in fact, this antagonistic contradiction between imperialism and the oppressed nations makes up the principal contradiction on a world scale.

Because the monopoly capitalist class is not only the exploiter of the working class, but also responsible for the oppression of these nations, the role of communists is to unite the working-class struggle for socialism with the anti-imperialist national liberation movements. The working class and the national liberation struggles are natural allies, bound together by a common enemy. Every blow by the workers against the monopoly capitalist class is a blow against the architects of national oppression, and every victory for the anti-imperialist liberation struggles likewise weakens the monopoly capitalist class.

Thus, communists in the United States must support the anti-imperialist liberation movements of oppressed nations, be they in Palestine, Puerto Rico, Hawaii, the Chicano nation in the Southwest, or the African American nation in the Black Belt South. This means raising the demand for self-determination, meaning the right for the oppressed nation to determine its future as a nation, including the right to separate and form an independent state in its national territory.

Some have argued that advocating for self-determination would lead to the formation of small and weak states, therefore helping imperialism automatically. However, Lenin argued that the purpose of self-determination was not to divide peoples, but to be able to unite freely, without compulsion. Lenin compared this to the right to divorce, as the basis of a freely chosen union.

It must be stated that the concrete analysis of concrete conditions, as always, must be taken into account, and the demand for self-determination, like any democratic demand, should be judged according to whether or not it ultimately helps or hinders imperialism.

The fight against national oppression, including the recognition of the right of self-determination, is the foundation on which the strategic alliance between the multinational working class and the oppressed nationalities is built. In the current era, that strategic alliance is absolutely indispensable. Nothing can be accomplished without it.

Chapter 30: What is neo-colonialism?

In the previous two chapters in this book, we’ve discussed imperialism, or monopoly capitalism, which Lenin called “the last stage of capitalism.” We explained how imperialism and monopoly capitalism are synonymous, the laws of motion inherent in capitalism that lead to imperialism, how imperialism means war, and how imperialism has affected the national question. In the last chapter, we talked about how and why the contradiction between imperialism and the national liberation movements is the principal contradiction on a world scale.

In 1916, Lenin wrote, “Imperialism, as the highest stage of capitalism in America and Europe, and later in Asia, took final shape in the period 1898–1914. The Spanish-American War (1898), the Anglo-Boer War (1899–1902), the Russo-Japanese War (1904–05) and the economic crisis in Europe in 1900 are the chief historical landmarks in the new era of world history.”

But imperialism was met everywhere with the resistance of the colonized peoples. In some places, it was thrown off by national liberation movements that won liberation. Where the proletariat has taken power, like in Vietnam, Cuba or China, for example, they have consolidated the gains of their liberation and built socialism. In other countries they have met with challenges to maintain an independent course, as the imperialists have tried to find other ways to keep those countries under their yoke. Why?

In his 1965 book, Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism, Kwame Nkrumah writes, “Once a territory has become nominally independent it is no longer possible, as it was in the last century, to reverse the process. Existing colonies may linger on, but no new colonies will be created. In place of colonialism as the main instrument of imperialism we have today neo-colonialism.”

Nkrumah defines neo-colonialism like this: “The essence of neo-colonialism is that the State which is subject to it is, in theory, independent and has all the outward trappings of international sovereignty. In reality its economic system and thus its political policy is directed from outside.”

The Chinese Communist Party put it this way in the 1963 article “Apologists for Neo-Colonialism”:

“The facts are clear. After World War II the imperialists have certainly not given up colonialism, but have merely adopted a new form, neo-colonialism. An important characteristic of such neo-colonialism is that the imperialists have been forced to change their old style of direct colonial rule in some areas and to adopt a new style of colonial rule and exploitation by relying on the agents they have selected and trained. The imperialists headed by the United States enslave or control the colonial countries and countries which have already declared their independence by organizing military blocs, setting up military bases, establishing “federations” or “communities”, and fostering puppet regimes. By means of economic “aid” or other forms, they retain these countries as markets for their goods, sources of raw material and outlets for their export of capital, plunder the riches and suck the blood of the people of these countries. Moreover, they use the United Nations as an important tool for interfering in the internal affairs of such countries and for subjecting them to military, economic and cultural aggression. When they are unable to continue their rule over these countries by “peaceful” means, they engineer military coups d’etat, carry out subversion or even resort to direct armed intervention and aggression.”

Another term for this is semi-colonialism, but the meaning is the same. The term, “semi-colonialism,” comes from the Communist International (Comintern), which categorized countries as imperialist, colonial, and semi-colonial, and gave different guidance regarding revolutionary strategy based on that categorization. Typically, a semi-colonial country is characterized by large peasantry, a relatively small proletariat, a significant landlord class, a national bourgeoisie, and a comprador bourgeoisie. The semi-colony is “independent,” formally, but remains dominated by the imperialists in a number of ways.

According to Nkrumah,

“The methods and form of this direction can take various shapes. For example, in an extreme case the troops of the imperial power may garrison the territory of the neo-colonial State and control the government of it. More often, however, neo-colonialist control is exercised through economic or monetary means. The neo-colonial State may be obliged to take the manufactured products of the imperialist power to the exclusion of competing products from elsewhere. Control over government policy in the neo-colonial State may be secured by payments towards the cost of running the State, by the provision of civil servants in positions where they can dictate policy, and by monetary control over foreign exchange through the imposition of a banking system controlled by the imperial power.”

Most recently we’ve seen this in the form of loans from the imperialist powers, often through an institution like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) or the World Bank. These loans have heavy strings attached, in the form of imposing Structural Adjustment Programs (SAP) upon the recipient as a condition of the loan. These SAPs impose privatization of industry and natural resources, opening them up to foreign capital. They also impose austerity programs, cutting wages and increasing taxes upon the people of the neo-colonial state. The economy is all around liberalized, the legal system made more favorable to capital and more hostile to labor, and all barriers to its super-exploitation by foreign finance capital are removed.

Imperialist trade agreements like the North American and Central American Free Trade Agreements (NAFTA and CAFTA) impose “free trade zones” to make it easier for U.S. companies to overpower the economies of Mexico and Central America. The domestic comprador bourgeoisie directly benefits, lining their own pockets as the bought-and-paid-for representatives of foreign capital in these countries.

Often military aid will also be an element of neo-colonialism, as the imperial power uses the military of the neo-colonial country, funded, armed and trained by the imperialists, to carry out proxy wars and counter-insurgency on its behalf. The United States alone has almost 800 military bases spread over 80 countries throughout the world. Through these regional proxies, like Israel or Ukraine, and through the domination of the NATO military alliance, the U.S. can extend its geopolitical hegemony even further.

All the money pumped into the neo-colonial government not only serves to open those countries up for super-exploitation by the imperialists, but also serves as an outlet for the export of capital by the monopoly capitalists. Nkrumah puts it well when he says, “The result of neo-colonialism is that foreign capital is used for the exploitation rather than for the development of the less developed parts of the world. Investment under neo-colonialism increases rather than decreases the gap between the rich and the poor countries of the world.”

And of course, a government that is unwilling to submit to this control, or that steps out of line, or elects a government unfriendly to the imperialists, faces the very real and constant threat of coups, military intervention, and other forms of regime change.

In some cases, the imperialists have granted de facto independence as a concession to a liberation struggle, only to transition the newly formed government into neo-colonial domination. In other cases, one imperialist power may encourage and aid an independence movement in order to pull a colony away from the orbit of another imperialist rival, only to dominate the newly independent government as a neo-colony.

Take for example the Philippines. In Philippine Society and Revolution, Jose Maria Sison argues,

“Though the reactionaries claim that the Philippines is already independent, it is not in fact completely so … The truth is that U.S. imperialism persists in violating the national sovereignty of the Filipino people and in strangulating Philippine independence. Before and after the grant of nominal independence, U.S. imperialism made sure that it would continue to control the Philippine economy, politics, culture, military and foreign relations. It has extorted unequal treaties and one-sided privileges that transgress the national sovereignty, territorial integrity and national patrimony of the Filipino people. U.S. imperialism continues to arrogate unto itself the privilege of giving armed protection to the local exploiting classes. Though there is now the illusion that the present government is self-determining, its basic policies and the election and appointment of its highest officials are mainly determined by U.S. imperialism. The clearest evidence that the Philippines is still a colony of the United States consists of economic enclaves lorded over by U.S. enterprises and also of huge U.S. military bases. These colonial enclaves can be removed only by means of an armed national revolution to assert Philippine independence.”

We see in the socialist countries something different. Because working and oppressed people are in power in those countries, instead of the bourgeoisie, they have, by and large, successfully resisted attempts by the imperialists to reassert their dominance. In some cases, the imperialists were able to orchestrate counter-revolutions and coups, sometimes with the help of opportunists and revisionists within the socialist government. In those cases, those countries have been met with balkanization, “shock therapy,” and terrible declines in their living standards. But in the case of Cuba, Vietnam, China, Laos, and the DPRK, imperialism has failed to regain control. Because the working class controls the commanding heights of the socialist economies of these countries and operates them in a planned way to benefit the people first and foremost, they have been able to develop their productive forces, expand their economies and improve the conditions of their people, while defending themselves from both foreign intervention and economic blackmail from the imperialist powers.

The move from formal independence to neo-colonialism in any country is a setback for people of the whole world whenever and wherever it occurs. But the absolute and irreconcilable antagonism at the root of the entire imperialist system cannot be papered over by the imperialists and their puppets. Imperialism is a system in decline. The working class here in the United States is becoming more conscious and organized. The socialist countries are on the rise. The national liberation movements are growing in strength, from the Philippines and the Middle East to Latin America.

As the Communist Party of China said in 1963, “However hard the imperialists disguise their intentions and bestir themselves, however hard their apologists whitewash and help neo-colonialism, imperialism and colonialism cannot escape their doom. The victory of the national liberation revolution is irresistible.”

Chapter 31: Against Sakai on settler colonialism and the national question in the U.S.

As we saw in the earlier chapter on the historic emergence of capitalism, capitalism’s origins are largely based upon “primitive accumulation” – the theft of land and resources during the colonial period. This theft helped to jumpstart the original accumulation of capital. In the U.S. this began with settler colonialism, whereby colonizers from Europe settled in the Americas, bringing with them terrible violence and oppression of indigenous and other oppressed peoples.

The FRSO Program, in particular the section on “Immediate Demands for U.S. Colonies, Indigenous Peoples, and Oppressed Nationalities,” describes this well. The colonists who founded the U.S. did so through genocide and slavery. They waged war against the indigenous population, systematically murdering and forcing them onto reservations. They brought enslaved people from Africa who they forced to toil on the plantations of the South. The American Revolution in 1776 ended British colonial rule, but the American colonists kept their newly founded bourgeois democracy for themselves. Only white male landowners had political power or the right to vote.

The Mexican-American War from 1846 to 1848 brought about the annexation of northern Mexico by the United States. This led to the formation of an oppressed Chicano nation in the Southwest. A second revolution, which began in 1861 with the U.S. Civil War, would be necessary to end chattel slavery and defeat the Southern planter class. This experience, along with the counter-revolution against Reconstruction in 1877, led to the formation of an African American oppressed nation in the Black Belt agricultural region of the southern U.S. In 1893 the U.S. overthrew the Kingdom of Hawaii, forging it into an oppressed nation made up of the Native Hawaiian, Japanese, Chinese, Filipinos, Koreans, Puerto Ricans and Portuguese working masses of the islands.

All of this turns around the national question. The Marxist-Leninist theory of the national question was developed by Lenin in The Right of Nations to Self-Determination and Stalin in Marxism and the National Question. Essentially, they argue that nations oppressed by imperialism, which are formed on the basis of common territory, history, economy, language and culture, have the right to self-determination, including the right even to secession. Proletarian internationalism demands that communists respect and uphold this right.

If national self-determination is to truly mean anything, it must be understood in terms of the right to separate. Lenin is crystal clear on this point, when he says, “The right of nations to self-determination means only the right to independence in a political sense, the right to free, political secession from the oppressing nation.” This means that U.S. oppressed nationalities have the right to full equality everywhere, and national self-determination within their homeland, be it the Black Belt, Aztlán, or Hawaii.

A lot of good, theoretical work has been done on this. Some of the most valuable writings are Harry Haywood’s 1948 book Negro Liberation, his pamphlet from 1958, For A Revolutionary Position on the Negro Question, and his 1978 autobiography Black Bolshevik. Most recently there is Frank Chapman’s outstanding book published in 2021, Marxist-Leninist Perspectives on Black Liberation and Socialism.

But not everything written on this has been so helpful. Another text that has gained some traction among the left is J. Sakai’s 1983 book, Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat. The book is correct to point out that the U.S. is founded on colonialism, slavery and genocide, but after that it gets a lot wrong. Unfortunately, Sakai’s book is anti-worker and ultra-leftist, and its errors come from a fundamental misunderstanding of the national question in the U.S. Essentially, the view advocated by Sakai rejects the possibility of forming a strategic alliance of the multinational working class and the oppressed nationality movements. It does so with a lot of ultra-left rhetoric, which may seem revolutionary, but actually its central thesis is harmful towards building a real revolutionary movement. It is a view that opposes the multinational working class unity that must be built if we are to organize a revolution in this country. Revolution is a serious matter. We need correct theory, not just the most revolutionary-sounding rhetoric.

Marxist-Leninists have long rejected the view that the working class in the imperialist countries is sold out and has no revolutionary potential. This is Sakai’s starting point, arguing that white workers are completely bought off by imperialism. Indeed, Lenin himself said in 1918 in his Letter to American Workers, “The American workers … will be with us, for civil war against the bourgeoisie. The whole history of the world and of the American labor movement strengthens my conviction that this is so.”

But according to Sakai, “Amerika is so decadent that it has no proletariat of its own, but must exist parasitically on the colonial proletariat of oppressed nations and national minorities.” This view, that the relationship of white workers to oppressed nationalities is fundamentally parasitic, runs counter to facts and makes enemies of friends, disrupting the most important revolutionary weapon the masses of the people currently have: the united front against monopoly capitalism and the strategic alliance. Bourgeois ideology has always sought to divide the multinational working class along racial lines, and Sakai’s work supports that effort.

Sakai’s analysis misses an essential point that the great African American communist Harry Haywood made way back in 1948 in his book Negro Liberation: white supremacy is bad for the multinational working class as a whole, even for white workers. According to Haywood, “It is not accidental … that where the Negroes are most oppressed, the position of the whites is also most degraded. Facts … expose the staggering price of ‘white supremacy’ in terms of health, living and cultural standards of the great masses of southern whites. They show ‘white supremacy’ … to be synonymous with the most outrageous poverty and misery of the southern white people. They show that ‘keeping the Negro down’ spells for the entire South the nation’s lowest wage and living standards.”

In other words, Haywood explains that white workers do not materially benefit from white supremacy, but are, in fact, tremendously harmed by it and have a material interest in opposing it. Haywood goes even further into this question in his 1981 comment on the book A House Divided: Labor and White Supremacy, where he says that the weakness of the U.S. labor movement shouldn’t be blamed on racist views among white workers, and that “to attribute the main and entire problem of labor’s slowness to revolt against capitalism to white chauvinism is an over-simplification and distorts the actual development that has taken place.” Clearly Harry Haywood is correct that things are far more complex than Sakai would have us believe.

Sakai fails to understand how contradictions have changed, and with this, the terrain of struggle over the course of U.S. history. The early period of settler colonialism that was at the root of capitalism’s genesis from Columbus through the beginning of the American Revolution gave way to a period of competitive capitalism in the new United States. While the genocide and land theft of native peoples continued, new contradictions emerged. The beginnings of the U.S. labor movement reflected the growing contradiction between labor and capital. Slave revolt intensified, with the most well known led by Nat Turner (1831) and John Brown (1859). As the conflict over slavery deepened, it eventually led to the U.S. Civil War.

The industrial buildup in the North during the Civil War intensified the concentration and centralization of capital, leading to the emergence of monopoly capitalism and modern U.S. imperialism. Imperialism twisted the U.S. into its own “prison house of nations,” locking the oppressed nations into underdevelopment. Revolutionary strategy must confront that reality. As Haywood pointed out, monopoly capitalism crushes the entire multinational working class – white and non-white workers alike, together with the broad masses of the people – under its boot. Only a revolutionary united front, led by the multinational working class and based on the strategic alliance of the workers movement and the oppressed nationalities can possibly defeat this terrible hydra.

We have said before that the working class has no material interest in the oppression of others and that it is on this basis that the working class is destined to end all oppression. This historic mission of the proletariat is an absolutely essential thesis of Marxism-Leninism. This reality forms the basis of the strategic alliance between the multinational working class and the oppressed nationalities, and it is for this reason that Haywood emphasized ideological struggle against errors that obscure that reality – against both white chauvinism and narrow nationalism.

The 1930 Resolution of the Comintern that Haywood helped to write clarifies how communists should put all of this into practice. “They, the white workers, must boldly jump at the throat of the 100 percent bandits who strike a Negro in the face. This struggle will be the test of the real international solidarity of the American white workers.” This means fighting against racism and national oppression every day and in all of its forms, from opposing workplace discrimination to standing up to police violence and against mass incarceration. It goes on to say that “It is the special duty of the revolutionary Negro workers to carry on tireless activity among the Negro working masses to free them of their distrust of the white proletariat and draw them into the common front of the revolutionary class struggle against the bourgeoisie.”

The Chicago Black Panther Party chairman, Fred Hampton, summed this up clearly, saying “we fight racism with solidarity.”

This same logic of opposing white chauvinism and narrow nationalism applies not just to the Black national question, but to the Chicano and Hawaiian national questions as well. It remains the road forward today in building the revolutionary strategic alliance. This anti-imperialist, multinational united front, based on a correct analysis of the national question, is the only way communists can successfully combat the legacy left behind by settler colonialism in the U.S. That means combatting that legacy not just with revolutionary-sounding rhetoric, but with a strategy to defeat it.

The national question in the United States is extremely complex, in both theory and practice. There are many opportunities for misunderstanding and error. But the national question is far too important to allow these errors to go unanswered. When the multinational working class seizes power in this country, the national question will be one of the most important problems to solve. National self-determination must mean precisely that: the right of oppressed nations to determine their own national destiny, including the right to separate. Multinational working-class unity can only be built on the basis of that understanding. This is absolutely essential if we are to make a revolution in this country that liberates all people from exploitation and oppression.

Section VI: Leninism

Chapter 32: The party of a new type

In order to have a successful revolution that can overthrow the capitalist ruling class, put the working class into power, and build socialism, we need to be organized in the way that is best suited to that task. The great leader of the Bolshevik revolution, V.I. Lenin, took up this question of Marxist revolutionary organization in 1902 in his book, What is to be Done? In this book, Lenin for the first time gives us the theory of the “Party of a new type.”

In this early period of the revolutionary movement in Russia, much like in the U.S. today, there were many groups and organizations contending for leadership of the working-class movement. No organization had been able to assume leadership and merge itself with the advanced fighters of the entire workers’ movement. But Lenin saw this as the critical task of the day. He saw the need for the workers to form a party, but not a party of the old type, that based itself on contesting parliamentary elections, but a new type of party that could lead a revolutionary, life-or-death battle against the ruling class.

One such group was known as the “Economists,” because they argued that the working class should limit itself to the economic struggle, leaving aside the political struggle. They argued that the working class would organize itself and its economic battles spontaneously, without conscious leadership. Lenin, on the other hand, argued that the working class must engage with politics outside of their immediate economic struggle, and that they could not achieve emancipation from economic exploitation without a political struggle against tsarism. Lenin also argued that the Economists tailed behind the spontaneity of the masses, leaving the working class unarmed against an enemy that was armed to the teeth. He argued that without fusing socialist consciousness and Marxist theory with the workers’ movement, the working class would be groping blindly in the dark. All in all, Lenin summed up the Economists as propagating a reformist trend in the workers’ movement and as being opposed to revolution.

In the process of the struggle against the Economists, Lenin explained what features were necessary for a revolutionary party. Stalin, in his Foundations of Leninism, lists six distinguishing features of this new, Leninist type of party.

First, the party must be the advanced detachment of the working class. This means that the party must be large enough that it comes to contain the best leaders of the entire workers’ movement. By merging itself with the most advanced leaders of the workers’ movement, the party fuses Marxist-Leninist theory with the working class. The party is therefore the political leader of the class, and its general staff. In this way, the party can use what Mao Zedong would later refer to as the “Mass Line” to lead revolutionary struggle, uniting with the advanced fighters in order to mobilize the broad intermediate and win over or isolate the backward elements. It does this by taking up the immediate demands of the masses, using Marxist theory to analyze the contradictions at work, and then bringing that back to the masses in a concentrated, strategic, and revolutionary form. With the mass line, the party and the masses together can win all that can be won in these struggles, while further developing consciousness and building revolutionary organization.

Second, the party must be the organized detachment of the working class. This means not everyone is in the party, and one cannot simply declare oneself a member. The members must be organized and disciplined. This means the party is organized according to “democratic centralism.” This means that the party is democratically organized, but centrally guided. Lower bodies, in which all members must participate, must submit to higher bodies. The members of the party, while able to debate the party’s general line and determine it democratically, must carry out that line once it is decided. Criticism and self-criticism must be practiced by all of the party cadres at all levels to overcome shortcomings.

Third, the party must be the highest form of class organization of the working class. The party is one of the organizations of the working class, but not the only one. These other organizations include trade unions, mass organizations, civic and cultural groups, and other parts of the broad united front against monopoly capitalism. These are organizations with a broad base of unity organized around immediate demands, particular tasks, campaigns and struggles. They require less discipline and less unity to participate in than the party itself, and can therefore include a much broader section of the masses. But the party must strive to give leadership to all of these groups, by means of persuasion and by example, so that the revolution can move forward in a strategic and unified way.

Fourth, the party must be an instrument of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Every state is a dictatorship of one class over the other. Capitalist society is a democracy for the rich, and dictatorship for the rest of us. It is the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. Socialist society will be true democracy for the working and oppressed masses, orders of magnitude more democratic than the capitalist “democracies,” but it will also exercise dictatorship against the defeated bourgeoisie and their agents who want to restore capitalism. The party must be an instrument both for overthrowing the bourgeoisie and for keeping them from organizing counter-revolution, and for maintaining and expanding the dictatorship of the proletariat. As Stalin puts it, this means

“imbuing the millions of proletarians with the spirit of discipline and organization; it means creating among the proletarian masses a cementing force and a bulwark against the corrosive influence of the petty-bourgeois elemental forces and petty-bourgeois habits; it means enhancing the organizing work of the proletarians in re-educating and remolding the petty-bourgeois strata; it means helping the masses of the proletarians to educate themselves as a force capable of abolishing classes and of preparing the conditions for the organization of socialist production. But it is impossible to accomplish all this without a party which is strong by reason of its solidarity and discipline.”

Fifth, the party must embody unity of will. In other words, factionalism goes against the purpose of the party. Once a decision is reached and democratically agreed upon, the cadres of the party must do their best to carry it out to the fullest. The minority submits to the majority.

Sixth, and finally, the party must strengthen itself by purging itself of opportunist elements. Factionalism forms out of opportunism. This doesn’t mean people cannot disagree, but those who would form factions, break the unity of the will of the party, shamelessly break its discipline, or act as enemy agents, thereby hindering it from carrying on with its work, have to be removed from the ranks of the party membership for it to be able to act effectively.

Lenin drafted the “Theses on the Organisational Structure of the Communist Parties and the Methods and Content of their Work,” which were adopted at the 3rd Congress of the Communist International in 1921. These theses further elaborated the function and tasks of the Marxist-Leninist party and deserve careful study.

As Mao Zedong once put it, “If there is to be revolution, there must be a revolutionary party.” Today, there is no party like this in the United States, no revolutionary vanguard, no advanced, organized detachment and general staff of the proletariat. The Communist Party USA, despite its many great achievements and proud history, had entirely abandoned its role as revolutionary vanguard by the end of the 1950s. It is up to the Marxist-Leninists in this country to build a new communist party. The FRSO Program goes into depth on this task and its importance:

“In our view, it is the central task of revolutionaries to create a new communist party – a political party that is serious about revolution in this country. Such a party cannot be proclaimed or declared into being. It will be the product of bringing together or fusing Marxism with the workers movement. In a practical sense this means that a substantial section of the activists, organizers, and leaders need to take up the science of revolution, Marxism-Leninism, in order to build a communist party that is, in fact, the advanced and organized detachment of the multi-national working class. This process will be the result of an organized effort, and it cannot come about spontaneously.”

Essential to this task is building the united front against monopoly capitalism, with the strategic alliance of the workers’ movement and the oppressed nationalities at its core.

Contradictions are sharpening every day, and the world cries out for things to be done. U.S. imperialism is in decline, and its laws of motion will push it into deeper and deeper crises. This will create the objective conditions necessary for revolution in this country. But in order to seize the time, subjective conditions are also necessary: we must have the organization that is required to contend for power. We must build it.

Chapter 33: The Leninist theory of the state

The central point of the Marxist-Leninist understanding of the state is that it is always and everywhere the product of antagonistic class contradictions. It arose from such contradictions, and as long as classes exist, so too will the state. Marx and Engels were the first to understand the state in this way, and it was Engels, in his book The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, who did the most to develop the materialist understanding of how and why and the state arises in human history.

The state arises historically due to material conditions in society, namely due to the development of classes with opposing class interests. Engels says, “But in order that these antagonisms, these classes with conflicting economic interests, might not consume themselves and society in fruitless struggle, it became necessary to have a power, seemingly standing above society, that would alleviate the conflict and keep it within the bounds of ‘order’; and this power, arisen out of society but placing itself above it, and alienating itself more and more from it, is the state.”

Engels goes on to explain that the state not only arises in order to hold class antagonism in check but arises out of those class struggles themselves. This means that the state is controlled by the class that makes up the principal, or dominant, aspect of that contradiction. “Because the state arose from the need to hold class antagonisms in check,” writes Engels, “but because it arose, at the same time, in the midst of the conflict of these classes, it is, as a rule, the state of the most powerful, economically dominant class, which, through the medium of the state, becomes also the politically dominant class, and thus acquires new means of holding down and exploiting the oppressed class.”

In the earlier chapter on the superstructure, we looked at how the political and legal institutions, along with repressive apparatuses of the police and military, arise from the economic base of society, in order to reproduce and reinforce the economic base. The state is the legal system and the political institutions of the dominant class, and it is also the “special bodies of armed men” who defend the interests of that class. When Mao Zedong said that “political power grows from the barrel of a gun,” he meant precisely the ability of a class to take and hold state power. In the case of the capitalist class, the guns that enforce their political power are in the hands of the military and the police, who wage war on working and oppressed people at home and abroad on their behalf.

Basically, every state is a dictatorship of one class. The ancient slave societies, even the ancient “democracies,” were dictatorships of slaver owners over slaves. The feudal kingdoms and principalities were dictatorships of the landlords over the peasants. And modern bourgeois democracy is the dictatorship of the capitalist class over the working class. Each of these historic states is a product in the superstructure of the fundamental contradiction between the forces and relations of production within the base.

How does a supposedly “democratic” capitalist state exercise its class dictatorship? When the United States was founded, it was very clear who the state existed for. The only people who could vote were wealthy, white, male landowners. The struggle of working and oppressed people, including armed struggle, such as in the Civil War to abolish chattel slavery, extended the democratic rights once held by this small group to larger and larger sections of the population. But even then, the capitalist class maintains its monopoly on economic and political power. With its money it controls not only the economy, but the press, the government, and the police and military as well.

If the failure of Bernie Sanders' bids for the Democratic Party presidential nomination tells us anything, it is that the capitalist state is designed from top to bottom to serve the interests of the rich and resist any fundamental change in that status quo. We can look at Chile in 1973 as another good example of this. Even though Salvador Allende was able to come to power through the democratic structures of the bourgeois state, he was unable to retain that power. The capitalist class maintained their control of enough of the military to overthrow Allende in a bloody, U.S.-backed coup.

According to Lenin in The State and Revolution, “The supersession of the bourgeois state by the proletarian state is impossible without a violent revolution. The abolition of the proletarian state, i.e., of the state in general, is impossible except through the process of ‘withering away’.” What does this mean? This is an important point. If the state is the product of class antagonism, and arises from those class antagonisms, then so long as class antagonism exists, so too will the state. The only way to get rid of the state is to get rid of class antagonism all together. A revolutionary struggle to smash the capitalist state is necessary, but the only way to abolish the state as such is to abolish classes altogether.

The bourgeois state cannot be democratically reformed. The “democratic” institutions of that state exist in the service of the ruling class. It must be smashed outright and replaced by the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat. The dictatorship of the proletariat has a number of interrelated tasks. First, it must oppress the overthrown bourgeoisie and their agents who want to restore the old order. It likewise must defend itself from hostile imperialist powers who want to dominate and control it. Second, it must construct socialism, a society based on the progressive elimination of all class antagonism. As Lenin says, the goal of socialism is communism. Once internal class antagonism has been done away with, and the external threat of imperialist war and intervention no longer exists, the socialist state will “wither away,” since the material forces that necessitate and give rise to it no longer exist to reproduce and reinforce it. The step-by-step, planned and organized transformation of class society into a classless society, coupled with the tenacity of imperialism, cause this to be a slow, protracted process.

The state cannot be abolished in one blow, as the anarchists would have it. Neither can the institutions of its rule, such as the military and the police. The apparatuses of the state arise necessarily from class antagonism, which cannot be uprooted overnight. Even if we managed somehow to abolish the police, for example, without abolishing the capitalist ruling class itself, then the capitalists would simply replace them with privatized police, which would essentially function as extrajudicial death squads. There are no shortcuts here. The entire state apparatus of the capitalists must be smashed, the expropriators must be expropriated, and the working class must have the power of its own state in order to systematically uproot class exploitation and oppression once and for all.

To sum up, the Leninist theory of the state is that it is a product of class antagonism. The superstructure arises from and enforces the material base of society. This means that the state, as the product of class antagonism, serves to reinforce and reproduce the class antagonism that gave rise to it, so that the exploiting class in power can conduct its exploitative business as smoothly as possible. But the proletariat has the distinction of being the first class in history that doesn’t exploit any other class. This means that the proletarian state has a historic mission that no state before it could achieve. The goal of the proletarian state is not to maintain itself at the expense of other classes, but to get rid of class antagonism, exploitation and oppression altogether, thus creating the material conditions needed to wither away.

Chapter 34: Against the theory of a peaceful transition to socialism

Marxism-Leninism is the science of revolution. The purpose of revolutionary theory is to guide revolutionary practice. Nevertheless, since Marxism was young, there have always been opportunists and revisionists who tried to distort its revolutionary essence. The leading edge of this attack on Marxism – from the misleaders of the Second International, Eduard Bernstein and Karl Kautsky in the early 1900s, to Khrushchev’s modern revisionism, beginning with the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) in 1956 – has been the advocacy of a peaceful transition from capitalism to socialism.

Can the bourgeois state be reformed and led peacefully towards socialism? What is there to learn from past attempts? Even as recently as Bernie Sanders’ campaigns for the presidency, we saw the ruling class unite to deny the possibility of a Sanders candidacy. Even his mild, social democratic reforms were too much for the U.S. monopoly capitalist class.

As Lenin said, and history has proven, “Never…will the exploiters submit to the decision of the exploited majority without trying to make use of their advantages in a last desperate battle, or series of battles.” Just look at the revolutionary movements of the past: for example, the U.S. aerial bombing of the coal miners of Blair Mountain in West Virginia in 1921, or, more recently, the FBI and police repression of the Black Panther Party in the 1960s and 70s, and the jailing and murder of its leaders like Fred Hampton. Civil Rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., in spite of his firm commitment to non-violence, was assassinated. All of these movements were met with counter-revolutionary violence.

Summing up the defeat of the Paris Commune in 1871, Marx said, “the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes.” Instead, it must be smashed, and this is especially true of its military, the force that maintains the power of the ruling class. This is why Marx said that “under no pretext should arms and ammunition be surrendered; any attempt to disarm the workers must be frustrated, by force if necessary.” Gun control leaves working and oppressed people defenseless.

Marx and Engels wrote in the Communist Manifesto, “communists disdain to hide their views and aims.” Revolutionaries must always be honest and clear. Nobody wants war or violence, but the reality is that history has never moved forward without it. The bourgeoisie knows this. They’ve enshrined revolutionary violence in their founding documents. The U.S. Declaration of Independence even calls it a “right” and a “duty.” And to this day, the monopoly capitalists maintain their class dictatorship with violence against working and oppressed people through their police and military. But for them, it is violence for the sake of capital and profit.

Lenin wrote in The State and Revolution, “The supersession of the bourgeois state by the proletarian state is impossible without a violent revolution.” Unfortunately, many communist parties, especially during and after the Second World War, became confused on this question. They came to believe that a desire for peaceful coexistence between capitalist and socialist countries likewise meant the possibility of a peaceful transition from capitalism to socialism. In 1944, the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) leader Earl Browder took the wartime alliance between the U.S. and the Soviets against Hitler so far as to liquidate the party entirely. This was resisted by the international communist movement as a whole, and the party was restored. But this wasn’t the first such error for the CPUSA, and it wouldn’t be the last. Even prior to Browder, the CPUSA had already been criticized by Stalin and the Communist International in 1927 for the “American exceptionalism” of Jay Lovestone, who argued that America wasn’t subject to the laws of history, including the need for revolution.

According to the outstanding African American Marxist-Leninist theorist and revolutionary leader, Harry Haywood, “it was right opportunism, this time expressed largely in the slogan of ‘peaceful, parliamentary and constitutional transition to socialism’ which plunged the Party into its third and fatal crisis.” This was in 1957. Haywood writes that “The Sixteenth Party Convention was a fateful turning point in our Party’s history—the point from which the Party turned inevitably and unalterably down the road to revisionism, the point from which the task of building a new anti-revisionist communist party became the primary task of Marxist-Leninists.”

In the late 1950s many parties, especially in Europe and the United States, were following Khrushchev’s lead in advocating for peaceful transition to socialism. The Communist Party of China (CPC) intervened in 1957 with the article, “Outline of Views on the Question of Peaceful Transition.” There, the CPC said, “If too much stress is laid on the possibility of peaceful transition, and especially on the possibility of seizing state power by winning a majority in parliament it is liable to weaken the revolutionary will of the proletariat, the working people and the Communist Party and disarm them ideologically.”

Later, in 1963, in one of the most important documents of the Great Debate between the CPC and the CPSU, The Proletarian Revolution and Khrushchev’s Revisionism, the CPC wrote, “The proletariat would, of course, prefer to gain power by peaceful means. But abundant historical evidence indicates that the reactionary classes never give up power voluntarily and that they are always the first to use violence to repress the revolutionary mass movement and to provoke civil war, thus placing armed struggle on the agenda.” Everyone knows this is true. But the advocates of peaceful transition would leave the masses unprepared for such an eventuality, instead feeding the working class a pipe dream of a peaceful, electoral, and constitutional road to socialism. For the socialist revolution to be successful, the working class requires what Mao Zedong and the Chinese Communists called the “three magic weapons” of the revolution: the party, the armed struggle, and the united front.

Of course, to deny the possibility of peaceful transition shouldn’t be taken to mean that the immediate task is the revolutionary overthrow of the monopoly capitalist class. A revolutionary struggle is a struggle of the masses in their millions. It requires objective and subjective conditions to be successful. Objectively, the economic crisis must bring about a political crisis, where working and oppressed people can no longer live in the old way, and the ruling class can no longer rule in the old way. On the subjective side, the proletariat must be class-conscious and organized, and must have a Marxist-Leninist Party capable of serving as the advanced detachment and revolutionary general staff of the class.

Revolution is a protracted struggle and the tactics that struggle uses depend upon time, place and conditions. Currently, the material conditions of a revolution do not yet exist. There is no revolutionary economic and political crisis, the working class has a relatively low level of class consciousness and is disorganized, and there is no vanguard, Marxist-Leninist party. We must therefore proceed step by step. At this stage and under these conditions, the main work of revolutionaries is mass organizing, prioritizing party building and the united front against monopoly capitalism. The present aim must be raising the level of consciousness and organization of the working class. We must engage with the masses around immediate demands for basic reforms, better wages, ending police violence, stopping imperialist war and intervention, and so on, to strike blows against the enemy and win all that can be won for the people. We can and should even engage with bourgeois elections – not with any reformist aims, but with the aim of affecting and optimizing the conditions of struggle. Our tactics must keep pace with where the masses are at, politically, and seek to move them forward. The long term goal in the midst of the day-to-day struggle is to prepare the working class and oppressed nationalities to be able to seize the time when such a revolutionary crisis arises.

Communists must be forward looking. Even now, when revolutionary struggle is not an immediate task and we are in a period of generally legal mass organizing, communists should study the strategy, tactics and experience of past and present revolutions around the world in light of our own particular conditions.

In the last analysis, a revolution is the highest form of class struggle, a life or death struggle between the exploiting class and the masses of working and oppressed people. It is, as Mao Zedong said, “an act of violence where one class overthrows another.”

From the October Revolution in 1917 that established the world’s first socialist state, to today – wherever the working class has taken power we have done so through revolutionary means. To recognize this fact isn’t to seek out violence. Truly, communists want peace, and abhor violence. It is a matter of facing facts. It is merely to have an objective, materialist, and scientific view of the role of force in history. The monopoly capitalist class backs up their rule with force – they will use force to maintain their rule. And for our part, the working class will never be able to gain any power that they are not organized and prepared to take.

Chapter 35: The united front against monopoly capitalism

Our enemy is monopoly capitalism, the capitalist and imperialist system that exploits the working class here in the United States and oppresses whole nations of people, here and around the world. The monopoly capitalist class, the imperialists, are well organized, and control both the legal and political institutions of the government as well as the military and police. It will take the masses of the people in their millions to overthrow them. We can’t do it alone. The working class must be organized, and it must organize together broadly with its allies. This “united front” against monopoly capitalism is the revolutionary strategy that will carry us forward toward being able to overthrow the imperialists.

When some forces talk about a united front, they mean something like a coalition of communist groups and organizations. That is not what we mean. We need to be organized much more broadly than that, bringing whole classes and strata together under leadership of the working class and its party. When we talk about a united front, we are talking about building just such a broad movement, with the strategic alliance of the multinational working class and the oppressed nationalities at its core. The purpose of this is to establish and maintain a broad unity of action in opposition to the monopoly capitalist class.

The communist party – the Marxist-Leninist vanguard, organized, and advanced detachment and general staff of the working class that must eventually lead the united front – doesn't exist yet. It is through the mass organizing work in the people's struggles that we will build it, together with the united front itself.

We looked at the Marxist-Leninist conception of the “party of a new type” in a previous chapter. As we said, that party has a very high standard of unity, based on the working class and its ideology, Marxism-Leninism. It is organized according to democratic centralism and demands a great deal of long-term commitment and discipline from its cadre. Because of this, it will never be an organization that contains all of the forces necessary to bring down monopoly capitalism on its own. By standing at the center of the much larger united front, this broader unity and broader organization of the masses becomes possible.

If we understand the united front against monopoly capitalism as a united front of classes, led by the working class and directed against our common enemy, then an analysis of those classes to determine who our friends and enemies are is essential.

The best analysis of the current class structure of the United States is in the Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO) Program. That document looks at the various classes – the monopoly capitalists, the non-monopoly capitalists, the petty bourgeoisie, the working class, and the lumpen proletariat – and analyzes their class interests and trajectory. Based on that analysis, it concludes that the united front must unite everyone who can be united against the monopoly capitalists, including the petty bourgeoisie, whose existence as a class is precarious because of the monopoly capitalists, and the non-monopoly capitalists of the oppressed nationalities – the national bourgeoisie – who suffer national oppression under imperialism. The objective conditions of monopoly capitalism will push some elements within those classes in a revolutionary direction.

One particularity of U.S. imperialism is that it oppresses entire nations within its borders, such as the Chicano nation of Aztlan in the Southwest and the African American nation in the Black Belt South. Because of this, the Black and Chicano liberation movements within the U.S. have an anti-imperialist character. Practically, this means the struggle against racist national oppression must confront the monopoly capitalist class directly. The strategic alliance of the workers’ movement and the national liberation struggles forms the core of the united front for this reason.

Even so, as Mao Zedong said, within the united front, we must maintain our independence and initiative. The united front contains within it a unity and struggle of class forces. The forces we unite with have their own class interests and their own organizations. Some sections of the petty bourgeoisie and the Black and Chicano national bourgeoisie are still exploiting classes, even if not on the scale of the monopoly capitalists. As a class, they want to shake off the monopoly capitalists in order to stabilize and secure their own place in the capitalist system.

We can only lead the united front by persuasion and by example, and we must do our best to do so. To give up leadership would be disastrous. The working class, while seeking broad unity, cannot follow the lead of these other class forces or submit its own class interests to theirs. We can struggle for leadership in a way that prioritizes unity, without giving up our independence and initiative within the united front. Ultimately, only the class-conscious proletariat can lead the revolution towards the construction of socialism and the elimination of exploitation and oppression.

Let’s look more closely at what this looks like in practice. As we’ve discussed previously, the masses are the makers of history, and the correct method of leadership is “from the masses to the masses.” We need to unite broadly with the masses, using Marxism-Leninism to concentrate the felt needs and immediate demands of the masses and focus them towards the long term goal of revolution. We need to rely on the advanced activists in the mass movements to mobilize the broad intermediate, and to win over or isolate the backwards. This is the mass line, and it is how we must conduct our work in the united front. This is true in the current period when our work is legal and above ground, and it would likewise be true if conditions changed, and our work was outlawed and forced underground.

Practically, it plays out something like this: Different classes and strata within the masses come together based on their own class interests, and the advanced within them put forward demands, such as, for example, money for people's needs at home rather than for war abroad. Some mass organizations will be formed spontaneously, while others must be initiated based on the needs of the moment. In either case, the mass organizations formed around these fights will draw in activists from different classes affected by this issue. Our job as communists is to unite everyone who can be united and direct them towards confronting the monopoly capitalists that are the cause of the problem.

We will do everything we can to win all that can be won for the people while striking blows against the enemy. And in the course of that struggle we will make every effort to build consciousness and organization. By drawing in the broad intermediate we can build the mass organizations of the united front. Simultaneously, we can make gains towards building the communist party by winning the advanced to Marxism-Leninism.

The struggle for socialism in the United States will be a protracted struggle, and we must unite broadly with all of the allies we can find. Monopoly capitalism is a system that exploits and oppresses millions of people here and around the world. Therefore, it creates the conditions for us to build the broad unity we need to defeat it.

Chapter 36: Bourgeois democracy and fascism

Communists have a proud history of fighting on the front lines of the resistance to fascism, from the International Brigades in Spain, to the Antifascist Resistance in occupied Europe, to the heroic struggle of the Soviet people to defend the USSR and defeat Nazi Germany. The Soviets liberated the survivors of the death camps and led the assault on Berlin. From that practice, theory has been developed to analyze what fascism is, how it develops, and how it should be fought.

It is common on the left to hear the United States described as fascist. This is especially true among the youth and some petty bourgeois radicals, who want to emphasize how terrible and repressive the U.S. really is. But is this an accurate description of the class enemy in the United States, and what difference does it make?

First, let’s define what fascism is. The commonly accepted definition among Marxist-Leninists is the one used by the Communist International. The Thirteenth Plenum of the Executive Committee of the Communist International (ECCI), in 1933, defined fascism in power as “the open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic and most imperialist elements of finance capital.”

This is different from some other definitions of fascism popular among the left today. Take, for example, the definition given by George Jackson in his book Blood In My Eye. He says, “But both Marxists and non-Marxists alike can agree on at least two of its general factors: its capitalist orientation and its anti-labor, anti-class nature.” From this, Jackson concludes, “these two factors almost by themselves identify the U.S. as a fascist-corporative state.”

Many people take up this view. People rightly see that the United States is repressive, and so they call it fascist, almost as a rhetorical or agitational device, or as an invective against it. Indeed, fascism is capitalist and anti-labor, but there’s more to it than just that. Marxists must be precise and scientific, because our practical and strategic orientation hinges on our scientific analysis of current conditions. The question, “What is to be done?” has to be answered based on these concrete conditions.

Between the ECCI definition and Jackson’s there are some very important differences. Most importantly, Jackson concludes that the U.S. is currently fascist. But if we look concretely and historically at the U.S., the Communist International definition seems to have a better grip on the material reality and historical development on how bourgeois democracy transforms into fascism, as a result of the class struggle.

The problem is that Jackson’s definition isn’t qualitatively different from bourgeois democracy in any stage of its history. Bourgeois democracy has always been a democracy for the rich, and a repressive dictatorship for the rest of us. U.S. capitalism, since its inception, has relied on genocide and national oppression, as well brutal repression of any movements for progressive change. It has always had a capitalist and anti-labor orientation. What good is to call the U.S. fascist if fascism isn’t qualitatively different from bourgeois democracy generally?

The main difference between these two ways of looking at fascism turns around the point of “open terrorist dictatorship.” Certainly, if we look at the fascist states of the 20th century, such as in Italy and Germany, we see something qualitatively different than what we have here. That doesn’t describe our current conditions. Currently, the ruling class can suppress the rights of people, but has to resort to some legal maneuvers to do so. With fascism, the gloves come off. Repression is no longer hidden behind a veil of bourgeois legal norms. “Open terrorist dictatorship” means that legal, above-ground organizing is practically impossible, and the entire resistance to fascism, both the communists and the broader united front, must operate underground in conditions of covertness and illegality.

There is a dialectical relationship between bourgeois democracy and fascism. Fascism is latent in imperialist countries. In its dealings with its colonies and neo-colonies, open terrorist dictatorship is often the principal, or dominant aspect of the contradiction. But within the United States, bourgeois democracy is the principal aspect. This contradiction is largely driven by the contradiction between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie.

Since the class struggle drives this contradiction, and the revolutionary movement is relatively weak, the ruling class doesn’t need to ramp up repression and resort to fascism at this moment. Certainly, it isn’t the case that communist organization has been outlawed and forced underground. And there’s a good reason why it hasn’t been. Simply put, if the monopoly capitalist class doesn’t need to resort to fascism, they would prefer not to. The revolutionary movement in the United States is not strong enough for the U.S. ruling class to outlaw it and resort to open violence against its leaders and militants.

Stalin, in his Report to the 17th Congress of CPSU in 1934, put it like this:

“In this connection the victory of fascism in Germany must be regarded not only as a symptom of the weakness of the working class and a result of the by the betrayals of the working class by Social-Democracy, which paved the way for fascism; it must also be regarded as a sign of weakness of the bourgeois, a sign that the bourgeois is no longer able to rule by the old methods of parliamentary and bourgeois democracy, and, as a consequence, is compelled in its home policy to resort to terrorist methods of rule — as a sign it is no longer to find a way out of the present situation on the basis of a peaceful foreign policy, and, as a consequence, is compelled to resort to a policy of war.”

The ruling class will not resort to fascism until the point is reached when it can no longer rule in the old way, because the movement of the working class and oppressed nationalities has become so well organized, so militant, and so powerful a threat to the monopoly capitalist class, that the ruling class can see the danger of their downfall and defeat before them.

Currently, there are fascist elements among the U.S. reactionaries, many of whom have been emboldened by Trump. Some of these elements even attempted to seize power on January 6, 2021, at the U.S. Capitol. These elements should be taken seriously and resisted by any means necessary. It is certainly possible that the most reactionary elements of finance capital in the United States will resort to fascism, driven by the development of the revolutionary movement to desperation, and of course we should prepare for that eventuality.

The far-right paramilitary groups like the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys, along with their enablers within the “Make America Great Again” wing that currently dominates the GOP, didn’t rise up so boldly out of nowhere. The current rise in reaction is a response to the growing progressive current among the masses, most sharply demonstrated by the uprisings in cities across the country after the police killing of George Floyd in 2020. The George Floyd uprisings pushed the peoples struggles forward in ways we haven’t seen in decades. As the people rose up in anger, we saw a great increase in reactionary violence against the people from both state and non-state forces. As the level of struggle and organization among the broad masses of the people increases, so too will the forces of reaction likely escalate.

But as things stand it only confuses the issue to mischaracterize the current state of bourgeois democracy as fascism in power when it clearly isn’t. Fascism isn’t just reaction in general. It is reaction of a particular type. We don’t need the invective of fascism to know that we should do everything we can to overthrow this horrible system of exploitation, oppression, waste and war. Bourgeois democracy is bad enough.

Section VII: Socialism

Chapter 37: What is socialism?

Marxism isn’t just a philosophical and analytical framework based on dialectical and historical materialism, or a critique of political economy. It is also a theory of revolutionizing society and building socialism. Based on the laws of motion of the capitalist societies that precede it, and the experiences of socialist construction from 1917 until today, Marxism-Leninism is able to give us a vision and roadmap for the socialist transformation of society. Of course, every country has its own concrete path to follow, based on its own time, place and conditions, but we can still draw some lessons from those experiences.

Marx and Engels didn’t invent socialism. Socialist theories existed before them, but they were the first to bring socialism down to earth. Before Marx and Engels put socialist theory on a materialist and scientific basis, the Utopian socialists cooked up all kinds of pie-in-the-sky ideas about utopian societies. But the main errors for the Utopians were that they didn’t understand that socialism required a certain material basis upon which to be built, and they didn’t understand the contradictions that drove the existing class forces, particularly the working class and the capitalist class, to struggle for and against socialism. Non-Marxist “socialist” tendencies today, like the social democrats and the anarchists, persist even now in these utopian errors.

Therefore, we need to examine what the Marxist theory of socialism entails. In that regard, there are two main points to understand about socialism. First, it is based on the state power of the working class, and second, its aim is to transition from capitalism to communism.

When we talk about working class state power, we mean what Marx and Lenin called “the dictatorship of the proletariat.” The working class must take state power in order to reshape society according to its interests, to revolutionize the forces of production and the relations of production, and to expropriate and suppress the defeated capitalist class. To take the power to shape society out of the strangling grip of a handful of billionaires and their agents, and to put into the hands of the working and oppressed people of this country, will not only make the country tremendously more democratic, but it will put this new, proletarian democracy to work in a way that can reshape society and uproot exploitation and oppression altogether.

The dictatorship of the proletariat has the task of organizing production and distribution in a way that can unleash the productive forces. Likewise, the proletarian state has the task of organizing the legal, political and cultural superstructure of society in such a way as to promote and reinforce the socialist mode of production. And finally, the proletarian state has the task of safeguarding the gains of the revolution against counter-revolution from within and imperialist intervention from without.

As Lenin pointed out, for Marx, socialism isn’t something that is just concocted, complete and fully formed at birth, but rather it is “something which develops out of capitalism.” In the “Critique of the Gotha Program,” Marx writes, “What we have to deal with here is a communist society, not as it has developed on its own foundations, but, on the contrary, just as it emerges from capitalist society; which is thus in every respect, economically, morally, and intellectually, still stamped with the birthmarks of the old society from whose womb it emerges.”

For this reason, according to Marx, socialism has to be understood as developing through stages. Marx explains that there are principles that can guide socialism during its lower and higher stages. During the first stage, which we’ve come to understand as the stage of socialist construction prior to the state’s “withering away,” the main organizing principle is “from each according to their ability, to each according to the work.” During this lower stage of socialism, “bourgeois right” still plays a major role. “The right of the producers is proportional to the labor they supply; the equality consists in the fact that measurement is made with an equal standard, labor.” The problem here, Marx says, is that one worker may be “superior to another physically, or mentally, and supplies more labor in the same time, or can labor for a longer time; and labor, to serve as a measure, must be defined by its duration or intensity, otherwise it ceases to be a standard of measurement. This equal right is an unequal right for unequal labor.”

Regarding the higher stage, Marx writes, “In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished; after labor has become not only a means of life but life's prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly – only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!”

In other words, the contradictions that are brought over from the previous mode of production must be eliminated step by step. This is the primary task of socialism, and the most important of those tasks is to eliminate the basis of class division and develop the productive forces to the point where scarcity is altogether eliminated, and the surplus allows for distribution according to need rather than according to labor.

Marx says “But these defects are inevitable in the first phase of communist society as it is when it has just emerged after prolonged birth pangs from capitalist society. Right can never be higher than the economic structure of society and its cultural development conditioned thereby.”

In our forthcoming chapters we’ll look at some of the major contradictions at work in socialist society, in the base and the superstructure, and we’ll also look at the concrete experience of the socialist countries from 1917 until today.

Lenin was correct to say that the goal of socialism is communism. The purpose of the dictatorship of the proletariat is to eliminate the reason for its own existence. By advancing the forces of production and by developing on this basis socialist relations of production, the socialist state creates the conditions for it to wither away, bringing society ever closer to the higher, classless and stateless, stage of communism.

Chapter 38: The socialist transformation of the superstructure

In the earlier chapter on the relationship between the superstructure and the economic base in historical materialism, we explained that the superstructure is basically the cultural, ideological, political and legal aspect of the mode of production, which arises from the economic base and, in turn, supports and helps reproduce the economic base. We also looked at how ideology arises from class struggle. Both bourgeois ideology and proletarian ideology arise from the class struggle in the capitalist mode of production, and, since the capitalist class is dominant and controls the superstructure under capitalism, their ideology is likewise dominant.

Socialism will turn the productive relations (the class relations) of society on their head, putting the working class in power. Also, it will also revolutionize the superstructure, giving control of the cultural, ideological, political and legal apparatuses of the state to the working class.

In his 1923 article, “On Cooperation,” Lenin writes,

“Two main tasks confront us, which constitute the epoch – to reorganize our machinery of state, which is utterly useless, in which we took over in its entirety from the preceding epoch; during the past five years of struggle we did not, and could not, drastically reorganize it. Our second task is educational work among the peasants. And the economic object of this educational work among the peasants is to organize the latter in cooperative societies. If the whole of the peasantry had been organized in cooperatives, we would by now have been standing with both feet on the soil of socialism. But the organization of the entire peasantry in cooperative societies presupposes a standard of culture, and the peasants (precisely among the peasants as the overwhelming mass) that cannot, in fact, be achieved without a cultural revolution.”

Lenin’s point here is that working class culture, that is, the ideology of the working class, must be used to reshape society, and that those ideas must be made to take root firmly among all of the allied classes and strata in the continuing class struggle against the bourgeoisie during socialism. The first task, as Lenin saw it, was political and legal. The state had to be reorganized to align with the needs of the socialist revolution. The laws of the old society had been written to benefit the capitalist class at the expense of the broad masses of the people. They were written first and foremost to protect private property, and they had to be rewritten to the benefit of the Soviet workers and peasants. The whole state apparatus had to be rebuilt in line with principles of proletarian, Soviet democracy.

The second task was educational. But this educational work (increasing literacy, Marxist education, cultural enrichment) had to be connected to the practice of reshaping society. In other words, theory was to be learned through practice, and the petty bourgeois ideology of the peasantry was to be overcome through practice. The Russian peasants had to be convinced through practical experience of the superiority of Marxism and the socialist system. At the same time, cultural institutions like theater, ballet, symphonies and opera, which had previously been the exclusive property of the capitalists, were likewise democratized. Museums, film houses, publishing houses, and the press were all nationalized. Even orchestras were brought to the factories to play for the workers.

When the Bolsheviks took power in 1917, only 41.7% of the population was literate. By 1939, in just 22 years, literacy rose to 87.4%. To give some perspective to this statistic, the current literacy rate in the United States in 2022 is 79%. This revolution in education in the Soviet Union involved the creation of national alphabets for several oppressed nationalities, along with a tremendous upsurge in broad scientific and technical education. The Soviet Union was a poor and backwards country, with underdeveloped productive forces. Building socialism requires the development of the productive forces in order to eliminate scarcity, and developing the productive forces requires an educated working class, technically and politically, that has the knowledge and the will to reshape society in its own image.

Every socialist state has had to revolutionize the superstructure in this way, both in terms of building a state of the working class, the dictatorship of the proletariat, and in terms of revolutionizing culture and ideology. Giving the masses of the people a broad education in science, technology, literature and culture is important to creating a society that has the scientific knowledge and understanding to propel itself forward. It is also essential that the ideology of the working class commands the heights of the superstructure. Marxism-Leninism is the science of revolution, and as such it must guide the socialist political, legal and military apparatuses, as well as guide the education and cultural development of the people.

We can learn from the successes and failures of past and present practice. The revisionist degeneration and collapse of the Soviet Union and a number of other socialist countries at the end of the 20th century demonstrates that only the ideology of the working class, Marxism-Leninism, can safeguard the gains of socialism and guide it forward in continuing the revolution towards building a communist society. In part this means waging a class struggle within the superstructure.

The experience of China in the late 1960s and 70s also shows us that the cultural revolution must be a protracted struggle rather than a hurried one, and that it must rely on careful and planned education and persuasion under the guidance and leadership of the party. Socialist countries such as Cuba and China have likewise shown that to persevere under the guidance of Marxism-Leninism, counter-revolution and imperialist intervention can be thwarted as the gains of the revolution are advanced and consolidated.

Marxism-Leninism has always understood that it is not sufficient to seize the means of production without also carrying out a broad and thorough revolution of the superstructure. Only by smashing the state apparatuses of the bourgeoisie and replacing them with the dictatorship of the proletariat, can the working class reshape society according to the needs of the broad masses of the people – and, only by educating the masses of the people in Marxism and by developing a well-educated, scientific socialist culture, can the gains of the revolution be safeguarded and carried forward.

Chapter 39: Socialism and bourgeois right

The task of socialism is to transition from capitalist society to communist society, from a society ruled by and for the rich, based on exploitation and oppression, to a society without classes and without exploitation and oppression. When the working class takes power and expropriates the wealth and power of the capitalist class, the dictatorship of the proletariat will have to eliminate the contradictions carried over from capitalist society in a planned, thoroughgoing, and step-by-step way. One of the most important tasks of the socialist state is the elimination of what Marx called “bourgeois right.” We already touched on bourgeois right in the previous chapter, “What is Socialism?” but it is a very important subject and needs to be understood clearly.

In his Critique of the Gotha Program, Marx says there are two stages to communist society, a lower and higher stage. To make things clearer, Marxism-Leninism has come to refer to the lower stage as socialism, and the higher stage as communism. In the lower stage, socialism, the guiding principle is “from each according to their ability, to each according to their work.” In the higher stage, communism, the guiding principle is “from each according to their ability, to each according to their need.” The goal of socialism is to transition to communism – to get from a society where distribution is based on work to a society where distribution is based on need.

In capitalist society, “bourgeois right” refers to the legal rights of property ownership and the social and political power that the capitalist derives from owning capital. Thus, in capitalist society, bourgeois right forms the basis of the capitalist relations of production, allowing for the capitalist to privately accumulate wealth from the exploitation of labor in the social process of production.

Socialist revolution intends to expropriate the expropriators – to do away with private ownership of the means of production, and therefore do away with private accumulation of wealth. However, as Marx says, socialism is born from the womb of capitalism and carries with it the birthmarks of capitalism. One of these birthmarks is bourgeois right. But bourgeois right is qualitatively different under socialism than under capitalism, since private ownership of the means of production has been abolished. So what remains of bourgeois right?

Lenin explains this very well in his book The State and Revolution:

“In the first phase of communist society (usually called Socialism) ‘bourgeois right’ is not abolished in its entirety, but only in part, only in proportion to the economic revolution so far attained, i.e., only in respect of the means of production. ‘Bourgeois right’ recognizes them as the private property of individuals. Socialism converts them into common property. To that extent—and to that extent alone— ‘bourgeois right’ disappears.

“However, it continues to exist as far as its other part is concerned; it continues to exist in the capacity of regulator (determining factor) in the distribution of products and the allotment of labor among the members of society. The socialist principle: ‘He who does not work, neither shall he eat,’ is already realized; the other socialist principle: ‘An equal amount of products for an equal amount of labor,’ is also already realized. But this is not yet Communism, and it does not yet abolish ‘bourgeois right,’ which gives to unequal individuals, in return for unequal (really unequal) amounts of labor, equal amounts of products.

“This is a ‘defect,’ says Marx, but it is unavoidable in the first phase of Communism [Socialism]; for if we are not to indulge in utopianism, we must not think that having overthrown capitalism people will at once learn to work for society without any standard of right; and indeed the abolition of capitalism does not immediately create the economic premises for such a change.

“And there is no other standard than that of ‘bourgeois right.’ To this extent, therefore, there still remains the need for a state, which, while safeguarding the public ownership of the means of production, would safeguard equality in labor and equality in the distribution of products.”

In other words, if the distribution of what is produced is measured by labor, then the problem that arises is that the labor input is unequal. Some people are more fit, or stronger. Some have children to take care of and other responsibilities while others don’t. Some workers may suffer from health issues while others don’t. Some may live farther from their place of work. Some may have better access to tools and machinery, some may work on land that is more or less suitable. Similarly, some may have an easier time learning and thus are able to attain higher levels of education. For some, networking and building connections may come naturally, or as a result of old family connections. All of these basic inequalities allow for uneven accumulation of wealth, and all of these basic inequalities require solutions.

Opponents of Marxism often put this basic inequality between individuals forward as a refutation of socialism, as if Marx didn’t understand or address this. On the contrary, this basic inequality between individuals is one of the most pressing issues that socialism can and must resolve. Marxism-Leninism understands very well that bourgeois right represents a danger, as it functions as a backwards drag on socialist development. If bourgeois right under socialism is left unchecked, then this uneven accumulation of wealth, power, and privilege can lead to corruption, the sharpening of class antagonism, and a material basis for bourgeois ideology and the revisionist degeneration of the proletarian dictatorship. Unchecked, bourgeois right functions as the material basis for the restoration of capitalism.

A fundamental task of the socialist state must be to combat and uproot bourgeois right. How is this accomplished? Lenin points to two factors in the citation above. First, people must learn to work for society without the bourgeois right of equal pay for equal work, and, second, the material basis that would allow for distribution based on need rather than work must be in place.

Transforming the way people think about labor and society is a long-term project, based on education and persuasion rooted in practical experience. This means dismantling the influence of bourgeois ideology and educating the masses of the people in the ideology of the working class, the science of Marxism-Leninism. Experience in the socialist countries has shown that this is possible, and that it takes time. Revolutionizing the productive forces to create a society where everyone can have what they need without any use for a distribution system based on work is also possible. It requires the elimination of scarcity, and thus, also takes time.

Ultimately, the transition through socialism to communism depends on solving the contradictions that linger in socialist society, both antagonistic and non-antagonistic. The class struggle continues under the dictatorship of the proletariat. The socialist state must resolve the contradictions that constrain the development of the productive forces, the contradiction between town and country, the contradiction between mental and manual labor, the contradictions rooted in the national question and patriarchy, and the contradiction between the leaders and the led. The correct handling of these contradictions and others are what keeps the proletarian dictatorship on track towards the goal of communism.

Chapter 40: The contradictions of socialist society

Contradiction is inherent in everything and is what causes things to change qualitatively. In socialist society there are also contradictions. Socialism is the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat, where the working class uses its state power to take society out of capitalism and towards the classless and stateless society of communism.

As a period of transition from capitalism to communism, socialism, of course, also contains many contradictions. After expropriating the means of production from the capitalists, a primary task of socialism is to develop the productive forces.

Transitioning to communism fundamentally depends on developing the productive forces and eliminating scarcity in order to be able to move from distribution based on work to distribution based on need. However, that isn’t all that must be done. Socialism must also resolve a number of other contradictions that continue to exist in socialist society.

There is an ongoing class struggle in socialist society. And there are also the contradictions that the Chinese communists called the “Three Major Differences” – the contradiction between workers and peasants, between town and country, and between mental and manual labor. There is also the contradiction between the leaders and the led, as well as contradictions that arise from the legacy of national oppression and patriarchy in the old society. Let’s look at the ways in which socialism can address these contradictions. Even though the particulars of how to resolve the contradictions arising from socialist revolution in the United States will have to be worked out concretely according to conditions, we can still draw some lessons from the experience of socialist construction in the socialist countries up to now.

The class struggle continues under socialism. As Mao Zedong put it,

“Socialist society covers a considerably long historical period. In the historical period of socialism, there are still classes, class contradictions and class struggle, there is the struggle between the socialist road and the capitalist road, and there is the danger of capitalist restoration. We must recognize the protracted and complex nature of this struggle, distinguish the contradictions between ourselves and the enemy from those among the people and handle them correctly. Otherwise a socialist country like ours will turn into its opposite and degenerate, and a capitalist restoration will take place.”

Socialism puts the working class in power and abolishes the private ownership of the means of production, but it also still resembles the old, capitalist society in some ways. This is unavoidable, due to the nature of bourgeois right, as we discussed previously. Socialism still has wage labor with a range of pay, distribution according to work, commodity production and exchange through money. While the pillars of industry, big factory farms, utilities, and big corporations would all be nationalized, some small businesses and family farms may continue to be privately owned for a period. Surplus value from labor, while no longer going to enrich the capitalists privately, still continues to exist, though it is redirected into developing the productive forces and other projects for the public good.

Bourgeois right, if unchecked, creates fertile ground for capitalist restoration by fostering inequality. Because a task of the socialist system is to restrict and finally eliminate bourgeois right, there will still be those who struggle to return to the old ways. Some corrupt individuals will try every trick they can think of to enrich themselves at the expense of the masses of the people. They want to return to capitalism, where anti-social behavior like that is rewarded. Instead, the proletarian dictatorship must wage a ceaseless and merciless class struggle against all of those who try to fleece the people and who strive to return to the old ways of exploitation and oppression.

Largely, this class struggle takes place in the superstructure. There, the party must struggle against tendencies towards capitalist restoration. As Stalin’s 1928 work “The Right Danger in the C.P.S.U.(B.)” explains, the rightist ideological trend towards capitalist restoration is based materially on remnants of capitalist production within the socialist system. The material conditions that necessitate bourgeois right must therefore be abolished step by step, through developing the productive forces to eliminate scarcity, improving infrastructure, developing industry, mechanizing and collectivizing agriculture, creating things like public cafeterias and childcare, and so on.

This also means the “three major differences” must be addressed, based on the concrete conditions that socialism inherits from the previous system. The contradiction between the working class and the peasantry is resolved mainly through the mechanization and collectivization of agriculture. Landlords must be expropriated, and land redistributed. We can draw upon the experience of systems like agricultural cooperatives and collective farming to do this in a scientific way based on particular conditions.

The contradiction between the town and country can be resolved through infrastructural improvements (such as developing an efficient public railway system that reaches thoroughly into the countryside), and through a concentrated effort to bring employment, educational and cultural opportunities out of the cities where they are concentrated and into the small towns and rural areas.

The contradiction between mental and manual labor is broken down step by step. First, the bloated administrative “middle management” should be scaled down and eventually eliminated. The gap in pay between mental workers (such as administrative workers, technicians, and engineers) and manual workers should be progressively reduced. Socialist automation should reduce the physical strain and time required for manual labor and improve the quality of life of workers. An important element to resolving these three major differences is raising the technical, educational and cultural level of the broad masses of the people.

The contradiction between the leaders and the led will exist throughout socialist society, and perhaps into communist society for a period as well, but it too must be handled correctly. There are many elements to this, from seeking to develop new and fresh leadership, especially from the most historically oppressed sections of the working class, such as among women, LGBTQ people, and oppressed nationalities. It also means promoting broad proletarian democracy and a spirit of mass participation and criticism. In 1928, Stalin discussed this in “Speech Delivered at the Eighth Congress of the All-Union Leninist Young Communist League,” in terms of “organizing mass criticism from below.” Stalin said that it was an immediate task “to wage a ruthless struggle against bureaucracy, to organize mass criticism from below, and to take this criticism into account when adopting practical decisions for eliminating our shortcomings.” The party can guide and set parameters for such criticism, but it is an essential element to building and maintaining a healthy proletarian democracy.

In the following chapters we will look closely at how socialism can resolve the contradictions arising from the legacy of national oppression and patriarchy in the old society. In any case, it should be clear that all of these contradictions demand very careful attention. The working class is the first class in history that does not benefit materially from the exploitation and oppression of others, and as such, it is its historic mission to eliminate all exploitation and oppression. Socialism, the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat, is its main tool for resolving these contradictions and advancing towards communism.

Chapter 41: Socialism and the national question

The Russian Empire under the Tsar was rightly called a “prisonhouse of nations,” because it oppressed, within its borders, whole nations of people. The Bolsheviks saw that it was a principal task of the socialist revolution to dismantle national oppression and support self-determination for the oppressed nations.

The United States is likewise a prisonhouse of nations, where the African American nation in the Black Belt South, the Chicano nation in the Southwest and the Hawaiian nation are all oppressed within the borders of the imperialist U.S. It will be a principal task of the socialist revolution in the U.S. to answer the national question, and we can draw on the experience of the Bolsheviks and others to understand how to do that.

The great African American communist leader and Marxist-Leninist theorist Harry Haywood lived in the Soviet Union, from 1925 to 1930, where he witnessed firsthand how the national question was handled there. In his autobiography Black Bolshevik, Haywood explained his experience there and the theory that guided the USSR on the national question. He writes,

“...the formation of peoples into nations is an objective law of social development around which the Bolsheviks, particularly Lenin and Stalin, had developed a whole body of theory. According to this theory, a nation is a historically constituted stable community of people, based on four main characteristics: a common territory, a common economic life, a common language and common psychological makeup (national character) manifest in common features in a national culture. Since the development of imperialism, the liberation of oppressed nations has become a question whose final resolution would only come through proletarian revolution.”

Haywood goes on to explain that the overthrow of the tsar and the construction of socialism required the unity of nationalities, and that this unity had to be based on “equality before the law for all nationalities – with no special privileges for any one people – and the right of the colonies and subject nations to separate.”

Thus, after the Bolsheviks seized power in the October Revolution, these principles were turned into the law of the land. Socialism set out to remove the effects of national oppression within the liberated nations of the former Russian Empire. Resources were diverted to them to raise their standards of living, education, health, and so on, while respecting and developing their cultural and political institutions. For example, Haywood writes of witnessing this policy in action in Crimea and the Caucasus in 1927 and 1928:

“The languages and culture which had been stifled under the czarist regime were now being developed. The language of the Crimean people was a Turko-Tartar language, but before the Revolution, almost all education, such as there was, was in the Russian language. Now there were schools established which used the native language.”

Abolishing national oppression is the first step, since it is the material basis of racism and prejudice. But as Haywood explains, after the Bolshevik revolution,

“…remnants of national and racial prejudice from the old society were attacked by education and law. It was a crime to give or receive direct or indirect privileges, or to exercise discrimination because of race or nationality. Any manifestation of racial or national superiority was punishable by law and was regarded as a serious political offense, a social crime.”

Haywood explains that in all of his five years in the Soviet Union, he only experienced a single instance of racism, which was met with outrage from bystanders, leading to an impromptu mass meeting and the arrest of the perpetrator. It may be hard to imagine in the U.S. today, where the police murder Black, Chicano, and other oppressed people with impunity every day, but in the USSR in the 1920s, a racial slur led to a night in jail for the offender. Creating a just society free of racism and national oppression was taken seriously.

It isn’t possible to predict exactly how the national question will be resolved in the course of socialist revolution. What we can say is that the U.S. colonies, such as Puerto Rico and Guam, must be granted their independence – if they have not already achieved by their own efforts. The full sovereignty of native peoples must be respected as must the right to national development. And the Black, Chicano and Hawaiian oppressed nations must have the right to self-determination, to choose whether or not to separate their historically constituted national territory.

The national question in the United States will be solved in practice by the working and oppressed people themselves in the course of socialist revolution. But we can draw many lessons from the experiences of others. In the Soviet Union this played out through the formation of Soviet republics of the formerly oppressed nations. In China it led to national autonomous regions.

In any case, the national question must be answered correctly both before and after the revolution, for its purpose is twofold. First, it is necessary to right the past wrongs of U.S. imperialism and see that they are not perpetuated. As Lenin said, the right of national self-determination, like the right to divorce, can be the only basis for a true, voluntary unity. Second, that unity is the only way we can defeat the oppressors. Only the strategic alliance of the multinational working class and the movements for national liberation can form the core of the united front necessary to topple monopoly capitalism, and only by freeing all peoples can the working class itself ever hope to be free.

Chapter 42: Socialism and patriarchy, women's liberation and LGBTQ liberation

The historic task of the working class in the socialist revolution is to eliminate all oppression. This includes the liberation of women and LGBTQ people from the shackles of patriarchy.

In her 1949 article “We Seek Full Equality for Women,” Claudia Jones states, “Marxism-Leninism exposes the core of the woman question and shows that the position of women in society is not always and everywhere the same, but derives from woman’s relation to the mode of production.”

In The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, Friedrich Engels gives us a historical materialist analysis of patriarchy’s foundation and explains how gender oppression is related to reinforcing the mode of production. Basically, Engels explains that patriarchal family relations and the gendered division of labor have their origin in the very beginning of class society and private property.

Engels writes, “the pairing family … is founded on male supremacy for the pronounced purpose of breeding children of indisputable paternal lineage. The latter is required, because these children shall later on inherit the fortune of their father. The monogamous family is distinguished from the pairing family by the far greater durability of wedlock, which can no longer be dissolved at the pleasure of either party. As a rule, it is only the man who can still dissolve it and cast off his wife.”

Thus the traditional patriarchal family has the original purpose of ensuring the inheritance of male property. Under capitalism, the family also serves the purpose of regulating reproductive labor by enforcing a gendered division of labor. Reproductive labor is the domestic labor required to reproduce labor-power — that is, the labor required for the workers survival, such as cooking, cleaning, childcare and other housework traditionally assigned to women while the men work outside the home

Even today in the U.S., where many women work outside the home, women earn 80 cents for every dollar earned by men, and also continue to carry the majority of the burden of domestic labor. Furthermore, this gendered division of labor means not only women taking up most domestic tasks at home, but also being disproportionately driven into generally lower paying jobs, such as in the service sector or clerical work.

The ruling class benefits from this gendered division of labor by using women and LGBTQ people as a reserve source of labor, driving down wages overall, and as a source of super-profits resulting from these lower pay rates. This is even more true for oppressed nationalities. In her 1949 article, “An End to the Neglect of the Problems of Negro Women,” Claudia Jones was correct to observe that “Negro women — as workers, as Negroes, and as women — are the most oppressed stratum of the whole population.”

It is this gendered division of labor that serves as the foundation for women’s and LGBTQ oppression and serves as the material basis for misogyny and male chauvinism. This is also the basis for attacks on LGBTQ rights. Today we see an ongoing, reactionary pushback against rights previously won through struggle, from reactionary “don’t say gay” bills to the overturning of Roe v. Wade which guaranteed the right to abortion.

Thus the goal of gender oppression is to maintain the gendered division of labor and the patriarchal family, primarily for the sake of ensuring the inheritance of property, gender-based super-profits, and the regulation of domestic, reproductive labor. For this reason, it works to suppress anything that would challenge that system, including both women’s liberation and LGBTQ liberation. LGBTQ equality presents a direct challenge to this oppressive system, and so LGBTQ people are also subject to severe repression, including discrimination in employment, housing, education, and healthcare, and denial of the right to marriage equality.

The working class as a whole must set itself the task of abolishing these oppressive, gendered social relations. The Bolshevik leader Alexandra Kollontai put it well in her 1909 article “The Social Basis of the Woman Question.”

“While for the feminists the achievement of equal rights with men in the framework of the contemporary capitalist world represents a sufficiently concrete end in itself, equal rights at the present time are, for the proletarian women, only a means of advancing the struggle against the economic slavery of the working class. The feminists see men as the main enemy, for men have unjustly seized all rights and privileges for themselves, leaving women only chains and duties. For them a victory is won when a prerogative previously enjoyed exclusively by the male sex is conceded to the ‘fair sex’. Proletarian women have a different attitude. They do not see men as the enemy and the oppressor; on the contrary, they think of men as their comrades, who share with them the drudgery of the daily round and fight with them for a better future. The woman and her male comrade are enslaved by the same social conditions; the same hated chains of capitalism oppress their will and deprive them of the joys and charms of life. It is true that several specific aspects of the contemporary system lie with double weight upon women, as it is also true that the conditions of hired labor sometimes turn working women into competitors and rivals to men. But in these unfavorable situations, the working class knows who is guilty.”

Kollantai and the Bolsheviks laid the primary blame for gender oppression at the feet of the capitalist ruling class, and the socialist revolution in the Soviet Union aimed to accomplish much more than simply winning additional privileges for women. It set about uprooting the material basis for gender oppression. The first step in doing this was by establishing legal gender equality. Women were immediately granted the right to vote and hold public office. But it also backed up that legal equality by granting women economic independence from men by dismantling the gendered division of labor. The number of women in the workforce more than doubled between 1917 and 1930. Likewise, the 1918 Family Code was truly revolutionary. Marriage was separated from the Church. Couples were allowed to choose their own surname, and guaranteed the equal right to divorce. The Soviet Union was the first country in the world to legalize abortion in 1920. Women were granted eight-week paid maternity leave and the same wage standards as men. Importantly, public cafeterias and child care facilities were created to remove the burden of domestic labor from the shoulders of women.

We can look at the socialist countries today for further practical lessons. For example, Socialist Cuba has guaranteed free gender affirming surgery since 2008. Further, Cuba deepened its commitment to gender equality in September of 2022, when it passed a revolutionary Family Code, legalizing equal marriage and adoption rights regardless of sexual orientation and recognizing the rights of surrogate mothers.

It should not be assumed that women’s and LGBTQ liberation are tasks left solely for after the revolution. It is an immediate task of all revolutionaries and progressive people to uproot gender-based oppression. We must take seriously, today and tomorrow, the task of completely destroying, root and branch, patriarchy and all systems of male supremacy in order to build a just, socialist society.

Chapter 43: The achievements of socialism in the Soviet Union

As Marxist-Leninists in the United States, we can draw lessons from the experiences of others in carrying out revolution and building socialism. While every revolutionary struggle must be firmly based on the concrete analysis of its own conditions, we should still study closely both the successes and failures in the rich experience of the Soviet Union. From that experience we can draw both lessons from their struggle as well as inspiration from their heroic achievements. In the next chapter we will examine the causes of the collapse of the USSR and draw lessons from it, but here let’s look at all that it achieved.

First, the Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin, developed Marxism-Leninism and applied it to the particular conditions of the Russian Empire. They fused Marxism with the workers movement and built a militant and revolutionary Communist Party that overthrew tsarism and capitalism and put the state into the hands of the toiling masses, the dictatorship of the proletariat. The dictatorship of the rich was smashed and a new democracy based on the Soviets (councils) of workers and peasants, was built in its place.

During the course of the revolution the Bolsheviks advanced the mass-line slogan of “Peace, Land and Bread,” opposing the imperialist war and advancing a program of land reform and ending poverty and hunger. World War I had claimed nearly 3 million dead from the people of the Russian Empire. Lenin mobilized mass anger against tsarist repression and raised the slogan of “revolutionary defeatism” to turn the imperialist war into a civil war through which the working and oppressed masses could throw off the yoke of the tsar, the bourgeoisie and the landlords. Uniting with the poor peasants, the Bolsheviks led the working class through a revolution in two stages, first to defeat tsarism, and then to defeat bourgeois reaction and imperialism. The revolution’s first stage brought about the 1917 February Revolution. The Great October Socialist Revolution of 1917 soon followed, which smashed the bourgeois state and established the Soviet Union.

The counterrevolutionary White Terror, led by the defeated bourgeoisie against the newly founded Soviet government, was aided by the imperialist countries. After a lengthy Civil War, the Soviet Red Army was victorious in defending their revolution and the Soviet Union could set about with the tasks of socialist construction. Lenin set out the basic principles that would guide the process of building socialism, but this had only just begun by the time he died in 1924.

Under the leadership of Lenin, the Third (Communist) International was founded to support revolutionary movements all over the world. The Soviet Union became the center and base of the international communist movement the world over. While Stalin led the Soviet people in building socialism, the Communist International continued to support proletarian internationalism all over the world, from Asia, Africa and Latin America to Europe and the United States. The Communist International allowed the working people of the entire world to come together to coordinate and to share experiences and summation.

From 1924 to 1953, Stalin led the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) and the masses of workers and peasants in carrying out and developing Lenin’s plans for building socialism. Stalin led the Bolshevik party in carrying out this Leninist line against opportunist and counterrevolutionary currents, such as those of Trotsky, Zinoviev and Bukharin.

Industrialization was achieved between 1921 and 1941, developing the productive forces to the point where the basic needs of the people could be met. The priority of the government was to see that people were fed, clothed, housed and guaranteed quality health care and education. Millions of peasants were educated, creating the first fully literate society in history. The Soviet Union guaranteed free and compulsory education in the arts and sciences. Educated and freed from capitalist relations of production, the Soviet Union advanced from a backwards, semi-feudal country to a major industrial power in just 30 years. In the countryside, landlords (Kulaks) were expropriated and farming was collectivized and mechanized. Horse-drawn plows were replaced by modern tractors.

According to Roger Keeran and Thomas Kenny in their book Socialism Betrayed,

“In fifty years, the country went from an industrial production that was 12 percent of that in the United States to industrial production that was 80 percent and an agricultural output 85 percent of the U.S. Though Soviet per capita consumption remained lower than in the U.S., no society had ever increased living standards and consumption so rapidly in such a short period of time for all its people.”

The Soviet Union guaranteed not only free education and health care. Trade unions had the power to veto firings and even recall managers. Prices were regulated by the state and basic food and housing was subsidized. Rent took up only 2 or 3%, and utilities only 4 or 5% of a family’s income. While socialism still has a wage scale with higher and lower incomes due to the persistence of bourgeois right (the lingering inequalities carried over from capitalism), the highest paid individuals in the USSR only made ten times that of the average worker. To put that gap in perspective, Keeran and Kenny point out that by the late 1990s, corporate executives in the U.S. made 480 times the wage of an average worker.

The Soviet Union fought tooth and nail to uproot both national oppression and gender oppression. The Soviet Republics of the formerly oppressed nations exercised their self-determination and their autonomy and national development was prioritized. Every effort was made to stamp out racism, bigotry and national chauvinism. At the same time, the Soviet Union worked tirelessly to abolish the gendered division of labor and dismantle the laws and customs that upheld gender oppression, misogyny and male chauvinism.

In 1936, the so-called “Stalin Constitution” set about to take proletarian democracy in the USSR to even further heights. As Anna Louise Strong wrote in her book The Soviets Expected It,

“Stalin’s great moment when he first appeared as leader of the whole Soviet people was when, as Chairman of the Constitutional Commission, he presented the new Constitution of the Socialist State. A commission of thirty-one of the country’s ablest historians, economists, and political scientists had been instructed to create ‘the world’s most democratic constitution’ with the most accurate machinery yet devised for obtaining ‘the will of the people.’ They spent a year and a half in detailed study of every past constitution in the world, not only of governments but of trade unions and voluntary societies. The draft that they prepared was then discussed by the Soviet people for several months in more than half a million meetings attended by 36,500,000 people. The number of suggested amendments that reached the Constitutional Commission from the popular discussions was 154,000. Stalin himself is known to have read tens of thousands of the people’s letters.”

The red banner of socialism flew as a beacon of hope to the workers and oppressed peoples of the world. Following the bitter experience of the Civil War period, the CPSU knew that the imperialists would not let such a challenge go unanswered. In 1931, ten years before the German Nazi invasion of the USSR, Stalin said, “We are fifty or a hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this distance in ten years. Either we do it, or they will crush us.” Stalin was correct in his assessment of the challenge and the danger that faced them, and they did close the distance. Likewise, Stalin led the CPSU in defeating the organization of a “fifth column” of enemy agents, spies and saboteurs with the USSR. The Soviet people heroically built their industry and developed their productive forces so that they were able to eventually turn the tide of the German invasion at Stalingrad and push the Nazis all the way back to Berlin. The Soviet Union lost 20 million people in this life or death struggle, bearing the brunt of the war and taking the lead in saving the world from fascism. During and after World War II, the Soviet Union was pivotal to the establishment of socialism in China, Korea and Eastern Europe.

After Stalin’s death in 1953, despite the growth of opportunist and revisionist currents within the CPSU, especially following the 20th and 22nd Congresses in 1956 and 1961, the Soviet Union continued to be a force for peace and democracy against imperialism and war. It aided and defended revolutionary movements all over the world, from defending Eastern European socialism from imperialist-backed counterrevolution, to supporting socialist revolution in Cuba and Vietnam.

The achievements of socialism in the USSR prove that the working class, guided by Marxism-Leninism, can create a society based on serving the people instead of the blind pursuit of profit, and despite all of the imperialist propaganda that would have you believe otherwise, can accomplish truly amazing things.

Chapter 44: On the restoration of capitalism in the USSR

How is it possible that the Soviet Union, bastion of socialism and proletarian internationalism, collapsed in 1991? What factors led to its collapse, and what were the results? We should look at both the material and ideological basis for the restoration of capitalism in the USSR. As Marxist-Leninists, what lessons can we draw from the experience of the fall of the Soviet Union?

Capitalism was restored in the USSR in 1991, but the process that led to that point began much earlier. Nikita Khrushchev came to lead the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) shortly after the death of Stalin in 1953. Under his leadership, the 20th Congress of the CPSU in 1956 marked the first major turning point towards revisionism in the USSR. Revisionism, in the name of “revising” Marxism, advocates for Marxism in words, but opportunism in deeds.

Ideologically, Khrushchev’s revisionism attacked the foundations of Marxism-Leninism in a number of ways, namely by advocating the transformation of the proletarian dictatorship into a “state of the whole people,” the party of the working class into the “party of the whole people,” by advocating for “peaceful coexistence between capitalism and socialism,” and by advocating for the “peaceful transition from capitalism to socialism.”

Like Trotsky before him, in the name of attacking “Stalinism,” Khrushchev set about to attack Marxism-Leninism. In his so-called “secret speech” Khrushchev launched his campaign of “de-Stalinization.” Of course, this didn’t go without resistance, so in order to carry this out, he maneuvered to defeat the revolutionary left in the party leadership, which made up the majority in the politburo. Molotov, Malenkov, Kaganovich and the rest of the left were all sidelined by Khrushchev as an “Anti-Party group.”

From there, the communists of China and Albania led the way in criticizing the errors of Khruschev’s revisionism and the dangers it posed to the international communist movement. As the Communist Party of China wrote in “On the Question of Stalin in 1963, “In repeating their violent attacks on Stalin, the leaders of the CPSU aimed at erasing the indelible influence of this great proletarian revolutionary among the people of the Soviet Union and throughout the world, and at paving the way for negating Marxism-Leninism, which Stalin had defended and developed, and for the all-out application of a revisionist line.” By attacking Stalin’s leadership and the history of the CPSU, Khrushchev struck a blow at Marxism-Leninism itself, weakening the confidence of the international communist movement in Marxism-Leninism.

In a significant article from 1992 entitled “An Assessment of the Collapse of the Soviet Union,” the outstanding Belgian communist leader, Ludo Martens, wrote, “the revisionism of Khrushchev opened a transitional period from socialism to capitalism. Old and new bourgeois elements needed thirty years to grow strong enough to capture and consolidate their power in the fields of politics, ideology and the economy. The process of degeneration, begun in 1956, took three decades to finish off socialism.”

Practically, as Keeran and Kenny emphasize in their 2004 book Socialism Betrayed, “Khrushchev favored incorporating a range of capitalist or Western ideas into socialism, including market mechanisms, decentralization, some private production, the heavy reliance on fertilizer and the cultivation of corn, and increased investment in consumer goods.” After this, the Kosygin Reforms in 1965 further liberalized the economy, emphasizing profitability, material incentives and commodity production to an even further degree. Guided by revisionism instead of Marxism-Leninism, these policies had a corrosive effect on the socialist system.

In those ensuing decades, we see first Brezhnev and then Gorbachev as the principal leaders of the USSR. While Brezhnev corrected some of Khruschev’s worst errors, he continued down the path that Khrushchev set out upon in the 20th Congress. The Soviet Union during the period of his leadership saw the party further divorce itself from the masses of the people as bureaucracy grew. Furthermore, the U.S. made every effort to destabilize the USSR during this period, most successfully by funding the Mujahideen to bog the Red Army down in Afghanistan, draining the Soviet Union’s resources.

Bad leadership, and a lack of Marxist-Leninist scientific clarity, only exacerbated the problem, leading to Gorbachev’s liberal “Perestroika” and “Glasnost” reforms, and finally to the open liquidation of the CPSU and the USSR, against widespread protest, under Yeltsin. In a 1991 referendum, the Soviet people overwhelmingly voted against dissolving the USSR. Nearly 80% wanted to maintain the Soviet Union, but Yeltsin and Gorbachev defied both the Soviet constitution and the Soviet people.

Like Khrushchev before him, Gorbachev put forward his attacks on Marxism-Leninism as an attack on “Stalinism.” The result was “shock therapy” and impoverishment for the masses of the people, total privatization, the rampant plundering of the state and national economy, and the unbridled hegemony of U.S. imperialism no longer counterbalanced by the USSR.

Life expectancy declined dramatically after 1991. The economy of the former Soviet Union suffered a crisis worse than the Great Depression. Indeed, despite all of its flaws during the period from 1956 to 1991, the collapse of the USSR was a disaster for the masses of the people of the USSR and the whole world.

We can draw at least four important lessons from this experience.

First, adhering to the principles of Marxism-Leninism is vital. Marxism-Leninism is the scientific analysis of our concrete conditions and summation of our practical experiences that lets us navigate the complex contradictions with which we are faced. If we abandon Marxism-Leninism for revisionism, accepting ideas like “peaceful transition from capitalism to socialism,” counter to objective laws, we disarm ourselves for the tasks ahead of us. The opponents of socialism love to claim that “socialism is great in theory but doesn’t work in practice.” On the contrary, when the Soviet Union united their revolutionary practice with Marxist-Leninist theory, socialism worked wonders. Indeed, when the USSR held to Marxist-Leninist principles, from 1917 to the mid-1950s, they piled success on top of success. When they cast Marxism-Leninism aside at the 20th Congress, they set about piling difficulty on top of difficulty.

Second, the party and the state must maintain its class character: the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat. The revisionist theories of “party of the whole people” and “state of the whole people” opened up the party and state to the influence of the class enemy. The working class is the only class with no material interest in the exploitation of others, and only the working class is capable of guiding the transition through socialism from capitalism to communism. Furthermore, the dictatorship of the proletariat is a weapon necessary to resist the forces of reaction and capitalist restoration from bourgeois forces within and without. The party of the working class must lead the proletarian state to construct socialism, restrict bourgeois right, and combat the forces of counterrevolution and reaction.

Third, classes and class struggle do not end with the establishment of socialism. This experience confirms what Lenin said in 1919: “The class struggle does not disappear under the dictatorship of the proletariat; it merely assumes different forms.” The communist party must persevere in carrying out the class struggle under socialism in order to restrict and overcome bourgeois right and guide society towards the goal of communism. According to Lenin, the socialist state is tasked with “creating conditions in which it will be impossible for the bourgeoisie to exist, or for a new bourgeoisie to arise.” Starting in the mid-1950s, the USSR took the opposite approach, but there were errors even earlier. Ludo Martens, in his important book Another View of Stalin, writes, “After 1945, the struggle against opportunism was restricted to the highest circles of the Party and did not assist in the revolutionary transformation of the entire Party.” Thus the broad masses and party as a whole were unprepared to resist the revisionist turn of the mid-1950s. Proletarian democracy, mass education in Marxism, and criticism and self-criticism are safeguards to the working class’s success in the class struggle under socialism.

Fourth, capitalist restoration is a protracted process, that ends with a sudden leap. Some in the international communist movement mistook the rise of revisionism in the USSR for the complete restoration of capitalism. This led them to see the Soviet Union as an enemy. Some even went so far as to claim that the USSR was “social-imperialist.” Against this view, Harry Haywood wrote in 1984, “Without a monopoly capitalist class and without capitalist relations of production there is no fundamental and compelling logic in the Soviet economy that creates a need to export capital and exploit other countries through trade. As a result, it also has no colonies and no empire to sustain.” On the contrary, the reality is the USSR was a bulwark against U.S. hegemony and a powerful ally to movements for revolution and liberation all over the world.

We have to understand this from a dialectical materialist point of view. Marxism holds that material reality isn’t simply determined by the ideas of a few leaders, and while those ideas can affect material reality, that is a process that takes time. Socialist revolution follows dialectical laws. According to those dialectical laws, the principle and secondary aspect of a contradiction can exchange places in a qualitative leap. Under socialism, the proletariat in power is the principal, determining aspect of this contradiction, and the bourgeoisie is secondary. Quantitative accumulation of strength by the bourgeoisie can flip this relationship, which is exactly what happened over the course of 30 years in the USSR. Revisionism weakened the socialist state and disarmed it against the threat of capitalist restoration. But the Soviet Union’s course towards capitalist restoration wasn’t irreversible, and its final collapse was a tragedy for working and oppressed people everywhere.

Despite the fall of socialism in the USSR, we have the People’s Republic of China, Democratic Korea, Vietnam, Laos and Cuba, which all continue to advance and are a beacon to working and oppressed people everywhere. Imperialism is in decline and the movements for revolution and national liberation are today gaining ground. Socialism may face attacks from within and without, and those attacks may lead to setbacks, but in the long view, the victory of socialism is inevitable. As Mao Zedong once put it, though the road is torturous, the future is bright!

Chapter 45: The achievements of socialism in China

After waging revolution from 1927 to 1949, Mao Zedong proclaimed from Tiananmen Gate that “the Chinese people have stood up!” This marked the end of imperialist domination in China and the beginning of socialism in the newly founded People’s Republic of China, led by the Communist Party. The Chinese revolution has continued through socialist construction from then until today, and we would do well to sum up some of its many heroic achievements in order to better understand, from a Marxist-Leninist perspective, the process of socialist revolution and socialist construction.

The achievements of socialism in China during Mao Zedong’s lifetime were tremendous. In 1949, Chinese life expectancy was 38 years. By the 1970s it had risen to 68 years. As John Ross says in his book China’s Great Road, “China’s rate of increase of life expectancy in the three decades after 1949 was the fastest ever recorded in a major country in human history.” China’s current life expectancy has overtaken that of the U.S. and is now 78.2 years.

Literacy also dramatically increased. In 1949, approximately 80 to 90% of China’s population was illiterate. The Communist Party launched a mass literacy and education campaign, and within ten years adult illiteracy fell to 43% and has steadily declined since. By 1979 illiteracy was only 16.4% in the cities and 34.7% in the countryside. Currently, the literacy rate in China is 99.8%, greatly exceeding the U.S. at 79%.

All of this was achieved as a direct result of the socialist system, which avoids the anarchy of production and the chronic cycles of boom and bust. In fact, since 1978, China has had the fastest sustained growth in a major economy in all of human history, with an annual average growth rate of 9.5%. Because China isn’t a capitalist country, the economy isn’t affected by the cyclical crises that are characteristic of and plague the capitalist mode of production.

Among China’s greatest achievements is the elimination of extreme poverty. Over just the past 40 years, the number of people in China living in extreme poverty has fallen by 800 million, accounting for three quarters of total global poverty reduction. This process began in the 1930s, with land reform in the liberated areas at the beginning of the Chinese revolution. This meant the expropriation of the landlords, division of their land among the peasants, and canceling debts. This is how the Communist Party of China (CPC) destroyed feudalism in the countryside.

After taking power in 1949, the CPC expanded land reform from the liberated areas to the entire country, and started setting up agricultural production cooperatives to mechanize agriculture and develop the forces of production throughout the country. The means of production were nationalized. China’s industrial output increased at an average annual rate of 13.5%. By 1977, China’s industrial output was 38 times what it was in 1949 when the revolution took power.

China has also succeeded in building a harmonious society composed of many different nationalities. The CPC helped to liberate the oppressed nationalities, such as the Tibetan people, from feudalism. The People’s Republic of China constitution and laws grant equality to the country’s nationalities and promotes economic and cultural development. Discrimination is outlawed and Articles 112 through 122 of the constitution of the People’s Republic of China detail the rights of the formerly oppressed nationalities to autonomous self-government.

As a result of their vast revolutionary experience, the Chinese communists have also made many great contributions to Marxist-Leninist theory. In the course of the civil war and the war of resistance against Japan, Mao Zedong developed the theory of protracted people’s war, a military strategy of advancing a revolution in stages by surrounding the cities from the countryside, applicable broadly to semi-colonial and semi-feudal countries with a large peasantry like China was.

Mao and his comrades also developed the theory of the United Front and the Mass Line as core strategic methods of organizing and mobilizing the broad masses of the people for revolution. Mao also made important contributions to Marxist philosophy with his essays “On Practice” and “On Contradiction,” among many others. And after Khrushchev came to power in the Soviet Union in the mid-1950s, the CPC made important contributions to the defense of Marxism-Leninism against revisionism in the polemics of the Great Debate.

China has been a beacon to oppressed nations and peoples all over the world, especially in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. In the United States, Mao Zedong and the Chinese Revolution were a guiding light to the Black liberation movement, especially for groups like the Black Panther Party, which used the Little Red Book, Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong, as a revolutionary handbook. After the Communist Party USA’s abandonment of Marxism-Leninism for revisionism in the 1950s, the young communists who set out to build a new communist party in the 1970s also drew upon the theory and practice of Mao Zedong and the CPC.

In 1985 in the Soviet Union, Gorbachev instituted his liberal reforms, Perestroika and Glasnost, hurling the USSR towards the precipice of capitalist restoration in 1991. Similar counterrevolutionary currents arose in other parts of the socialist world, including China. Many in the USSR and Eastern Europe failed to defeat counterrevolution. Mick Kelly sums up the trajectory that led to a similar situation in China in the 1989 work Continuing the Revolution is Not a Dinner Party: “While the intentions were the best, the ultra-left errors of the Cultural Revolution (1966-1975) slowed the development of socialism in China. Right errors in the post Mao/Hua period then created the material conditions and allowed the political space to open for bourgeois liberalization.” But when right opportunists led by Zhao Ziyang attempted to restore capitalism in China in 1989, the CPC managed to rise to the challenge. They held firm to Marxist-Leninist principles, overcame the crisis, defended socialism and the proletarian dictatorship, and came out stronger on the other side.

The Communist Party of China has proved in practice that it is prepared to avoid the fate of the USSR. As Xi Jinping said in a speech in 2021, “It is easier to breach a fortress from within. In this sense, degeneracy, corruption and betrayal from within the Party have been the gravest threat since its founding. The Party would lose the people’s support if it betrays its political character as a Marxist party and fundamental purpose. Over its century-long journey, our Party has stayed alert to risks of corruption and disintegration, and maintains its progressive and wholesome nature.” In this regard, China has launched a successful anti-corruption campaign to make sure the Party continues to serve the people.

As China develops its productive forces in order to eliminate scarcity and bring common prosperity to the Chinese people, China is also breaking new ground in combining socialist construction with ecological sustainability. In his article, “China is Building a Truly Ecological Civilization,” Carlos Martinez writes that the People’s Republic of China is aggressively pursuing decarbonization, reducing reliance on coal in favor of wind and solar energy. China is also carrying out the largest reforestation project in the world, expanding forest coverage from 12% to 23% from 1980 to 2020. China is able to do this because they have a socialist, planned economy, whereas capitalism can only blindly pursue the highest rate of profit.

Similarly, as a result of its socialist system, China is able to prioritize public health over profit, as seen by its COVID policy. The United States has had over one million deaths as result of its poor handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, while, at the time of this writing, China’s has had over 1000 times fewer, relative to its population.

What China has accomplished is nothing short of extraordinary. From when Mao and his comrades first set out on their Long March, until today, the Chinese revolution has served to teach and inspire revolutionaries all over the world.

As Xi Jinping said at the recent 20th National Congress of the CPC, “Marxism is the fundamental guiding ideology upon which our Party and our country are founded and thrive. Our experience has taught us that, at the fundamental level, we owe the success of our Party and socialism with Chinese characteristics to the fact that Marxism works, particularly when it is adapted to the Chinese context and the needs of our times,” and “…only by applying dialectical and historical materialism can we provide correct answers to the major questions presented by the times and discovered through practice, and can we ensure that Marxism always retains its vigor and vitality.”