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Ten Theses on Marxism and Decolonisation

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Dossier no. 56

Tricontinental and Casa de las Américas logos

Violeta Parra (Chile), Untitled (unfinished), 1966. Embroidery on sackcloth, 136 x 200 cm.

The works of art in this dossier belong to Casa de las Américas’ Haydee Santamaría Art of Our America ( Nuestra América ) collection. Since its founding, Casa de las Américas has established close ties with a significant number of internationally renowned contemporary artists who have set visual arts trends in the region. Casa’s galleries have hosted temporary exhibitions including different artistic genres, expressions, and techniques by several generations of mainly Latin American and Caribbean artists. Many of these works, initially exhibited in Casa’s galleries, awarded prizes in its contests, and donated by the artists, have become part of the Haydee Santamaría Art of Our America collection, representing an exceptional artistic heritage.

Roberto Matta (Chile), Cuba es la capital (‘Cuba Is the Capital’), 1963. Soil and plaster on Masonite (mural), 188 x 340 cm. Located at the entrance to Casa de las Américas.

Cultural Policy and Decolonisation in the Cuban Socialist Project

Abel prieto, director of casa de las américas.

The Cuban Revolution came about in a country subordinated to the US from all points of view. Although we had the façade of a republic, we were a perfect colony, exemplary in economic, commercial, diplomatic, and political terms, and almost in cultural terms.

Our bourgeoisie was constantly looking towards the North: from there, they imported dreams, hopes, fetishes, models of life. They sent their children to study in the North, hoping that they would assimilate the admirable competitive spirit of the Yankee ‘winners’, their style, their unique and superior way of settling in this world and subjugating the ‘losers’.

This ‘vice-bourgeoisie’, as Roberto Fernández Retamar baptised them, were not limited to avidly consuming whatever product of the US cultural industry fell into their hands. Not only that – at the same time, they collaborated in disseminating the ‘American way of life’ in the Ibero-American sphere and kept part of the profits for themselves. Cuba was an effective cultural laboratory at the service of the Empire, conceived to multiply the exaltation of the Chosen Nation and its world domination. Cuban actresses and actors dubbed the most popular American television series into Spanish, which would later flood the continent. In fact, we were among the first countries in the region to have television in 1950. It seemed like a leap forward, towards so-called ‘progress’, but it turned out to be poisoned. Very commercial Cuban television programming functioned as a replica of the ‘made in the USA’ pseudo-culture , with soap operas, Major League and National League baseball games, competition and participation programmes copied from American reality shows, and constant advertising. In 1940, the magazine Selections of the Reader’s Digest , published by a company of the same name, began to appear in Spanish in Havana with all of its poison. This symbol of the idealisation of the Yankee model and the demonisation of the USSR and of any idea close to emancipation was translated and printed on the island and distributed from here to all of Latin America and Spain.

The very image of Cuba that was spread internationally was reduced to a tropical ‘paradise’ manufactured by the Yankee mafia and its Cuban accomplices. Drugs, gambling, and prostitution were all put at the service of VIP tourism from the North. Remember that the Las Vegas project had been designed for our country and failed because of the revolution.

Fanon spoke of the sad role of the ‘national bourgeoisie’ – already formally independent from colonialism – before the elites of the old metropolis, ‘who happen to be tourists enamoured of exoticism, hunting, and casinos’. He added:

We only have to look at what has happened in Latin America if we want proof of the way the ex-colonised bourgeoisie can be transformed into ‘party’ organiser. The casinos in Havana and Mexico City, the beaches of Rio, Copacabana, and Acapulco, the young Brazilian and Mexican girls, the thirteen-year-old mestizas, are the scars of this depravation of the national bourgeoisie. 1

Our bourgeoisie, submissive ‘party organisers’ of the Yankees, did everything possible for Cuba to be culturally absorbed by their masters during the neocolonial republic. However, there were three factors that slowed down this process: the work of intellectual minorities that defended, against all odds, the memory and values of the nation; the sowing of Martí’s principles and patriotism among teachers in Cuban public schools; and the resistance of our powerful, mestizo, haughty, and ungovernable popular culture, nurtured by the rich spiritual heritage of African origin.

In his speech ‘History Will Absolve Me’, Fidel listed the six main problems facing Cuba. Among them, he highlighted ‘the problem of education’ and referred to ‘comprehensive education reform’ as one of the most urgent missions that the future liberated republic would have to undertake. 2 Hence, the educational and cultural revolution began practically from the triumph of 1 January 1959. On the 29 th of that same month, summoned by Fidel, a first detachment of three hundred teachers alongside one hundred doctors and other professionals left for the Sierra Maestra to bring education and health to the most remote areas. Around those same days, Camilo and Che launched a campaign to eradicate illiteracy among the Rebel Army troops since more than 80% of the combatants were illiterate.

On 14 September, the former Columbia Military Camp was handed over to the Ministry of Education so that it could build a large school complex there. The promise of turning barracks into schools was beginning to be fulfilled, and sixty-nine military fortresses became educational centres. On 18 September, Law No. 561 was enacted, creating ten thousand classrooms and accrediting four thousand new teachers. The same year, cultural institutions of great importance were created: the Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry (ICAIC), the National Publishing House, the Casa de las Américas, and the National Theatre of Cuba, which has a department of folklore and an unprejudiced and anti-racist vision unprecedented in the country. All of these new revolutionary institutions were oriented towards a decolonised understanding of Cuban and universal culture.

But 1961 was the key year in which a profound educational and cultural revolution began in Cuba. This was the year when Eisenhower ruptured diplomatic relations with our country. This was the year when our foreign minister, Raúl Roa, condemned ‘the policy of harassment, retaliation, aggression, subversion, isolation, and imminent attack by the US against the Cuban government and people’ at the UN. 3 This was the year of the Bay of Pigs invasion and the relentless fight against the armed gangs financed by the CIA. This was the year when the US government, with Kennedy already at the helm, intensified its offensive to suffocate Cuba economically and isolate it from Nuestra Am é rica – Our America – and from the entire Western world. 4 1961 was also the year when Fidel proclaimed the socialist character of the revolution on 16 April, the eve of the Bay of Pigs invasion, as Roa exposed the plan that was set to play out the following day. This is something that – considering the influence of the Cold War climate and the McCarthyite, anti-Soviet, and anti-communist crusade on the island – showed that the young revolutionary process had been shaping, at incredible speed, cultural hegemony around anti-imperialism, sovereignty, social justice, and the struggle to build a radically different country. But it was also the year of the epic of the literacy campaign; of the creation of the National School of Art Instructors; of Fidel’s meetings with intellectuals and his founding speech on our cultural policy, ‘Words to the Intellectuals’; of the birth of the National Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba (UNEAC) and the National Institute of Ethnology and Folklore. 5

In 1999 in Venezuela – almost four decades later – Fidel summed up his thinking regarding the cultural and educational component in any true revolutionary process: ‘A revolution can only be the child of culture and ideas’. 6 Even if it makes radical changes, even if it hands over land to the peasants and eliminates large estates, even if it builds houses for those who survive in unhealthy neighbourhoods, even if it puts public health at the service of all, even if it nationalises the country’s resources and defends its sovereignty, a revolution will never be complete or lasting if it does not give a decisive role to education and culture. It is necessary to change human beings’ conditions of material life, and it is necessary to simultaneously change the human being, their conscience, paradigms, and values.

For Fidel, culture was never something ornamental or a propaganda tool – a mistake commonly made throughout history by leaders of the left. Rather, he saw culture as a transformative energy of exceptional scope, which is intimately linked to conduct, to ethics, and is capable of decisively contributing to the ‘human improvement’ in which Martí had so much faith. But Fidel saw culture, above all, as the only imaginable way to achieve the full emancipation of the people: it is what offers them the possibility of defending their freedom, their memory, their origins, and of undoing the vast web of manipulations that limit the steps they take every day. The educated and free citizen who is at the centre of Martí’s and Fidel’s utopia must be prepared to fully understand the national and international environment and to decipher and circumvent the traps of the machinery of cultural domination.

In 1998, at the 6 th Congress of the UNEAC, Fidel focused on the topic ‘related to globalisation and culture’. So-called ‘neoliberal globalisation’, he said, is ‘the greatest threat to culture – not only ours, but the world’s’. He explained how we must defend our traditions, our heritage, our creation, against ‘imperialism’s most powerful instrument of domination’. And, he concluded, ‘everything is at stake here: national identity, homeland, social justice, revolution, everything is at stake. These are the battles we have to fight now’. 7 This is, of course, about ‘battles’ against cultural colonisation, against what Frei Betto calls ‘globo-colonisation’, against a wave that can liquidate our identity and the revolution itself.

Enrique Tábara (Ecuador), Coloquio de frívolos (‘Colloquium of the Frivolous’), 1982. Acrylic on canvas,140.5 x 140.5 cm.

Fidel was already convinced that, in education, in culture, in ideology, there are advances and setbacks. No conquest can be considered definitive. That is why he returns to the subject of culture in his shocking speech on 17 November 2005 at the University of Havana. 8 The media machinery, together with incessant commercial propaganda, Fidel warns us, come to generate ‘conditioned responses’. ‘The lie’, he says, ‘affects one’s knowledge’, but ‘the conditioned response affects the ability to think’. 9 In this way, Fidel continued, if the Empire says ‘Cuba is bad’, then ‘all the exploited people around the world, all the illiterate people, and all those who don’t receive medical care or education or have any guarantee of a job or of anything’ repeat that ‘the Cuban Revolution is bad’. 10 Hence, the diabolical sum of ignorance and manipulation engenders a pathetic creature: the poor right-winger, that unhappy person who gives his opinion and votes and supports his exploiters.

‘Without culture’, Fidel repeated, ‘no freedom is possible’. 11 We revolutionaries, according to him, are obliged to study, to inform ourselves, to nurture our critical thinking day by day. This cultural education, together with essential ethical values, will allow us to liberate ourselves definitively in a world where the enslavement of minds and consciences predominates. His call to ‘emancipat[e] ourselves by ourselves and with our own efforts’ is equivalent to saying that we must decolonise ourselves with our own efforts. 12 And culture is, of course, the main instrument of that decolonising process of self-learning and self-emancipation.

In Cuba, we are currently more contaminated by the symbols and fetishes of ‘globo-colonisation’ than we have been at other times in our revolutionary history. We must combat the tendency to underestimate these processes, and we must work in two fundamental directions: intentionally promoting genuine cultural options and fostering a critical view of the products of the hegemonic entertainment industry. It is essential to strengthen the effective coordination of institutions and organisations, communicators, teachers, instructors, intellectuals, artists, and other actors who contribute directly or indirectly to the cultural education of our people. All revolutionary forces of culture must work together more coherently. We must turn the meaning of anti-colonial into an instinct.

Introduction

In 1959, the Cuban revolutionary leader Haydee Santamaría (1923–1980) arrived at a cultural centre in the heart of Havana. This building, the revolutionaries decided, would be committed to promoting Latin American art and culture, eventually becoming a beacon for the progressive transformation of the hemisphere’s cultural world. Renamed Casa de las Américas (‘Home of the Americas’), it would become the heartbeat of cultural developments from Chile to Mexico. Art saturates the walls of the house, and in an adjacent building sits the massive archive of correspondence and drafts from the most significant writers of the past century. The art from Casa adorns this dossier. The current director of Casa, Abel Prieto – whose words open this dossier – is a novelist, a cultural critic, and a former minister of culture. His mandate is to stimulate discussion and debate in the country.

Over the course of the past decade, Cuba’s intellectuals have been gripped by the debate over decolonisation and culture. Since 1959, the Cuban revolutionary process has – at great cost – established the island’s political sovereignty and has struggled against centuries of poverty to cement its economic sovereignty. From 1959 onwards, under the leadership of the revolutionary forces, Cuba has sought to generate a cultural process that allows the island’s eleven million people to break with the cultural suffocation which is the legacy of both Spanish and US imperialism. Is Cuba, six decades since 1959, able to say that it is sovereign in cultural terms? The balance sheet suggests that the answer is complex since the onslaught of US cultural and intellectual production continues to hit the island like its annual hurricanes.

To that end, Casa de las Américas has been holding a series of encounters on the issue of decolonisation. In July 2022, Vijay Prashad, the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, delivered a lecture there that built upon the work being produced by the institute. Dossier no. 56, Ten Theses on Marxism and Decolonisation , draws from and expands upon the themes of that talk.

Antonio Seguí (Argentina), Untitled , 1965. Oil on canvas, 200 x 249 cm.

Thesis One: The End of History . The collapse of the USSR and the communist state system in Eastern Europe in 1991 came alongside a terrible debt crisis in the Global South that began with Mexico’s default in 1982. These two events – the demise of the USSR and the weakness of the Third World Project – were met with the onslaught of US imperialism and a US-driven globalisation project in the 1990s. For the left, this was a decade of weakness as our left-wing traditions and organisations experienced self-doubt and could not easily advance our clarities around the world. History had ended, said the ideologues of US imperialism, with the only possibility forward being the advance of the US project. The penalty inflicted upon the left by the surrender of Soviet leadership was heavy and led not only to the shutting down of many left parties, but also to the weakened confidence of millions of people with the clarities of Marxist thought.

Thesis Two: The Battle of Ideas . During the 1990s, Cuban President Fidel Castro called upon his fellow Cubans to engage in a ‘battle of ideas’, a phrase borrowed from The German Ideology (1846) by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. 1 What Castro meant by this phrase is that people of the left must not cower before the rising tide of neoliberal ideology but must confidently engage with the fact that neoliberalism is incapable of solving the basic dilemmas of humanity. For instance, neoliberalism has no answer to the obstinate fact of hunger: 7.9 billion people live on a planet with food enough for 15 billion, and yet roughly 3 billion people struggle to eat. This fact can only be addressed by socialism and not by the charity industry. 2 The Battle of Ideas refers to the struggle to prevent the conundrums of our time – and the solutions put forth to address them – from being defined by the bourgeoisie. Instead, the political forces for socialism must seek to offer an assessment and solutions far more realistic and credible. For instance, Castro spoke at the United Nations in 1979 with great feeling about the ideas of ‘human rights’ and ‘humanity’:

There is often talk of human rights, but it is also necessary to speak of the rights of humanity. Why should some people walk around barefoot so that others can travel in luxurious automobiles? Why should some live for 35 years so that others can live for 70? Why should some be miserably poor so that others can be overly rich? I speak in the name of the children in the world who do not have a piece of bread. I speak in the name of the sick who do not have medicine. I speak on behalf of those whose right to life and human dignity has been denied. 3

When Castro returned to the Battle of Ideas in the 1990s, the left was confronted by two related tendencies that continue to create ideological problems in our time:

Post-Marxism. An idea flourished that Marxism was too focused on ‘grand narratives’ (such as the importance of transcending capitalism for socialism) and that fragmentary stories would be more precise for understanding the world. The struggles of the working class and peasantry to gain power in society and over state institutions were seen as just another false ‘grand narrative’, whereas the fragmented politics of the non-governmental organisations were seen as more feasible. The retreat from power into service delivery and into a politics of reform was made in the name of going beyond Marx. But this argument – to go beyond Marx – was really, as the late Aijaz Ahmad pointed out, an argument to return to the period before Marx, to neglect the facts of historical materialism and the zig-zag possibility of building socialism as the historical negation of capitalist brutality and decadence. Post-Marxism was a return to idealism and to perfectionism.
Post-colonialism . Sections of the left began to argue that the impact of colonialism was so great that no amount of transformation would be possible, and that the only answer to what could come after colonialism was a return to the past. They treated the past, as the Marxist José Carlos Mariátegui argued in 1928 about the idea of indigenism, as a destination and not as a resource. Several strands of post-colonial theory developed, some of them offering genuine insights often drawn from the best texts of patriotic intellectuals of the new post-colonial nations and of the national liberation revolutionary tradition (anchored by writers such as Frantz Fanon). By the 1990s, the post-colonial tradition, which had previously been committed to revolutionary change in the Third World, was now swept up in North Atlantic university currents that favoured revolutionary impossibility. Afro-pessimism, one part of this new tradition, suggested – in its most extreme version – a desolate landscape of ‘social death’ for people of African descent, with no possibility of change. Decolonial thought or decolonialidad trapped itself by European thought, accepting the claim that many human concepts – such as democracy – are defined by the colonial ‘matrix of power’ or ‘matrix of modernity’. The texts of decolonial thought returned again and again to European thought, unable to produce a tradition that was rooted in the anti-colonial struggles of our time. The necessity of change was suspended in these variants of post-colonialism.

The only real decolonisation is anti-imperialism and anti-capitalism. You cannot decolonise your mind unless you also decolonise the conditions of social production that reinforce the colonial mentality. Post-Marxism ignores the fact of social production as well as the need to build social wealth that must be socialised. Afro-pessimism suggests that such a task cannot be accomplished because of permanent racism. Decolonial thought goes beyond Afro-pessimism but cannot go beyond post-Marxism, failing to see the necessity of decolonising the conditions of social production.

Antonio Martorell (Puerto Rico), Silla (‘Chair’), n.d., edition unknown. Woodcut. 100 x 62 cm.

Thesis Three: A Failure of Imagination. In the period from 1991 to the early 2000s, the broad tradition of national liberation Marxism felt flattened, unable to answer the doubts sown by post-Marxism and post-colonial theory. This tradition of Marxism no longer had the kind of institutional support provided in an earlier period, when revolutionary movements and Third World governments assisted each other and when even the United Nations’ institutions worked to advance some of these ideas. Platforms that developed to germinate left forms of internationalism – such as the World Social Forum – seemed to be unwilling to be clear about the intentions of peoples’ movements. The slogan of the World Social Forum, for instance, was ‘another world is possible’, which is a weak statement, since that other world could just as well be defined by fascism. There was little appetite to advance a slogan of precision, such as ‘socialism is necessary’.

One of the great maladies of post-Marxist thought – which derived much of its ammunition from forms of anarchism – has been the purist anxiety about state power. Instead of using the limitations of state power to argue for better management of the state, post-Marxist thought has argued against any attempt to secure power over the state. This is an argument made from privilege by those who do not have to suffer the obstinate facts of hunger and illiteracy, who claim that small-scale forms of mutual aid or charity are not ‘authoritarian’, like state projects to eradicate hunger. This is an argument of purity that ends up renouncing any possibility of abolishing the obstinate facts of hunger and other assaults on human dignity and well-being. In the poorer countries, where small-scale forms of charity and mutual aid have a negligible impact on the enormous challenges before society, nothing less than the seizure of state power and the use of that power to fundamentally eradicate the obstinate facts of inequality and wretchedness is warranted.

To approach the question of socialism requires close consideration of the political forces that must be amassed in order to contest the bourgeoisie for ideological hegemony and for control over the state. These forces experienced a pivotal setback when neoliberal globalisation reorganised production along a global assembly line beginning in the 1970s, fragmenting industrial production across the globe. This weakened trade unions in the most important, high-density sectors and invalidated nationalisation as a possible strategy to build proletarian power. Disorganised, without unions, and with long commute times and workdays, the entire international working class found itself in a situation of precariousness. 4 The International Labour Organisation refers to this sector as the precariat – the precarious proletariat. Disorganised forces of the working class and the peasantry, of the unemployed and the barely employed, find it virtually impossible to build the kind of theory and confidence out of their struggles needed to directly confront the forces of capital.

One of the key lessons for working-class and peasant movements comes from the struggles being incubated in India. For the past decade, there have been general strikes that have included up to 300 million workers annually. In 2020–2021, millions of farmers went on a year-long strike that forced the government to retreat from its new laws to uberise agricultural work. How were the farmers’ movement and the trade union movement able to do this in a context in which there is very low union density and over 90% of the workers are in the informal sector? 5 Because of the fights led by informal workers – primarily women workers in the care sector – trade unions began to take up the issues of informal workers – again, mainly women workers – as issues of the entire trade union movement over the course of the past two decades. Fights for permanency of tenure, proper wage contracts, dignity for women workers, and so on produced a strong unity between all the different fractions of workers. The main struggles that we have seen in India are led by these informal workers, whose militancy is now channelled through the organised power of the trade union structures. More than half of the global workforce is made up of women – women who do not see issues that pertain to them as women’s issues , but as issues that all workers must fight for and win. This is much the same for issues pertaining to workers’ dignity along the lines of race, caste, and other social distinctions. Furthermore, unions have been taking up issues that impact social life and community welfare outside of the workplace, arguing for the right to water, sewage connections, education for children, and to be free from intolerance of all kinds. These ‘community’ struggles are an integral part of workers’ and peasants’ lives; by entering them, unions are rooting themselves in the project of rescuing collective life, building the social fabric necessary for the advance towards socialism.

Alirio Palacios (Venezuela), Muro público (‘Public Wall’), 1978. Oil on canvas, 180 x 200 cm.

Thesis Four: Return to the Source . It is time to recover and return to the best of the national liberation Marxist tradition. This tradition has its origins in Marxism-Leninism, one that was always widened and deepened by the struggles of hundreds of millions of workers and peasants in the poorer nations. The theories of these struggles were elaborated by people such as José Carlos Mariátegui, Ho Chi Minh, EMS Namboodiripad, Claudia Jones, and Fidel Castro. There are two core aspects to this tradition:

From the words ‘national liberation’, we get the key concept of sovereignty . The territory of a nation or a region must be sovereign against imperialist domination.
From the tradition of Marxism, we get the key concept of dignity . The fight for dignity implies a fight against the degradation of the wage system and against the old, wretched, inherited social hierarchies (including along the lines of race, gender, sexual orientation, and so on).

Thesis Five: ‘Slightly Stretched’ Marxism . Marxism entered the anti-colonial struggles not through Marx directly, but more accurately through the important developments that Vladimir Lenin and the Communist International made to the Marxist tradition. When Fanon said that Marxism was ‘slightly stretched’ when it went out of its European context, it was this stretching that he had in mind. 6 Five key elements define the character of this ‘slightly stretched’ Marxism across a broad range of political forces:

It was clear to the early Marxists that liberalism would not solve the dilemmas of humanity, the obstinate facts of life under capitalism (such as hunger and ill-health). Not one capitalist state project put the solution to these dilemmas at the heart of its work, leaving it instead to the charity industry. The capitalist state projects pushed the idea of ‘human rights’ to abstraction; Marxists, on the other hand, recognised that only if these dilemmas are transcended can human rights be established in the world.
The modern form of industrial production is the precondition for this transcendence because only it can generate sufficient social wealth that can be socialised. Colonialism did not permit the development of productive forces in the colonised world, thereby making it impossible to create sufficient social wealth in the colonies to transcend these dilemmas.
The socialist project in the colonies had to fight against colonialism (and, therefore, for sovereignty) as well as capitalism and its social hierarchies (and, therefore, for dignity). These remain the two key aspects of national liberation Marxism.
Due to the lack of development of industrial capitalism in the colonies, and therefore of a large enough number of industrial workers (the proletariat), the peasantry and agricultural workers had to be a key part of the historical bloc of socialism.
It is important to register that socialist revolutions took place in the poorer parts of the world – Russia, Vietnam, China, Cuba – and not in the richer parts, where the productive forces had been better developed. The dual task of the revolutionary forces in poorer states that had won independence and instituted left governments was to build the productive forces and to socialise the means of production. The governments in these countries, shaped and supported by public action, had a historical mission far more complex than anything envisaged by the first generation of Marxists. A new, boundless Marxism emerged from these places, where an experimental attitude towards socialist construction emerged. However, many of these developments in socialist construction were not elaborated into theory, which meant that the theoretical tradition of national liberation Marxism was not fully available to contest both the post-Marxist and post-colonial assault on socialist praxis in the Third World.

Thesis Six: Dilemmas of Humanity . Reports come regularly about the terrible situation facing the world, from hunger and illiteracy to the ever more frequent outcomes of the climate catastrophe. Social wealth that could be spent to address these deep dilemmas of humanity is squandered on weapons and tax havens. The United Nations’ 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to end hunger and promote peace would require an infusion of $4.2 trillion per year, but, as it stands, an infinitesimal fraction of this amount is spent to address these goals. 7 With the pandemic and galloping inflation, even less money will go towards SDGs, and benchmarks measuring human well-being, sovereignty, and dignity will slip further and further away. Hunger, the greatest dilemma of humanity, is no longer within sight of being eradicated (except in China, where absolute poverty was ended in 2021). 8 It is estimated that around 3 billion people now struggle with various forms of daily hunger. 9

Take the case of Zambia and the fourth SDG to eradicate illiteracy, for example. Approximately 60% of the children in classes 1 to 4 in the Copperbelt cannot read. 10 This is a region that produces much of the world’s copper, which is essential to our electronics. The parents of these children bring the copper to the world market, but their children cannot read. Neither post-Marxism nor post-colonialism addresses the fact of illiteracy or these parents’ determination for their children to be able to read. The theory of national liberation Marxism, rooted in sovereignty and dignity, however, does address these questions: it demands that Zambia control copper production and receive higher royalty payments (sovereignty), and it demands that the Zambian working class take a greater share of the surplus value (dignity). Greater sovereignty and dignity are pathways to address the dilemmas facing humanity. But rather than spend social wealth on these elementary advances, those who own property and exercise privilege and power spend over $2 trillion per year on weapons and many trillions on security forces (from the military to the police). 11

Hervé Télémaque (Haiti), Fait divers , 1962. Oil on canvas, 130 x 195 cm.

Thesis Seven: The Rationality of Racism and Patriarchy. It is important to note that, under the conditions of capitalism, the structures of racism and patriarchy remain rational. Why is this the case? In Capital (1867), Marx detailed two forms for the extraction of surplus value and hinted at a third form. The first two forms (absolute surplus value and relative surplus value) were described and analysed in detail, pointing out how the theft of time over the course of the working day extracts absolute surplus value from the waged worker and how productivity gains both shorten the time needed for workers to produce their wages and increase the amount of surplus produced by them (relative surplus value). Marx also suggested a third form of extraction, writing that, in some situations, workers are paid less than would be justified by any civilised understanding of wages at that historical juncture. He noted that capitalists try to push ‘the wage of the worker down below the value of his labour power’, but he did not discuss this form further because of the importance for his analysis that labour power must be bought and sold at full value. 12

This third consideration, which we call super-exploitation, is not immaterial for our analysis since it is central to the discussion of imperialism. How are the suppression of wages and the refusal to increase royalty payments for raw material extraction justified? By a colonial argument that, in certain parts of the world, people have lower expectations for life and therefore their social development can be neglected. This colonial argument applies equally to the theft of wages from women who perform care work, which is either unpaid or grossly underpaid on the grounds that it is ‘women’s work’. 13 A socialist project is not trapped by the structures of racism and patriarchy since it does not require these structures to increase the capitalist’s share of surplus value. However, the existence of these structures over centuries, deepened by the capitalist system, has created habits that are difficult to overturn merely by legislation. For that reason, a political, cultural, and ideological struggle must be waged against the structures of racism and patriarchy and must be treated with as much importance as the class struggle.

Thesis Eight: Rescue Collective Life . Neoliberal globalisation vanquished the sense of collective life and deepened the despair of atomisation through two connected processes:

by weakening the trade union movement and the socialistic possibilities that come within the public action and workplace struggle rooted in trade unionism.
by substituting the idea of the citizen with the idea of the consumer – in other words, the idea that human beings are principally consumers of goods and services, and that human subjectivity can be best appreciated through a desire for things.

The breakdown of social collectivity and the rise of consumerism harden despair, which morphs into various kinds of retreat. Two examples of this are: a) a retreat into family networks that cannot sustain the pressures placed upon them by the withdrawal of social services, the increasing burden of care work on the family, and ever longer commute times and workdays; b) a move towards forms of social toxicity through avenues such as religion or xenophobia. Though these avenues provide opportunities to organise collective life, they are organised not for human advancement, but for the narrowing of social possibility.

How does one rescue collective life? Forms of public action rooted in social relief and cultural joy are an essential antidote to this bleakness. Imagine days of public action rooted in left traditions taking place each week and each month, drawing more and more people to carry out activities together that rescue collective life. One such activity is Red Books Day, which was inaugurated on 21 February 2020 by the International Union of Left Publishers, the same day that Marx and Engels published The Communist Manifesto in 1848. In 2020, the first Red Books Day, a few hundred thousand people around the world went into public places and read the manifesto in their different languages, from Korean to Spanish. In 2021, due to the pandemic, most of the events went online and we cannot really say how many people participated in Red Books Day, but, in 2022, nearly three-quarters of a million people joined in the various activities.

Part of rescuing collective life was vividly displayed during the pandemic when trade unions, youth organisations, women’s organisations, and student unions took to the public domain in Kerala (India) to build sinks, sew masks, establish community kitchens, deliver food, and conduct house-to-house surveys so that each person’s needs could be taken into account. 14

Antonio Berni (Argentina), Juanito Laguna , n.d. Painted wood and metal collage (triptych), 220 x 300 cm.

Thesis Nine: The Battle of Emotions . Fidel Castro provoked a debate in the 1990s around the concept of the Battle of Ideas, the class struggle in thought against the banalities of neoliberal conceptions of human life. A key part of Fidel’s speeches from this period was not just what he said but how he said it, each word suffused with the great compassion of a man committed to the liberation of humanity from the tentacles of property, privilege, and power. In fact, the Battle of Ideas was not merely about the ideas themselves, but also about a ‘battle of emotions’, an attempt to shift the palate of emotions from a fixation on greed to considerations of empathy and hope.

One of the true challenges of our time is the bourgeoisie’s use of the culture industries and the institutions of education and faith to divert attention away from any substantial discussion about real problems – and about finding common solutions to social dilemmas – and towards an obsession with fantasy problems. In 1935, the Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch called this the ‘swindle of fulfilment’, the seeding of a range of fantasies to mask their impossible realisation. The benefit of social production, Bloch wrote, ‘is reaped by the big capitalist upper stratum, which employs gothic dreams against proletarian realities’. 15 The entertainment industry erodes proletarian culture with the acid of aspirations that cannot be fulfilled under the capitalist system. But these aspirations are enough to weaken any working-class project.

A degraded society under capitalism produces a social life that is suffused with atomisation and alienation, desolation and fear, anger and hate, resentment and failure. These are ugly emotions that are shaped and promoted by the culture industries (‘you can have it too!’), educational establishments (‘greed is the prime mover’), and neo-fascists (‘hate immigrants, sexual minorities, and anyone else who denies you your dreams’). The grip of these emotions on society is almost absolute, and the rise of neo-fascists is premised upon this fact. Meaning feels emptied, perhaps the result of a society of spectacles that has now run its course.

From a Marxist perspective, culture is not seen as an isolated and timeless aspect of human reality, nor are emotions seen as a world of their own or as being outside of the developments of history. Since human experiences are defined by the conditions of material life, ideas of fate will linger on as long as poverty is a feature of human life. If poverty is transcended, then fatalism will have a less secure ideological foundation, but it does not automatically get displaced. Cultures are contradictory, bringing together a range of elements in uneven ways out of the social fabric of an unequal society that oscillates between reproducing class hierarchy and resisting elements of social hierarchy. Dominant ideologies suffuse culture through the tentacles of ideological apparatuses like a tidal wave, overwhelming the actual experiences of the working class and the peasantry. It is, after all, through class struggle and through the new social formations created by socialist projects that new cultures will be created – not merely by wishful thinking.

Tilsa Tsuchiya (Peru), Pintura N° 1 (‘Painting N° 1’), 1972. Oil on canvas, 90 x 122 cm.

It is important to recall that, in the early years of each of the revolutionary processes – from Russia in 1917 to Cuba in 1959 – cultural efflorescence was saturated with the emotions of joy and possibility, of intense creativity and experimentation. It is this sensibility that offers a window into something other than the ghoulish emotions of greed and hatred.

Thesis Ten: Dare to Imagine the Future . One of the enduring myths of the post-Soviet era is that there is no possibility of a post-capitalist future. This myth came to us from within the triumphalist US intellectual class, whose ‘end of history’ sensibility helped to strengthen orthodoxy in such fields as economics and political theory, preventing open discussions about post-capitalism. Even when orthodox economics could not explain the prevalence of crises, including the total economic collapse in 2007–08, the field itself retained its legitimacy. These myths were made popular by Hollywood films and television shows, where disaster and dystopian films suggested planetary destruction rather than socialist transformation. It is easier to imagine the end of the earth than a socialist world.

During the economic collapse, the phrase ‘too big to fail’ settled on the public consciousness, reinforcing the eternal nature of capitalism and the dangers of even trying to shake its foundations. The system stood at a standstill. Austerity growled at the precarious. Small businesses crumpled for lack of credit. And yet, there was no mass consideration of going beyond capitalism. World revolution was not seen on the immediate horizon. This partial reality suffocated so much hope in the possibility of going beyond this system, a system – too big to fail – that now seems eternal. Our traditions argue against pessimism, making the point that hope must structure our interventions from start to finish. But what is the material basis for this hope? This basis can be found on three levels:

The obstinate facts of hunger and illiteracy, houselessness and indignity, cannot be made invisible. Neither will those who are denied their basic rights be silenced, nor will their material conditions disappear if these obstinate facts are not addressed. Desolation and anger are the products of this denial.
Massive advances in global production – both in agriculture and industry as well as in the service sector – have enabled us to imagine a world that transcends necessity and opens the door to freedom. One cannot be free simply by a legal edict. Freedom requires that the obstinate facts of life under capitalism be transcended. For decades, we have lived in a world with the capacity to meet the needs of humanity.
These massive advances in global production took place not only because of improvements in science and technology, but decisively because of the socialisation of labour. What is known as globalisation sees the entire process from the standpoint of capital and increased returns to scale. What it does not acknowledge is that these massive advances in global production took place because workers now labour with each other across oceans and that this socialisation of labour demonstrates the integration of the international working class. This socialisation of labour runs against the narrow, suffocating boundaries of private property, which hold back further advances for its own petty gains. The clash between the socialisation of labour and private property deepens the struggles to socialise property – the basis for modern socialism – as Marx predicted.

Capitalism has already failed. It cannot address the basic questions of our times, these obstinate facts – such as hunger and illiteracy – that stare us in the face. It is not enough to be alive. One must be able to live and to flourish. That is the mood that demands a revolutionary transformation.

We need to recover our tradition of national liberation Marxism but also elaborate the theory of our tradition from the work of our movements. We need to draw more attention to the theories of Ho Chi Minh and Fidel, EMS Namboodiripad and Claudia Jones. They did not only do , but they also produced innovative theories. These theories need to be developed and tested in our own contemporary reality, building our Marxism not out of the classics alone – which are useful – but out of the facts of our present. Lenin’s ‘concrete analysis of the concrete conditions’ requires close attention to the concrete, the real, the historical facts. We need more factual assessments of our times, a closer rendition of contemporary imperialism that is imposing its military and political might to prevent the necessity of a socialist world. This is precisely the agenda of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, of the almost thirty research institutes with which we work closely through the Network of Research Institute, and of the more than 200 political movements whose mass lines inform the development of Tricontinental’s research agenda through the International Peoples’ Assembly.

Certainly, socialism is not going to appear magically. It must be fought for and built, our struggles deepened, our social connections tightened, our cultures enriched. Now is the time for a united front, to bring together the working class and the peasantry as well as allied classes, to increase the confidence of workers, and to clarify our theory. To unite the working class and the peasantry as well as allied classes requires the unity of all left and progressive forces. Our divides in this time of great danger must not be central; our unity is essential. Humanity demands it.

Osmond Watson (Jamaica), Spirit of Festival , 1972. Watercolor and varnished oil on paper, 104 x 78 cm.

1 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 2004), 101. 2 Fidel Castro, La historia me absolverá [History Will Absolve Me] (Havana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 2007). 3 Raúl Roa, ‘Fundamentos, cargos y pruebas de la denuncia de Cuba’, In Raúl Roa: Canciller de la dignidad (La Habana: Ediciones Políticas, 1986 [1961]).

4 Translator’s note: Nuestra América is a concept stemming from Cuban national hero Jose Martí’s 1891 essay on Latin American nationalism calling for unity among nations to foment a Pan-Latin American identity opposed to the cultural values of Europe and the United States.

5 Fidel Castro, ‘Word to the Intellectuals’, Speech at the conclusion of meetings with Cuban intellectuals held at the National Library on 16, 23, and 30 June 1961, http://www.fidelcastro.cu/es/audio/palabras-los-intelectuales.

6 Fidel Castro, A Revolution Can Only Be the Child of Culture and Ideas (Havana: Editora Política, 1999), http://www.fidelcastro.cu/en/libros/revolution-can-only-be-child-culture-and-ideas.

7 Abel Prieto, ‘Sin cultura no hay libertad posible’. Notas sobre las ideas de Fidel en torno a la cultura’ [‘Without Culture There Is No Possible Freedom’: Notes on Fidel’s Ideas About Culture], La Ventana , 12 August 2021, http://laventana.casa.cult.cu/index.php/2022/08/12/sin-cultura-no-hay-libertad-posible-notas-sobre-las-ideas-de-fidel-en-torno-a-la-cultura/.

8 Fidel Castro, Speech delivered at the Commemoration of the 60 th Anniversary of his admission to University of Havana, Aula Magna, University of Havana, 17 November 2005, http://www.fidelcastro.cu/en/discursos/speech-delivered-commemoration-60th-anniversary-his-admission-university-havana-aula-magna.

9 Today, with the use of social networks in electoral campaigns and in subversive projects, this very acute observation by Fidel about ‘conditioned responses’ carries significant weight.

10 Castro, Speech at the Commemoration of the 60 th Anniversary of his admission to University of Havana.

11 Fidel Castro, ‘Without Culture There Is No Freedom Possible’, Key address at the opening ceremony of the 18 th Havana International Ballet Festival, 19 October 2002, http://www.fidelcastro.cu/en/fragmento-portada/october-19-2002-0.

12 Fidel Castro, ‘Concept of Revolution’, Speech at the mass rally on International Workers’ Day at Revolution Square, 1 May 2000, http://www.cuba.cu/gobierno/discursos/2000/ing/f010500i.html.

1 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1968), 38. 2 Food and Agriculture Organisation, Building a Common Vision for Sustainable Food and Agriculture. Principles and Approaches (Rome: FAO, 2014); FAO, IFAD, UNICEF, WFP and WHO, The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2022 : Repurposing Food and Agricultural Policies To Make Healthy Diets More Affordable (Rome: FAO, 2022), vi. 3 Fidel Castro, Statement at the UN General Assembly, in capacity of NAM President, 12 October 1979, https://misiones.cubaminrex.cu/en/articulo/fidel-castro-human-rights-statement-un-general-assembly-capacity-nam-president-12-october .

4 Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, In the Ruins of the Present , working document no. 1, 1 March 2018, https://thetricontinental.org/working-document-1/ .

5 Govindan Raveendran and Joann Vanek, ‘Informal Workers in India: A Statistical Profile’, Statistical Brief 24 (Women in Informal Employment: Globalising and Organising, August 2020), 1; Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, The Farmers’ Revolt in India , dossier 41, 14 June 2021, https://thetricontinental.org/dossier-41-india-agriculture/.

6 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth , trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press), 5.

7 Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, ‘Global Outlook on Financing for Sustainable Development 2021’, 9 November 2020, https://www.oecd.org/newsroom/covid-19-crisis-threatens-sustainable-development-goals-financing.htm .

8 Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, Serve the People: The Eradication of Extreme Poverty in China , 23 July 2021, https://thetricontinental.org/studies-1-socialist-construction/ .

9 FAO et al., The State of Food Security , vi.

10 Lusaka Times, ‘Over 60% Copperbelt Province Lower Primary Pupils Can’t Read and Write – PEO’, Lusaka Times , 18 January 2018, https://www.lusakatimes.com/2018/01/27/60-copperbelt-province-lower-primary-pupils-cant-read-write-peo/ .

11 Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, ‘World Military Expenditure Passes $2 Trillion for First Time’, SIPRI , 25 April 2022, https://www.sipri.org/media/press-release/2022/world-military-expenditure-passes-2-trillion-first-time .

12 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy – Volume I , trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin Books, 2004), 670.

13 Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, Uncovering the Crisis: Care Work in the Time of Coronavirus , dossier no. 38, 7 March 2021, https://thetricontinental.org/dossier-38-carework/ .

14 Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, CoronaShock and Socialism , CoronaShock no. 3, https://thetricontinental.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/20200701_Coronashock-3_EN_Web.pdf .

15 Ernst Bloch, Heritage of Our Times , trans. Neville and Stephen Plaice (Berkeley; Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991), 103.

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2 Historical Materialism

Paul Blackledge, London South Bank University

Published: 10 September 2018
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Marx’s theory of history is often misrepresented as a mechanically deterministic and fatalistic theory of change in which the complexity of the real world is reduced to simple, unconvincing abstractions. Nothing could be further from the truth. Though Stalin attempted to transform Marxism into something akin to this caricature to justify Russia’s state-capitalist industrialization after 1928, neither Marx nor his most perceptive followers understood historical materialism in this way. This chapter shows that Marx’s theory of history, once unpicked from its misrepresentations, allows us to comprehend social reality as a non-reductive, synthetic, and historical totality. This approach is alive to the complexity of the social world without succumbing to the descriptive eclecticism characteristic of non-Marxist historiography. And by escaping the limits of merely descriptive history, Marxism offers the possibility of a scientific approach to revolutionary practice as the flipside to comprehending the present, as Georg Lukács put it, as a historical problem.

The term “historical materialism” has a peculiar place within the Marxist tradition. While it has come to function as a synonym for Marxism, the phrase itself was never used by Marx. In fact, it was first coined by Engels after Marx’s death as a synonym for an earlier notion, “the materialist conception of history,” which he had first used in his 1859 review of Marx’s A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (Engels 2001a : 8; 2001b : 36).

Engels aimed, both in his 1859 review and in a series of later essays and letters, to unpack Marx’s dense methodological comments to make them palatable to the general reader. Many critics have argued that in so doing Engels reduced Marx’s method to a mechanically determinist and fatalist caricature of the real thing. And just as Marx once famously joked that he was not a Marxist ( Engels 1992 : 356), Engels’s critics have suggested that neither was Marx an (Engelsian) historical materialist ( Thomas 2008 : 39). Others have gone further to suggest that Marx shared Engels’s mechanically determinist and reductive conception of history. So, despite the illuminating insights contained within his historical writings, the method outlined in the 1859 preface is incompatible with the tenets of modern historiography ( Rigby 1998 :94).

As we shall see, neither Marx, nor Engels (Blackledge 2017 ; 2019 ), embraced a reductive or mechanical method. In fact, Marx’s method, properly understood, facilitates the integration of evidence into a non-reductive, synthetic whole that offers the possibility of simultaneously explaining the historical process with a view to informing revolutionary practice. This approach stands in stark contrast to the tendency toward eclectic description characteristic of even the best of non-Marxist historiography.

Georg Lukács articulated the most sophisticated philosophical critique of the limitations of non-Marxist thought generally and non-Marxist historiography in particular. He argued that it was impossible to comprehend capitalism as a historical totality from the (bourgeois) standpoint of the individual within civil society because “when the individual confronts objective reality he is faced by a complex of ready-made and unalterable objects which allow him only the subjective responses of recognition or rejection” ( Lukács 1971 :48, 50, 63, 69). To argue that this standpoint is bourgeois should not be interpreted mechanically as assuming that those who hold it are individual members of the bourgeoisie. Rather, it is best understood as a claim that this general worldview emerged with the rise of capitalism, whose parameters it cannot escape. In relation to historiography, this failing explained the “total inability of every bourgeois thinker and historian to see the world-historical events of the present [1914–23—PB] as universal history.” More generally, Lukács claimed, “We see the unhistorical and antihistorical character of bourgeois thought most strikingly when we consider the problem of the present as a historical problem .” Because the standpoint of the individual within civil society tends to naturalize capitalist social relations, intellectuals viewing the world from this perspective are incapable adequately of conceiving “the present as history” ( Lukács 1971 :157–158).

Conversely, the collective struggles of the proletariat against alienation provide a standpoint from which intellectuals can begin to understand capitalism as a historical totality. It is because the proletariat exists at the center of the constant reproduction of bourgeois society that its struggles against this system are able to point beyond it. Historical materialism, from this perspective, is best understood as “the theory of the proletarian revolution . . . because its essence is an intellectual synthesis of the social existence which produces and fundamentally determines the proletariat; and because the proletariat struggling for liberation finds its clear self-consciousness in it” ( Lukács 1970 :9).

Conceived in this way, it is understandable that the influence of Marxism has tended to ebb and flow with changing fortunes in the class struggle. Within the academy, Marxism became more popular as the generation radicalized in the 1960s came to maturity, while the subsequent downturn in class struggle informed what Ellen Meiksins Wood called a “retreat from class” amongst intellectuals from the late 1970s onward ( Wood 1986 ). Subsequently, many radical intellectuals tended to justify their embrace of culturally defined New Social Movements at the expense of socially structured class politics through criticisms of Marxism’s supposed inability to comprehend non-economic forms of oppression and domination ( Blackledge 2013 ; Palmer 1990 ).

This article challenges this caricature of Marxism: the false claim that Marx’s method is reductive involves a one-dimensional interpretation of his attempt to conceptualize the complexity of the real world as a synthetic whole. As we shall see, although Marx’s dialectical approach is not reductive, it does fundamentally challenge the dominant tendency merely to describe reality superficially as the evolving interaction of a multiplicity of factors. As Georg Plekhanov argued more than a century ago, the problem with the factoral approach to social analysis lies not in the attempt to distinguish different aspects of the mediated whole but rather in the tendency to reify these factors such that history is made to stand still. Marxism transcends the theory of factors not by reducing everything to class but through a “synthetic view of social life” that facilitates our cognition of the whole as a complex totality centred on humanity’s productive engagement with nature ( Plekhanov 1944 :13). Because this approach allowed Marx to comprehend the social whole as a historically evolving totality it underpinned his organic conception of revolutionary politics ( Engels 1987 : 27).

1. The Materialist Conception of History

In 1859 Marx and Engels published outlines of their basic methodology. The first of these essays was Marx’s preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy , followed by Engels’s review of this book. Both these works are somewhat opaque: Marx’s preface was written with an eye to the censor ( Prinz 1969 ); while only the first two of three projected instalments of Engels’s review were written because the journal in which it was serialized, Das Volk (effectively edited by Marx), went bankrupt before Engels had time to complete the final part of the review ( MECW 16 , 673–674).

The central paragraph of Marx’s preface is an infamously dense summary of themes from the German Ideology (for a comparison of these texts see Carver 1983 :72–77).

In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness. 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” ( Marx 1987 : 263).

According to Richard Miller, the widespread claim that this passage proffers a mechanically determinist and fatalist theory of history is predicated upon the assumption that Marx was a positivist. And while it is certainly possible to interpret Marx’s 1859 preface through a positivist lens as making hard technologically deterministic predictions which are not only falsifiable but have in fact been falsified, Miller points out that neither Marx nor “most of his insightful followers” understood historical materialism in this way ( Miller 1984 :7, 271). In fact, Marx’s method is best understood, contra positivism, as a precursor to the critical realist philosophy of social science. This approach includes a stratified conception of reality through which agency is explained as an emergent property rooted in but irreducible to underlying social relations. Further, this approach points to the existence of tendencies rather than superficial Humean constant conjunctions. Interpreted in this way, Marx is best understood as positing that though modes of production shape the contours of social struggles, definite historically and socially constituted men and women are the active, conscious, and (historically relative) free agents of change. In this model there is nothing preordained about the outcome of the struggles in which these agents engage ( Blackledge 2006a :14–16; Meikle 1985 :57; Collier 1994 ; Blackledge 2002 ). This is why, as Geoffrey de Ste. Croix has powerfully argued (and as many Marxist historians have demonstrated in practice), there is no necessary contradiction between Marx’s conception of social structure on the one hand and the demand that historians attempt to richly reconstruct historical processes on the other ( Ste. Croix 1983 :90; Blackledge 2008b ).

More concretely, Marx’s analytical distinction between forces and relations of production on the one hand, and base and superstructure on the other, is intended not as a schema of automatic historical progress but rather as a map of the broad coordinates of revolutionary politics. If the development of the forces of production—the means of production and the labor power required to utilize instruments and raw materials—sets the parameters of what is politically possible at any particular historical juncture, the relations of production—class relations of effective control—frame the contradictory material interests that underpin the evolving lines of conflict in developing struggles. This latter concept is the foundation of the Communist Manifesto ’s claim that “the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another” ( Marx and Engels 1984 :482).

If crises born of the contradiction between forces and relations of production evidence the historical necessity of revolution, the potential for hope emerges because structural crises create the conditions in which revolutionary movements tend to develop as groups rooted in the relations of production coalesce around competing responses to structural crises. But victory for these revolutionary forces is never guaranteed: though structural crises will tend to generate challenges to the existing relations of production, the legal, political, and ideological superstructure acts to ensure the reproduction of these relations. Which side will triumph in the ensuing conflicts is an open question. As Marx and Engels wrote in the Manifesto : the class struggle is “carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes” ( Marx and Engels 1984 :482; Harman 1998 :7–54).

Engels’s own gloss on Marx’s method points in a similar direction. In his introduction to the English edition of Socialism: Utopian and Scientific he defined historical materialism as “that view of the course of history which seeks the ultimate cause and the great moving power of all important historic events in the economic development of society, in the changes in the modes of production and exchange, in the consequent division of society into distinct classes, and in the struggles of these classes against one another” ( Engels 1990b : 289). He was, however, adamant that this was not a reductionist model:

According to the materialist conception of history, the ultimately determining element in history is the production and reproduction of real life. Other than this neither Marx nor I have ever asserted. Hence if somebody twists this into saying that the economic element is the only determining one, he transforms that proposition into a meaningless, abstract, senseless phrase. ( Engels 2001b : 34–35)

Engels emphasized, for instance, that this approach allowed “political power” to enjoy a degree of “relative independence” from the economic base ( Engels 2001c :60). Moreover, he insisted that the sophistication of his and Marx’s method was apparent in their works of historical analysis. While in polemics with their opponents they often one-sidedly “emphasise[d] the main principle . . . when it came to presenting a section of history . . . it was a different matter and there no error was permissible” ( Engels 2001b :36).

Some have charged that Engels mischaracterized Marx’s method in his 1859 review ( Carver 1983 :116). But this claim is difficult to square with what we know of the piece’s publication history. Marx was editing the journal in which Engels’s essay was published, he had asked Engels for the review, and Engels had offered it with a cover note suggesting that “if you don’t like it in toto , tear it up and let me have your opinion” ( Engels 1983 : 478). Moreover, while the phrase “materialist conception of history” may have been new in 1859, it certainly is not an eccentric description of either Marx’s 1859 preface, the approach outlined in The German Ideology , or (though Engels had not had sight of this) Marx’s method as detailed in his 1857 Introduction to the Grundrisse ( Hunley 1991 :92).

This is not to say that nothing new was added to the Marxist method in the late 1850s. There was a shift in Marx’s understanding of method at this juncture, but this development constituted, as Henri Lefebvre has argued, a deepening of Marx’s conception of the historical method ( Lefebvre 2009 :69–74). To this end, he famously wrote to Engels in January 1858 stating: “What was of great use to me as regards method of treatment was Hegel’s Logic ” ( Marx 1983 :249). Though Marx’s reengagement with Hegel is of the first importance to his method, before this aspect of his work is discussed it is instructive to outline the theory of history he articulated alongside Engels in The German Ideology .

The German Ideology is not an easy read. The text that eventually saw the light of day after its authors’ deaths was cobbled together from various unfinished texts penned between November 1845 and August 1846 and intended for publication as separate journal articles ( Carver and Blank 2014 ). Though this provenance gives The German Ideology a somewhat opaque quality, it nonetheless remains an invaluable resource for anyone wanting to understand and extend Marx and Engels’s method of analysis. For it was through these manuscripts that they achieved a degree of what they both described as “self-clarification” ( Marx 1987 :264; Engels 1990a :519), while the manuscript itself offers “page after page [of] astonishing insights” ( Arthur 2015 ).

In The German Ideology Marx and Engels argue that humans make and remake themselves through labor to meet their needs. It is through social, conscious productive interaction with nature that our ancestors became human: they transformed themselves by working together to transform nature. So, while Marx and Engels argue that we do have a nature made up of needs and capacities, by contrast with crude materialists who posit this essence as a simple transhistorical fact, they insist that our nature is not fixed because these needs and capacities are not fixed. They claim that our essence evolves because these needs and capacities develop through our active interaction with nature ( Marx and Engels 1976 :41–43). This argument marks the point of synthesis between the concepts of practice and material need that constitutes a core feature of Marxism. Moreover, because need is a social concept that nonetheless has natural roots, this argument highlights the unity (but not identity) of natural and social history ( Marx and Engels 1976 :28–29).

This unity between natural and social history informs their famous claim that definite individuals at a specific moment in time differentiated themselves from nature by consciously transforming their environment in order to meet their (initially natural) needs:

Men can be distinguished from animals by consciousness, by religion or anything else you like. They themselves begin to distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence, a step which is conditioned by their physical organisation. By producing their means of subsistence men are indirectly producing their material life ( Marx and Engels 1976 :31).

Consequently, rather than follow modern political theory from Hobbes and Locke onward in positing abstract “man” as the starting point for the analysis of the social world, Marx and Engels wrote that their study proceeds from the standpoint of definite individuals in definite social relations:

The premises from which we begin are not arbitrary ones, not dogmas, but real premises from which abstraction can only be made in the imagination. They are the real individuals, their activity and the material conditions of their life, both those which they find already existing and those produced by their activity ( Marx and Engels 1976 :31).

The human essence is on their account a historical rather than ideal abstraction: at any particular juncture it is the “sum of productive forces, capital funds and social forms of intercourse” ( Marx and Engels 1976 :54). Though too often dismissed as the background noise to history, the mere “reproduction of the physical existence of the individuals,” human productive interaction with nature is rather “a definite form of activity of these individuals, a definite form of expressing their life, a definite mode of life on their part” ( Marx and Engels 1976 :31). More specifically, by contrast with traditional elitist ideologies that tend to denigrate practice as the poor cousin to theory’s pure universality, Marx and Engels insist that our consciousness is profoundly shaped by the way we produce to meet our needs.

Morality, religion, metaphysics, and all the rest of ideology as well as the forms of consciousness corresponding to these, thus no longer retain the semblance of independence. They have no history, no development; but men, developing their material production and their material intercourse, alter, along with this their actual world, also their thinking and the products of their thinking. It is not consciousness that determines life, but life that determines consciousness. For the first manner of approach the starting-point is consciousness taken as the living individual; for the second manner of approach, which conforms to real life, it is the real living individuals themselves, and consciousness is considered solely as their consciousness ( Marx and Engels 1976 :36–37; also see Marx 1987 :263).

Marx and Engels argue that production includes both natural and social aspects. It comprises not only our work on nature to meet our needs but also the social relations that spring from working together to that end. Indeed, “a certain mode of production, or industrial stage, is always combined with a certain mode of co-operation, or social stage” ( Marx and Engels 1976 :43). They labeled the totality of these relations a “mode of production,” and periodized history according to changes in the mode of production ( Marx and Engels 1976 :43). Their conception of a mode of production as a totality is in the first instance a “scientific hypothesis” about how the world works ( Vygodski 1973 :16). The essence of capitalism is different from the essence of feudalism and both of these differ again from other modes of production. The goal of science is, in the first instance, to grasp the essence of each particular mode so as to understand its distinct dynamic. It can only then move on to make sense of more complex characteristics of the system as a whole.

It was through the concept of mode of production that Marx and Engels began to overcome the limitations of earlier attempts to understand modernity ( Marx and Engels 1976 :32–37). By contrast both with liberalism’s attempt to naturalize egoistic individualism and private property and earlier socialist criticisms of the consequences of private property, they outlined a dialectical and historical approach according to which private property had a history—having evolved through “tribal,” “ancient communal,” “feudal,” and on to its present capitalist form—and through its history these specific forms had played positive and negative parts at specific junctures. Most recently, capitalist private property had fostered the social development necessary for the transition to socialism before itself becoming a fetter on further development ( Marx and Engels 1976 : 33, 48).

While this approach marked a step beyond both liberal and early socialist conceptions of private property, when compared with Marx’s later conception of social determination it remains analytically weak. For whereas Marx would subsequently insist that production determines exchange and distribution, in this earlier text he and Engels conceive production and exchange as co-determining distribution, which in turn determines them ( Marx and Engels 1976 :40). Nonetheless, the analysis of private property in The German Ideology did constitute a profound theoretical breakthrough. It allowed Marx and Engels to grasp capitalism as a historical mode of production with dominant progressive and regressive characteristics at different moments in its history. Furthermore, they understood this dialectical account of capitalism to be a specific example of a more general historical law: one whereby social change through revolutions occurs when social relations that had previously fostered social development subsequently come to fetter that development ( Marx and Engels 1976 :74; see, e.g., Marx 1987 :263). Marx subsequently worked an important improvement on the account of social change given in The German Ideology . Whereas in The German Ideology he used the term “forms of intercourse” to describe the social relations that initially fostered and latterly fettered the development of the forces of production and through which he periodized history, he subsequently refined this concept as relations of production to rid it of any remnants of technological determinism ( Therborn 1976 :366; Callinicos 2004 :48).

More specifically, Marx and Engels argued that though private property had previously played a progressive historical role, the crises and social conflicts that it now engendered meant that this was no longer the case. This claim was a double-edged sword: although socialism was now moving onto the historical and political agenda, this movement was possible only because economic growth had previously been fostered by private property relations. Consequently, any attempt to bypass this earlier stage of history would be disastrous for the socialist project, the

development of productive forces . . . is an absolutely necessary practical premise, because without it privation, want is merely made general, and with want the struggle for necessities would begin again, and all the old filthy business would necessarily be restored. ( Marx and Engels 1976 :49)

Concretely, it is “only with large-scale industry [that] the abolition of private property becomes possible” ( Marx and Engels 1976 :64). As a fundamental precept of Marx’s theory of history this argument also undermines the claims that Stalin and Mao were able to introduce socialism in relatively backward countries ( Cliff 1974 ).

Socialism, in Marx and Engels’s model, far from being an abstract, transhistorical moral ideal is best understood as a historically concrete form offered as a solution by definite historically constituted individuals to historically specific problems ( Blackledge 2012 ). Ludwig Feuerbach, the most important antagonist in their critique could understand none of this because he assumed two related myths: a transhistorical human essence alongside a transhistorical natural world ( Marx and Engels 1976 :40–41). This mistake meant that insofar as he “is a materialist he does not deal with history, and as far as he considers history he is not a materialist. With him materialism and history diverge completely” ( Marx and Engels 1976 :41).

Marx and Engels’s new approach to human history amounted to a real transcendence (sublation) of materialism and idealism. As Lukács argued, they aimed to overcome the opposition between materialism and idealism by synthesizing causal, materialist models of behavior with purposeful, idealist accounts of agency to provide a framework through which our actions could be understood as human actions ( Lukács 1975 :345). Marx famously contrasted his approach with these earlier systems in the first of his Theses on Feuerbach :

The chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism—that of Feuerbach included—is that the thing, reality, sensuousness, is conceived only in the form of the object or of contemplation , but not as sensuous human activity, practice , not subjectively. Hence, in contradistinction to materialism, the active side was developed abstractly by idealism—which, of course, does not know real, sensuous activity as such ( Marx and Engels 1976 :4).

So, Marx differentiated his materialism from older forms of materialism which were in one way or another reductive in their effects. His sublation of materialism and idealism into a new approach to history nonetheless remained a form of materialism because it recognized that priority should be assigned to satisfying our needs: as Chris Arthur writes, “ in the first instance material circumstances condition us, however much we revolutionise those conditions later” ( Arthur 1970 :23).

By contrast with the fatalism of earlier mechanical forms of materialism, because Marx and Engels aimed to grasp real historical change, theirs was a form of “practical materialism” focused on “revolutionising the existing world, of practically coming to grips with and changing the things found in existence” ( Marx and Engels 1976 , 38). Indeed, they claimed that in the modern world practical materialism was a synonym for communism because only those intent on the revolutionary reconstruction of existing social relations are able to transcend the sterile opposition between the old mechanical materialism, which accepted reality as a pre-given and immutable fact, and its idealist (moralist) other that responded to the evils of the world with “impotence in action” ( Marx and Engels 1975 :201). Conversely, practical materialism assumes the existence of agents already challenging the status quo: “The existence of revolutionary ideas in a particular period presupposes the existence of a revolutionary class” ( Marx and Engels 1976 :60). In the modern world, or so Marx and Engels claimed, this was the working class, and they framed their political activity in relation to its real struggles against capitalism.

2. Coquetting with Hegel

What Marx added to this model when he reread Hegel in the 1850s was a more nuanced understanding of how the social world might be conceived as a totality of interdependent processes. In his 1857 Introduction he wrote:

The economists of the seventeenth century, e.g., always begin with the living whole, with population, nation, state, several states, etc.; but they always conclude by discovering through analysis a small number of determinant, abstract, general relations such as division of labour, money, value, etc. As soon as these individual moments had been more or less firmly established and abstracted, there began the economic systems, which ascended from the simple relations, such as labour, division of labour, need, exchange value, to the level of the state, exchange between nations and the world market. The latter is obviously the scientifically correct method. The concrete is concrete because it is the concentration of many determinations, hence unity of the diverse. It appears in the process of thinking, therefore, as a process of concentration, as a result, not as a point of departure, even though it is the point of departure in reality and hence also the point of departure for observation and conception. Along the first path the full conception was evaporated to yield an abstract determination; along the second, the abstract determinations lead towards a reproduction of the concrete by way of thought. In this way Hegel fell into the illusion of conceiving the real as the product of thought concentrating itself, probing its own depths, and unfolding itself out of itself, by itself, whereas the method of rising from the abstract to the concrete is only the way in which thought appropriates the concrete, reproduces it as the concrete in the mind” ( Marx 1973 :101).

Though the approach set out here is clearly dialectical, it is also not Hegelian. Marx suggested that he “openly avowed [himself] the pupil of that mighty thinker, and even . . . coquetted with the modes of expression peculiar to him” ( Marx 1976 :103). However, whereas the Hegelian concept develops deductively, for Marx conceptual deepening emerged through the successive introduction of more complex determinations as he sought to move from the abstract to the concrete ( Ilyenkov 2013 :149–167). Commenting on this method, Bertell Ollman writes that Marx and Engels considered the whole to be constituted through its internal relations, and their work focused on the painstaking reconstitution of the whole as such a concrete totality ( Ollman 1976 :34; Marx 1973 :101). As Engels wrote:

Our view of history, however, is first and foremost a guide to study, not a tool for constructing objects after the Hegelian model. The whole of history must be studied anew, and the existential conditions of the various social formations individually investigated before an attempt is made to deduce therefrom the political, legal, aesthetic, philosophical, religious, etc., standpoints that correspond to them ( Enggels 2001a :8).

So, while Marx and Engels may well have agreed with Hegel that the truth is the whole, they nonetheless insisted that the process of reproducing the whole in thought as a concrete totality of many determinations was an arduous and ongoing scientific process. Marx’s goal was not to reduce non-economic processes of oppression and domination to class relations. Rather, he aimed to integrate these processes into a complex totality where explanation “means something like being placed correctly in the system of concepts that together form the theory of the capitalist mode of production” ( Callinicos 2014 :131; Gimenez 2001 ). According to Sue Clegg this method entails, for instance, not that forms of oppression are reduced to epiphenomena of class relations but that they are conceived as part of a greater whole: “The argument for historical materialism is not, as some of its critics have claimed, to reduce women’s oppression to class but that women’s position only makes sense in the explanatory context of the dynamics of particular modes of production” ( Clegg 1997 :210; cf Blackledge 2018 ).

Clegg is right, for though Marx insisted that relations of production constitute the inner essence of a mode of production, he also stressed that other aspects of the social whole cannot be reduced to these underlying social relations; they must be understood through an active engagement with empirical evidence:

The specific economic form, in which unpaid surplus-labour is pumped out of direct producers, determines the relationship of rulers and ruled, as it grows directly out of production itself and, in turn, reacts upon it as a determining element. Upon this, however, is founded the entire formation of the economic community which grows up out of the production relations themselves, thereby simultaneously its specific political form. It is always the direct relationship of the owners of the conditions of production to the direct producers—a relation always naturally corresponding to a definite stage in the development of the methods of labour and thereby its social productivity—which reveals the innermost secret, the hidden basis of the entire social structure and with it the political form of the relation of sovereignty and dependence, in short, the corresponding specific form of the state. This does not prevent the same economic basis—the same from the standpoint of its main conditions—due to innumerable different empirical circumstances, natural environment, racial relations, external historical influences, etc., from showing infinite variations and gradations in appearance, which can be ascertained only by analysis of the empirically given conditions ( Marx 1981 :927).

Consequently, in his theory of history Marx posited a method of analysis that opens with an attempt to grasp the essence of a system understood as the dominant form in which surplus is extracted from the direct producers. However, essence is not appearance, and science must also be able to comprehend totalities as complex wholes not as simple abstractions, and this entails careful theoretically informed and detailed engagement with evidence.

In modern capitalist societies Marx’s method involves starting from an analysis of wage labor, because this is the historically novel and dominant form through which surplus is extracted from the direct producers. Wage labor is not, of course, the only way that surplus is thus extracted, and it certainly is not the only form of work in the modern world. Nevertheless, it is the dominant form through which the system is reproduced and the specific character of wage labor differentiates capitalism from earlier modes of production. In particular, wage labor underpins capitalism’s most salient characteristics: its dynamism and its tendency to crisis.

By contrast with this essentialist model, descriptive accounts of history tend to reduce it to the successive iteration of mere chance—“one damn thing after another” as Toynbee wrote. By contrast with Marxism, the descriptive approach fails to recognize that to understand a thing we must grasp not merely what it is but also what it has the potential to become—and indeed what its essence necessitates that it tends toward (Meikle 1983 , 1985 ). For Marx, properly understood the scientific method aims to reveal the dynamic social essence beneath the appearance of things: “All science would be superfluous if the form of appearance of things directly coincided with their essence” ( Marx 1981 :956). To this end, social science is a theoretical exercise aimed at cognizing the world we inhabit: “In the analysis of economic forms neither microscopes nor chemical reagents are of assistance. The power of abstraction must replace both” ( Marx 1976 :90). Marx’s own contribution to this project revealed that capitalist society necessarily tends to both dynamism and crisis, which in turn impose an aging process on the system—and these are all essential characteristics of capitalism. Of course, the ways in which these tendencies are realized in practice is highly mediated and complex. If this truth means that mechanical applications of Marx’s model to reality will tend to a crude caricature of existing reality, the alternative approach of dismissing essence as a metaphysical concept lends itself to the tendency to lose sight of the capitalist wood for the trees.

Critics of essentialism generally argue that it fails as a model of history because it is fundamentally reductive. But as Scott Meikle argues in relation to Geoffrey de Ste. Croix’s The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World this criticism of Marxism misses its mark. In his magnificent book, Ste. Croix aimed to reveal the essence of the ancient world as a system of surplus extraction from unfree labor. Far from being a reductive exercise, The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World married the highest level of theoretical sophistication with an incredibly detailed knowledge both of the primary and the secondary sources for his period of study. By marrying these two aspects of knowledge, Ste. Croix was able to explain the historical evolution of the ancient Greek world in relation to slowly changing forms of unfree labor—whereas even the best of mainstream historians were only able to describe this process ( Ste. Croix 1983 ; Meikle 1983 ; Blackledge 2006a ).

Ste. Croix illuminated the changing form of surplus extraction over more than a millennium, and through his analysis he revealed the evolution from the ancient mode of production dominated by slavery to the feudal system dominated by serfdom. This changing essence underpinned changes across society more broadly, as new social relations gave rise to new forms of rationality, politics, and culture. In so doing, Ste. Croix’s book acts as a concrete application of Marx’s method. He shows how the “real individuals” noted as the starting point of analysis by Marx and Engels in The German Ideology are in fact, as Marx wrote in the 1857 Introduction , concrete not because they are the unmediated starting point of analysis imagined by naive positivists but because they are constituted through the synthetic “concentration of many determinations.” They are, therefore “a result, not as a point of departure, even though it is the point of departure in reality and hence also the point of departure for observation and conception” ( Marx 1973 :101).

3. England’s Bourgeois Revolution?

The limitations of descriptive history are evident in mainstream interpretations of the English Revolution. Within the mainstream, the “Civil War” tends to be framed as a struggle between two sections of the English ruling class that had little or nothing to do with the rise of capitalism. Marxists, by contrast, have tended to label the events of 1640 to 1660 as a bourgeois revolution, though they disagree markedly over the meaning and even applicability of this term.

In his fundamental contribution to this literature, Brian Manning evidenced the power of Marx’s essentialist method as compared to the superficiality of mainstream historiography ( Blackledge 2005 ). He agreed that the mainstream account of the Civil War captured a superficial truth, but insisted that this account was inadequate as an explanation for the revolution. In a series of studies of turning points in the revolution he highlighted the decisive part played within it by the “intervention of people from outside the class that normally dominated politics” ( Manning 1992 :16–17).

In his discussion of the growing divisions with the ruling class in the period 1640 to 1642, Manning looked beneath the superficial story of the growing distrust felt for Charles by large sections of the aristocracy to examine the role of popular struggles in shaping the opposing sections of the ruling class. He explained the emergence of a strong royalist party in this period as a response to the fear caused by the independent actions of the London crowd. Conversely, he points out that parliamentarians came to believe that the only force that stood between them and the King’s wrath was the London crowd ( Manning 1991 :71, 101).

According to Manning, the independence of the core group of the crowd was rooted in the growing economic independence of the “middle sort of people” in the century preceding the conflict ( Manning 1991 :230). This analysis of the role of the middling sort in the revolution followed Maurice Dobb’s argument that English capitalism emerged from within the ranks of the direct producers, and that roughly speaking the nation divided in the 1640s along socioeconomic lines ( Dobb 1963 :170; Manning 1994 :86). Manning suggested that the growing importance of this group should be related to the prior development of industry, and through his stress on this development Dobb was able to explain why “industrial districts—not all of them—provided a main base for the parliamentarian and revolutionary parties” ( Manning, 1994 : 84–86). Following Dobb, Manning argued that the English Revolution could best be understood as a bourgeois revolution located within a framework dominated by “the rise of capitalism” ( Manning 1999 :45–51).

This concept of an English bourgeois revolution is contentious even amongst Marxists. Perhaps the most important critic of this sort of interpretation of the Civil War is Robert Brenner ( Blackledge 2008a ). Though Brenner has written a detailed analysis of the social roots of the conflict between the English monarchy and parliament in the 1640s ( Brenner 1993 ), he rejects the idea of a bourgeois revolution because, or so he argues, the break between feudalism and capitalism long preceded the Civil War. In his alternate account of this transition he argues that capitalism originated not as a result of a victory of the peasantry over the feudal nobility in the class struggle, and still less was it the product of a rising bourgeoisie. Rather the transition occurred as an unintended consequence of the class struggle under feudalism. According to Brenner:

The breakthrough from ‘traditional economy’ to relative self-sustaining economic development was predicated upon the emergence of a specific set of class or social-property relations in the countryside—that is, capitalist class relations. This outcome depended, in turn, upon the previous success of a two-sided process of class development and class conflict: on the one hand, the destruction of serfdom; on the other, the short-circuiting of the emerging predominance of small peasant property. ( Brenner 1985 :30)

In France, serfdom was destroyed by the class struggle between peasants and lords, but the process went beyond that needed for the development of capitalism, leading instead to the establishment of widespread small peasant property. In Eastern Europe, the peasants were defeated, which led to the reintroduction of serfdom. Only in England did optimal conditions come about for the evolution of agrarian capitalism.

Commenting on this thesis, Guy Bois has argued that Brenner’s thesis “amounts to a voluntarist vision of history in which the class struggle is divorced from all other objective contingencies and, in the first place, from such laws of development as may be peculiar to a specific mode of production” ( Bois 1985 :115). Conversely, Ellen Meiksins Wood argues that Brenner’s interpretation of the transition to capitalism in England is of the first importance to the crique of capitlalism because, contra the orthodox Marxist case that ascribes explanatory primacy in history to the development of the productive forces, Brenner does not assume that a peculiar rationality (characteristic only of the capitalist mode of production) is a constituent element of human nature. His approach is therefore better able than its alternatives to grasp the specificity of capitalist rationality, and consequently the possibility of transcending capitalism ( Wood 1999 :7).

Though nominally aimed at Marx’s 1859 preface, Wood’s critique of orthodoxy is best understood as a challenge to GA Cohen’s understanding of historical materialism as detailed in his classic study Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence . Cohen’s interpretation of Marxism is characterized by its analytically rigorous defense of two key propositions. First, “the forces of production tend to develop throughout history (the development thesis),” and, second, “the nature of the production relations of a society is explained by the level of development of its productive forces (the primacy thesis)” ( Cohen 2000 :134). Cohen explained the relationship between these propositions, and thus the course of history, in functionalist terms ( Cohen 2000 :260, 272). He also pointed to an explanation for the salience of the development thesis: he assumed that in a situation of scarcity human agents find it rational to develop the forces of production over time. This is because “men are . . . somewhat rational,” they live in a “historical situation of . . . scarcity,” and they “possess intelligence of a kind and degree which enables them to improve their situation” ( Cohen 2000 :152). Cohen’s interpretation of historical materialism consequently included an idiosyncratic defence of a type of political fatalism that was rooted in what Erik Olin Wright et al. call a “transhistorical” model of human rationality ( Wright et al. 1992 :24). He claimed that “in so far as the course of history, and more particularly, the future socialist revolution are, for Marx, inevitable, they are inevitable not despite what men may do, but because of what men, being rational, are bound, predictably, to do” ( Cohen 2000 :147, Cohen 1988 :55). Commenting on this argument, Alex Callinicos observes that the inevitabilist structure of Cohen’s reinterpretation of historical materialism “is almost a reductio ” of historical materialism, while Terry Eagleton writes that “rarely has a wrongheaded idea been so magnificently championed” ( Callinicos 2004 :69; Eagleton 2011 :242–243; Blackledge 2015 ).

If some theorists have responded to Cohen’s work by dismissing the utility of the developmental thesis and productive force determinism, others have attempted to salvage the rational core of these ideas. The problem with Cohen’s account is that by interpreting Marx as a positivist he reconstructed a caricatured version of historical materialism as a fatalist theory of change. By contrast, when he was still a Marxist, Alasdair MacIntyre argued that if the ethical core of Marxist political theory was to be retrieved from the corpse of Stalinism, historical materialism must be rescued from such crude account of historical progress ( MacIntyre 2008a :32). Stalin’s claim that history’s general course was predictable rested, or so MacIntyre maintained, on a misconceived view of the role of the base-superstructure metaphor in Marxist theory. Marx understood this metaphor as denoting neither a mechanical nor a causal relationship. Rather, he utilized Hegelian language to denote the process through which the economic base of a society provides “a framework within which superstructures arise, a set of relations around which the human relations can entwine themselves, a kernel of human relationships from which all else grows.” It was a mistake to imply that according to this model political developments followed automatically from economic causes. This is because in Marx’s view “the crucial character of the transition to socialism is not that it is a change in the economic base but that it is a revolutionary change in the relation of base to superstructure” ( MacIntyre 2008a :39).

Through this argument MacIntyre began the process of reconnecting Marx’s conception of history to his revolutionary politics after they had been torn asunder by the Stalinist counter-revolution. MacIntyre showed that once extricated from positivistic caricatures of his writings, Marx’s theory of history could be conceived as an essential resource for anyone wanting to understand capitalism as a historically transient mode of production, so as to overcome it. From a similar perspective, Manning’s work on the English Revolution detailed how the development of the forces of production in the century prior to 1640 had cumulatively restructured society. One consequence of these changes was the emergence of new forms of agency that were able to challenge the status quo in a way that would have been inconceivable a century earlier (see, e.g., Harman 1998 :96).

If it is difficult to imagine Cromwell’s victory, the Restoration, and subsequently the Glorious Revolution apart from these changes, it is equally true that the precise outcome of these revolutionary struggles was not inescapable. As Chris Harman argues, nothing was inevitable about the triumph of capitalism. For instance, the area around Prague was the most economically developed part of Europe in the early seventeenth century, but social forces similar to those that won a revolution in England were defeated by feudal reaction in Bohemia ( Harman 1998 :103–105). In an illuminating debate, Brenner and Harman agreed that the outcome of the class struggle could not be predicted, while disagreeing markedly in their assessment of the role of the development of the forces of production in history. Following Bois and others, Harman argued that a focus on the development of the forces of production allows historians to better explain why the revolutionary challenge to feudalism happened generally across Europe when it did, and not at any earlier point over the previous millennium ( Harman and Brenner 2006 ).

Whether one finds Harman or Brenner more persuasive on this point, they shared a desire to comprehend the transition from feudalism to capitalism in terms of forces inherent to the feudal system and without recourse to claims of inevitability. Gramsci embraced a similar conception of Marxism. Against attempts to downplay the role of individuals in the Marxist theory of history, Gramsci insisted that “organic crises” could develop and continue indefinitely if the agency required to overcome them did not appear.

A crisis occurs, sometimes lasting for decades. This exceptional duration means that incurable structural contradictions have revealed themselves (reached maturity), and that, despite this, the political forces which are struggling to conserve and defend the existing structure itself are making every effort to cure them. These . . . efforts . . . form the terrain of the conjunctural. ( Gramsci 1971 :178)

Similarly, though from the opposite angle, Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution examined Lenin’s role in overcoming an organic crisis. Trotsky maintained that individual socialists could play pivotal roles in history. But whereas in the past the process of revolutionary change had been less consciously determined, the transition from capitalism to socialism could only be won if the agents had a clear understanding of their position within a historical process. Lenin not only had a profound understanding of the historical process but also had built a party able to act on this understanding. Consequently, he was able to intervene decisively into a “chain of objective historic forces” in October 1917. Specifically, Lenin accelerated the process through which the Bolsheviks were able to grasp the new reality at a moment when time was at a premium, such that without him the revolutionary opportunity would probably have been missed ( Trotsky 1977 :343). Commenting on these arguments, MacIntyre points out that by contrast with caricatured criticisms of Marxism, because Trotsky recognized that “from time to time history presents us with real alternatives” his History illuminated the dialectical unity that can exist between great social forces and individual political initiatives ( MacIntyre 2008b :275; Blackledge 2006b ).

4. Conclusion

Commenting on Trotsky’s History , C. L. R. James wrote that “it is the greatest history book ever written . . . the climax of two thousand years of European writing and study of history” ( James 1994 :118). James was no fool, and he did not give praise lightly. He believed that Trotsky deserved this accolade because his History creatively applied Marx’s synthesis of the great strands of European culture to reconstruct the historical totality without either reducing the role of individuals to epiphenomena of broader social forces or reifying them as “great men” separate from these forces. Trotsky’s History was therefore a powerful example, perhaps the most powerful example, of what Hobsbawm calls “total history,” understood not as a “history of everything but history as an indivisible web in which all human activities are interconnected” ( Hobsbawm 2007 :186).

To reconstruct the social totality in the mind was, of course, Marx’s aim, and it continues to be the aim of contemporary Marxists. This project is an intrinsic aspect of revolutionary politics because the social revolution demands the present be understood as a historically constituted whole. Such a scientific account of the present as a historically evolving whole is an essential prerequisite for coherent revolutionary practice. If radical theory too often shares with mainstream social science a tendency to mere description—one thinks of intersectionality theory, for instance—pseudo-radical criticisms of the ideas of essentialism, necessity, and totality actually undermine the attempt to move beyond abstract moral condemnation to the politics of liberation. This article argues, contra the caricatures of Marx’s theory of history as a mechanically deterministic and fatalist conception of reality, that by providing the resources necessary to understand the present as a historical problem, historical materialism is the necessary theoretical complement to socialist activity without which the latter is blind.

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A Truncated Marxism: On the Ideological Structure of Western Marxism

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Published: 24 February 2023
Volume 16 , pages 145–170, ( 2023 )

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Roland Boer ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-8355-2737 1

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This study presents an overview of the ideological framework of “Western Marxism.” This framework has a number of components, which are described in terms of a series of reductions, determinations, and the suspicions entertained by Western Marxists. The result was a truncated type of Marxism that cut itself off from the Marxist–Leninist tradition. It did so by reducing Marxism to the works of Marx alone and calling this “historical materialism,” which entailed a rejection of Engels’s significant contributions in history, science, and theory, and thus entailed a rejection of the subsequent developments of Marxism. This Western Marxism has been primarily promoted by “freelance intellectuals” with virtually no connection to Workers’ or Communist Parties and was determined by an assumed ideological position before a proletarian revolution, was shaped by Western liberalism and imperialism, and has been constantly tempted into religiously inspired utopian versions of socialism. With deep suspicions of the state and national liberation, of science and technology, and of the importance of productive forces, this Western Marxism was always hoping for the ideal revolution (or even better, a peaceful transition) that would very quickly produce a utopian socialist society organised only by the people and without a state. This ideological framework also entailed a dismissal of the actual experience in developing countries of successful proletarian revolutions and the construction of socialism.

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Marxism in the horizon: an essay on Maurice Godelier

Susana Narotzky

Ariel or Caliban? The Civilizing Process and Its Critiques

Since this study may also be read by Chinese scholars, where necessary and possible I include references to both the English text (at times translated from another language) and to the Chinese text.

Lukács’s charge that Engels’s approach to dialectics is inadequate indicates the significant residues of idealist philosophy in Lukács’s thought at the time.

We may think here of Althusser’s persuasive arguments concerning ideology, the semi-autonomous realms of capitalist society in which the economic base is determinative in the last instance, and his late turn to an “aleatory” Marxism of the chance encounter.

Althusser deployed “dialectical materialism” in an idiosyncratic manner, as the philosophy that follows the scientific discovery of history, which then becomes “historical materialism” (Althusser 1972 , 165, 1990, 109).

Curiously, Anderson neglects the enormous sacrifice of the Soviet Red Army in defeating fascism in the European theatre of the Second World War.

Needless to say, this suggestion that Stalin invented “socialism in one country” goes against all of the facts (Van Ree 1998, 2015).

Marxist engagements with, efforts to understand, and criticisms of Western religion have a much longer history (Boer 2014 ). My interest here is with specific features of more recent Western Marxist engagements with religion.

This has been a recurring theme in Jameson’s work (Jameson 1991 , 260–278), but I refer here to talk delivered in China and published in the Chinese collected works of Jameson. One may also consult the collation of essays on science fiction and utopia, with a lengthy closing reflection, in Archaeologies of the Future (Jameson 2005 ).

Since the Western Marxist literature on these questions is rather voluminous, see the full discussion in the first chapter of Friedrich Engels and the Foundations of Socialist Governance (Boer 2021b, 9–24).

It is this primary sense that has come through in the Chinese minzu , although as the Cihai notes two overlapping senses may now be found: the first is a group with common characteristics within a state (so that China has 56 minzu ), while the other sense is due to Western influences, so that one also finds the “Chinese nation” and even “ minzu-guojia ” (Xia and Chen 2009, 2734).

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Boer, R. A Truncated Marxism: On the Ideological Structure of Western Marxism. Fudan J. Hum. Soc. Sci. 16 , 145–170 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40647-023-00366-0

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Marxism, U.S. Democracy, and Lenin’s Commune Against Capitalism

Joel wendland-liu.

Integrative, Religious, and Intercultural Studies Department, Grand Valley State University, Allendale, MI USA

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In his 2016 essay “An American Utopia,” Fredric Jameson appropriates Lenin’s concept of “dual power” to ruminate on its potential meaning in the present U.S. context. Jameson’s remarks on “dual power” and U.S. politics offer a starting point to explore both the most recent developments in the U.S. and to revisit Lenin’s State and Revolution fruitfully to review the concept of “the commune” as a post-capitalist political theory. Lenin’s work transcends anodyne demands for abstract democracy. Indeed, my intervention aims to explore the limits of “democracy” in U.S. political discourse, demanding a reconsideration of Leninist political theory. In so doing, the conditions of struggle in the U.S. potentialize the dialectical development of struggles to extend democracy (reform) with struggles to overcome democracy (revolution).

An American “Commune”?

In his 2016 essay “An American Utopia,” Fredric Jameson appropriates Lenin’s concept of “dual power” to ruminate on its potential meaning in the present U.S. context. He dismisses communist parties and socialist aspirations as something “no one believes in anymore.” The social democratic parties and coalitions offer reform, while the labor unions are too weak to counter the state. Laboring under the same cynicism and pessimism that he attributes to the working class, Jameson ponders which types of mass organizations, parties, institutions, or social movements in North America qualify for the moniker of “dual power.” He dismisses the 2011 Occupy Wall Street movement as merely an uprising, or “a spatial event” that relied too much on information technology to extend itself beyond the physical space of Zuccotti Park near Wall Street in downtown New York City. He embraces the Black Panther Party, which reshaped U.S. Black radicalism in the 1970s, and the historical maroon societies of self-liberated Blacks in the era of enslavement, but ignores Occupy Wall Street’s mutual aid response to the widespread damage wrought by Hurricane Sandy to the Atlantic coast in 2012, and does not mention the #BlackLivesMatter uprisings in 2014 (Jameson 2016 , 4). Jameson’s remarks on “dual power” and U.S. politics offer a starting point to explore both the most recent developments in the U.S. and to revisit Lenin’s State and Revolution fruitfully to review the concept of “the commune” as a post-capitalist political theory that transcends anodyne demands for abstract democracy. Indeed, my intervention aims to explore the limits of “democracy” in U.S. political discourse, demanding a reconsideration of Leninist political theory.

After dismissing Occupy Wall Street, Jameson turns to contemplate the judicial system and the healthcare system as potential sites of dual power. In doing so, he fails to note the judicial system’s function in harming Black and Brown people through police killings, racist profiling, over-policing, and mass incarceration, e.g., its well-known historical role in assassinating, imprisoning, and decimating the Black Panther Party, linking state repression of organizations that deploy radical critiques of capitalism with those that militantly confronted systemic white supremacy (Burden-Stelly 2017 ). When he underlines the healthcare system as a latent site of dual power, he remarks presciently, “it may not be impossible to imagine crisis situations in which physicians are able to wield social power of considerable significance, in a kind of epidemiological dual structure” (Jameson 2016 , 17). Such speculation about the judicial and healthcare systems invokes spaces and histories that reveal latent aporias in Jameson’s thinking. For example, the #BlackLivesMatter uprisings in 2014, a national protest against racist police and vigilante abuses that reshaped national discourse about the state’s control of Black people, is manifestly absent. Indeed, because history required that he name the Panthers in this essay, it is puzzling that he failed to center the struggle for Black freedom in the contemporary moment. 1

This bewildering absence haunts Jameson’s American utopia imaginary. Ignoring the struggle against white supremacy is a particularly non-Leninist approach to revolutionary politics (Wendland-Liu 2021 ). It is a symptom of the U.S. academy’s view of #BlackLivesMatter generally, as rhetoricians Donna Hunter and Emily Polk found in their 2016 study of academic engagement with both Occupy and #BlackLivesMatter. The divisions registered by white reluctance to engage the latter revolutionary militancy derives from racial and class privilege of those who feel more comfortable teaching about the former while ignoring the latter. In addition to noting Occupy Wall Street’s network of cultural and institutional affiliations with university radicals, “the overrepresentation of white males in coveted tenure positions illustrates the white privilege that Black Lives Matter challenges. This contradiction makes collective support of the movement more difficult” (Hunter and Polk 2016 , 443). While this analysis accounts for some dimensions of the absence, it fails to speak to the historical relation of racism to capitalist development and its mulish persistence despite recurring crises (Wolff 2020 ; Burden-Stelly 2020 ).

Unfortunately, this absence registers as an economism that Jameson shares with other North American Marxists, such as the late Ellen Meiksins Wood. In delineating the economic from the “extra-economic,” Meiksins Wood mistakenly disentangles the concepts of race and gender from their capitalist and economic moorings and limits them to the political dimension. She writes, “capitalism’s structural indifference to the social identities of the people it exploits makes it uniquely capable of discarding extra-economic inequalities and oppressions” (Meiksins Wood 2002 , Kindle Locations 5545–5546). 2 She insists that capitalism has overcome the “scarcity” of extra-economic goods and errs in arguing that capitalism has become “indifferent” to racism or gender-based inequalities. Lenin regarded these “extra-economic” goods as central and constitutive of capitalism and could not be separated from the system itself. In a 1916 article on the national question, Lenin argues that “while being based on economics, socialism cannot be reduced to economics alone,” giving special attention to global struggles for national liberation, in which he included the African American freedom struggle (Lenin 1964e , 325; Prashad 2020 : Wendland-Liu 2021 ). 3 Indeed, the reductive economism of western intellectuals has led to an ideological elision of class struggle (Losurdo 2016 , 101–115).

Other contemporary U.S. Marxists, however, refuse to divest capitalism of its racist building blocks and mechanisms, and, since the 2014 and 2020 #BlackLivesMatter uprisings in the U.S., this view has gained a new hearing (Davis 2020 ; Burden-Stelly 2020 ; Kelley 2017 ; Singh 2016 ; Prashad 2016 ; Marable 2015 ). Before the term “racial capitalism” became centered in U.S. public discourse, scholar E. San Juan Jr. theorized racism’s dynamic and constantly reassembled relation to capitalism. He argues that the core concept of “race” has a “signifying power [that] comes from the articulation of a complex of cultural properties and processes with a mode of production centered on capital accumulation and its attendant ideological apparatuses.” Further, “[t]his system depends primarily on material inequality in the appropriation and exploitation of land, labor, power, and means of production by a privileged minority of European origin” (San Juan Jr. 2002 , 143, emphasis added). The “racial problematic” endures as a set of practices that over-determines the class process of exploiting labor and capitalist accumulation and development (West 1988 , 17). Theoretical dislocation of the present concreteness of racism to the historical past erases the special conditions of super-exploitation faced by women of color, men of color, and gender non-normative people of color. Such an omission as that which Jameson inflicts operates like the Marxist version of “all lives matter,” because it allows the necessary relation of racism to an exploitative class process function without critique or confrontation. The anti-racist uprisings of 2020 served as a heroic defense of Black lives, but also an elemental form with which class struggle appears in the U.S.

The second opening that Jameson’s remarks induce are his references to the healthcare system as a potential site of “dual power” during a major epidemiological crisis. While physicians and other healthcare professionals and mutual aid associations in countries like China, Vietnam, Laos, and the left-led state of Kerala, India moved swiftly to intervene in the COVID-19 pandemic, in the U.S., these same professionals were paralyzed by the failed national leadership that downplayed and then politicized the crisis. 4 Essentially, they were blocked from playing a “dual power” role by the federal government’s ties to capitalism which insists on profit as the motive for action and demands the labor of the working class to function (Tricontinental 2020 ). Still, the global COVID-19 pandemic prepared the radical terrain of the current stage of the 2020 anti-racist uprising and the struggle against the fascist threat by revealing on a mass scale some critical truths about capitalism. The pandemic exposed a central contradiction of capitalism, its ideology, and its democratic state. Workers cannot mix bodily in the workforce without risk of infection, death, and extension of the pandemic, leading to the deaths of over 800,000 U.S. people by the end of 2021. The exploitation of the labor power of workers, the extraction of surplus value, and the functioning of the state, however, cannot occur without the physical presence of tens of millions of workers in productive spaces. For large sections of capital, profit and the accumulation of capital depended on making people return physically to work. Thus, the uneven, contradictory, callous, and inept response to the pandemic levied by the U.S. ruling class, exacerbated by the deliberate stupidity and irrationality of the near-fascist Trump administration (Tricontinental 2020 ).

The pandemic unveiled a new entity known as “essential workers,” or laboring people upon whom the functioning of the system, the provision of basic needs of food, shelter, and health depend. Some of the “essential workforce” is highly skilled healthcare professionals and economically secure financial professionals. Many millions are underpaid, undereducated workers, however, and are disproportionately Black and Brown people. Of the 55 million U.S. workers identified as “essential,” approximately half are nonwhite, are likely to be unprotected by a union contract and collective bargaining power, and are paid significantly less than a living wage. In fact, in the food, agriculture, and facility services industries, where workers of color disproportionately outnumber white workers, workers of color earn far less than their white counterparts (McNicholas and Poydock 2020 ). These workers are typically maligned, abused, and abandoned through racist oppression and other forms of marginalization but in this moment of pandemic proved essential to the rudimentary systemic operations and the lives of the capitalists and the most privileged members of society.

Linked to this discovery of essential labor is the revelation of what Marx calls the secret, hidden truth of capitalism––that labor power produces the value expropriated by capitalists. Within days of the announcement of “stay-at-home” orders, when millions were fired, laid off, furloughed, put on temporary leave, or simply moved to online remote work that initially proved far less productive than normal operations, the wealth of current and expected values evaporated. Mass unemployment and stingy relief for workers combined with threats of withholding unemployment payments to force workers back to dangerous workplaces exposed the racist–classist nature of state power and its capitalist logic as the essence of U.S. democracy. Put another way, these contradictions proved U.S. democracy incapable of addressing the pandemic, the economic collapse, and the violence of white supremacy.

This set of contradictions opened the door for major working-class struggles over health and safety in both the private and public sectors. When the Trump administration ordered students to return to classrooms in the fall of 2020, threatening to punish schools that refused, the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association mobilized their members to demand federal standards for health and safety for teachers, school staff, children and their families (Goldstein and Shapiro 2020 ). They created science-based health and safety standards and shared them on a national scale with their members, other school workers, and school families, forcing, in many cases, school districts to scale down plans to open in-school classes. In Chicago, for example, a coalition of neighborhoods, families, and teachers fought to maintain virtual classroom settings, rallying in person in the streets and car caravans throughout the summer (Issa 2020 ). This willingness and ability to assert power stems in part from a shift among the Chicago teachers to social movement unionism which proved crucial to their success in their 2012 and 2019 strikes. Social movement unionism, according to teacher and union activist Lois Weiner, sees teachers “[take] leadership in organizing a coalition that looks to mobilize more support within the immediate neighborhood and the larger community” (Weiner 2012 ). Likewise, the nurses’ union, longtime proponents of the social movement unionism model, mobilized its membership and coalition partners to pressure state and federal authorities for personal protective equipment and expansion health services for infected patients. Nurses marshaled their skills to produce much of this equipment when federal authorities politicized the pandemic and dragged its feet on delivering the equipment. 5

As the pandemic crisis extended from weeks to months, revelations about the police-protected lynching of Ahmaud Arbery and the police killings of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd ignited another insurgency movement for Black lives beginning in May 2020. The North American uprising, surging from May through August of 2020, against racist police brutality quickly advanced from a protest over the targeting of Black people with violent police repression to become a blistering criticism of white supremacy, capitalist exploitation, and the domination of state instruments of power by the equally corrupt, racist, and fascistic Trump administration (Kellner 2018 ). Thus, the uprising became a mass demand to reshape power relations more broadly, wrest control of resources and coercive power from the dominant racist–capitalist minority, and reorder the state’s machinery to serve the needs of the majority of the people. In addition, the generalized demand to “defund the police” and replace policing with community-controlled forms of social welfare, public safety, and reparations and restoration indicates the preparation for “dual power” in ways with which Jameson seems unequipped to contend.

A radical criticism of the police, the vanguard of state repression and violence against the working class, offers a starting point to construct a clear form of dual power. “Any real agenda for police reform must replace police with empowered communities working to solve their own problems” (Vitale 2017 , 66). Approaches to police reform that strengthen the legitimacy of the police through “sensitivity training” and even individualized punishment of “bad apples” strengthen the state’s coercive power without necessarily transforming the state from a capitalist state to a proletarian state. Incipient conceptions of this necessity were articulated in criticisms of the failure of police reform. One legal activist stated, “[r]eforms do not make the criminal legal system more just, but obscure its violence more efficiently” (Purnell 2020 ). Because state coercive power is history and structurally rooted in white supremacy, the police, reformed or not, will play a violent role in maintaining white supremacy, and Black and Brown people will remain in danger. Activists and organizations, defining themselves as “abolitionists,” called for defunding the police and replacing most policing with community-controlled social resources, such as non-police responses to domestic violence, non-criminalized interventions in drug “offenses,” eliminating carceral resources and infrastructures in schools, ending immunity from prosecution for police offenders, and massively shifting resources from the police to community services (Corder and Perez 2020 ).

Such demands, however, when left to state bureaucracies, laws, or other “democratic” processes, become easily swamped by fears of crime and structural inequalities of wealth and power that are fostered by reliance on the state for protection and legitimacy. If these demands cannot be protected from police or right-wing terrorist violence, the state’s ability to regain its contested monopoly on power, supported by a wave of media framing of police as the only force for order and protest as the harbinger of anarchy, is fortified. This functioning contradiction results from the nature of capitalist and white supremacist power, but also the over-reliance on legitimated democratic forms, even from the socialist camp. Protests and subsequent events in Minneapolis, Minnesota and Seattle, Washington revealed these contradictions in detail and point to what “dual power” might look like on the level of public safety. Minneapolis police in the 1980s and 1990s were notorious for their racist targeting of nonwhite communities with violence and impunity. Violent police actions contributed to the growth of crime and violent clashes with police. In the early 2000s, connections between the police union and white supremacist motorcycle gangs added to the evidence that Minneapolis police were unafraid and uninhibited in their use of extra-legal forms of violence and coercion to maintain their power (Michaels 2020 ). Attempts at reform through democratic and legalistic processes met with powerful resistance, though city officials convinced the department to accept extra resources for new racial sensitivity training. In 2020, the slaying of George Floyd by five Minneapolis officers only became international news after a digital recording of the incident surfaced sparking international protest and the reemergence of the #BlackLivesMatter in the streets (Cooley 2020 ).

Initial calls for reform by the city’s leaders essentially rehearsed the same appeals to smother protest by promising restraints on police excesses that had shaped the urban experience in the 1980s and 1990s. A separate campaign to defund the police department and “reboot” it based on community control and new definitions of public safety was met with massive resistance from conservatives who cried anarchy, media which distorted the aims of the reforms, and even among reformers themselves who feared going too far. The bureaucratic process served as an excuse to block change, for some officials who insisted that even mild reforms would “require navigating a complex labyrinth of city and state laws, police union contracts, and budget issues” (Bush 2020 ). Congress’s refusal to address police reforms after the 2020 elections secured Democrats a thin majority signaled the failure of liberal democracy to the decisive advantage of the coercive elements of the state, the capitalist class vested in property rights, and nefarious right-wing political forces.

While these struggles unfolded, in Seattle in early June 2020, #BlackLivesMatter protesters occupied the East Seattle police precinct building, forced the police force to flee, renamed the building the “Seattle People’s Department,” and established an “autonomous zone” in a portion of the city’s Capitol Hill neighborhood. Participants named this takeover the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ). Thousands of people sympathetic to the #BlackLivesMatter struggle and angered by police violence the previous month, including an attack on a 7-year-old child and other protest spectators, attended to the occupation of the zone. In this action, they operationalized alternatives to policing and repressive state power. According to one account, “[j]ust as historic protests after Floyd’s death served as a release valve for deep rage against racist policing and relief from months of pandemic lockdown, the CHAZ was a flowering of hope that drew thousands in a season of death” (Gupta 2020 ). 6 The zone mirrored past attempts at autonomous social experiments, such as Occupy Wall Street. Occupiers built kitchens, educational facilities, child care centers, and other resources for the inhabitants. Occupiers made intentional comparisons between themselves to the Paris Commune and many referenced Lenin’s political theory outlined in State and Revolution . They believed they were creating a non-state alternative form of community and institutional power. 7 In response to this occupation, the city’s liberal government combined its forces with the police, the right-wing militias, an unsympathetic media, a hostile business community worried about property values, and the increasingly authoritarian federal law enforcement apparatus to force its closure.

The Trump administration responded to the anti-racist uprising with fascist tactics. It threatened city and state governments to crackdown on protesters with violence and imprisonment or face waves of federal troops entering their cities. It encouraged police departments to use excessive force, resulting in extreme violence against protesters, including deadly assaults by police vehicles, the use of tear gas and brutal violence against protesters. Trump personally encouraged right-wing, white supremacist militias to join the police adding to the brutality of the moment. In May 2020, he tweeted, “when the looting starts the shooting starts,” implying both that anti-racist protesters were mere criminals and that he supported police and civilian violence directed at them (Southern Poverty Law Center 2020 ). This appeal to the militant right wing combined with Trump’s dismissal of the COVID-19 pandemic as a “hoax,” his appeals to racist rhetoric and policies, notably attack nonwhite immigrants, blaming China for U.S. economic struggles and the pandemic, and his abuse of the U.S. media cultivated conspiracy-driven, paranoia among his followers leading to the January 6th riot at the U.S. capitol building (Wendland-Liu 2020a , b , c ). While the social forces leading the uprising were decisive in defeating Trump’s bid for reelection, democracy itself is insufficient for eliminating the fascist threat. Racist inequalities and brutalities, general powerlessness and exploitation, and ongoing health emergency and climate crisis, and the fear of war did not resolve themselves when Trump temporarily fled to his compound in Florida. Since Trump’s electoral defeat, U.S. democracy has provided no reforms for these systemic elements of capital accumulation or the fascist threat.

The ongoing fascist threat, the collapse of the legitimacy of Washington’s leadership of global capitalism, and the transparency of the facile U.S. claim to model democracy and human rights on the world stage demands an intervention. My alternative “American utopia” reading of the three recent major revolutionary events––the Occupy Wall Street movement of 2011, the #BlackLivesMatter rebellions of 2014, and the May–July 2020 uprising against racist police brutality––insists on announcing the ongoing conjunctural rupture in ruling-class hegemony in the U.S., a crisis of capitalist state power, and mass critiques of state forms of rule or reform. The criticisms of the state by these movements and their organizational forms center on shifting administration of economic, juridical, and political governance from the state to the people. The need for an ongoing struggle to politically empower “essential labor,” the urgent need for social solidarity to survive the pandemic, and crisis of U.S. ruling-class legitimacy, many North American radical and Marxist theorists remain entrenched in democratic theory, hoping it will offer a salutary response. This latter view depends fundamentally on the formation of majority influence on existing state forms or the modification of those forms to retain their legitimacy (rather than a shift to people’s rule or working-class control ). By contrast, the combination of riots, permanent protest, staged occupations, and the persistent demand for social solidarity and. the enhancement of working-class capacity to govern demonstrates increasing political sophistication through mass affective affiliation with resistance.

Marxism and Democratic Theory

It is easy to point to multiple examples of how the U.S. government has deployed rhetoric of “democracy” to justify its imperialist domination of global affairs or to maintain a political status quo domestically. We need not explore these examples much to understand how cynical and empty these usages have been. Ongoing U.S. military, economic, and political interventions, which have destroyed so many hundreds of thousands of lives, enacted in the name of democracy have proven to be little more than a mockery of the same. By contrast to this empty rhetoric of democracy, many North American Marxists adopt the same language of democracy to name the horizon and goal of socialism—but with, they claim, a deeper or substantive meaning (Wolff 2000 ). Thus, they contrast socialist or radical democracy with capitalist or bourgeois democracy. 8

Meiksins Wood in Democracy Against Capitalism poses what she sees as the political concept of democracy against the economic concept of capitalism. She does so to deliver a socialist critique of capitalism that shares some Leninist features. Wood argues that democracy refers to all “extra-economic goods” or “political goods” (Meiksins Wood 2002 , Kindle Locations 5545–5546). Political struggles around “extra-economic goods,” she avers, “remain vitally important, but they have to be organized and conducted in the full recognition that capitalism has a remarkable capacity to distance democratic politics from the decisive centers of social power and to insulate the power of appropriation and exploitation from democratic accountability” (Meiksins Wood 2002 , Kindle Locations 5413–5415). 9 Meiksins Wood imagines the socialist transition as contained within “democratic accountability.” She further distinguishes democracy associated with socialism and a limited version associated with capitalism––thus, the political form, being separate from capitalist economics, can simply be extended for a greater portion of the population, open a socialist transition, and remain generally unchanged (Meiksins Wood 2002 ). Her formula is not a complex one: she seeks to project a socialist economics, while preserving political democracy created by capitalist social formations. Ironically, her political stance, apart from its egalitarian economics, shares an ideological positioning with the neo-conservative thinker Francis Fukuyama who insists that democracy aims to hold accountable the state (Fukuyama 2016 ), suggesting the ideological convergence of these otherwise diverging points of view. Neither emphasize the class character of the state or political order.

Other North American scholars, who stop short of Lenin’s injunction to move beyond the limits of democracy, join the call for extensions of democracy based on a perceived division between the political and economic constructed ideologically and structurally within capitalism and its state functions. For example, Wolff, despite establishing Marxism’s ambiguity toward democracy, describes S&R through this lens, writing that its theoretical aim is “a complete or full democracy .” Wolff adds that Marxism’s contribution to democratic theory lies primarily within its demand to expand the definition of democracy to include economic processes that Marxists define as class (Wolff 2000 , 113, n. 1, emphasis added). Resch asserts that “socialism without democracy is a sham, and socialism without some market mechanisms is impossible to sustain.” He applies the formula, constructing an opposition between “participatory democracy” and capitalist democracy, the former holding the latter accountable through an extension of the number of people who oversee economic processes (Resch 1992 , 14, 30–31). Townshend tactically advocates a reconstruction of Lenin to dismiss his demands to overcome democracy to prevent liberals from using his revolutionary ideas to shelve all of the Marxist tradition. When the liberals succeed in scorning Marxism like this, Marxists are denied the ability to make more reasonable demands like “expanding democracy” or to raise reasonable questions about the class structure that limits this expansion (Townshend 1999 , 70–71). The mystical figure of democracy , of a particularly extensive sort, renders a system of liberation. A common feature here is the theory of extension: make democracy include economic processes overseen by larger groups of people, and, with some terminological variation, liberation follows in the form of participatory or even socialist democracy. It is, thus, essentially, economic in its aims and aspirations.

While Lenin had advocated a struggle for democracy, 10 he rejected the implicit conciliation with dominant discourses wherein democracy lies at the end of history. Simply put, democracy subverts the revolutionary content of Marxist theory by offering the working-class-only limited participation in bourgeois civil society, a role closely linked to the maintenance of its subordination as an object of the capitalist class’s agency via the democratic state. In a Leninist strain, Jodi Dean argues, “democratic theory presents ideals and aspirations as always already present possibilities. In so doing, it brings utopia inside, eliminating it as an external space of hope.” Adherence to democratic theory is a concession that ensnares socialist hope. Deans continues, “by internalizing the hope that things might be otherwise, democratic theory destroys that hope: potential problems are solved in advance, through democratic channels. We already know how to get there. We already have the procedures. ” (Dean 2009 , 78, emphasis in the original). Revolutionary transformation is foreclosed. For this reason, Dean, discontent with a negative critique of democracy and capitalism, looks to the “communist horizon” (Dean 2012 ).

Contemporary Marxist democratic theory, then, circumvents an issue that Lenin foregrounds: the necessity of looking past democracy itself for a radical future. Democracy operates appropriately under capitalism; it is, at its most advanced, nothing but the limit of political maturity under capitalist conditions (Marot 2014 ). Its proper function is a contradiction between its ideals and the reality of uneven power relations, mismanagement, incompleteness, and failure. Appeals for democracy as the endgame invite persistent inequality, incomplete social development in perpetuum , a halt in historical movement, a submission to the state as it is. Dean argues that placing democracy as the final goal of the socialist struggle “presupposes democracy is the solution to the problems of democracy.” Thus, “it is a dead end for left politics” (Dean 2009 , 94). Democratic theory, as Lenin argued, “keeps everything within the bounds of the bourgeois parliamentary republic” (Lenin 1964c , 489).

The tension within Marxist theory over the capitalism–democracy–socialism triad invokes Lenin’s metaphor of democracy as “the shell of capitalism.” He wrote, “A democratic republic is the best possible political shell for capitalism” (Lenin 1964c , 393). Capitalism inhabits this shell to conceal its relations and hide its core truths within the cover of dynamic political activity, campaigns, and debate. It is the appearance of freedom and dynamism that “insulates” the real power of capitalist domination of the state. The “shell” metaphor describes something more than just an obfuscation, however. Capitalism’s essential political form is a reflection and synthesis of the contradiction between the dictatorial power of the capitalist class and its massive resources for coercive functions, and the emergent, resistant power of the exploited and oppressed. Class relations guarantee that despite its numerical disadvantage, however, the capitalist class enjoys domination in most circumstances within this structure.

Democracy proved progressive over “slavery” (Lenin’s interchangeable term for early racial slavery, European-led colonialism, early capitalist development, and autocratic Tsarism). 11 Following a historical stage model of social development, Lenin regarded democracy (and capitalist relations of production) as worth fighting for in 1905 and the early stages of 1917 (Lenin, 1962 , 1964a ). By April 1917, however, democracy stood as a barrier to what could be: an end to the war, land for the peasants, and proletarian leadership of governing entities. Here, Lenin revealed the general impossibility of extricating democracy from bourgeois class politics. Bourgeois ideology and governing tactics make room for “good governance, flexibility, achieving a complex multi-level system, characterized at the same time by bottom-up approaches and soft law alongside hard law,” which constituted liberal democratic theory and practice (Sammaddar 2018 , 179). These instruments for securing capitalist class hegemony recognize and fear the specter of working-class resistance and adopt the tactics, forms, and modes necessary to secure broader cultural and political consent for bourgeois rule. If the shell of democracy hides capitalist exploitation, the totality of this structure refuses any substantial departure between democratic theory and capitalist exploitation.

The Limits of Democracy and the Possibilities “Revolutionary Self-government”

The limits of democratic theory invite a return to Lenin. I do so here in the spirit of Indian Marxist Aijaz Ahmad who urged a return to Marx because historical materialism’s insistence on the centrality of class struggle under capitalism offered the clearest way to both interpret present realities and invite revolutionary transformation (Ahmad 2012 ). It is in the spirit of this search for clarity from within the Marxist tradition that I offer this reading of Lenin’s State and Revolution ( S&R ) and its injunction to overcome democracy in the struggle to establish a replacement for the capitalist state. I do not offer this reading as if Lenin or Leninism is the most authoritative thread of Marxism or a universal approach socialist theory, but rather as a vehicle for exploring a political means by which U.S. Marxist theory may move beyond the discursive limits of self-congratulatory democratic pretense. Axiomatic is Lenin’s call for a break with a democratic theory, because this latter condition remains mired in the contradiction of political democracy’s necessarily permanent limitations, a structural totality that is capitalistic. Democracy functions as a determining political frame that is the inseparable instrument of capitalist totality, constituted by the class needs, power, laws, ideologies, cultures, and interests of the bourgeoisie. Lenin maintained that even once a proletarian state is established representing the most complete form of democracy, its democratic state apparatuses, its class content, its function, must also be replaced (Lenin 1964c ). The socialist task is, thus, to use the tools of democracy to push that totality to its limits (its “end”), to transform the power of the working class and other oppressed classes from resistance to creativity in new organized political and economic forms, and to subordinate democratic instruments (the state) to working-class power, and then ultimately see them vanish.

After the first 1917 revolution and his return to Russia, Lenin experienced a profound disillusionment and frustration with the class nature of democracy. He thought (perhaps optimistically) that bourgeois democracy had been accomplished in Russia under the liberal provisional government, but it refused (by the necessities of its existence and the logic of capitalist relations) to meet the needs of the people (Lih 2011 , 231). The dire predicament of war, poverty, starvation, and disease demanded the working class take steps toward a new stage of revolutionary development. Lenin posited that the post-tsarist democratic state denoted a capitalist class dictatorship. That is, the capitalist class manages and deploys state machinery through a governmentality of pluralist political parties and voting procedures to enforce its rule over the exploited and oppressed classes. The socialist-oriented majority, composed of the exploited working class in alliance with the oppressed and exploited peasantry, had to subordinate this machinery, dismantle it, and replace it with original, self-created forms of political organization. Two agencies emerged in the struggle against tsarism, one with dictatorial power and one with “incipient” power (Lenin 1964d , 38–39). In contention for supremacy stood the reactionary bureaucratic power of the capitalist state (democracy) and the revolutionary institutions of the working class and the peasants. 12 Social Democratic theory, heretofore, conceded the terrain of this struggle to the capitalist class and its democratic state, urging compromise, quiescence, and submission on the working class and its allies in a truly revolutionary moment.

As 1917 wore on, the famous slogan “all power to the soviets!” signaled the Bolshevik demand for compulsory transfer of political power from the state to the working class, peasant, and military soviets. It represented the call for the beginning of a transition from democracy to a post-democratic, working-class hegemony of the political order. Lenin recognized the tremendous political significance of the soviets in 1905 when he saw the strike committees press for deeper development of the revolutionary demands, and function as a site in which broad revolutionary working-class and peasant unity would crystalize (Shandro 2007 ). Shandro contends that through the soviets in 1905 had both “disrupted the hegemony of the liberal bourgeoisie and gained for itself some political experience” and “it had erected a new institutional form through which the diverse revolutionary-democratic forces could mesh together in a coalition of the masses, the worker-peasant alliance, and assume state power” (Shandro 2007 , 325). With this historical experience in mind, Lenin feared that if the working class failed to step forward immediately to claim revolutionary power, the state under the provisional government would never address the concrete needs of the mass of people. Further, if the Bolshevik Party endorsed the existing regime, it would sacrifice hard-won revolutionary credentials by asking the worker–peasant alliance to suspend its forward momentum, relinquish its purchase on power, and starve and suffer. The historical motion toward working-class power drives revolutionary necessity. “It is impossible to stand still in history,” he warned his opponents who insisted on adhering to the gains made under a revolutionary democracy (Lenin 1964b , 324).

Lenin argued that once the national democratic revolution had won power from the Tsarist regime, the revolutionary forces should transition to a “commune” political project, a political formation that represents an advance over revolutionary democracy, as well as over the “dual power” of the subordinated soviets. Lenin explored the role of the “commune” in relation to the specific conditions of the Russian Revolution in April 1917 in a short article called “The Dual Power,” the terminology Jameson referenced in his exploration of U.S. political dynamics in his 2016 essay. The first Russian revolution of 1917 produced a unique situation whose specific character was “highly remarkable” and something “ [n]obody previously thought.” This uniqueness was the duality of power. It was the simultaneously contested power of the state––dominated by the capitalist class articulated by the police, parliament, laws, the army, schools, and media––and the soviets, the people’s institutions that operated as “an entirely different kind of power” from the Russian state. This second power, in this early stage, was “incipient” and erroneously inclined to compromise with the bourgeois state. It was, however, also characterized by its non-reference to existing law and its willingness to exercise power through armed force and extra-legal self-activity of the masses of the working class and the peasants. Soviets deployed power to maintain public safety and order (which the state could no longer guarantee), replaced state bureaucracies “by the direct rule of the people themselves,” and imposed direct forms of popular control over bureaucracies and political entities through mechanisms like the “recall” and the payment of working-class wages (Lenin 1964d , 38–39).

This discourse needs careful attention. Lenin regarded the soviets in the form developed after 1905 as “incipient,” or early-stage forms of dual power. He also suggested they emerged under specific conditions, but called on the revolutionary class to operationalize them in ways that matched the people’s needs and realities. Jameson’s discussion of the lack of “dual power” configurations in the U.S. misses this feature. Lenin saw incipient dual power entities as endemic, if sublimated, to any capitalist formation, the specific forms in which the revolutionary class will create them depends precisely on the historical development of the revolutionary class, in combination with the needs, the history, and the cultures of the people from whom they emerge. Theoretically, he elicited the dialectic between structure and agency, between systems and human action whose application is universal, if the specifics of place and time reshape the form and content of the institutionalized agency of the exploited and oppressed class. Thus, Jameson’s judgments and selections about what could constitute dual power entities in the U.S. perforce discard the social unionism of the teachers’ and nurses’ unions as an incipient form, and completely miss the organizing and mobilizing that underline the #BlackLivesMatter struggles. Institutions or formations that comprise this incipient power do so when they assert a claim to power ordinarily claimed by the state. This incipient power threatens the dominance of capitalists in the economic and political spheres.

According to Lenin, when incipient power is made permanent it forms a basis of “dual power” and offers concrete alternatives to capitalist power. During the revolutionary democratic struggle, the revolutionary forces obtained “certain special methods of making history which are foreign to other periods of political life.” These “methods” entailed, first, the “ seizure by the people of political liberty ” (Lenin 1964a , 349–350). They claimed rights, public space, actions, and creative means to redefine their relationship to the state and its institutions, one another, and to capitalism. This qualitatively new form of social action created “new organs of revolutionary authority ,” the soviets. The soviets achieved these two features because the people built them “irrespective of all laws and regulations,” essentially defying the coercive power of the state. Lenin described the soviets as “a product of native genius” that was a “manifestation of the independent activity of the people which has rid itself, or was ridding itself, of its old police fetters” (Lenin 1964a , 350). In Lenin’s view, this dual power served as a material and institutional foundation for the commune, the mode of political organization beyond democracy.

Lenin first outlined the commune, based on the Paris Commune, the ultimate, original occupy protest- cum -nascent workers’ governing entity, as an institutional and permanent form of political power to contest the authority and legitimacy of the bourgeois parliament and state bureaucracy. In this creative space, Lenin saw the soviets operating as mechanisms for workers and peasants (and other revolutionary forces and allies) to amplify demands, collectively cultivate approaches to administer enterprises, manage resources, build new social institutions, and protect their communities. In S&R , Lenin developed this idea more explicitly. “The Commune, therefore, appears to have replaced the smashed state machine ‘only’ by fuller democracy…. But as a matter of fact this ‘only’ signifies a gigantic replacement of certain institutions by other institutions of a fundamentally different type.” The difference is so complete that it “a case of ‘quantity’ being transformed into ‘quality’” (Lenin 1964c , 419). It was “accessible to the masses, sprang directly from the masses; and was a direct and immediate instrument of the popular masses, of their will” (Lenin 1964a , 351). The image Lenin discloses of this alternative form of collective, socialist power reveals it to be utterly and inalterably other from democracy. This alternative form of governing power rests on the actions, participation, and movement of the majority of people who were formerly exploited, oppressed, and propertyless.

The soviets had not finished their transformative work with the eventual assumption of sole governance (after the second revolution), however. The revolutionary process necessarily continued through the subordination of the capitalist-dominated state to a new form of institutionalized revolutionary self-government led by the worker–peasant majority. By necessity, this meant eliminating “the imperialist and military machinery,” police and repressive forces, the dismantling of parliamentary forms of power consolidation, and the disintegration of bureaucratic administration tied to capitalist economic needs. In their place, socialist power would elevate the soviets as the source of administration, ownership, planning, and resource distribution, as well as control of coercive machinery such as police and other public safety instruments. This subordination of the capitalist state entailed “revolutionary democracy” or the production of “democracy in a new way” (Lenin 1964c , 412, 416, 444). Lenin referred to this process as the establishment of revolutionary self-government and considered it as a necessary precursor for the dissolution of capitalist power but not as the equivalent of socialism.

The evolution of this new complex of power remains a preparatory ground for the radical transformation, which Lenin identified as the “overcoming of democracy.” In his thought, one detects a pause in the theorized momentum of the revolution to take stock of democratic theory. Here, Lenin posed an equivalence of democracy and the state. Democracy is a form of state that operationalizes coercive force and ideological hegemony through its police, institutions, and bureaucratic apparatuses to suppress the majority, to form a bloc of power and institutionalization that depends not only on the individuals or capitalist class fractions that dominate it but also on the imaginary beliefs in and consent to the necessity of its perpetuation for the good of all. Because the state becomes democracy becomes capitalism itself (Lenin 1964c , 396), the revolutionary goal is the “withering away of democracy,” the “abolition of democracy.” “No, democracy is not identical with the subordination of the minority to the majority. Democracy is a state which recognizes the subordination of the minority to the majority” and, by reinforcing a permanent inequality, provides to the capitalist class, via its positioning vis-à-vis the social relations of production, the tools to mobilize coercive and consensual power to prevent this numerical disadvantage from allowing it to be subdued (Lenin 1964c , 456). In other words, democracy is the set of political conditions that enable an omnipotent minority to secure the consent of the far weaker, disorganized, less conscious majority for a system that requires the majority’s exploitation to survive.

This “commune” form, as a potential post-state, post-democratic socialist instrument of political power, theoretically functions more effectively within the socialist economic project of public ownership of enterprises, resources, institutions, and communities through the elimination of capitalist private property relations, commodity production, and the class process of the expropriation of surplus labor power. Here, we discover how Lenin rubbished the common belief that public ownership of the means of production through the socialized existing state machinery and institutions is the limit of socialist construction. Unless the new entities are administered and planned by the spontaneously developed and coordinated forms of worker and community associations that make sense culturally and technically to U.S.-based working-class people, to make a cross-cultural comparison, they remain state capitalist, a project of imposition. In such a situation, the class struggle within a capitalist bourgeois democratic framework persists, demanding more advanced development of socialist institutions.

While the specific institutional form of the soviet was unique within Lenin’s moment and place, some Marxists continue to theorize its generalizable necessity for a socialist revolution. For example, scholar Ranabir Samaddar, who discusses the concept of “dual power” through the lens of anti-colonial struggles, explains further. Dual power is not a “counter-power” concept or a reflection of the bourgeois state. Rooted in the local and strategically oriented, it is not equivalent to the Communist Party, though the role of the Communist Party in initializing and organizing alternative institutions is indispensable from Lenin’s point of view. Instead, it is a multi-sited, interlinked network of power struggles that expose the class nature of the bourgeois state, the illegitimacy of its rule, and the need for new institutional frameworks for displacing that power to liberate the working class and its oppressed allies. The ruling class is unable to rule in the usual manner; and the people no longer allow themselves to be ruled in that manner and make new forms of power. Samaddar indexes this ideological and chronological break with capitalist rule. “[D]ual power means dual time,” he writes. It defies linear conceptualizations of “transition” and the contemporaneity of historical time. Indeed, it opens a new era within the space and time of the old era, requiring new political terminologies, philosophical stances, class relations of power, and international relations (Samaddar 2018 , 181).

This duality of time poses a complex problem. This complexity is best exemplified by what appears to be a contradiction over the struggle for democracy and a break with that struggle to establish the post-capitalist political and economic order. Reconciliation of these two temporalized concepts is unnecessary. Instead, a return to Lenin on the question of the capitalism and the democratic state enable a move to theorize “the question of democracy, from the inside of the determined moment,” to follow Badiou ( 2007 , 9). This means the location of the fluid moments between the end of democracy and the beginning of revolution and to “[hold] open a gap” (Dean 2016 , 121) that appears to be blocked by neoliberal ideologies of the end of history or fascistic tendencies of the ultra-right. To return to Lenin is to take seriously the necessity of the struggle for democracy, the development of the revolutionary subjectivity of the working class in that struggle, and its creation of historically and culturally relevant independent institutional forms of dual power in preparation for its post-capitalist and post-democratic supremacy. While democratic theory as an end has no future, revolutionary theory as a beginning has no history.

Conclusion: What’s Next?

State and Revolution inscribes a commitment to socialist revolution against the atrocities of “the all-European filthy, bloody morass” of total global war, a general crisis of imperialist capitalism, and an openly racist and colonialist counterrevolution (Lenin 1964c , 415). More than a denunciation of capitalism and reaction, S&R theorizes and calls forth the technical–institutional tools, ideological apparatus, and value systems for the creative transcendence of the capitalistic and imperialist violence. It registers a new claim in its theoretical rupture with capitalism, with the totality of its political forms, its ideological and cultural hegemony, and its global economic processes. It should, thus, be read as both a specific critique of this balance of forces in Russia and a theorization of the dialectics of the political development of capitalism. S&R ’s critique of democracy, may enable us to imagine new radical and socialist possibilities in the present conjunctural crises in the U.S. deepened by pandemic, economic collapse, an anti-racist uprising, and the threat of fascism. If the primary purpose of democracy in the U.S. political system is to produce reforms during a crisis that are meant not to empower the marginalized, oppressed, or exploited but rather to extend the legitimacy of capitalism and its rule by the capitalist class, then S&R , authorizes a transcendence of that political cul-de-sac.

If the “liberal world order,” as represented and led by the U.S. “does not (sufficiently) address issues of cultural identity, distributive justice, ecological integrity, moral decency, and solidarity,” then Lenin’s political challenge is worth our return (Scholte 2019 , 68). Indeed, recent research shows that non-democratic systems that account for class and class struggle provide new models for what I term a post-democratic society. According to political science scholar Zhongyuan Wang, for example, the Chinese system dispenses with Western concepts such as multi-party systems, expensive election campaigns, and endless media demagoguery in a guise of democracy in favor of seeking actionable and accountable modes of representation, service, and mobilization that open more fundamental connections to the people’s needs and interests (Wang 2020 ). By contrast, Western imperialist desires to impose class-based and ethnically indoctrinated democratic political rituals on states and peoples who do not share dominant European historical roots has produced a massive catalogue of historical failure, violence, dictatorship, and recurring militaristic intervention (Yang 2021 ).

Thus, struggles in the U.S. outlined in this essay potentialize the dialectical attempt to articulate democracy (reform) with the attempts to overcome democracy (revolution). The experiences of “essential workers,” the teachers’ unions, the healthcare crisis, or of Minneapolis and Seattle do not yet approximate what Lenin championed as “an incipient power” (Lenin 1964d , 39), the forerunner of the commune, a new, people-defined power that substitutes, subverts, and supplants the capitalist democratic state. They do, however, provide glimmers of hope. Class struggle, the demand for justice combined with the practical activity of the oppressed and the embryonic political forms of dual power, transform the oppressed and exploited into a revolutionary subject. Through this uprising, in its resistance to racist police brutality––the truncheon of the racist–capitalist class that dominates the U.S. state––the working class and its allies seek to extend democratic rights, secure power, build a bridge to an emancipated future, and reconstruct themselves as their own rulers.

Acknowledgements

I offer special thanks to the anonymous reviewers, to Yilin Wendland-Liu, and to Joe Sims, Gerald Horne, Azfar Hussain, and Tony Pecinovsky.

Authors’ contributions

The author is the sole contributor to this paper.

Not applicable.

Availability of Data and Material

Code availability, declarations.

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

1 Jameson also explores religious organizations and the Mafia, but concludes the military is the U.S. answer to Lenin’s soviets.

2 Meiksins Wood pursues this line of thinking for two reasons: (1) she is battling identity politics, and (2) attempting to project a socialist economics while preserving a political democracy. The former appears to be a response to the academic left’s retreat from class, while the latter signals her disapproval of the states who claimed socialist systems as goals.

3 Here and throughout, as many non-specialists in Russian history and language must, I am forced to use English translations of Lenin’s collected works.

4 Notably, smaller population, high-income countries like New Zealand, South Korea, and Norway successfully averted the worst of the pandemic through strictly enforced quarantine policies (or suspension of democratic freedoms) and strong social safety nets (included national health systems) that could offset a temporary economic stoppage. This civil society measured were founded on shared cultural commitments to collective well-being and respect for science-driven public health policies (Gulley 2020 ).

5 Normally, U.S. labor unions limit their mobilization of workers to “economic” demands related to wages, benefits, and conditions of work. Extra-economic activities have some origins in the social unionism concept that reemerged in the 1990s. Some labor unions saw a need to build broader alliances by tying their specific struggles to community demands for reform and working-class power (Hurd et al. 2003 ). Social unionism may also be fruitfully explored as an “incipient” form of dual power.

6 Initially, CHAZ participants called it the Capitol Hill Organized Protest, or CHOP.

7 The prominent statue of Lenin in Seattle’s Fremont neighborhood and its radical labor history, which earned it the moniker “the Soviet of Washington” during a general strike in 1919, drew CHAZ’s political lineage to mind (Winslow 2018 ).

8 Exploring the motives of North American Marxists in adhering to political democracy, whether they lie in a disapproval of, opposition to, or disillusionment with the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, or other states who claimed socialism as a goal is beyond the scope of this paper.

9 Meiksins Wood insists that capitalism has overcome the “scarcity” of extra-economic goods, and she errs in arguing that while pre-capitalist formations depended on their scarcity (massive civic inequality based on race or gender, for example), capitalism has erased that particular distinction. Lenin regarded these “extra-economic” goods as central and constitutive of capitalism and could not be separated from the system itself.

10 In October 1917, Lenin argued in “Can the Bolsheviks Retain State Power,” that “ revolutionary democracy” relies on the majority of people to subvert the power of the capitalist class and the ultra-rightists. Still, this revolutionary democratic project functioned as an opening to more fundamental post-capitalist changes. It could not be the end itself (Lenin 1972 ). Further, he argues that capitalism and its democratic state creates undemocratic conditions for the working class, which can be better provided by revolutionary socialist governance (Lenin 1964c ).

11 Losurdo notes that this conflation of forms of slavery—racial, wage, colonial—were commonplace in European Social Democratic thought, beginning with Marx himself (Losurdo 2016 , 60–62; 125–127).

12 Leninism, even as it insists on the leadership role of the Communist Party before the establishment of socialist forms of political power, did not equate the Communist Party with the revolutionary agency of the working class (Shandro 2007 , 312; Dean 2016 , 121).

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