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| (2014) PhD thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science. During the 2000s the terms ‘imperialism’ and ‘empire’ made a reappearance. This reappearance followed ‘unilateral’ military interventions by the United States and its allies. Because these military interventions were all justified using international legal argument that the international legal discipline also became increasingly concerned with these terms. Given this, it is unsurprising that there also arose two critical schools of thinking about international law, who foregrounded its relationship to imperialism. These were those working in the Marxist tradition and the Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) movement. Both of these intellectual movements are contemporary examples of older traditions. Despite this popularity, there has been little sustained attention to the specific concepts of imperialism that underlie these debates. This thesis attempts to move beyond this, through mapping the way in which Marxist and TWAIL scholars have understood imperialism and its relationship to international law. The thesis begins by reconstructing the conceptual history of the terms ‘colonialism’, ‘empire’ and ‘imperialism’, drawing out how they are enmeshed in broader theoretical and historical moments. In particular it pays close attention to the historical and political consequences of adopting particular understandings of these concepts. It then examines how these understandings have played out concretely. It reconstructs earlier Third Worldist thinking about imperialism and international law, before showing how contemporary TWAIL scholars have understood this relationship. It then looks at how the Marxist tradition has understood imperialism, before turning specifically to Marxist international legal theory. Finally, it turns to the interrelationship between Marxist and Third Worldist theory, arguing that each tradition can contribute to remedying the limitations in the other. In so doing it also attempts to flag up the complex historical inter-relation between these two traditions of thinking about imperialism and international law.
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 3. Ideology and Law
This chapter looks at the problem of consciousness in order to analyse the Marxist explanation of how the ruling class know how to rule, and in particular how they use law as an instrument of class oppression. The first section elaborates upon the Marxist theory of ideology. It does this in order to demonstrate the plausibility of the contention that a common perception of self-interest emerges within the dominant class. It then considers the merits of such a claim when confronted with the variety of laws and legal systems. Personal account
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Part of the book series: Marx, Engels, and Marxisms ((MAENMA)) 645 Accesses The chapter aims to investigate the way Bourdieu’s sociology of juridical field has defined itself through its relationship with Marx and the Marxism of Althusser and Thompson. Firstly, it shows Bourdieu’s relationship with Marx through a case of misinterpretation concerning practical obedience to law. Then it tries to highlight how Bourdieu develops certain features of his sociology in opposition to and in dialogue with Althusser and Thompson, proposing an epistemological model of radical critique aimed at politically problematizing law through the analysis of the relationship between the juridical field, the field of power and the habitus. This model is contradicted neither by the realpolitk of reason nor by the political positions taken by Bourdieu in the 1990s in favour of public service and Welfare State. Indeed, it shows a Marxian ancestry in the constant concern to link the analysis and critique of normativity to power relations and social struggles, as emerges from the confrontation between Bourdieu and the Durkheimian-derived juridical perspectives. This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access. Access this chapterSubscribe and save.
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout Purchases are for personal use only Institutional subscriptions Similar content being viewed by others Philosophical and Theological Aspects in the Thought of Johannes Althusius Rousseau, Jean-Jacques: Law Helvétius, Claude-AdrienBourdieu was familiar with Marxist studies in the juridical field thanks to S. Spitzer ( 1983 ). My analysis will not consider the specificities of Bourdieusian sociology outside of its relationship with Marx or Marxism, nor the Marxist authors who concerned themselves with law but whom Bourdieu does not discuss (e.g. Gramsci, Pashukanis, Poulantzas). Bourdieu ( 1987 : 849): “the movement from statistical regularity to legal rule represents a true social modification.” Marx and Engels ( 1976 : 31–32): “As individuals express their life, so they are. What they are, therefore, coincides with their production, both with what they produce and with how they produce.” As has been observed, on this point Bourdieu stands very close to the work of historians such as Robert W. Gordon. See Coombe ( 1989 ). Jean-Yves Caro was one of the first economists to deal with neoliberalism in France from a Bourdieusian perspective. See Caro ( 1981 and 1983 ). Yves Dezalay has analysed in numerous works the neoliberal transformations of law. See Dezalay ( 1992 ). Among his work with Brian Garth, see at least Dezalay and Garth ( 1998 , 2021 ). On the other dimensions of political struggle (redefinition of the macroeconomic calculus, internationalism, etc.) that Laval recognizes in Bourdieu, see Laval ( 2018 : 243–245). Bourdieu ( 1987 : 844): “Alain Bancaud and Yves Dezalay have demonstrated that even the most heretical of dissident legal scholars in France, those who associate themselves with sociological or Marxist methodologies to advance the rights of specialists working in the most disadvantaged areas of the law (such as social welfare law, droit social),” continue to claim a monopoly of the science of jurisprudence. See Bancaud and Dezalay ( 1984 ). The quotation in this note belongs to Eugen Ehrlich, but the translator did not indicate this. For an appreciation of the pars destruens and a critique of the pars construens of Duguit’s work, see Chevallier ( 1979 ). On this point, I have tried to interpret Bourdieu’s and Foucault’s methodological innovations in the juridical field as an extension of the external history of law, in the direction of a critique of the articulation of legal practices with phenomena of heterogeneous social normativity (Brindisi 2019 ). On the relationship between Bourdieu and Foucault see Brindisi and Irrera ( 2017 ), Laval ( 2018 ). Althusser, Louis. 2014 [1995]. On the Reproduction of Capitalism. Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses . Ed. G.M. Goshgarian. London and New York: Verso. Google Scholar Bancaud, Alain, and Yves Dezalay. 1984. La sociologie juridique comme enjeu social et professionnel. Revue interdisciplinaire d’études juridiques 12 (1): 1–29. Article Google Scholar Bidet, Jacques. 2014. Introduction: An Invitation to Reread Althusser. In On the Reproduction of Capitalism. Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses , ed. Louis Althusser, XIX–XXVIII. London and New York: Verso. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1987 [1986]. The Force of Law: Toward a Sociology of the Juridical Field . Trans. R. Terdinam. The Hastings Law Journal 38: 814–815. ———. 1989. Reproduction interdite. La dimension symbolique de la domination économique. Etudes rurales 113–114: 15–36. ———. 1990a [1987]. In Other Words: Essays Toward a Reflexive Sociology . Trans. M. Adamson. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. 1990b. Droit et passe-droit. Le champ des pouvoirs territoriaux et la mise en œuvre des réglements. Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 81–82: 86–96. ———. 1991. Les juristes, gardiens de l’hypocrisie collective. In Normes juridiques et régulation sociale , ed. François Chazel and Jacques Comaille, 95–99. Paris: LGDJ. ———. 1992 [1980]. The Logic of Practice . Trans. R. Nice. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. 1994. Raisons pratiques. Sur la théorie de l’action . Paris: Éditions du Seuil. ———. 1996 [1989]. The State Nobility. Elite Schools in the Field of Power . Trans. L.C. Clough. Cambridge: Polity Press. ———. 1998a [1998]. Acts of Resistance: Against the New Myths of Our Time . Trans. R. Nice. New York: The New Press. ———. 1998b [1994]. Practical Reason. On the Theory of Action . Trans. R. Johnson. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. 2000 [1997]. Pascalian Meditations . Trans. R. Nice. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. 2008 [2002]. Political Interventions. Social Science and Political Action . Trans. D. Fernbach. London and New York: Verso. ———. 2014 [2012]. On the State. Lectures at the College de France, 1989–1992 . Trans. D. Fernbach. Cambridge: Polity. ———. 2016. Sociologie générale. Cours au Collège de France 1983–1986, Volume 2 . Paris: Raisons d’agir/Seuil. ———. 2018 [2015]. Classification Struggles. General Sociology. Volume 1. Lectures at the College de France (1981–1982) . Trans. P. Collier. Cambridge: Polity. ———. 2020 [2015]. Habitus and Field. General Sociology, Volume 2. Lectures at the College de France (1982–1983) . Trans. P. Collier. Cambridge: Polity. ———. 2022. L’Intérêt au désintéressement. Cours au Collège de France 1983–1986 . Paris: Raisons d’agir/Seuil. Bourdieu, Pierre, and Jacques Maître. 1994. Avant-propos dialogué avec Pierre Bourdieu . In L’autobiographie d’un paranoïaqu , ed. Jacques Maître, V–XXII. Paris: Anthropos. Brindisi, Gianvito. 2018. Violenza simbolica e soggettivazione. Sul rapporto tra psicoanalisi e sociologia in Pierre Bourdieu. In Dimensione simbolica. Attualità e prospettive di ricerca , ed. Vincenzo Rapone, 55–79. Milano: Mimesis. ———. 2019. La storia esterna del giudiziario tra Bourdieu e Foucault. Teoria e critica della regolazione sociale 2: 183–205. Brindisi, Gianvito, and Orazio Irrera, eds. 2017. Bourdieu/Foucault: un rendez-vous mancato? Cartografie sociali. Rivista di sociologia e scienze umane 4: 7–244. Caro, Jean-Yves. 1981. La théorie économique du crime. Sociologie du travail 23 (1): 122–128. ———. 1983. Les économistes distingués. Logique sociale d’un champ scientifique . Paris: Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques. Chevallier, Jacques. 1979. Les fondements idéologiques du droit administratif français. In Variations autour de l’idéologie de l’intérêt général , ed. Jacques Chevallier, vol. 2, 3–57. Paris: PUF. Commaille, Jacques. 2008. Droit et sociologie. Des rapports au risque de l’histoire. Académie de sciences morales et politiques . Available online https://academiesciencesmoralesetpolitiques.fr/2008/06/09/sociologie-et-droit/ Coombe, Rosemary J. 1989. Room for Manoeuver: Toward a Theory of Practice in Critical Legal Studies. Law & Social Inquiry 14 (1): 69–121. Croce, Mariano. 2015. The Habitus and the Critique of the Present: A Wittgensteinian Reading of Bourdieu’s Social Theory. Sociological Theory 33 (4): 327–346. De Fiores, Claudio. 2019. Tra diritto e rivoluzione. La questione costituzionale in Karl Marx. Democrazia e diritto 2: 32–90. Dezalay, Yves. 1992. Marchands de droit. La restructuration de l’ordre juridique international par les multinationals du droit . Paris: Fayard. Dezalay, Yves, and Garth Bryant. 1998. Le «Washington consensus». Contribution à une sociologie de l’hégémonie du néolibéralisme. Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 121–122: 3–22. Dezalay, Yves, and Bryant Garth. 2021. Law as Reproduction and Revolution: An Interconnected History . Stanford: University of California Press. Book Google Scholar Duguit, Léon. 1913. Les transformations du droit public . Paris: Armand Colin. Fabiani, Jean-Louis. 2016. Pierre Bourdieu. Un structuralisme héroique . Paris: Seuil. Hauriou, Maurice. 1884. L’histoire externe du droit . Paris: Cotillon. Laval, Christian. 2018. Foucault, Bourdieu et la question néolibérale . Paris: Éditions la Découverte. Legendre, Pierre. 1974. L’Amour du censeur. Essai sur l’ordre dogmatique . Paris: Seuil. Maine, Henry Sumner. 1875. Lectures on the Early History of Institutions . New York: Henry Holt and Company. Marx, Karl. 1974 [1880–1882]. The Ethnological Notebooks of Karl Marx . Ed. L. Krader. Assen: Van Gorkum. ———. 1975 [1842]. Proceedings of the Sixth Rhine Province Assembly. Third Article Debates on the Law on Thefts of Wood . Trans. C. Dutt. In MECW , vol. 1: 224–263. ———. 1976 [1847]. The Poverty of Philosophy . Trans. F. Knight. In MECW , vol. 6: 105–212. ———. 1986–1987 [1857–1858]. Economic Manuscripts of 1857– 58. Trans. E. Wangermann. In MECW , vol. 28. Marx, Karl, and Frederick Engels. 1976 [1932]. The German Ideology . Trans. C. Dutt. In MECW , vol. 5: 19–539. ———. 2017 [1848]. The Communist Manifesto . Trans. S. Moore. London: Pluto Press. Pallotta, Julien. 2015. Bourdieu face au marxisme althussérien: la question de l’état. Actuel Marx 58: 130–143. Sfez, Lucien. 1976. Duguit et la théorie de l’état (représentation et communication). Archives de Philosophie du droit 21: 111–130. Spitzer, Steven. 1983. Marxist Perspectives in the Sociology of Law. Annual Review of Sociology 9: 103–124. Supiot, Alain. 2017 [2005]. Homo juridicus. On the Anthropological Function of the Law . Trans. S. Brown. London and New York: Verso. Thompson, Edward Palmer. 1975. Whigs and Hunters. The Origins of the Black Act . London: Allen Lane. ———. 1976. Modes de domination et révolutions en Angleterre. Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 2 (2–3): 133–151. ———. 1978. The Poverty of Theory & Others Essays . London: Merlin. Wacquant, Loïc. 1993. From Ruling Class to Field of Power: An Interview with Pierre Bourdieu on La Noblesse d’État . Theory, Culture & Society 10: 19–44. Xifaras, Mikhail. 2002. Marx, justice et jurisprudence une lecture des ‘vols de bois’. Revue Française d’Histoire des Idées Politiques 15: 63–112. Download references Author informationAuthors and affiliations. University of Campania “Luigi Vanvitelli”, Caserta, Italy Gianvito Brindisi You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar Corresponding authorCorrespondence to Gianvito Brindisi . Editor informationEditors and affiliations. Department of Political and Social Sciences, University of Florence, Firenze, Italy Gabriella Paolucci Additional informationI’m grateful to Bridget Fowler for reading this paper and for her valuable suggestions. Rights and permissionsReprints and permissions Copyright information© 2022 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG About this chapterBrindisi, G. (2022). Bourdieu, Marxism and Law: Between Radical Criticism and Political Responsibility. In: Paolucci, G. (eds) Bourdieu and Marx. Marx, Engels, and Marxisms. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06289-6_13 Download citationDOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06289-6_13 Published : 30 September 2022 Publisher Name : Palgrave Macmillan, Cham Print ISBN : 978-3-031-06288-9 Online ISBN : 978-3-031-06289-6 eBook Packages : Social Sciences Social Sciences (R0) Share this chapterAnyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content: Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article. Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative
Policies and ethics
Ten Theses on Marxism and Decolonisation
Dossier no. 56  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 ProjectAbel 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. IntroductionIn 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:
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:
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:
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:
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:
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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 Marxism, U.S. Democracy, and Lenin’s Commune Against CapitalismJoel wendland-liu. Integrative, Religious, and Intercultural Studies Department, Grand Valley State University, Allendale, MI USA Associated DataData transparency: Not applicable. Software application or custom code: Not applicable. 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 TheoryIt 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. AcknowledgementsI offer special thanks to the anonymous reviewers, to Yilin Wendland-Liu, and to Joe Sims, Gerald Horne, Azfar Hussain, and Tony Pecinovsky. Authors’ contributionsThe author is the sole contributor to this paper. Not applicable. Availability of Data and MaterialCode 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).
 A Beginner’s guide to Fundamental Principles of MarxismMarxist thought primarily critiques capitalism. It was founded by the renowned German philosopher, theorist and revolutionist Karl Hein Marx (1818-1883) and Fredrich Engels. Besides being a globally adapted and practised social and political theory, Marxism has influenced prominent modern literary theories like historicism, feminism, deconstruction, postcolonialism and cultural studies. This article discusses the fundamental principles of Marxism as established by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. What are the Fundamental Principles of Marx’s Thought?The foremost step towards understanding marxist literary theory is to be familiar with the basic principles of Marxism. I. Critique of Capitalism A capitalistic society is characterised by features such as private ownership of means of production, minimal governmental intervention, and profit. For example, the United States is a typical capitalist society. Most of the means of production in the U.S. are privately owned by individual entrepreneurs or private corporations. The economy of the nation is primarily driven by profit and has minimal governmental intervention. One of the most significant and foremost principles of marxism is the critique of capitalism. Karl Marx objected to Capitalism on the basis of four factors:
II. Dialectic of History is motivated by material forces- Impact of Hegel on Marx Vladimir Lenin has accurately pointed out that “I t is impossible completely to understand Marx’s Capital, and specially its first chapter, without having thoroughly studied and understood the whole of Hegel’s Logic. ” Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel or G.W.F Hegel (1770-1831) was one of the most influential German philosophers who significantly shaped Marx’s philosophy. Hegel regarded dialectics as the hallmark of his philosophy and used it in his Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences (1817) and Elements of the Philosophy of Right (1820) Understanding Hegel’s DialecticsHegel’s concept of dialectics is primarily a synthesis of opposites. It is popularly known as the triad of thesis, antithesis and synthesis . It is a process where tensions are eventually resolved throughout history. In the first stage, a thesis is proposed, or an idea is defined. This initial thesis is a simplistic and individualistic definition of an idea. During the second stage, there is an antithesis that opposes the definition of the proposed initial thesis, and in the process provides a wider scope to the initial idea. The final stage or the synthesis is the reconciliation between the thesis and the antithesis. It acts as a union between the particular and the universal. Hegel employed dialectical methodology while exploring the concept of freedom in the Philosophy of Right. We can utilise this to understand the dialectical methodology.
Even though the triad of Thesis-Antithesis-Synthesis is famously attributed to Hegel, he never employed these terms for his dialectical methodology. The triad of thesis-antithesis-synthesis was coined by the German philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fitche . Nevertheless, it provides an outline to his philosophy of dialectics. Hegel extensively explains his dialectical method in Encyclopedia Logic , the first part of his Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences . According to him, a logic has three moments:
Thus, Hegel uses the abstract-negative-concrete scheme where something concrete forms through the reconciliation between the abstract and the negative. Hegel perceived dialectic operating throughout history - from the Oriental world through the Greek and Roman, to the modern German world. According to him, the underlying principles of one society eventually created successive new societies. Although a new society is based on entirely new principles, they still absorb and adapt certain values of the previous society. One of the most significant features of Hegel’s dialectics is the thought that every concept must be situated in a historical context, and as a product of certain historic relations. Differences between the dialectical approaches of Marx and Hegel For Karl Marx, dialectics was significant and relevant. It was Hegel’s concept of freedom that drove the bourgeoisie to revolt and bring down feudalism whose social hierarchy was based on irrational theology and superstition. They eventually established a free economy based on rationality and a free individual. Thus, for Marx, dialectic was a powerful political tool that could negate the state of affairs. Like Hegel, Marx also established that earlier phases in history were sublated during their negation by subsequent phases. However, where Hegel believed that the dialectical movement of history was driven by divine spirit, for Marx, the dialectic of history was driven by material forces and relations of economic production. Particularly, Marxism states that history is driven by class struggle: “ The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle ”. (The Communist Manifesto) Marxism emphasises that dialectic in history is a combination of theory and practice. An established system and society cannot be overthrown by thought and theory alone. Marx states that “ The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it ”. Marxism theory inverts Hegel’s dialectical methodology. In his Capital Volume I Marx remarks that Hegel’s dialectic was “ standing on its head. It must be turned right side up again, if you would discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell. ” For Hegel, progress or societal change was the product of the conflict in ideas. For Karl Marx, ideas were shaped by material forces throughout history. "My dialectic method is not only different from the Hegelian, but is its direct opposite. To Hegel, the life process of the human brain, i.e., the process of thinking, which, under the name of “the Idea,” he even transforms into an independent subject, is the demiurgos of the real world, and the real world is only the external, phenomenal form of “the Idea.” With me, on the contrary, the ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought." In his A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859) Marx points out that “At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production…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” He highlights the class struggles between the slaves and the freemen, patricians and plebeians, lords and serfs throughout history. He states that at present the class struggle is between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. Just like the capitalistic society had sublated the feudal society, socialism would eventually negate and sublate capitalism. Capitalism would continue to cause economic crisis and oppression when eventually the working class would unite and revolt against the bourgeoisie. Thus, capitalistic exploitation would inevitably end once the masses would have suffered perpetually. With time, as the wealth and property will get concentrated in the hands of fewer and fewer people, the working class or the proletariat will continue to grow in number. Eventually, the oppressed labour class that is forced into discipline will organise, revolt and overthrow the capitalists. For Marx, this is the dialectical movement from feudalism through capitalism to communism. Thus, the capitalistic stage represents the negation of feudalism. Similarly, communalism becomes the negation of negation where the conflict between private property and socialised production is resolved by the establishment of socialised property. We must keep in mind that Marx did not mean that communism will completely overtake capitalism. Instead, it will grow out of capitalism while retaining its ideals of freedom and democracy. III. The Division of Labour Division of labour is the process in which a production is broken down into multiple separate tasks for efficiency. Each task is then assigned to different individuals or groups of individuals. As a result, the workers are alienated and detached from the final product. Marxism emphasises that there have been various forms of ownership throughout history. For him, there were three significant consequences of social division of labour.
IV. Concept of Ideology Ideology is a set of beliefs and ideas that legitimises and validates the existence and the dominance of the ruling class. It is through ideology that the capitalist class is able to skew the true and exploitative nature of prevalent social and economic relations. The class in power must gain political agency inorder to maintain its power position and project its interest as general interest. This is where the concept of ideology arrives. According to Marxism, the class that possesses the material forces in a society also rules its intellectual domain. Since it is a class that is in possession of property and wealth, it can promulgate its ideas in the fields of law, morality, religion and art and advertise them as universal. For example, before the French revolution (1789-1799) it was the monarchy and the nobility that enjoyed the most economic and social power. In order to maintain their position, the ruling class perpetuated ideologies such as the divine rights of kings where the kings were declared to be chosen by God. This ensured minimal conflict and opposition. The French Revolution was the result of perpetual economic crisis, social injustices, and political oppression inflicted by aristocracy and monarchy. As a result, it overthrew monarchy and its ideologies of feudalism and divinity. In its place rose the bourgeoisie or the capitalistic middle class and their ideologies of equality, liberty, and fraternity. According to Marxism, the ideology of the ruling class is always projected as the ideology and interest of people as a whole. Moreover, the modern state is nothing “but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie” The fundamental principles of Marxism have been extremely impactful in social and economic spheres. Even today, when it is perceived to be obsolete, we must realise that the principles of marxism are dialectical. As our world changes, these principles too continue to change, adapt and extend to the evolving societies. Just like other critical theories, Marxism is not a complete and static system but is a dynamic critical theory that is still crucial and relevant to our world. Barlas, Baran. "What do Hegel and Marx Have in Common?" TheCollector.com, December 15, 2022, https://www.thecollector.com/what-do-hegel-and-marx-have-in-common/ . Cuddon, John A. The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory. London, England, Penguin Books, 2014 Economic Manuscripts: Preface to a Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy.” Www.marxists.org, www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/preface.htm#005 Marx, Karl. “Economic Manuscripts: Capital Vol. I - 1873 Afterword.” Marxists.org, 2019, www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/p3.htm . Rafey Habib. A History of Literary Criticism and Theory : From Plato to the Present. Malden, Mass., Blackwell Publ, 2009  Academia.edu no longer supports Internet Explorer. To browse Academia.edu and the wider internet faster and more securely, please take a few seconds to upgrade your browser . Enter the email address you signed up with and we'll email you a reset link.
On Motley feminism: A Decolonising Marxism for a thesis 14 of Marxism-feminism 2024, Capital & Class The article enhances Frida Haug's theses on Marxism-feminism by discussing a silence in the theses regarding the internal colonialism of the feminist movement that continue creating racialised hierarchies among White feminist and indigenous people and women of colour and their struggles. The author contends that Marxism-Feminism is failing to find new ways to understand diversity due to the influence of traditional Eurocentric Marxism. To tackle the problem, Marxism-feminism requires a decolonising Marxism that draws on 'late Marx' and recent Marxist and feminist theoretical developments aiming to criticise and de-Westernise and de-Eurocentralise Marxism. The author explores four elements for a 'decolonising' Marxism (value theory, subsumption and social formation, linear development of radical change and temporality of struggles) and discusses its implications on Marxism-feminism towards a possible thesis 14 on Marxism-feminism. Related PapersFeminist Review Suzanne C . Persard From yoga to the Anthropocene to feminist theory, recent calls to 'decolonise' have resulted in a resurgence of the term. This article problematises the language of the decolonial within feminist theory and pedagogy, problematising its rhetoric, particularly in the context of the US. The article considers the romanticised transnational solidarities produced by decolonial rhetoric within feminist theory, asking, among other questions: What are the assumptions underpinning the decolonial project in feminist theory? How might the language of 'decolonising' serve to actually de-politicise feminism, while keeping dominant race logics in place? Furthermore, how does decolonial rhetoric in sites such as the US continue to romanticise feminist solidarities while positioning non-US-born women of colour at the pedagogical end of feminist theory? I argue that 'decolonial', in its current proliferation, is mainstreamed uncritically while serving as a catachresis within feminist discourse. This article asks feminism to reconsider its ease at an incitement to decolonise as a caution for resisting the call to decolonise as simply another form of multicultural liberalism that masks oppression through imagined transnational solidarities, while calling attention to the homogenous construction of the 'Global South' within decolonising discourse.  Gertrude De Allen International Feminist Journal of Politics Anne Runyan Srushti Mahamuni I will begin this essay with a brief explanation of the euro- centric idea of modernity and the coloniality of being. Next, I will explore the non-western critiques of this idea by delving deeper into politics of knowledge, epistemic disobedience, resistance from the fractured locus, epistemologies of the south and epistemic interculturality. Throughout, I will simultaneously weave in decolonial feminism to show how it complements and extends these critiques. In my conclusion, I push my argument further to suggest that not only does decolonial feminism complement and extend non-western critiques of modernity but it is in itself a non western critique of modernity. ΚΡΙΣΗ / KRISI Angela Dimitrakaki Opening with a discussion of the relationship and tension between Marxism and feminism, the article argues for the specificity of Marxist feminist analysis in relation to other currents of feminism on the left. Drawing on Susan Watkins, the article contends that capitalist strategy has contributed to shaping the intellectual trajectory of feminism as known today. This trajectory developed under a complex hegemony that entailed, among other things, the Cold War and the end of Bretton Woods in relation to postmodernism and cultural imperialism, ideological uses of the 'middle class' , and technologies that increasingly challenge the clear distinction between production and reproduction. The analysis is specifically concerned with (a) how histories of reactionary but also progressive ideas formed under this hegemony (b) the pull of/ to immateriality in a perceived 'post-industrial' society, and the relevance of both to feminism. The article revisits the debate of Judith Butler and Nancy Fraser from 1997 as encapsulating the roots of a divide within left feminism-one related to understandings of intersectionality, a popular concept also in Marxist feminism. Intersectionality brings together salient political categories (such as gender, race, class), the question for Marxist feminism being: how? It is argued that intersectionality, coined at a specific moment of American cultural history and in relation to postmodernism's spatialising imaginary, is not always and necessarily compatible with Marxist feminism's focus on a social totality forming out of a mode of production and reproduction. To demonstrate this, the article concludes by considering Ashley Bohrer's influential interpretation of intersectionality. Overall, the article argues for a Marxist feminism that attends closely to the key tendencies, possibilities and contradictions of 21st-century capitalism and what hegemony consists of-as a first step towards re/thinking the priorities and specificity of struggle. Reference: Κρίση 13-2023/1, 9-44 Journal: ΚΡΙΣΗ - Εξαμηνιαία Επιστημονική Επιθεώρηση / KRISI - Biannual Scientific Review Kiran Asher Margaret A McLaren Arguing that it is too easy to release postmodernism as just another example of Western intellectual's separation from activism, this essay considers the connection between feminism and postmodernism as a largely anti-Marxist endeavour. The type of post-modern feminist theory that has blossomed, has presented distinct and well-documented challenges. It has destabilised previously secured categories and encouraged theorists to analyse meaning and relationships of power in a way that has called into question unitary, universal concepts and radically opened discussions concerning subjectivity, sex and gender. Taking into consideration postmodernism as a historically-situated occurrence rather than an intellectual abstraction or movement, the author contends that feminists and their allies need the fragmentation of identities not as a cause for celebration or an oppositional strategy, but rather as an effect of oppressive structures that must be analyzed within the context of their historical, political and economic specificity. It is this tension in postmodernism (between what is expressed and its expression between the latent and manifest) and its parallelism in feminist theory that is the interest of the study. It is the contention of the study that feminist postmodernism, like any other system of thought, has internalised contradictions that heightened during the 1980s and are now becoming self-evident. Capital & Class Heidi Hartmann This paper argues that the relation between marxism and feminism has, in all the forms it has so far taken, been an unequal one. While both marxist method and feminist analysis are necessary to an understanding of capitalist societies, and of the position of women within them, in fact feminism has consistently been subordinated. The paper presents a challenge to both marxist and radical feminist work on the “woman question”, and argues that what it is necessary to analyse is the combination of patriarchy and capitalism. It is a paper which, we hope, should stimulate considerable debate. Ioana Cerasella Chis This paper makes visible the hegemonic dimension of the white, middle class and Western (henceforth ‘WMW’) model of feminism and its relationship of complicity and convergence with the development-industrial complex in reproducing the ‘imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy’ (hooks 2004:17). I contend that for a feminist social transformation at both material and ideational levels, there is a need for a cross-border, horizontalist and pluri-versal praxis which has at its core political autonomy, solidarity, reflexivity and recognition of the epistemic privilege of women and populations in the Global South. The argument is constructed as follows. Firstly, I outline the way in which development furthers colonial, capitalist, white supremacist, heterosexist, modernist, patriarchal and classist ideologies and structures of power. I then show that the WMW feminism and its gender based approaches to development are particularistic due to their sole concern to end sexism, misogyny and gender inequality. They fallaciously claim unity and universal solidarity with women in the Global South, masking their complicity with hegemonic systems that colonise and erase agency, contexts and experiences; ‘difference’, thus, is subjugated and used as a negative qualifier of ‘the other’. Secondly, we will see that the interconnection between gender identity, roles, relations and performance cannot be isolated from power relations and material realities. Finally, I discuss possibilities for feminist solidarity and the recognition of commonalities across geopolitical and epistemological locations which can emerge through decolonial, non-hierarchical strategic alliances that focus on strength/possibility, rather than oppression. Recognising one’s positionality and complicity with the neo-colonial matrix of power and acknowledging difference as positive would benefit feminist struggle, enabling a move beyond merely resisting systems of domination, towards creating new social imaginaries and realities. Loading Preview Sorry, preview is currently unavailable. You can download the paper by clicking the button above. RELATED PAPERSRaisa Sehovic Shift. International Journal of Philosophical Studies Marianna Esposito Mary E John Luciana Ballestrin Aysel Ozturk Smita Agarwal Aditya Nigam Ledys Sanjuan David Camfield Asian Social Science Dr.ALM RIYAL Contemporary Literary Review India Ananya Bhardwaj Elizabeth Challinor Gender <html_ent glyph="@amp;" ascii="&"/> History Jayne O. Ifekwunigwe 2nd International Marxist-Feminist Conference, Vienna Marina Vishmidt , Zoe Sutherland Michael Braverman Farnella Husseini Sara de Jong Thula Rafaela de Oliveira Pires Xhercis Méndez Amalia Sa'ar Anne Castaing Lee E. (1996) Marxism and feminist theory. In: Wolton S. (eds) Marxism, Mysticism and Modern Theory. St Antony’s Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. Brinda Karat Navtej Purewal RELATED TOPICS
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Paul O'Connell Paul O'Connell is a Reader in Law at SOAS, University of London. His research focuses on human rights, legal theory and Marxist approaches to law. He has published on socio-eco-nomic rights, the relationship between human rights and globalisation, and Marxism, social movements and human rights.
Martin Krygier. This article concerns the relationship between the thought of Karl Marx and the fate of law, and the rule of law, in the communist states of the Soviet. Union and east and central Europe. It takes the rule of law to be primarily an attempt to institutionalize restraint on power through law, and it takes it to be realized to a ...
This contumacious purpose of Marxist jurisprudence sets it apart from other modern schools of legal philosophy. The typical legal theory dispensed in law schools presents descriptions of law, analyses of legal concepts, and inquiries into the demands of justice, based upon assumptions about the legitimate authority of the power which is exercised through the institutions of a modern legal system.
This thesis attempts to move beyond this, through mapping the way in which Marxist and TWAIL scholars have understood imperialism and its relationship to international law. The thesis begins by reconstructing the conceptual history of the terms 'colonialism', 'empire' and 'imperialism', drawing out how they are enmeshed in broader ...
This chapter traces the impact of Marxist thought on international law by focusing on structural aspects of international law: the structure of the (international) legal relation, aka 'the legal form'; the content of the legal relation with particular emphasis on interpretation; and the justification of the legal relation through ideology.
to the Marxist position (i.e. the position developed by Marx and Engels), concerned with the most general laws of development, which function in reality and are also reflected in the development of social consciousness.2 The topic of this study is the concept of law in the Marxist method. The aim to elaborate on the nature of
February 2014 . Collection 2 . Collection i The dissertation contains no materials accepted for any other degrees in any ... the ―Tucker-Wood thesis‖ claims that Marx is a radical moral relativist and that his condemnation of capitalism stems from its failure to deliver some non-moral goods. As its name suggests, this claim is made by ...
Karl Heinrich Marx (1818-1883) was the son of a successful Jewish lawyer of conservative political views who converted to Christianity. He studied at the Universities of Bonn and Berlin (changing from law to philosophy) under the in fluence of Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-1872), Bruno Bauer (1809-1882), and the Young (or Left) Hegelian movement.
I celebrate Frigga Haug's Thirteen Theses on Marxism Feminism (), which she regards as the unfinished product of a collective process.This Special Issue in Capital & Class testifies to the inspirational nature of the theses and the ideas they elicit for debate, enabling us to seek new answers to old questions and pose new ones. In thesis 7, Haug points to the limitations of traditional ...
harmonious. A dialectical, hist orical and materialist way of knowing, Marxism is a form of explanatory. critique of society with a p ractical intent. It is a cl ass-based interpretation of soci ...
Marx's economic work is largely a search for value and process. His social and political thought is an attempt to analyze human experience within the context of the economic forces that ultimately have enormous influence upon it. He attempts to discover, via the methodology of dialectical materialism, the true underpinnings of human society and ...
Abstract. This chapter looks at the problem of consciousness in order to analyse the Marxist explanation of how the ruling class know how to rule, and in particular how they use law as an instrument of class oppression. The first section elaborates upon the Marxist theory of ideology. It does this in order to demonstrate the plausibility of the ...
ABSTRACT. This paper revives the debate as to whether Marxism is compatible with a commitment to human rights, but, in presenting a defence of such a compatibility, seeks to extend that debate beyond the confines of philosophical analysis to incorporate the contributions of Marxist theory to the sociology of human rights.
Feminism, Marxism, Method, and the State: An Agenda for Theory. Catharine A. MacKinnon; ... It Appears Not to Result from Patriarchy or Sex Role Socialization, (Sep 2014): ... Defining Sexual Harassment in American and French Law, Law & Society Review 34, ...
As is well known, for Marx, law finds both its conditions of possibility and its function in society, since each form of production generates its own juridical relations and each political authority does no more than translate into law a determinate state of the relations of production (Marx 1986-1987: 26). In this sense, law is but a system of representation that expresses the interests of ...
MARxrAN LEGAL THEORY. 1157. PASHUKANIS AND VYSHINSKY: A STUDY IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF MARXIAN LEGAL THEORY. Lon L. Fuller*. Reading Andrei Y. Vyshinsky's The Law of the Soviet Union1 ought to be a stimulating and rewarding experience. It is an exposi tion. of Soviet legal philosophy and of the theory and practice of Soviet public or "state" law.
Ten Theses on Marxism and Decolonisation . Thesis One: ... 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. ... Principles and Approaches (Rome: FAO, 2014); FAO, IFAD, ...
Work to rule : rethinking Pashukanis, Marx and law. thesis. posted on 2021-07-11, 22:14 authored by Adam Bandt. This thesis was scanned from the print manuscript for digital preservation and is copyright the author. Researchers can access this thesis by asking their local university, institution or public library to make a request on their behalf.
The new unionism of women workers in feminized workplaces and sectors was also examined, as well as feminist unionism in different employment arenas, including the analysis of the current digital and financialized capitalism. This Special Issue is based on the plenary of this conference titled: the Thirteen Theses of Marxist Feminism.
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 ...
A Beginner's guide to Fundamental Principles of Marxism. Marxist thought primarily critiques capitalism. It was founded by the renowned German philosopher, theorist and revolutionist Karl Hein Marx (1818-1883) and Fredrich Engels. Besides being a globally adapted and practised social and political theory, Marxism has influenced prominent ...
The author explores four elements for a 'decolonising' Marxism (value theory, subsumption and social formation, linear development of radical change and temporality of struggles) and discusses its implications on Marxism-feminism towards a possible thesis 14 on Marxism-feminism.
Research on Marx's theoretical education thought and its value (Ph.D. thesis, Tianjin Normal University, 2014). On the characteristics and laws of the sinicization of Marxist theoretical education ...