Forward! Popular Theory & Practice Issue #1

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FORWARD! POPULAR THEORY & PRACTICE

S U M M E R

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[If] indeed we succeeded in reaching the point when all, or at least a considerable majority, of the local committees, local groups, and study circles took up active work for the common cause, we could, in not the distant future, establish a weekly newspaper for regular distribution in tens of thousands of copies throughout Russia.

This newspaper would become part of an enormous pair of smith's bellows that would fan every spark of the class struggle and of popular indignation into a general conflagration...

That is what we should dream of!

V. I. Lenin, What Is To Be Done

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CONTRIBUTORS J . F. P O I N T O N

FORWARD! FOUN DE R & E D I TO R

J.F. Pointon CREAT I V E DI R EC TO R & E D I TOR

Daniel A. Clark E DI TO R I AL B OA RD

Nate Reed Liz Estrem Austin A. Austin James Brian Griffith Ben Stahnke X Eros Ember Kelley Natasha Red Wolf Mao Wan-Zhang S P O NS O RS

Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute

Founder of Pravda Media, Editor for Forward!, a nd General Secretary of the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute.

EMBER KELLEY Christia n Communist Theologia n, Member of the Tra ns Issues Committee of the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute a nd Contributing Editor.

IAN GOODRUM Ia n Goodrum is a writer a nd journalist whose work has appeared in the Iowa City Press-Citizen a nd Interrogating the Reel. He is a digital editor for China Daily.

B E N STA H N K E Copyright Š 2017 by Pravda Media All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotation in a book review or scholarly journal.

First Printing: 2017 ISBN <Enter your ISBN> Pravda Media 3180 W Greenwood St. Box 28 Springfield, MO 65807 www.pravda-m.com ORDERING INFORMATION Special discounts are available on quantity purchases by corporations, associations, educators, and others. For details, contact the publisher at the above linked address.

U.S trade bookstores and wholesalers; please contact Pravda Media Tel: 1-417-374-1966

Ph.D. student at Antioch University, Editor for Forward!

SHANE CREEPINGBEAR Sha ne Creepingbear is the associate director of admission for a ntioch college in Yellow Springs, OH. Sha ne spends his free time orga nizing locally, raising four Daughters, a nd is a blue belt in Brazilia n jiu jitsu.

K I M B E R LY MILLER Kimberly Miller doctoral student studying geopolitical economy, US imperialism, Asia n immigra nt a nd black America n sociocultural encounters.

CHRISTOPHER COSTELLO Marxist-Leninist activist, contributor to The Forge News, writer at writetorebel.com.

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FORWARD! is dedicated to establishing a space for discussion of the essential questions of todayâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s revolutionary socialism.

We seek to publish rigorous analysis of current events, practical lessons of everyday political activity, and new developments in socialist theory.

In the process, we aim to arm our readers with a rbadical understanding that furthers the liberation struggles of all working and oppressed peoples.

History has shown socialism to be the only successful path toward human liberation, with a proven record of ending poverty and improving people's livelihoods.

Socialists have been at the forefront of every movement against exploitation and oppression, from the earliest

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attempts at workers' power, to the anti-colonial revolutions in Asia, Africa and the Americas, to the struggle for women's and LGBTQ liberation.

Now, the need for a consistent, unapologetic socialist position has never been more important.

We believe our duty as revolutionaries is to seek the greatest possible development of socialist practice.

That is, to change the real world.

We hope that through sincere effort and collaboration, FORWARD! will be a principled source for readers, and a rallying point for revolutionary socialists throughout the world to express a unified voice.

In solidarity with all who struggle against capitalism and imperialism â&#x20AC;&#x201D; This is FORWARD!

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THE SANDERS SHUFFLE

MISTER LIES • GUEST CONTRIBUTOR

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enator Bernie Sanders, standard-bearer for the left wing of the Democratic Party, was in the New York Times on Friday marshaling the long march back into national relevance for the Democratic Party. His attempt to recapture the public imagination comes with heaps of Trumpist populism and Clintonian authority. The nation cries out for political guidance, and Bernie will play Pied Piper in the coming years to bring a younger generation back into the fold of the parties responsible for that outcry.

Bernie has proven deft at harnessing class-conscious rhetoric toward the ends of bourgeois politics. He correctly asserts that “[o] ver the last 30 years, too many Americans were sold out by their corporate bosses,” failing to mention that in the last 30 years, Democrats have held the Presidency for a slim majority of the time. He neglects to lay blame on the Clinton administration for its lopsided multinational trade deals (exacerbated under Bush II), or

"Will he have the courage to stand up to Wall Street, work to break up the 'too big to fail' financial institutions and demand that big banks invest in small businesses and create jobs in rural America and inner cities?"

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summer 2017 — for Gramm-Leach-Bliley, the financial reform act which enabled the 2008 financial collapse.

Bernie is yet another false prophet, pushing the gospel of opposing the establishment while representing one flank of it. Had Trump conceded, a similar op-ed with his byline would likely have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, or at least on Breitbart.​ Bernie issues direct challenges to the Trump administration in this masterpiece of willful-absentmindedness: “Will he have the courage to stand up to Wall Street, work to break up the “too big to fail” financial institutions and demand that big banks invest in small businesses and create jobs in rural America and inner cities? Or, will he appoint another Wall Street banker to run the Treasury Department and continue business as usual? Will he, as he promised during the campaign, really take on the pharmaceutical industry and lower the price of prescription drugs?”​ Ever lovable, if forgetful, Sanders makes no mention of the fact that Obama’s Treasury

Promises of change come as readily before each national election as the status quo afterward returns.

Secretaries have been neoliberal alumni of Citigroup and the International Monetary Fund.

That Obama broke up no banks deemed too big

to fail and indeed signed a financial regulatory law, Dodd-Frank, which explicitly enshrines their existence. He fails to mention that Obama’s health care reform has brought and continues to bring Big Pharma many billions in new revenues thanks to the pharmaceutical industry’s lobbying. Bernie evades entirely the plight of the rural poor under the watchful eye of President Obama.

This reality fuels the extant racial animus of many rural whites against a President whom Glenn Beck famously claimed “has a deep-seated hatred for white people.” And to add injury to insult, Sanders continues the long tradition of liberal capitulation to fascism, saying, “I will keep an open mind to see what ideas Mr. Trump offers and when and how we can work together.”

Perhaps Bernie has also forgotten the previous 18 months of Trump’s vitriol regarding women, minorities, immigrants, and other marginalized groups. The ideas are already out.​ Promises of change come as readily before each national election as the status quo afterward returns. Obama’s revolutionary promises became reformist policies, indistinguishable from Bush II, if not heightened in their class character. Obama's agenda reveals all we need to know of what Clinton II might have delivered.

None of this is to forgive the blatant sins of the Republicans, who have elevated a neofascist strongman to the level of godhead. His promises decidedly populist, his rhetoric undeniably oppressive, Trump's policies will only benefit the capitalists and bourgeoisie as assuredly as the last four Republican Presidents’ did.​ After the humiliation of the Clinton campaign’s tactical and strategic errors, and decades of the Democratic and Republican Parties failing

10 — forward! to meaningfully address the concerns of marginalized communities, we must look for answers elsewhere. We will find these answers in revolutionary theory, and certainly not in the runner-up to the runner-up, lest we fall into the trap the Democrats are now laying for us. “In the coming days, I will also provide a series of reforms to reinvigorate the Democratic Party,” Bernie emptily promises. It is clear in this phrase that the ideas are meant to revitalize a Party and recoup its losses. Not to revitalize the working class, but to re-empower the political class. These ideas will certainly sound nice coming from a Party with no power to enact them, just as Trump’s outsider perspective sounded soothing when not rooted in political ability.​ Now is the time for those who wish to see change in our political system to recognize the abject failure of Democrats and Republicans to live up to their continual promises to workers, and for workers seeking an outsider perspective to look away from insiders portraying outsiders, as Bernie and Trump unbelievably attempt. As assuredly as President-elect Trump will gut the social safety net and deliver huge tax breaks for his wealthy peers, so too will the Democratic Party continue to serve the interests of Wall Street, pharmaceutical companies, large insurers, and energy companies, who gatekeep their path back to power. Democrats will not bite the hands that feed them – even if Bernie spends four years promising they will, finally, this time, hold them accountable.​ The time is ripe for workers, long left in both parties’ distant rear view, to band together outside the machine that manufactures false hope. Do not join, or rejoin, the Democratic Party, no matter what their curmudgeonly spokesman sells you. They are failing, and in

their absence the Republican Party will doom itself by governing as it sees fit. Workers should abandon the Republican Party's proud plutocrats to govern like business-owners - they will lose all popular support in doing so.

To build real, antiestablishment power, join a socialist organization and develop solutions outside the bourgeois system. Study revolutionary theory and tactics.

Develop solutions to protect the marginalized people whom Trump’s administration (and followers) will target openly, just as Obama’s administration (and followers) targeted undocumented people and foreign citizens without admission. Build solidarity in your own community, rather than listening to the supposed-saviors of the working class hoping to lure us into a four-year struggle to elect the next Clinton, or Obama, or Sanders, or Bush, or Trump.

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SEE ING RED It’s time to quit shying away from a positive communist politics. Turning away from the past only gives our opponents ammunition.

IAN GOODRUM • GUEST CONTRIBUTOR

There’s a pandemic loose among the left.

It’s dangerous, and spreading fast. If we don’t act now, it might be too late to contain it before it throttles this nascent socialist wave in the crib.

Luckily, the symptoms are easy to spot.

Just ask any self-described communist or

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Pavel Filonov, GOELRO (National Plan for the Electrification of Russia), 1930.

“leftist” about the socialist experiments of the last century: the USSR, Cuba, China, Vietnam, DPRK and so on. If they’re a carrier, it should be simple to tell; their head will drop, they will avert their eyes and begin stammering something about failures and mass deaths and suddenly that leftist will start to sound a lot like a card-carrying member of the John Birch Society.

If these folks are to be believed, the past is the past and the socialist politics of the future will avoid the errors of those countries — and if this person is afflicted, the errors will be all they can talk about — through unexplained wizardry, usually technological advances. With allies like these, willing to toss aside the entire 20th century to appease the mildest questioning, is it any wonder people see the left as impotent?

Democratic socialists correctly point to a need to develop a positive politics in response to neoliberalism’s collapse — a vision of what a better world can specifically do for people. Inevitably, what this ends up looking like is a repackaging of Scandinavian social democracy, which does no Muslims or non-whites many favors in the convincing department. When pressed about

the states presided over by communist parties, the dissembling begins. “Sure, they had good ideas,” they’ll say. “But,” they continue, everything fell apart, nothing good happened, it’s time to try something totally new with zero cues from history. Compelling stuff.

What we as Marxist-Leninists must develop is a positive politics of our own. The Norsephiles are quick to use programs of universal health care and free education as a model for the United States, and that’s enough for some to be convinced. But there’s more to socialism than a tepid imitation of Sweden. We sorely need a similar shorthand that goes even farther, and uses examples from those countries the afflicted members of the broader left would have us forget.

It goes without saying a new communist program would include free health care and education. Yet under socialism, universal rights to material security don’t end there, the way they do in social democracy.

Ruling parties enshrined in their constitutions the sorts of rights capitalist countries have yet to codify into law, nearly a century after the

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Russian Revolution. An entire chapter of the Soviet Constitution of 1936 is a list of rights, which include “the right to work…the right to rest and leisure…the reduction of the working day to seven hours…annual vacations…the right to maintenance in old age…equality of rights irrespective of race…women [guaranteed] equal rights with men.”

We don’t have to go around quoting directly from the Constitution of the Soviet Union — unless you want to! — but anyone who’s sat down and read the whole thing will have difficulty arguing today’s post-revolutionary constitution won’t have quite a few similarities.

So what does the communist bullet point list of policies look like in the modern age?

Unsurprisingly, there are still parts of Marx and Engels’ ten-item plan which could be included. But key to our movement is distinguishing what we want from what we can characterize as Socialism Lite: all the nice free stuff without any of that stopping capitalism business.

We can talk about housing, and the end of homelessness.

That’s compelling to anyone living in a city like New York or San Francisco, where landlords rule supreme. Guaranteed housing has been a key, recurrent part of socialist constitutions since the beginning. How does this shake out in reality, though? For this, we turn to — gasp! — a historical example. In East Germany, a place Socialism Lite would have us think was all Stasi, all the time, monthly housing costs in the form of rent or loan payments were capped at four percent of income.

Ask anyone to divide their monthly paycheck by 10, then divide that by two. Then knock off a bit more. Then have them picture paying that much for rent every month, in a country

where rents regularly go over 50 percent of income. That should generate some interest.

While you’ve got their attention, throw in a $2 utility bill, like they have in Cuba.

Home ownership was different, too. If a person wanted to build a house, the government would send the necessary building materials and equipment on a one-percent interest loan.

Homebuilding by a community became such a common occurrence people made an event out of it, and locals would pitch in with their collective construction experience to put together a dwelling.

Sounds like some actually existing socialism to me.

You ignore the past, you ignore positive examples like these.

We can talk about employment, and the fear of unemployment.

It’s no great secret much of the power of the capitalist class is derived from the threat of unemployment and the maintenance of a great mass of unemployed at any given time. Removing this anxiety from the equation is essential, and for anyone who’s been unemployed, it’s yet another distinguishing feature of socialism that makes it appealing.

Ensuring everyone has work or the opportunity to work, while providing adequate pension for those who can’t, has been talked to death in the West without ever seeing the light of day.

Meanwhile, in socialist countries, this is and was a fact of life. Before perestroika, structural and cyclical unemployment were unheard of in the

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summer 2017 — Soviet Union. The terror over the possibility of losing one’s job was practically nonexistent.

With so many firms in the West laying off employees and no government program to help the people who fall through the cracks, the eradication of unemployment should be a top priority. Yet the imaginations of so many who consider themselves on the left begins and ends with health care and education. The people want more, and so should we. Refusing to acknowledge these accomplishments to accommodate the fantasies of anti-communists does us no favors.

We can talk about capitalist crises.

Perhaps most importantly, the programs we’ve discussed — including the ones already present under social democracy — are ironclad.

Barring a complete upheaval of the political and economic system, as we saw with the end of the Soviet Union, the socialist states of the 20th and 21st century refused to abandon these guarantees at the first sign of trouble.

While post-war capitalist governments provided a halfway decent safety net for their working classes for a few decades, the welfare state was and is under constant attack. Periods of economic slowdown led to a “privatization creep,” when capitalists and their state representatives raided public coffers to shore up profits in times of low growth.

Contrast this with socialist countries, who even in their most desperate moments — Cuba’s Special Period, the DPRK’s Arduous March, the USSR’s era of stagflation — maintained public ownership and administration of health care, housing, education and employment security. These services were not up to the same standard during this time, what with it being a crisis period and all, but they were not demol-

ished in some craven attempt to kickstart the economy. It takes a counter-revolution to reverse this pledge, as we’ve seen in the post-Soviet economies, where living standards and life expectancies have nose-dived.

This might seem like Marxism 101 to most who read this, but the pressing need to re-articulate these positions shows the public still has an overwhelmingly negative view of our ideology’s history. If the exchange of “Socialism has failed!”

“Well, that wasn’t real socialism!” is commonplace as experience suggests, then radical assertions of socialism’s successes must be the balm to these mealymouthed non-defenses. I’ve yet to meet many people who respect someone who kowtows to their opposition at a moment’s notice.

No doubt there is a great deal of propaganda to break through in making these arguments.

Combatting the prevailing narrative will be difficult. But attempting to recruit and expand a left organization with a message of starting from scratch — or worse, using fragile social democracies as examples — is a losing gambit.

People want results, and if you can tell them that under socialism, rent was 4 percent of income, or that everyone had a job and didn’t worry about getting fired, or that basic services weren’t in danger of being rolled back when capitalists decided they want more, that’s a foundation you can build from. It’s persuasive to anyone who’s had to work for a living; that is, the people we ostensibly want on our side.

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ON MARXISM AND ELECTIONS

CHRIS COSTELLO • GUEST CONTRIBUTOR PART ONE: The Electoral Path to Socialism

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here has been much debate about how radical political actors should engage with electoral politics. Some, like anarchists, argue that the correct tactic is to ignore electoral politics entirely, focusing on what they see as the more useful path of direct action or “propaganda by the deed” 1. Among those who identify as Marxists, thought on this topic is generally more varied. Some parties have chosen to confine themselves entirely to the electoral sphere, attempting to win socialism through the ballot box. Others have boycotted elections and embarked upon a “people’s war” of armed struggle with the state and capital. The point here is that there is no one Marxist theory of elections.

This is partly because elections themselves are a vastly different from place to place. The electoral system in Britain, for example, is quite different from the one in Peru. As such, it is impossible to approach elections in a vacuum. Marxists understand that tactics must be based on the material conditions of the struggle, so attempting to craft a platonic plan of action in the electoral sphere is useless. In the essays that follow, I will not attempt to craft such a theory. This is not a manual

or a blueprint for Marxist organizations. What I want to do here is sketch out, in broad terms, an analysis of electoral politics from a Marxist perspective. This is simply my opinion of the topic, and I caution readers not to trust in it blindly. It is important to conduct concrete social investigation of every issue rather than simply reading about it. We must, in the words of Mao, “oppose book worship” 2.

In this first section, I want to refute the idea of “voting our way to socialism.” This strategy has been a failure nearly everywhere it has been attempted. I am firmly in favor of a revolutionary road to socialism, based on smashing the existing state and building new organs of worker’s power where it once stood.

It is important to note that the social democratic parties-that is, parties whose main goal is to win socialism through elections rather than revolution-have failed to abolish capitalism even once. This is especially egregious in the context of Western Europe, where many of these parties have enjoyed media backing and majorities in parliament. These parties have not only failed in their aims to bring about socialism peaceful-

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summer 2017 — ly, however. In many cases, they have actually become parties of the bourgeois elite or the labor aristocracy. Across the region, social democratic parties have implemented dramatic cuts in social spending, as well as a host of reforms designed to boost the position of capital at the expense of workers. In Greece and Italy, proposed or recently passed budgets will reduce spending over the coming years by about 29 billion dollars 3. In Germany, this number is as high as $96 billion.

This figure constitutes the largest collection of spending cuts in this country since World War Two 4. Cuts will also total as much as one billion dollars in France 5. Planned or approved reforms in this region include a host of anti-worker measures. This involves a three-year increase in the age at which French workers can retire 6, the elimination of payments into the pensions of the unemployed in Germany 7, and changes to Spain’s labor laws which will make it cheaper and easier for employers to lay off workers 8.

These attacks have, predictably, been met by a great deal of militancy from workers. Many will have heard of the mass strikes and violent protests opposing catastrophic austerity plans in Greece 9.

I bring all of this up because they tell us quite a bit about the nature of social democracy, or “socialism through the ballot box.” As I said above, Western Europe has traditionally been a hotbed of reformist socialism. Many of these parties still exist across the continent. At one point, they hoped to slowly implement reforms culminating in the transition to socialism. This view stood opposed to that of revolutionaries, who sought a sharp, rapid overthrow of the system 10. After the Second World War, however, many of these parties gave up even this goal. They instead settled on a program of slow

progressive alterations to capitalism, offering piecemeal improvements in the lot of workers within the bounds of a “managed capitalism” 11.

They focused on creating welfare institutions, extensive public sector employment, and government support for unions. All of these measures, meager though they are, have been or are being destroyed. In many cases, this destruction is being spearheaded by the same parties that instituted them in the first place. This gets at the real problem with reformism. Because reformist socialist parties want to work within states designed to uphold the rule of capital, they will forever be bound by the laws of capitalism. This means that any reforms they win will be subject to market forces and cut back at the first opportunity. We can never hope to win socialism by passing one reform after another, because these reforms will always be fragile. The capitalist class will seek to cut public services and benefits so that they can better exploit their workers. A socialist party working within a capitalist state will also find themselves subjected to this pressure.

This is why social democratic parties have, in many places, become a vehicle for the set of profree-market, anti-worker policies often grouped under the banner of neoliberalism. In Greece, Germany, and elsewhere, it is social democratic governments or coalitions pushing these measures 12. Even outside of government, reformist socialists have led no sustained or comprehensive attempts to resist the neoliberal order.

How has it happened that in Europe, where the power and influence of social democratic parties has been greater than anywhere else, social democrats have not only failed in their original mission of abolishing capitalism in the electoral sphere, but have largely come to serve the interests of capital against labor? Perry

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Anderson, editor of the New Left Review, explained the trajectory this way in 1994: “Once, in the founding years of the Second International, social democracy was dedicated to the overthrow of capitalism. Then it pursued partial reforms as gradual steps towards socialism. Finally it settled for welfare and full employment within capitalism….[I]t now accepts the scaling-down of one and the giving-up of the other…” 13.

I want to make some theoretical points about why this shift has occurred. Firstly, socialism is not just state ownership of the economy, as many social democrats believe. In many cases, efforts to bring about socialism in the electoral process failed because the “socialism” these parties were working towards did not actually challenge capitalism. It is entirely possible that an economy could be majority state-owned and still be controlled by capitalists. The state is an instrument of class power, so a transition to state ownership does not automatically correlate to worker’s power. For Marxists, the question is not whether the state owns the economy, but who owns the state. Socialism is the collective rule of a class: the working class. It thus cannot be handed down from above, but must won through the self-activity of the class guided by a Party which is deeply imbedded in it. Reformist socialism ignores the fact that socialism can only be a collective project, instead trusting the will of a group of politicians rather than the advanced workers. This is one reason why efforts to vote in socialism have continually failed.

Further, the electoral system is rigged in favor of capital. However, this is not a new development, as social democrats like Bernie Sanders say 14. The American state was not “taken away” from the people, but instead was designed from the beginning to subjugate them. James Mad-

ison, the fourth President of the United States, admitted as much in a 1787 debate on the constitution. He wrote: The man who is possessed of wealth, who lolls on his sofa or rolls in his carriage, cannot judge the wants or feelings of the day-laborer. The government we mean to erect is intended to last for ages. The landed interest, at present, is prevailed lent; but in process of time, when we approximate to the states and kingdoms of Europe, — when the number of landholders shall be comparatively small, through the various means of trade and manufactures, will not the landed interest be overbalanced in future elections, and unless wisely provided against, what will become of your government? In England, at this day, if elections were open to all classes of people, the property of landed proprietors would be insecure. An agrarian law would soon take place. If these observations be just, our government ought to secure the permanent interests of the country against innovation.

Landholders ought to have a share in the government, to support these invaluable interests, and to balance and check the other. They ought to be so constituted as to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority. The senate, therefore, ought to be this body; and to answer these purposes, they ought to have permanency and stability 15.

In other words, wealth (“landed interests”) will be increasingly concentrated into fewer and fewer hands through markets (“various means of trade and manufactures”). The wealthy, therefore, would be outvoted in a democratic system and government would be overrun by the majority of working people. To prevent the working class from attaining political power and expropriating the property and wealth of the rich (“an agrarian law”), we have to “wisely” ensure that government “protect the minority” of the rich

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summer 2017 — against the majority of the poor.

What this means is that the very institutions socialist parties engage with in the electoral arena-the senate, the congress, and even city councils-are designed to hamstring worker’s parties. The American electoral system is explicitly engineered so that socialists-or those opposed to the rule of capital-can never take power within it. Thus, we should not see electoral engagement as the primary means of struggle. We cannot put all our eggs in that basket, as it were.

It is vital that, in our engagement with elections, we do not neglect other kinds of mass organizing, such as strikes. Elections, I want to stress, are a tool in our arsenal, one tactic among many.

The capitalist state is, whether “democratic” or otherwise, is constructed to serve the interests of a class that exists for and through the exploitation of workers. As Engels, Marx’s longtime friend and collaborator, once put it, ”the modern representative state is an instrument of exploitation of wage labor by capital” 16. This function is expressed not simply in the parliament itself, but also in the civil services sector, the courts, and-crucially-the fundamental bodies of the state: the “bodies of armed men,” as Lenin put it [17]. These institutions-the army, the police, and so on-cannot simply be redirected towards defending worker’s power. Workers “cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery and wield it for its own purposes” 18. Rather, workers must smash the existing state and build their own worker’s state.

Where reformist socialists take power, the institutions of the state-army, police, courts, etcwill revolt. This was seen in General Pinochet’s 1973 military coup, backed by the United States, of the reformist socialist government in Chile 19.

The army and police were created in the inter-

ests of capital. This purpose is baked into their very DNA. Attempts to build socialism without fundamentally altering these institutions will inevitably be, to quote Marx in a different context, “drowned in blood” 20.

A word should be said here of Venezuela and Hugo Chavez, arguably one of the most successful “reformist” leaders of all time. While it is true that Chavez could be described as a reformist, in the sense that he took power in an election, the Bolivarian Revolution itself is just that: a revolution. The rank and file working class of Venezuela rejects the idea that socialism was given to them from above. They have instead called for a “radicalization” of the revolution, a “truly communal state” 21. In a certain sense, this has already taken place. Unlike the social-democratic reformists in Western Europe, the Venezuelan government did not leave the existing state institutions untouched. The Venezuelan government has dedicated its forces to reconstructing the state on a communal basis.

According to the Commune Law established in 2006, the Communal Parliament envisions integrating the communes into a regional and national federation, to construct “a system of production, distribution, exchange, and consumption rooted in social property” 22.

The Venezuelan people understand the need to create a new state, rather than using the existing state to legislate socialism into being.

In this sense, the characterization of Venezuela as “reformist” in the sense I have defined it is overly simplistic. Although Chavez did attempt to “legislate socialism,” he did so in a framework characterized by popular participation and a connection with the masses. The PSUV has not used its position in government to divorce itself from struggle.

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The reality, however, is that there have been very few Chiles, and only one Venezuela. Despite a long-held rhetorical commitment to socialism, reformists have rarely, in practice, done things that threaten the power of capital in a significant way. To explain that failure, revolutionaries often point to the character flaws of reformist politicians. The reformists have historically been bourgeois, and this explains why they did not build socialism. This is an incorrect tactic.

Our objection is not to reformists as people, but to reformism as a strategy. No matter their background, social democrats, by virtue of their position, eventually become members of a class distinct from the workers they supposedly represent. Well-paid and freed from the daily insults of normal working-class existence, reformist leaders come to occupy a privileged position.

This condition is dependent upon their ability not to fight for the emancipation of workers, but to balance the competing interests of capital and labor. They grow conservative and become the out-and-out representatives of capital. We might also add that the importance of campaign contributions and positive media coverage in modern elections mean that electorally-oriented politicians of all stripes must gain support from those who own the money and the media: the capitalist class 21.

Despite the power of this argument, there are deeper reasons for the failure of reformism.

Even if the social democratic parties were run by a collection of true proletarians who spent their free time laboring in factories, and even if such parties have media backing and a majority in parliament (which, to reiterate, they often have), they still would not legislate socialism into being. Reformism is definitionally contradictory, and it is these contradictions that are to blame

for its continued failure.

Reformism posits that socialists can win elections and use their control over the state to legislate the destruction of capitalism, but the nature of electoral competition itself prevents socialists from forging the kind of solidarity necessary to create majority support for socialism.

Elections are static and passive forms of political action â&#x20AC;&#x201D; encouraging compromises on important principles and the formation of alliances based on lowest-common-denominator politics.

Prioritizing elections leads socialists to adapt to, rather than challenge, popular but conservative ideas. The point of elections, for reformists, is not to advance ideas (that comes later, once they are in power) but to win elections. Because reformists believe that the parliament is the site of liberation, they cannot actually begin liberating the people until they are in parliament.

In service to this goal, reformists must learn to avoid radical positions or actions that might threaten short-term vote totals. Pursuing a reformist strategy inevitably leads to missing the forest for the trees. Social democrats cannot lead politically, which is what the masses require, but are instead doomed to tail the most backward elements in the movement.

This leads reformists to hold back mass movements at moments of radicalization, to channel mass grievances into elections and parliamentary maneuvering, and to limit demands to those that do not threaten the power of elites to a degree that those elites would be forced to engage in open struggle against the popular movement, and thus reveal their true character to the masses. In this respect, reformism blinds the masses and makes them incapable of understanding society as it actually exists. Unless one understands society, one cannot hope to change

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summer 2017 — it. Reformism, therefore, actively prevents the italists to reduce investment in a given country. transition to socialism from taking place. It conThis happens because capitalists want to punish fuses the masses so that they become distracted, governments that implement policies antithetical unable to carry the struggle forward. to their interests. Pro-worker reforms mean that Reformists might move left when faced with capitalists can invest their money more profitably pressure from the masses, but always within very elsewhere, and those who choose not to do this strict limits. They will attempt to re-stabilize will go out of business. When capitalists stop capitalism at those moments investing or lack the capital to of social, economic, and They will attempt to re-stabilize invest, the result is ecopolitical crisis: precisely nomic crisis, declining tax capitalism at those moments of the moments at which social, economic, and political crisis: revenue, and inflation. very large numbers of precisely the moments at which very This leads to a sharp people could come to drop in support for the large numbers of people could come understand that there is government, resulting in to understand that there is something something deeply wrong its fall from power. Social deeply wrong with the system. with the system. A perfect democrats must, by neexample of this is Syriza in cessity, balance their desire to Greece which, at the moment of crisis, chose to reform the country towards socialism with their ignore the issues really facing the masses and need to keep capitalists profitable and investing. embrace austerity 23.

When there is a contradiction between these two Finally, profits are the lifeblood of the impulses, there are structural pressures built capitalist system. As long as capitalism exists, into the state, described above, that push them profits are what will keep it afloat. If the state is to side with capital over labor. This can be seen to have resources to distribute to workers and happening right now in Norway, the supposed the poor, as reformists claim to want, they must liberal utopia [25]. collect enough taxes to do so. That will only It should be noted, by virtue of Western happen if the economy is growing. If workers are social democracy’s need to accommodate the into win ever greater wage and benefit increasterests of capital, it has failed to provide an alteres, the firms in which they are employed must native to imperialism. Scandinavia, for example, stay in business. Not only that, they must be largely maintains itself through violent imperialprofitable enough relative to their competitor ist policies just like other Western nations. capitalists to afford concessions. As one Swedish In 2008, Norwegian communications mulsocial democratic leader put it, “because social tinational, Telenor was exposed in a documentademocracy works for a more equal distribution of ry as partnering with a Bangladeshi supplier that property and incomes, it must never forget that employed child labor in horrendous conditions. one must produce before one has something to The report also uncovered that the children were distribute” 24. This raises a dilemma. The reality made to handle chemical substances without is that large-scale structural reforms, such as any protection and one of the workers even died wage increases or social welfare, can drive capafter falling into a pool of acid. Not only was the

22 — forward! treatment of workers unacceptable, they also ruined the crops of farmers in the surrounding areas with the waste from the plant. Like other Western multinationals that deliberately go to the developing world looking to save money on labor and operations costs, the company washed its hands of the accusations, denying knowledge about their partner’s inhumane practices [26].

Similarly, Norwegian oil and gas company Statoil, has been involved in multiple corruption cases around the world-especially in underdeveloped countries-where they have bribed state companies and government officials in order to obtain licenses for extraction. Their involvement is not only limited to these aggressive economic practices, they are also deeply involved in the West’s military exploits. Norway dropped 588 bombs on Libya but scarcely is mentioned as being part of these imperialist operations. Statoil has since started joint extractions operations worth millions in the ruined country [27].

Both of these companies, it is crucial to note, are partly owned by the state. This furthers the above argument that state ownership does not automatically translate to a more equitable system of production or distribution. By working within the capitalist state, reformist socialists will be forced to make concessions to that state.

This will always mean exploiting workers at home and abroad.

The Swedish clothing giant H&M can retail affordable products in rich nations and make huge profits only because they exploit and underpay workers in impoverished nations such as Bangladesh. As John Smith points out in his book Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century , only 0.95 euros of the final sale price of an H&M T-shirt remains in Bangladesh to cover the cost of the factory, the workers, the suppliers, and the

government. The remaining 3.54 euros goes for taxes and transportation in the market country, with the bulk going to the retailer. In other words, Western nations capture most of the profit although it is the poor workers and nations that have put most of the input in terms of labor and resources [28].

The ‘Nordic Model’, as it has come to be known, is hardly a system that we should look to for inspiration. No model, system, or structure that depends on the exploitation and domination of others can be ethical. Western nations and their people—if they are to be taken seriously by the rest of the struggling world—must begin to think about developing socialist political and economic structures that are internationalist and, crucially, anti-imperialist at their foundations. This can never be done by working within the capitalist state. Imperialism is, as Lenin put it, “the highest stage of capitalism” [29]. It is a phenomenon that is bound up with capitalist production. Once a capitalist economy becomes sufficiently developed, imperialism must arise in order to keep it afloat. Social democratic parties, because they are working within the capitalist state, must bow to the pressures of capitalist markets. As such, they must engage in imperialism and rank exploitation.

This is the crux of the matter: the state under capitalism is an organ of capitalist power.

In light of this, attempts to build socialism by winning seats in parliament or similar political bodies will always result in failure. Treating the electoral arena as the primary space in which socialism will be won is a recipe for disaster.

In order to achieve victory, we must organize workers in a militant communist party capable of smashing the existing state and running society in the interests of all.

23

summer 2017 — 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

John Most, “Action as Propaganda” Freiheit, July 25, 1885 Mao Zedong, Oppose Book Worship, 1930.

Beirne, John, and Marcel Fratzscher. “The pricing of sovereign risk and contagion during the European sovereign debt crisis.” Journal of International Money and Finance 34 (2013): 60-82.

Tomasson, Richard F. “Government old age pensions under affluence and austerity: West Germany, Sweden, the Netherlands, and the United States.” Research in Social Problems and Public Policy 3 (1984): 217-72.

Levy, Jonah D. “Partisan politics and welfare adjustment: the case of France.” Journal of European Public Policy 8.2 (2001): 265-285.

Kirkpatrick, Elizabeth Kreitler. “The retirement test: An international study.” Soc. Sec. Bull. 37 (1974): 3.

Börsch-Supan, Axel. “Incentive effects of social security on labor force participation: evidence in Germany and across Europe.” Journal of public economics 78.1 (2000): 25-49.

Bentolila, Samuel, and Juan J. Dolado. “Labour flexibility and wages: lessons from Spain.” Economic policy 9.18 (1994): 53-99.

Rüdig, Wolfgang, and Georgios Karyotis. “Who protests in Greece? Mass opposition to austerity.” British Journal of Political Science 44.03 (2014): 487-513.

Paul Blackledge (2013). “Left reformism, the state and the problem of socialist politics today and Jesus followers”. International Socialist Journal.

Stan Parker (March 2002). “Reformism – or socialism?”.

Socialist Standard.

Puetter, Uwe. “Europe’s deliberative intergovernmentalism: the role of the Council and European Council in EU economic governance.” Journal of European Public Policy 19.2 (2012): 161-178.

Giddens, Anthony. The third way: The renewal of social democracy. John Wiley & Sons, 2013.

“Bernie Sanders: The Democracy Now Interview.” Democracy Now, 2016.

Madison, James. “Federalist no. 39.” The Federalist

16.

17.

18.

19.

20.

21.

22.

23.

24.

25.

26.

27.

28.

29.

30.

Papers (2007): 246.

Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. The Communist Manifesto. Penguin, 2002.

Lenin, Vladimir Ilʹich, and Todd Chretien. State and revolution. Haymarket Books, 2015.

Ibid.

Petras, James F., and Morris H. Morley. The United States and Chile: Imperialism and the Overthrow of the Allende Government. Monthly Review Pr, 1975.

Marx, Karl, and Céline Surprenant. The class struggle in France. 2000.

Epstein, David, and Peter Zemsky. “Money talks: Deterring quality challengers in congressional elections.”

American Political Science Review 89.02 (1995): 295308.

Hawkins, Kirk Andrew, and David R. Hansen. "Dependent Civil Society: The Círculos Bolivarianos in Venezuela." Latin American Research Review 41.1 (2006): 102-132.

Ibid.

Kouvelakis, Stathis. “SYRIZA’S RISE AND FALL.” (2016): 45-70.

Quoted in John Hall, The State: Critical Concepts. 1993. p. 325.

Bayulgen, Oksan. Foreign Investment and political regimes: The oil sector in Azerbaijan, Russia, and Norway. Cambridge University Press, 2010.

Falkenberg, Andreas W., and Joyce Falkenberg. “Ethics in international value chain networks: The case of telenor in bangladesh.” Journal of business ethics 90 (2009): 355-369.

Ask, Alf Ole (2003-09-12). “Statoil’s international director resigns”. Aftenposten.

Foster, John Bellamy, Robert W. McChesney, and R. Jamil Jonna. “The global reserve army of labor and the new imperialism.” Monthly Review 63.6 (2011): 1.

Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich. Imperialism: The highest stage of capitalism. Resistance Books, 1999.

PART TWO: Electoral Engagement as a Tactic Above, I argued that Marxists cannot hope to win socialism solely through the electoral system. The capitalist state is rigged against the interests of workers. Sacrificing other kinds of organizing in favor of intervention in the electoral sphere can only result in the defeat of the socialist movement. However, this does not mean that socialist parties should abstain from elections entirely. There are a variety of benefits to standing in elections, In this essay, I hope to outline them from a Marxist perspective.

I think the best place to begin is with The Communist Manifesto. This document

was drafted at the founding of the Communist League, a revolutionary organization that Marx and Engels helped to organize. The Manifesto was meant to serve as a set of perspectives that could guide the League in its revolutionary struggle. In it, Marx and Engels pointed to three strategic tasks for the Communists. The first was that they needed to build working class organizations at the primary site of worker’s power: the workplace. Secondly, they had to build social movements to fight against all forms of oppression in society more broadly. Finally, struggle necessitated the construction of an independent

24 — forward! political party of and for the working class to, as they put it, “win the battle of democracy” [1].

This battle broke out in a very serious way in 1848, before the ink on the Manifesto had even dried. The 1848 revolutions, by way of background, essentially constituted mass uprisings against the reactionary feudal order and replace it with a representative, democratic one. During this period, the workers were the most militant and dedicated fighters. They were prepared to carry the revolution through to its democratic end. The capitalists, although they mouthed support for democracy and revolution, betrayed the struggle by forming alliances with the feudal oligarchy [2].

The Communist League was far too small to determine the course of these events, but by relating to the wave of revolutions that broke out across Europe in this period, Marx and Engels could better articulate what they meant when they called for an independent working class political party. Marx wrote a document entitled “The March 1850 Address to the Communist League.” In it, he put forward a strategy to prevent another 1848-style betrayal of the working class. He wanted to ensure that the next democratic revolution would be completed to its fullest extent. This strategy grants insights into the ideas of Marx and Engels concerning the relationship between revolutionary socialism and electoral politics. This document was of such great importance that Lenin supposedly committed it to memory [3].

The document warned against workers entering into tight alliances with capitalists. Marx again argued for the formation of an independent worker’s party, in which the working class could realize its potential to lead the revolution through to the end. This political party was de-

scribed as “the coming together or coordination of various communes and worker’s associations” [4] . The communes referred to local branches of the Communist League, while worker’s associations meant unions, clubs, and the like. Each of the local worker’s groups formed by this coordination was to act as a nucleus or center in which “the position and interests of the proletariat can be discussed free from bourgeois influence” [5].

Here, Marx is arguing not merely for the organizational independence of the working class, but also its political independence, which would be formed from the ground up.

Marx points out that this organization — formed again by the merger of the advanced communist organizations and the worker’s movement as a whole — must be capable of functioning both in secret and in the open. Further, this organization must arm itself to create a military force independent of the existing state.

Then, as a product of the revolutionary creation of a representative democracy, this organization must “run its own candidates within the new electoral system and take every opportunity to put forward [its] own demands so that the bourgeois democratic government not only immediately loses the support of the workers but finds themselves, from the beginning, supervised and threatened by authorities behind which stand the whole mass of the workers” [6].

Here, we see one of the key reasons why standing in elections can be a useful tool. Seeing a worker’s party on the ballot threatens the bourgeoisie’s stranglehold over the status quo.

It shows them that they are being watched, that we are working to overthrow them. This may help reign them in and push them further left.

Although running in elections can never bring about socialism on its own, our mere presence

25

summer 2017 — on the ballot may be enough to win workers minimal gains in the short term. When we explain to workers how these gains were won, they will be more likely to rally behind us. It is only at this stage that the Party can really become a force to be reckoned with. Electoral engagement, then, does two things: it keeps the bourgeoisie in check and shows workers that there is an organization fighting for their interests.

The second element is the most important. Even when there was no potential at all of getting a candidate elected to government, Marx and Engels argued that the worker’s party must still put forward their own candidates. This helped to preserve the independence of the working class, project working class politics into public life, and assess the audience for such politics and count the forces behind the workers. Standing for elections, even when we know we cannot win them, is an important ideological and organizational tool. It shows workers that someone is standing with them, someone really does represent their interests. Socialist candidates give us a rallying point. They give us a face.

Standing in elections turns us into a legitimate, visible political

movement capable of making public gains. It also provides us a point to refer people who have questions about politics. In effect, socialist intervention in the electoral sphere makes working class politics visible, and thus helps to radicalize those sectors of society most willing and able to bring about socialism.

standing in elections is counterproductive, because socialist candidates will split the vote between themselves and the mainstream “center left” party.

It is argued that instead of running our own candidates, we should accept the lesser of two evils. Marx and Engels took a firm stance against this, writing,

“All such talk means, in the final analysis, is that the proletariat is to be swindled.

The progress which the proletarian party will make by operating independently in this

Further, standing in elections can help us gain key information about the strength of our movement. We will know how many votes the worker’s party received, and thus understand the kind of manpower we have at our disposal. We can measure the strength of our movement against the strength of our opponents, and use this data to ascertain what kind of action is possible in the streets. In this sense, standing in elections is not only advantageous for the masses, but for the Party itself.

It is often claimed that

way is infinitely more important than the disadvantage resulting from the presence of a few reactionaries in representative bodies. If the forces of democracy [meaning the liberals] take decisive action against the reactionaries from the very beginning, the reactionary influence in the election will already have been destroyed” [7].

Essentially, what Marx and Engels mean is that if the liberals lose elections, it is not because a proletarian party has split the vote. Rather, it is because the liberals themselves

26 — forward! have failed to put forward a program that the masses can rally around, and in so doing neutralize the reactionaries.

The purpose of running in elections, in Marx and Engels’ view, was this: win the masses over politically, challenge the political hegemony of the capitalist class, pose a real alternative to its agenda, and to defend that alternative by force. The electoral strategy, then, was to be part of a process of self-activity, leading to the self-emancipation of the working class.

Marx and Engels, therefore, saw the fight for representative democracy as crucial. It opened up important political space, as well as a range of tactics and tools that workers could integrate into the revolutionary struggle. This did not, however, mean that radical change could be won by electing socialists to office and legislating it into being. Elections were seen as a tool, one component part of a wider revolutionary strategy that included an armed and militant working class. Elections were not to be a substitute for this militant organization.

Twenty-five years after the March Address was written, the German Socialist Party (SDP) came into being. Within ten years, they had already won half a million votes for their candidates running for seats in parliament. By 1912, they had built up an impressive membership and exercised a considerable degree of political influence in working class life [8]. This shows that elections can be a kind of “broadcasting station” for the Party and its platform. Elections cannot bring about socialism, but they can help galvanize workers to do so.

The experience of the SDP, although it does prove that standing in elections has some benefit, also shows the dangers of treating the electoral area as the primary site of struggle.

Given the aforementioned success in this area, it is perhaps understandable that a significant faction within the Party argued that a socialist society could be voted into being. The left wing of the SDP, led by Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht, and Paul Levey, understood that this was a pipe dream. The real power in society, they argued, does not lie with the elected officials.

It lies with the board members of corporations and the heads of the major financial institutions in society. These people are not elected, but the government is really set up to serve them [9]. Of course, this fact must remain a secret. This is why politicians make promises they can never hope to keep: they need to win over the majority and convince voters that the state is looking out for their own best interests. When these politicians enter office, however, they do little more than serve the interests of capital. A recent example of this can be found with Barack Obama, who campaigned on a slogan of hope and change. He was the “people’s candidate,” ready and willing to take the government back from the greedy corporate parasites who had taken it over [10] . Once in office, he immediately rescinded this vision of a new egalitarian order, making ninety percent (90%) of the Bush tax cuts permanent [11] .

This gets at the core problem of reformism, which I discussed at length in the previous section. Representative government, like the military and police, is a component of the state.

The state is an organ that functions to protect the interests of a particular class. The capitalist state, then, has been developed and tuned to defend the interests of capital against labor. Marx developed this point in a letter to his German comrades. He wrote, “A historical development can remain

27

summer 2017 — peaceful only for so long as its progress is not forcibly obstructed by those wielding social power. If, in England, for instance, or in the United States, the working class were to gain a majority in parliament or congress, they could, by lawful means, rid themselves of such laws and institutions as impeded their development. However, the peaceful movement might be transformed into a forcible one by resistance on the part of those interested in restoring the former state of affairs. If they are put down by force, it is as rebels against lawful force” [12].

In other words, if the ruling capitalist class feels that its power is threatened, it will not hesitate to use the state to remove that threat. If attempts at cooptation or coercion fail, the military and police will employ brutal force to crush the socialist movement.

This was not abstract speculation on the part of Marx and Engels. Rather, it was arrived at through a rigorous analysis of the 1871 Paris Commune. For a short time, the workers of Paris took control of the city and formed their own institutions of direct democracy. The Commune taught Marx and Engels that “the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery and wield it for its own purposes” [13].

A radically different form of worker’s self-government would need to be established and defended against counterrevolution. The Paris Communards were content to establish an island of socialism within the city, but did not defeat the existing bourgeois state of France. As a result, the deposed ruling class was quickly able to regroup and, as Marx put it, “drown the Commune in its own blood” [14].

In analyzing elections, we should always be mindful of the corrosive and destructive effects of capital. Our goal, in this respect, should not

necessarily be to win office, but to spread our message and rally the workers behind a concrete political program. Capitalism, as the Paris Commune proves, can never be voted out of existence. Those in power will never let us peacefully take that power from them. There must be a revolution in which the workers and oppressed forcibly defeat the bourgeoisie, break up their state, and create a radically new one in its place.

As I argued above, reformist socialism necessarily entails watering down our political program to appeal to the widest possible audience of voters. Receiving as many votes as possible becomes the goal, instead of winning socialism. This negates the tactical benefit of elections described above: elections no longer show workers that someone is fighting for their actual interests, but merely sow confusion as to what those interests are. In order for elections to benefit the Party, therefore, they must remain subordinate to other forms of struggle. Only in doing so can they actually serve to push workers towards socialism.

This dynamic played itself out disastrously in the SDP at the outbreak of World War One. They turned their backs on their working class comrades around the world and supported their own state in the conflict. They did this in order to win over German voters, who had been temporarily whipped into a pro-war frenzy by the bourgeoisie. This abandonment of international solidarity by the Party-the most advanced detachment of the worker’s movement-caused German workers to believe that international solidarity was not in their interests and set the worldwide struggle for socialism back by decades [15] .

In fairness, the SDP took their pro-war position at a time when speaking out against the

28 — forward! war would mean imprisonment of leaders and the outlawing of the organization entirely. This, of course, would have eliminated their electoral strategy altogether and jeopardized the progress they had made in that arena. While their actions are understandable, they also reveal the strategic problem with focusing on elections. By engaging exclusively in legal modes of struggle, we subject ourselves to the whims of the law. Since the judicial system is part of the state, this means that we put ourselves at a disadvantage. By acting openly in the electoral sphere, and leaving open no other avenues of struggle, repression of the Party would have meant the complete downfall of the movement. Not diversifying our tactics, as the experience of the SDP shows, can only mean death [16].

Given this experience, it is understandable that some revolutionaries could develop a complete aversion to political elections under capitalism. It is understandable that some would argue that we should not partake in elections under any circumstances. I would, of course, argue against this view. Lenin and the Bolsheviks engaged in a similar debate as a result of the 1905 revolution. In response to mass upheaval, the Russian Tsar granted the creation of a parliament called the Duma. He did not do this because his mind had been changed by the masses, but rather because he knew that the revolutionary movement was most dangerous in the streets. If he could redirect it to legal channels, the pressures of the parliament would render it ineffective. The Duma, because it was stacked with pro-tsarist forces, could easily control and neutralize the revolutionary struggle. For the Tsar, the establishment of the Duma was not matter of principle. It was a purely tactical consideration based on an actual assessment of a particular

situation. It is important to note at this juncture that even our enemies are aware that there is no electoral road to socialism [17]. When standing for elections, we must be ever vigilant and on guard, ensuring that we do not get caught up in the spectacle of anti-worker politics. If our enemies utilize bourgeois democratic institutions in a tactical manner, we must also understand them in this way.

Initially, the Bolsheviks organized an active boycott of the election. They recognized that it was a trap and chose to focus their energy on harnessing the rising struggle in the streets.

In this context, this was the correct line. The point that we need to take away from this is that we ought not use elections as a substitute for struggle, but neither should we swear them off completely. Whether we intervene in the electoral sphere at a given moment should be dependent on a rigorous analysis of the concrete material conditions of struggle. This is how the Bolsheviks understood this question as well. In 1906, when it was clear that the struggle was turning towards a period of reaction, the Bolsheviks changed their position on the Duma [18]. This was the result of a long theoretical and practical debate in the Party. The Bolsheviks understood that at that particular point, the forces of reaction had vastly outnumbered the forces of progress.

In order to rally the workers behind the Party, it was necessary to unify them around a program and a “face.” Elections here functioned, as I said above, as a “broadcasting unit” capable of carrying the struggle forward.

Lenin also published a pamphlet called “Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder” in which he put forward another argument for participation in the Duma. He argued that, while revolutionaries understand that the electoral

29

summer 2017 â&#x20AC;&#x201D; system is set up to serve the people in power, the masses have not necessarily drawn this conclusion. If the electoral arena garners the political attention and focus of the working class, if the masses believe that the government can serve them, then revolutionaries must play an active part in it. This is part of how we relate to the masses, shift their consciousness, and win them to revolution. This theoretical point reflects an understanding of the mass line, which Leninists argue should be the primary method of work of the Party. The mass line begins when we meet the people where they are at. We cannot run ahead of the masses. If we do so, we risk alienating them and dooming the Party to isolation [19].

The Bolsheviks, based on this understanding, participated in the Duma and eventually won six delegates (which they called Deputies) to it. In the same vein as the Marx-Engels attitude outlined above, the Bolshevik Deputies were used as a tactic in pursuit of a wider strategy of raising the revolutionary consciousness and combativity of the masses. The elections were not an end in and of themselves, but rather a means to an end. For this to be possible, the Deputies had to engage in activity outside the Duma as well as inside it. They needed to have strong, intimate connections with both the workers and the rest of the Bolshevik party. Unlike capitalist politicians, the deputies were not divorced from the real conditions of working people and subject to the totalizing influence of the bourgeoisie and their lackeys. Nor could they be like the German socialist representatives mentioned above. They were not put on a pedestal and divorced from

30 — forward! the socialist party from which they came. The Bolshevik deputies were deeply involved with non-electoral Party work as well as the Duma.

They made daily contact with the editorial board of Pravda, the Bolshevik newspaper, and were also in close contact with the central leadership of the Party. They also attended the regional and national Party congresses. All the Bolshevik deputies were workers themselves, and Bolshevik trade union work meant that they had already cultivated grassroots connection to the class.

The Bolsheviks knew that electoral engagement was merely one tactic among many, not to be used in place of genuine organizing [20].

They also understood, however, that electoral intervention gave them a unique advantage, in that it allowed them to reach sections of the masses they would ordinarily have been cut off from. Having seats in the Duma helped to legitimize the Party and its platform in the eyes of the general public. It gave them an opportunity to meet with labor leaders and other working class organizations within their districts, and thus exercise greater influence on the worker’s movement as a whole. Elections, as this experience makes clear, can help extend the influence of the Party and carry the struggle towards revolution [21] .

The Bolshevik deputies made cunning use of the privileges that came with being members of the government. They were able to conduct propaganda among the masses, give radical speeches at strikes and protests without legally being arrested. When the police and the government tried to crack down on the deputies, it only enhanced the ties between the Party and the masses, making it more difficult to follow through with the persecution [22].

The deputies also used the Duma as a plat-

form to concentrate the attention of the masses on crimes committed by the Tsarist government.

They found that they could do this effectively in the Duma by using a procedure called an interpolation. This involved the deputies giving a speech on the floor of the Duma and officially asking the government to explain their reasoning behind a particular anti-worker policy or action.

Knowing full well that liberal ministers within the Duma wanted to cast themselves as sympathetic to the workers, the Bolshevik deputies would bring them worker concerns, publish a full account of the conversation — including the false promises made by the ministers — and then use the breaking of those promises to appeal to the workers to continue their struggles and not place any hope in the liberal authorities moving forward [23].

The Bolshevik deputies utilized the Duma to expose the workers to the actual nature of the system, to show the workers that they could not rely on liberals who pretended to speak for workers while apologizing for violence against them.

They could only rely on themselves and their party to make real, lasting change [24].

This point is key to our understanding of elections. Because the masses are focused on the parliamentary sphere, winning seats in it actually allows the Party to spread its critique of the system to a wider audience. We cannot change the system from within, but we can call it out from within. This, again, reflects an understanding of the mass line. Once we meet the people where they are (in this case in parliament), we must develop their understanding of the issues and move them forward in struggle.

Because elections are seen as legitimate by the masses, winning seats in representative bodies is an excellent way to do this.

31

summer 2017 — The Bolshevik deputies were always careful to meet the people where they were, often literally. Upon hearing of any worker incident or protest, the deputies would rush there, provide solidarity, and collect information from the workers on the ground. They would then use this information for the next interpolation. Before long, resolutions began streaming in from the workers to the deputies, requesting that the government be questioned on everything from the persecution of trade unions to the treatment of political prisoners. In this way, the Duma functioned as a rallying point for the workers, showing them that the Party was willing and able to fight for their interests. To quote the Bolshevik deputy A.Y. Badayev, “the worker’s deputies were in the thick of the fight. We were in constant communi-

and winning them over to the cause of the Party.

Badayev continues, “Workers would call on me to ask all sorts of questions, especially on paydays when money and aid for strikers was brought. I had to arrange supply passports and secret hiding places for those who became illegal, help to find work for those victimized during strikes, petition ministers on behalf of those arrested, [and] organize aid for exiles. Where there were signs that a strike was flagging, it was necessary to instill vigor into the strikers, to lend the aid required, and to print and send leaflets….There was not a single factory or workshop, down to the smallest, with which I was not connected in some way or another. Often, my callers were so numerous that my apartment was not large enough for

“the worker’s deputies were in the thick of the fight. We were in constant communication with the strikers, helped to formulate their demands, handed over funds collected, negotiated with various government authorities, etc” cation with the strikers, helped to formulate their demands, handed over funds collected, negotiated with various government authorities, etc” [25].

The deputies would collect strikes and deliver the money to workers so that they would have an income even when they were on strike. This was a way of providing concrete solidarity with workers

them, and they had to wait in a queue down the staircase. Every successive stage of the struggle, every new strike, increased these queues, which symbolized the growing unity between the workers and the Bolshevik faction, and at the same time furthered the organization of the masses” [26] .

32 â&#x20AC;&#x201D; forward!

To reiterate, socialism cannot be handed down from above, but must be a product of the self-activity of the workers and their party. Revolutionaries cannot simply win seats in parliament and cloister themselves off from the struggle.

They must remain in contact with the masses every step of the way. Elections are merely one path by which to do this.

Putting this electoral strategy into action not only increased the self-activity and consciousness of the masses, it also gave the Bolsheviks a thermometer through which they could measure the mood of the masses and tailor their practice to fit that mood.

This helped them win the masses over to their program with much greater expediency than if they had abstained from elections entirely.

Ultimately, in 1917, it was by assessing their elections to the soviets that allowed the Bolsheviks to ascertain whether they had enough support to wage an armed revolutionary struggle [27]. If you think back to the strategic perspectives put forward by Marx and Engels in 1848, all of this should sound familiar. Elections were not the be-all and end-all of socialist practice. They were a tool to be utilized as part of a greater strategy of winning the masses over to revolution and organizing them to take power.

Of course, there are some significant dif-

ferences between where we are as a movement today and where we were in 1848 or 1917. Just like the Bolsheviks debating whether or not to boycott the Duma, all strategy and tactics need to be based on as accurate an assessment as possible of the concrete situation. They must be based on our weaknesses as well as our strengths, on what we think we can accomplish.

Above all, however, we must always return back to the central question every revolutionary should ask: what will it take to increase the consciousness, combativity, and organization of the workers and the oppressed?

In short, what will it take to win?

Elections ought to be subordinate to this goal, but they can play an important role in catalyzing and sustaining revolutionary struggle.

In the United States particularly, one of the major factors holding back the progress of the workerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s movement is the Democratic Party. Unlike in other countries, where workers have their own political Party, the American working class is tied to an organization that, although it claims to support their interests, is actually bound up with the interests of capital. Election law in this country is rigged against third party challenges. Unlike in Europe, where seats in parliament are dictated by the proportion of the vote a party receives, the United States has a winner-take-all system.

what will it take to increase the consciousness, combativity, and organization of the workers and the oppressed? In short, what will it take to win?

33

summer 2017 —

The American political system offers little in the way of real democracy; workers feel that they only have two choices at the ballot box [28].

Their choice is of the Republican party, which openly supports the rich and powerful, and the Democratic party, which offers a more clandestine form of moneyed repression.

Although the Democratic party attempts to hijack the rhetoric of the left, history has shown that they can never be any more than liberaldemocratic defenders of the status quo. By dishonestly and hypocritically giving voice to

vaguely left politic, a dynamic is created in which the workers, no matter how frustrated they are with the Democrats, feel compelled to vote for the “lesser of two evils.” Every four years, there is pressure on the worker’s movement to put militant organizing on pause and focus on making sure a Republican is not elected into office. When Democrats feel like the have the working class vote on lock, there is nothing to stop them from shifting further and further to the right once they actually get into office.

This was never clearer than in the Obama presidency. On the 2008 campaign trail, Obama said he was going to “put on his walking shoes” and walk picket lines with workers [29]. He was nowhere to be found when Democrat Rahm Emanuel attempted to smash the teacher’s strike in Obama’s hometown of Chicago [30]. This strike was waged for better working conditions and against racist school closures. It is easy to

34 — forward! imagine that, if there was ever a time for a black Chicago native to walk a picket line, this would be it. The Left’s ties to the Democratic Party, as this example illustrates, serves only to demobilize and demoralize the working class and oppressed. Marx’s call for an independent political party of the working class has never been more relevant and vital.

This has such potential to be a boon to the consciousness of the working class and oppressed; having candidates that jump in the opportunity to participate in and support strikes the way the Bolshevik delegates to the Duma did.

While the conditions in the United States are very different from the conditions of Russia more than a century ago, we are still faced with the historic task of building an independent political party of the working class and oppressed.

In the United States, that means breaking the stranglehold of the Democratic Party on the working class. This is no easy task. It will be a long process, encompassing a wide variety of tactics, strategies, and moments. In this task, we must never cut ourselves off from the tools at our disposal. Standing in elections is just one of such tools. Insofar as we assess that standing in elections would carry the struggle forward, that it would make a real impact on the consciousness of the masses, we should make use of this tactic. We must always remember, though, that the goal of the revolutionary party is to raise and direct the consciousness of the masses. We must stand firmly against the failed reformist roads to socialism; understanding that the route to a better society for everyone is one that is revolutionary and engaging on every level.

31.

32.

33.

34.

35.

36.

37.

38.

39.

40.

41.

42.

43.

44.

Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. The Communist Manifesto. Penguin, 2002.

Marx, Karl, and Celine Surprenant. The Class Struggle in France. 2000.

Nimtz, August. Lenin’s Electoral Strategy from Marx and Engels through the Revolution of 1905: The Ballot, the Streets—or Both. Springer, 2016.

Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. “Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League.” Communist League, 1850.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Retallack, Imperial Germany p. 187 O’Kane, Rosemary HT. Rosa Luxemburg in Action: For Revolution and Democracy. Routledge, 2014.

“Candidate Obama,” Francine Orr. Los Angeles Times, 2017.

“Budget Deal Makes Permanent 82 Percent of President Bush’s Tax Cuts.” Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

N.p., 10 June 2015.

Quoted in Nimtz, August H. Marx and Engels: Their contribution to the democratic breakthrough. SUNY Press, 2000.

Lenin, Vladimir Ilʹich, and Todd Chretien. State and Revolution. Haymarket Books, 2015.

Ibid.

35

summer 2017 â&#x20AC;&#x201D;

36 — forward!

IT IS RIGHT TO

REBEL AN ANTI-IMPERIALIST THEOLOGY OF CLASS

EMBER KELLEY • Editor SECTION ONE: Context

T

he year is 1950, and the United States has assumed the mantle of leading the capitalist powers following World War 2.

The country feels that it is important to position itself against various communist movements and the Soviet Union. One rising popular communist movement was that led by Kim Il Sung in Korea, where the people had recently overthrown Japanese Occupation. The United States had agreed with the Soviet Union to divide influence in Korea, with a communist North and a capitalist South. By 1950, tensions had boiled over to the point of war. With the communist forces of the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea gaining a quick upper hand in the conflict, the United States came to the aid of the capitalist forces of the Republic of Korea. Thus began “the first ‘hot’ war of the Cold War”1. In the United States, this war is known as the Korean War, and is not often discussed with much depth.

However, if we do not analyze this war and subsequent United States actions, we will fail to see how the United States developed into a global imperialist power.

Writing for The Intercept, Mehdi Hasan offers this insight into this need for unveiling forgotten history, How many Americans, for example, are aware of the fact that U.S. planes dropped on the Korean peninsula more bombs — 635,000 tons — and napalm — 32,557 tons — than during the entire Pacific campaign against the Japanese during World War II? How many Americans know that “over a period of three years or so,” to quote Air Force Gen. Curtis LeMay, head of the Strategic Air Command during the Korean War, “we killed off … 20 percent of the population”?...

37

summer 2017 — According to LeMay, “We went over there and fought the war and eventually burned down every town in North Korea.”...

How many Americans have heard of the No Gun Ri massacre, in July 1950, in which hundreds of Koreans were killed by U.S. warplanes and members of the 7th U.S. Cavalry regiment as they huddled under a bridge? Details of the massacre emerged in 1999, when the Associated Press interviewed dozens of retired U.S. military personnel. “The hell with all those people,” one American veteran recalled his captain as saying. “Let’s get rid of all of them.”

How many Americans are taught in school about the Bodo League massacre of tens of thousands of suspected communists on the orders of the U.S.-backed South Korean strongman, President Syngman Rhee, in the summer of 1950? Eyewitness accounts suggest “jeeploads” of U.S. military officers were present and “supervised the butchery.”

Millions of ordinary Americans may suffer from a toxic combination of ignorance and amnesia, but the victims of U.S. coups, invasions, and bombing campaigns across the globe tend not to. This violent and oppressive history is not made part of the narrative of the Korean War in the United States. The United States used Korea as a testing ground for the two key strategies that it would use to establish imperial hegemony around the world in the following decades- military intimidation and politico-economic domination.

This pattern has continued since the Korean War. The Republic of Korea was ruled by a rotation of United States backed politicians and military leaders. Important among these was Park Chung-hee who “seized power in 1961 and ruled with an iron hand until he was assassinated in 1979”. Under his leadership, the economy be-

came focused on “export-led economic growth”.

This move was largely beneficial to the United States importing products, while in Korea it meant repression of unions and low wages. It was not until 1987 that progress was made in living out democratic principles.

While economic conditions have improved in the Republic of Korea and the people have been granted some autonomy, the United States still has “28,500 troops in South Korea” The United States has also recently installed a new missile defense system despite popular and political opposition to its placement.

The Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea in the North initially had economic success as part of the Soviet bloc. However with the fall of the Soviet Union in the 1990’s, they lost their major economic partners and became increasingly isolated. The United States has since worked “to isolate north Korea from the world’s financial system” and apply military intimidation through annual war games in the region. George W. Bush even named the country as part of his Axis of Evil so as to connect them with the modern War on Terror.

Turning to the effects of these systems in the United States, this imperialistic culture has led to systemic dehumanization. This can be seen in popular media, with both Team America World Police (2004) and The Interview (2014) featuring racist humor and plots of assassination of political leaders. There seems be bipartisan consensus on the need to continue intimidation.

In the 2016 Vice Presidential Debate, Governor Pence advocated “peace through strength” while Senator Kaine advocated for “extensive sanctions”. There seems to be little care for the people of Korea, but rather for United States power on the world stage.

38 — forward!

SECTION TWO: Understanding Class in Our Context It is not popular to discuss class and economic systems in the United States, with a preference to focus on the mythology of class mobility. Yet Joerg Rieger tells us that “Class.. shapes our lives to the core”. So it is important to come to “the understanding of a society formed by class contradictions”. Class is an essential feature of Capitalism, where workers have a class relationship with those who manage the economy whether in finance or ownership of the means of production. Because of this class contradiction, Richard D. Wolff tells us that “to accept capitalism is to endorse withholding from most people- the workers- experiences crucial to acquiring a whole range of skills, capacities, relationships, satisfactions, and pleasures in life.”

While the United States contains its own class structure, it is also vital to see the United States as at the head of the globalized Capitalist system. Understanding this system helps us to see the role that the United States plays on a global scale, as well as to see how the globalized system is used to alleviate contradictions within the United States. As Pamela Brubaker states, These global comparisons are not meant to diminish the significance of the increasing concentration of income and wealth within the United States. Nevertheless, they may broaden our perspective so that we think not just about class and power in the United States, but also about how the United States as a nation uses its power globally and contributes to global inequality This structure of global capitalism, with the United States at the head of the global economy can best be understood as imperialism. This concept has been defined in a variety of ways by different schools of thought , but Vladimir Lenin

was one of the key thinkers to discern its relation to economics and class conflict. He observes: Imperialism is capitalism at that stage of development at which the domina nce of monopolies a nd fina nce capital is established; in which the export of capital has acquired pronounced importa nce; in which the division of the world among the international trusts has begun, in which the division of all territories of the globe among the biggest capitalist powers has been completed….

Imperialism, as interpreted above, undoubtedly represents a special stage in the development of Capitalism.

From this definition we can see that economics and class plays a key role in the desire of capitalist countries to have access to the resources of developing countries. As we have seen in laying out our context, the methods of imperialism can vary. With our Korean context in mind, Kim Il Sung the first leader of the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea summarizes some of those methods: The imperialists are working towards invading and dominating other countries in every possible way and in different fields. They are trying to invade other countries and establish political domination over them by resorting to military force and underhanded methods. They are scheming to subordinate them economically and infiltrate them ideologically and culturally by means of surplus goods, unfair economic relations.

At the core of imperialism is the driving

39

summer 2017 — force of the market, which always requires new profits and resources to continuous growth.

This market however, continually seeks to commodify life and thus exclude people from life.

As Nestor Miguez notes,“As the market aims to extend its reach, to absorb all the resources and products, service and capabilities, in order to be the unregulated regulator of all existence… the excluded are deprived of life”.

Imperialism, based on this exclusion, is thus built on economic domination of other human beings on a global level. Amilcar Cabral, an anti-colonial leader in Africa noted this nature, declaring that

“Colonialism is primarily an economic domination.

Colonialism or imperialist domination in the first place seeks to dominate other peoples economically.”

This global imperialism is historically guided by the interests of the Euro-American countries, with the United States currently at the lead. This global domination is given support at home in

the United States by creating fear of the other.

This dehumanization thrives, because those at the center of empire become concerned for their own priorities first. People in the United States fear losing their place on the top of the global politico-economic order. As anti-colonial leader Thomas Sankara observes, this is a “fear that the struggle of the popular masses might radicalize and lead to a genuinely revolutionary solution”.

This domination requires that in the United States we practice dehumanization of the other.

Our global order has led to Americans seeing whole nations as either an economies to be used to our advantage or threats to our existence.

This dehumanization has a class element to it, creating an other that is deemed unworthy. Yet dehumanization only brings harm. As educator Paulo Freire notes,

“Dehumanization, which marks not only those whose humanity has been stolen, but also(though in a different way) those who have stolen it, is a distortion of the vocation of becoming more fully human”.

These imperialist dehumanization tactics flow from the United States own history of genocidal colonization of indigenous lands, and share similarities to the tactics e used in dehumanizing marginalized peoples inside the United States.

Imperialism thus dehumanizes and creates a class of other outside the United States, which we see happening in our Korean context, while also perpetuating and creating dehumanizing conditions internally in the United States.

40 — forward!

“If you do not condemn colonialism, if you do not side with the colonial peoples, what kind of revolution are you waging?”

— Ho Chi Minh SECTION THREE: Revolutionary Reconciliation Theological Context So how does one do the work of theology from the imperial center of the United States?

What can guide us in framing an anti-imperialist theology of class? What can help us in overcoming the dehumanization created by imperialism?

A key theological concept can be found in reconciliation. This concept is scattered throughout the Christian Scriptures as a key part of what Jesus sought to accomplish. In 2nd Corinthians 5 we read, All this is from God, who recociled us to himself through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself,* not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us.

In Ephesians it is written about Jesus, For he is our peace; in his flesh he has made both groups into one and has broken down the divid-

ing wall, that is, the hostility between us. He has abolished the law with its commandments and ordinances, so that he might create in himself one new humanity in place of the two, thus making peace, and might reconcile both groups to God in one body through the cross, thus putting to death that hostility through it.

In the present, we have found this concept of reconciliation useful in dealing with past horrors through Truth and Reconciliation Commissions in various countries.

Yet as one looks at our context in Korea, or in our wider context of United States imperialism and dehumanization, is it enough to merely ask for an easy forgiveness and reconciliation? I believe that our efforts at reconciliation coming from the imperial center of the United States must be more than simply asking for a new start.

We must seek revolutionary reconciliation, which I will seek to define with three key principles-

41

summer 2017 — confronting dehumanization, embracing self determination, and standing in solidarity with the oppressed. In these three principles we can create a theology of class that helps to dismantle political and theological imperialism. In this work I am indebted to those living and developing insights from within the oppressive context of United States imperialism in Korea.

capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism have created relationships where people have been othered and dehumanized. He elaborates on this otherering: Most fundamentally, however, the gap—indeed,chasm—between “the” dialectic and a decolonized dialectics emerges from the diagnosis of the systematic ontological disqualification of certain subjects, their relegation to what Fanon calls the

Confronting Dehumanization

‘zone of nonbeing”…It is the ontological difference

As we dive into these points, it is vital to draw from our context. How do we dehumanize Korea? One need only take a quick look at the news to see that we are willing to openly discuss dropping a 15 ton bomb Pyongyang, a city of 2.8 million people. The United States news media regularly runs stories about the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea that portray an entire nation of 25 million people as brainwashed. As Andrew Dobbs observed,

between full Being and subjected nonbeings—be-

Western propaganda draws from a deep well of racist “yellow peril” prejudice to stoke irrational fears against this tiny, poor, isolated country, and it amplifies this paranoia with long-standing stereotypes of East Asian “oddity” to dehumanize North Koreans and justify U.S. aggression against them.23

There is also little interest for Americans in seeing the human side of the Republic of Korea either, with more people likely to know Korean brands than information about Korean politics.

So, how do we as theologians help to create conditions for reconciliation when the relationship between Americans and Koreans is clearly based on the dehumanization of others?

In thinking of how to break this cycle of dehumanization, we can find insight from George Ciccariello-Maher in his book Decolonizing Dialectics. This book looks at how slavery,

tween that which is visible and legible as humanity and that which is relegated to the status of lessthan-being- that intervenes to block dialectical movement in the present.24

This is a crucial concept to grasp as we think about reconciliation. We cannot have progress or reconciliation of contradictions while imperialism pushes those outside the imperial center of power into categories of other. Reconciliation cannot exist while the United States dehumanizes nations and attempts to dominate through economics and military intimidation.

This even prevents reconciliation of internal contradictions in the United States, because if we attempt to solve our internal contradictions of class without seeing how they are linked to past and present colonialism and imperialism then we may simply move the pain of the contradiction onto someone else. What gain is free college education or universal health care in the United States if it is paid for by the exploitation of other countries?

Yet there is hope. Paulo Freire writes “Dehumanization, although a concrete historical fact, is not a given destiny but the result of an unjust order”25. By confronting these unjust systems, humanity can be restored to all. Freire laters declares that “it is only the oppressed who,

42 — forward! by freeing themselves, can free their oppressors”26. We must not seek to be the saviors, but rather listen to the oppressed.

While many Christians in the United States have embraced the spirit of imperialism with claims of American exceptionalism, others have come forward to say that exploitation of others is not compatible with Christian conceptions of reconciliation and justice. Theology can provide us tools for working towards revolutionary reconciliation. As Nestor Miguez states, “Theology must be fundamentally grounded as a liberating alternative to this vision, and in order to do that, an analysis of class dynamics and the struggles that affect peoples lives is utterly indispensable”27.

Embracing Self Determination One key component of fighting against dehumanization is supporting the right of peoples to be self sufficient and self determining of their future. After all, a forced reconciliation by the powerful will not provide lasting solutions to class contradictions. Reflecting on our context, the United States has not often respected Korean self determination. It backed authoritarian leaders who oppressed working people in the Republic of Korea, and endlessly sanctions the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea to the harm of its citizens. Economic control has been vital in enforcing the United States vision for Korea.

Self determination is key, because as Freire has observed- it will not work to simply have the United States develop a nicer form of imperialism. He writes, Only power that springs from the weakness of the oppressed will be sufficiently strong to free both.

Any attempt to soften the power of the oppressor in deference to the weakness of the oppressed

almost always manifests itself in the form of false genorosity; indeed, the attempt never goes beyond this. In order to have the continued opportunity to express their generosity, the oppressors must perpetuate injustice as well.28

This struggle for oppressed people to have their own say in their fate is essential to combating dehumanization. This is a struggle for recognition that must be supported to combat imperialism, for as Cabral pronounces “liberation struggle… is the negation of imperialist domination"29.

However, Freire observes that this may not seem appealing to those benefiting from oppression, in this case those in the United States. He believes that “to the oppressor consciousness, the humanization of the ‘others’ of the people, appears not as the pursuit of full humanity, but as subversions”30. Our attitude at the center of empire is that everyone should pursue our goals, and work in a way the benefits our desires. When someone counters that narrative they are deemed a terrorist. Resistance to acts of imperialist violence are seen as the real cause of the violence. In light of this, Freire notes that, “Violence is initiated by those who oppress, who exploit, who fail to recognize others as personsnot by those who are oppressed, exploited, and unrecognized”31.

So what does supporting this self determination look like in our context? Kim Il Sung writes that “an independent world is a world where all forms of colonialism have been abolished completely, and where all countries and all nations are provided with complete sovereignty”32. Kim Il Sung’s concept of Juche is related to this- it is a belief that people should be self sufficient instead of reliant on outside forces.

In our context, self determination means not enforcing the will of the United States on other

43

summer 2017 — nations through economic and military pressure.

As people in the imperial center, we are called to humanize others and fight attempts to control and dominate. This is vital work that will help towards reconciliation.

Self determination also must happen on a theological level. Western colonialism and imperialism have also often meant a theological imperialism. This has expressed itself in a hegemony of western forms of Christianity as the norm. In the last decades we have seen the emergence of liberation theologies in various contexts, but many of these theologies are prevented from exposure by the domination of theological imperialism.

Minjung — Standing In Solidarity Our Korean context offers us an example of a theology that counters western theological narratives-Minjung Theology. Minjung theology also provides us insights into how we can work towards reconciliation by being in solidarity.

According to Young-Chan Ro, Minjung theology is “a distinctively Korean way of doing theology”33. It is a theology which seeks to challenge the western ways of doing theology, and instead build a theology that is relevant to and comes from its cultural context. As Ro explains, Minjung theology aims to “transform the socioeconomic structure of Korean society and to transform theology itself”34.

Minjung theology itself comes from a history of struggle. Yung Suk Kim writes that, “Minjung theology came out of this struggle for justice and freedom. It did not begin at school or the church, but came out of the gravest concerns about oppressive powers- the despotic state and the greedy exploitive economic systems- and in solidarity with the oppressed”35. Minjung the-

ology thus does not shy away from the need to struggle for justice. It has been willing to engage Korean cultural sources for developing theology, thus practicing a sense of theological self determination. The praxis of Minjung theology provides a framework for how those who have been marginalized can challenge imperialist theological hegemony.

Minjung theology also can provide us insight into the solidarity necessary for revolutionary reconciliation. Minjung theology is centered on the experiences of the Minjung. According to A. Sung Park, this term “designates not only the economically oppressed but also the culturally, politically, and socially repressed”36. Minjung theologian Ahn Byung-Mu looked at the Gospel narratives and found that Jesus both speaks to the Minjung of his time in Galilee, and he sees Jesus as being part of the Minjung. Another theologian, Nam-Dong Suh, discusses how “Jesus was the channel to help our understanding of the oppressed”37. Minjung theology points to the need for the experiences of the oppressed to be made central to theological conversation.

Thus it relates to our previously discussed need to counter dehumanization and exclusion.

Minjung theology also points towards Solidarity with those who are oppressed being part of Jesus’ mission, as well as what Christians are called to do. While being unique and inseparable from its own Korean context, it provides a framework for theologians attempting to rethink theology and counter theological imperialism.

It is a reminder that as Freire writes, “Solidarity requires that one enter into the situation of those with whom one is solidary, it is a radical posture”38. May we be called to engage in this radical posture of solidarity as we seek to live out an anti-imperialist theology of class.

44 — forward!

Revolutionary Reconciliation Within the context of living in the center of United States imperialism, it is vital to understand our wider global context. We must recognize that imperialism is a part and function of Capitalism. Imperialism has created and aggravated conditions of injustice, while also creating classes of people which are excluded and dehumanized. We can look at the example of the history of United States and Korean relationships since the 1950’s to understand how this process of imperialism unfolds.

Taking inspiration from Minjung theology in Korea and other liberation theologies, we recognize that to have reconciliation, the dehumanization created by imperialism must be ended and peoples be given self determination politically, economically, culturally, and theologically. To achieve this we must not seek to be saviors, but rather to stand in solidarity.

Western theologians seeking to address economics as it relates to theology must address imperialism and the class contradictions it creates on a global scale. It is in understanding global imperialism that we can better understand our local contexts of oppression in the United States. As Malcom X and others have observed “the police do locally what the military does internationally”39. We better understand our own society when we understand imperialism, and we are better able to fight for justice when we confront the injustice of imperialism as well. This is a necessary concept to theologically analyze; because in the end a liberation theology of class must free all people, not just those at the center of empire.

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"Anti-THAAD protests continue in South Korea amid controversy over costs." SINA English. Accessed May 10, 2017. http://english. sina.com/news/2017-05-01/detail-ifyetstt4051516.shtml.

Axe, David. "Trump's Got a Mega-Bomb Designed to Hit North Korea." The Daily Beast. January 30, 2017. Accessed May 11, 2017. http://thedailybeast.com/articles/2017/04/19/world-s-biggest-baddest-non-nuke-bomb-designed-just-to-hit-n-korea.

Byung-Mu, Ahn. Reading Minjung Theology in the Twenty-first Century: Selected Writings by Ahn Byung-Mu and Modern Critical Responses. Edited by Yung Suk Kim and Jin-ho Kim. Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2013.

Cabral, Amílcar. Resistance and Decolonization. London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2016.

Ciccariello-Maher, George. Decolonizing Dialectics. Durnham, London: Duke University Press, 2017.

Dobbs, Andrew. "A Lot of What You Know About North Korea Is Racist Nonsense." Medium. April 18, 2017. Accessed May 11, 2017. https://medium.com/defiant/a-lot-of-what-you-knowabout-north-korea-is-racist-nonsense-a625256b51cc.

Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: Bloomsbury, 2015.

Gowans, Stephen. "Understanding North Korea." Center for Research on Globalization. November 12, 2006. Accessed May 10, 2017. http://www.globalresearch.ca/understanding-north-korea/3818.

Hasan, Mehdi. "Why Do North Koreans Hate Us? One Reason They Remember the Korean War." The Intercept. May 03, 2017.

Accessed May 10, 2017. https://theintercept.com/2017/05/03/why-do-north-koreanshate-us-one-reason-they-remember-the-korean-war/.

Il Sung, Kim. The Selected Works of Kim Il Sung. New York, NY: Prism Key Press, 2012.

Lenin, Vladimir. Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism.

New York, NY: Int. Pub. Co., 1969.

Minh, Ho Chi. Down with Colonialism! Compiled by Walden Bello.

London: Verso, 2007.

Mizokami, Kyle. "It's time for the U.S. military to leave South Korea." The Week. August 13, 2015. Accessed May 10, 2017. http:// theweek.com/articles/570764/time-military-leave-south-korea.

Park, A. Sung. "Minjung Theology: A Korean Contextual Theology." Accessed May 11, 2017. https://biblicalstudies.org.uk/pdf/ ijt/33-4_001.pdf.

Rieger, Joerg, ed. Religion, Theology, and Class: Fresh Engagements after Long Silence. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.

Ro, Young-Chan. Lift Every Voice: Constructing Christian Theologies From The Underside. Edited by Susan Brooks. Thistlethwaite.

Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2007.

Sankara, Thomas. We Are Heirs Of The World's Revolutions: Speeches from the Burkina Faso Revolution, 1983-87. New York, NY: Pathfinder, 2007.

Shorrock, Tim. "In South Korea, a Dictator's Daughter Cracks Down on Labor." The Nation. June 01, 2016. Accessed May 10, 2017. https://www.thenation.com/article/in-south-korea-a-dictators-daughter-cracks-down-on-labor/.

Springer, Devyn, and Joel Northam. "Mask Off: The Monopoly on Violence and Re-Invigorating an Anti-Imperialist Vision for Black Liberation" Medium. May 01, 2017. Accessed May 11, 2017. https://medium.com/@DevynSpringer/mask-off-the-monopoly-on-violence-and-re-invigorating-an-anti-imperialist-vision-for-black-ab969bcd79b.

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46 — forward!

THE LIMITATIONS OF

IDENTITY POLITICS

SHANE CREEPINGBEAR • Guest Contributor

T

here was a time when conversations about privilege and identity-based oppression were strong and important tools towards defining political movements. In particular, these conversations were often used in higher education to get white people to talk about whiteness, as a 101 conversation towards a broader understanding of oppression. Understanding how your interactions and the unchecked ways you can marginalize people you are interacting with in social, professional and classroom settings is undeniably important, but not as an end unto itself. The end is the liberation of all nationally oppressed peoples. Unfortunately, privilege discourse has become its own, nearly ubiquitous political line, its hamster wheel politics. Its the same conversations over and over again. Its constant struggle with no progress. Talking about privilege is a legitimate method to catalog some of the ways

some individuals tend to benefit over others, but it can’t go much further than that.

While we should recognize the importance of a basic understanding of identity-based oppressions, it's also important to understand the limitations of the discourse. Framing identity-based oppression as the main political line does not allow for the adequate deconstruction of oppressive structural issues built to maintain white supremacy and disrupt national liberation of the oppressed. Identity discourse alone cannot fix structural problems because rather than opening up to a wider critique, it atomized the issues to their smallest level: the individual’s responsibility to “check themselves” when they marginalize another person from a “more oppressed” identity group. These privilege politics have observably stalled progress towards breaking down white supremacy.

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summer 2017 — It’s time to stop centering our discourse around identity-based privilege politics.

Call-out culture and privilege-checking, as political tools, ultimately amount to little more than a series of underwhelming interpersonal confessions.

Discussion of skin privilege, for example, places whiteness at the focal point; the discourse of identity politics will group as many people into the category of white as possible, which is in no way a new phenomenon. This is largely where the term “white passing” has developed— and although this wasn’t a term used until recently, the discourse around it is very similar to how grouping as many indigenous peoples as white was used as a tool for colonial and cultural genocide. In many cases when someone uses the term “white passing,” they are actually describing a situation of colorism or shadeism, although not necessarily accurately. These terms are prescribed to any discriminatory behavior anywhere in the world, as long as it has to do with skin tone. There is a paper by Solomon Leong that explores the notion of “fair skin” and its social construction in Hong Kong as a basis of a social hierarchy that gave birth to the design and marketing of skin

whitening products. In the paper Leong describes skin tone as “as a visual agent in defining the boundaries of cultural identity, and in identifying a person's place in a local social hierarchy."

The acute reality is that there are benefits to being lighter skinned, but this is not “white privilege.”

“White privilege” cannot and does not exist monolithically and as such is an inadequate framework for analysing whiteness, a concept that varies drastically based on context. “White privilege” is a moving target that cannot discern geographic location, socioeconomic status or the effects of colonialism and settlerism. Ironically, it’s the same homogenous definition that settler scumbags have been wielding for hundreds of years to justify the theft of land and resources from Indigenous peoples. Four hundred years of European colonization in the Americas has widened the gene pool, allowing for native peoples with the possibility of lighter skin, hair and eye color.

Andrew Jackson, the seventh U.S. president, used that effect as justification for the removal of Cherokee peoples from their lands, saying they were now really “white” and hence their lands were not entitled to them.

Natives Americans were valued for their land so it makes sense from a colonial lens to group as many to be as white as possible.

This is a good example of how privilege rhetoric becomes increasingly confusing and obfuscating. People describe privilege with rubrics that say things like, “you do not get followed around in stores,” or “no one questions you when you get a great job.” This understanding of privilege becomes a way to selectively describe oppression as interpersonal discrimination, a kind of idealistic reductionism that gets nowhere near the real

The issues at play are structural, not individual. issue. The issues at play are structural, not individual. Colorism is real—light skin does come with its benefits—but both colorism and racism were born out of white supremacy, the structural basis for a huge portion of the oppression that exists in the United States today.

48 — forward!

The term and idea of “whiteness” is new to our history. When Europeans settlers came to the U.S. they came with distinct identity categories: Irish, Dutch, English, and so on. Elite rich white planters developed colonies in the south with slavery as the economic foundation.

Virginia had about 50 families that fit within this “elite” category, and the whites in the south were vastly outnumbered by large numbers of black slaves and indigenous peoples in the area.

Class lines began to harden. As the distinctions between rich and poor became more apparent, the elites began to fear an uprising from below.

As slaves revolted, the rich began to worry that discontented whites—the urban poor, indentured servants, tenant farmers, soldiers, and the property-less—would join forces with black slaves in rebellion based on class alliances.

In 1676, Bacon’s Rebellion—in which white frontiersmen and indentured servants revolted with black slaves—shook the planter elite to the core. Revolts spread throughout the colonies, from New York to South Carolina. The elites’ solution was to divide and control this broad working-class alliance. Certain privileges were given to white indentured servants;they were allowed to join militias, carry guns, acquire land, and have other legal rights not allowed to slaves.

But to gain these privileges, one had to be legally declared white on the basis of skin color and continental origin. This solidified poor whites as legally "superior" to Blacks and Indians. Thus, whiteness was deployed as an apparatus to prevent lower-class whites from joining people of color, especially Blacks, in revolt against their shared class enemies. Even today, unity across color lines remains the biggest threat in the eyes of a white ruling class.

The context of the history of “whiteness”

begins to show the limitation of identity politics. When these conversations take shape they rarely take any aspect of economic position into account. Identity politics have the tendency to emphasize matters of culture, language, ethnicity, ability, and so on while avoiding underlying issues of economic exploitation and oppression.

The role of imperialism in sustaining the system of social oppression is rarely considered, even though it’s the systemic root of racial oppression in the U.S. today. “Whiteness” developed as a class alliance to undermine any attempts by lower and working classes to liberate themselves, and simply cataloging privileges is not enough to deconstruct a system of racial oppression that has intentionally constructed us in opposition to each other in order to decrease our chances of revolutionary success.

Building and maintaining class solidarity is one of our strongest assets as we challenge and deconstruct white supremacy, and we must leave space for solidarity outside of a particular national and cultural groups. We are working towards queer liberation, and the liberation of all oppressed national groups, but liberal identity politics have become embedded in the minutia of discourse, and discourse alone. It will take a deep examination of the history of oppression and how it is currently maintained, and the creation of a strong and unified political line across these struggles if we’re going to tear them down.

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Radical History, Reactionary Erasure Remembering Communist Yemen

KIMBERLY MILLLER • GUEST CONTRIBUTOR YEMEN, THEN AND NOW 1980 postages from the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen show powerful images celebrating the 110th anniversary of the birth of revolutionary Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin, or drawings of Yemeni women scrupulously writing and reading together. It is a stark contrast to the images the West is usually fed of Yemen, conceiving the country as hapless and impoverished, irrelevantly situated on the southern end of the Arabian peninsula. Lately, when Yemen is discussed in the media it is within context of dire poverty, ‘harboring extremism,’ being a launch-

ing pad for Saudi Arabian military aggression, the site of geopolitical proxy warfare between Gulf state hegemony and Iranian ascendency, or a dehumanizing United States’ drone strike destination. Starving children, mass civilian casualties, dilapidated buildings, and destroyed infrastructure exacerbated by a two year war of unconscionable Saudi aggression, plaster left media, with occasional orientalist stories about ‘child brides’ from western feminists. But often Yemen gets reduced to only these aspects of its existence.

This reductionist approach downplays the complex dynamics that come to shape Yemen’s current tumultuous political climate.

It also minimizes the historical significance of

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summer 2017 — being the first explicitly Marxist state in the Middle East. This piece is an overview of Yemen’s radical leftist history and national liberation that speak to larger themes of resistance, sovereignty, internationalism, and anti-colonialism, while challenging the historical erasure of revolutionary movements and struggle.

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND South Yemen had a Marxist revolutionary government that lasted from 1967 to 1990, following the collapse of the Soviet Union. It was formed in the throws of anti-imperial resistance to British colonialism. Yemen’s National Liberation Front successfully defeated British forces in 1967. South Yemen’s 1971 Constitution proudly proclaimed the land had “striven valiantly… to oust the invaders” and that the NLF actively fought against “colonialism, feudalism, and the rule of the Sultans from South Yemen.”

Yemen's leftist government made gains in literacy, education, women's advocacy, nationalized land, and pushed back against reactionary regional forces such as dynastic religious elitism from the north. They fought for self-determination and were internationalists, aligning with anti-colonial struggles and progressive movements in Palestine, Cuba, East Germany, and the Soviet Union. Moreover, Yemen’s leftist government engaged different groups in South Yemen to encourage a versatile civic and nationally cultural identity to avoid sectarian division or insular kinship factionalism.

Furthermore, South Yemen’s strategy for addressing class struggle and religion did not go unnoticed by imperialists. The United States Special Operations forces set for South Yemen astonishingly and boldly asserted, “Islam and Marxism are diametrically opposed from both the

Islamic and Marxist viewpoints. In South Yemen however, this condition has existed since 1967,” and noted South Yemen has a “unique blend of Islam and Marxism” and that this hybrid would be a specific challenge to “pro-Western Arab governments and United States interests in the region.” South Yemen clearly posed a threat to imperialist hegemons.

SOUTH YEMEN AND INTERNATIONALISM In the Marxist-Leninist tradition of internationalism and oppressed nations, South Yemen is no exception to the rule. Communist Yemen made strategic alliances with other Marxist governments and left movements in Cuba, East Germany, and the Soviet Union while supporting Palestine against settler Zionist repression.

Cuba under the impassioned leadership of Fidel Castro sent hundreds of troops to South Yemen to instruct and train Yemeni armed forces against possible invasion from the north or imperial destabilization plans from the west. Additionally, in enacting the Soviet Union’s “Third World Strategy,” East Germany’s National People’s Army would provide tactical support and solidarity aid to South Yemen, bulking up their defenses and infrastructure. Moreover, material assistance to Palestine affirmed South Yemen’s stance on national liberation struggles and anti-imperial resistance to Israeli aggression.

National liberation is how South Yemen came into existence and would influence its relationship to other oppressed nations. Internationalism connected South Yemen to a larger global community exploited and subordinated by the same structures they were-capitalist imperialism. Internationalism acted as transnational resistance, eroding highly militarized colonially inscribed border divisions that stymied engage-

52 — forward! ment with Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

Internationalism was crucial to South Yemen’s functionality and identity.

THE FALL OF SOUTH YEMEN Despite its successes, once the Soviet Union wasn’t able to provide material assistance to South Yemen, the PDRY government inevitably made tactical alliances with the United States backed north, which incorporated more reactionary lineal oriented forces. Regressive attitudes in the north inculcated South Yemen's politics, rolling back nationalization in agriculture and re-installing landlords and sultans. Just so it’s clear: the reactionary northern regime was hostile to leftist change and was 100% backed and financed by Western imperial powers. This emboldened counter-revolutionary, anti-communist forces that preferred religious fundamentalism to class struggle and anti-imperial militancy. In fact, these extremist groups could then be used to further obstruct future leftist mobilization in the region.

REFLECTING Today, Yemen has recently aligned with Saudi Arabia’s policy of isolating Qatar and further antagonizing Iran after years of incessant US armed bombardment by Saudi, killing scores of Yemeni civilians and engaging in nefarious political meddling. Ultimately, Yemen was at one point a transformational Marxist force in the Gulf. South Yemen’s radical history expands Eurocentric conceptions of what areas are ‘capable’ of socialist revolution and what areas are not. South Yemen’s fascinating history speaks to larger questions around national autonomy, self-determination, oppressed nations, and anti-colonial resistance. Despite Yemen’s his-

torically salient north/south divide, I’ll conclude with a hopeful unifying sentence taken from South Yemen’s amended 1978 Constitution:

“…despite the unnatural situations of the false division of the Yemeni land and people, its struggle in the two parts is dialectically correlated in its unity not only against the reactionary imperialists against the Yemeni homeland, but also for the purpose of finally getting rid of division and restoring the natural situation for the democratic unity of Yemen.”

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LAND RELATIONS AND LANDOWNERSHIP AN EXCERPT FROM A NEW PRAVDA MEDIA PUBLICATION

"A World After Its Own Image" BEN STAHNKE • Editor

“T

he right of landownership,” wrote a young Karl Marx, “has its source in robbery.” This robbery, we might speculate, has existed since time immemorial.

History itself might be conceived as a series of unending robberies; lapping waves of violent displacement. We might imagine that these waves of displacement, these unending movements of taking and taking-back, are natural. And indeed, we can begin from this hypothesis: land is held through a natural violence, or a threat of violence. When one becomes incapable of holding on to a space of land, another, stronger, comes in to take ownership. Violence, in the case of the domination of land, can take both material and ideological forms. The threat of physical violence, an idea of violence, is often enough for an individual, or a social class, to maintain land holdings.

What happens when a species-group remains local to a geographical space for years— hundreds or thousands of years, even? Can we assert that, over time, a land relationship develops which influences not only the individual

species-being and her material efforts, but the species’ resultant cultural, legal, and political superstructure as well?

How intricately is the land itself woven into the social consciousness of society?

“As individuals express their life,” Marx and Engels noted, “so they are. What they are, therefore, coincides with their production, both with what they produce and how they produce it.” In other words, there occurs, in actu, an ontological identity not only between the individual and her action, but also between the species and its material resource-environment. An individual, as species-being, cannot exist but in intimate relationship to matter—to land. Hegel, in The Philosophy of History, commented on this intimacy, stating that: It is not our concern to become acquainted with the land occupied by nations as an external locale, but with the natural type of the locality, as intimately connected with the type and character of the people which is the offspring of such a

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summer 2017 — soil. This character is nothing more nor less than the mode and form in which nations make their appearance in History, and take place and position in it [emphasis added].

A locality for Hegel does two things: 1. it is categorizable—able to be considered distinctly by its natural type, or category—and 2. it produces offspring-species, including people, who also have a type and a character which are both intimately influenced by the locale itself. In other words, people and land share an identity. Following Hegel, we can thus, rather safely, assert the first premise of our argument: individuals engage in a (productive) material-psychological relationship with the land upon which they dwell, and in turn the character of this relationship is shaped by the distinctness of the land. In our view, this can be asserted without any great leaps in logic.

Foregoing some traumatic split, for example, individuals tend to dwell fondly upon memories of hometowns, local parks, forests, and beaches.

At the root of this fondness is, in our view, an intrinsic relationship to land itself—a specialized fondness.

Over time, we can imagine, the relational ways in which lands are occupied, cultivated, and utilized for sustenance might tend to coalesce around a material status quo, thus becoming, simply, the ways by which things happen. It is at this point that material ways soon anabolize into ideas; ideas which quickly ossify as ideology; ideas which reinforce ways.

Ideas, in situ, are always linked to ways; ways which have, historically, been managed by social stratification—a social positioning for resource access. And, as such, the relationship of humanto-land is always mediated, in society itself, by relationships of power. Dominant social classes emerge to control the best portions of land, and

class-controlled states quickly evolve to codify their rule. In The State and Revolution, Lenin observed that, “The state is the product and the manifestation of the irreconcilability of class antagonisms. The state arises when, where and to the extent that class antagonisms cannot be objectively reconciled.” In other words, states represent the exercising (and centralization) of public power by the various apparatuses of the extant dominant class. This public power, Engels noted, “exists in every state; it consists not merely of armed men, but of material appendages, prisons and coercive institutions of all kinds.”

Here, coercion implies threat of repression, or the idea of violence. Land-alienation, an idea which separates a species-being from its environment by way of legality, economy, or politics is the exercising of a violent idea by one social class over another; a purposeful weakening of the land-bond of the subordinate class.

What then is the nature of the land-bond?

It is nothing other than the dialectic of the productive mode as it conditions social life; productive relations as they condition the status quo of ideas; and the ideas of social life as they then inform how the species-being interacts with material reality. In essence, it is the economy of material reality conditioning man’s response to material reality itself. In his Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Marx wrote: The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that

56 — forward! determines their consciousness

The land provides both shelter and food, as well as the material means for a reproduction of physical life. Species are drawn to land, specific geographies, out of the necessity for the basic requirements of sustenance and reproduction.

Fondness for one specific piece of land over others might also be seen both as anecdotal and accidental: we are drawn to the land which has historically sustained us, our forebears, and their children.

In the modern era, however, land tends to be conceived of as an irreconcilable other: an alien thing which seems to exert a strange power over the species. Man and land, for example— appearing distinct—are categorized by man as ontologically discrete units. Yet the former may not exist without the latter. Indeed, the former essentially emerges from the very substrate of the latter. So, to posit such an irreconcilable distinction between individual and land does not do justice to the intrinsic unitive-emergent relationship between them. To resurrect Hegel’s logic here, the dependent and independent variables of human experience— the dualisms of metaphysical subject and object—do not exist in reality, but only as analytical tools for human reason; the truth of the matter lying somewhere in the epistemological Aufheben (sublation) of

these apparent opposites.“Yet since they are related to each other as opposites,” Hegel exclaimed in his Phenomenology of Spirit, “only one can be the essential moment in the relation, and the distinction of essential and unessential moment must be shared between them. One of them, the object […] is the essence regardless of whether it is perceived or not […] the object must express this its nature in its own self.” Read from a materialist perspective, the essential, or dependent, moment in the relationship of object and subject is, in every case, that which defines itself to the perceiver. The object conditions the character of the subject, who is also himself—to the perceiving other—an object. In nuce, not only are all heretofore dualist conceptions of species/ environment ideological in nature, they are also ontologically incorrect. Here, we must be led to adopt an Hegelian conception of species/environment which might be thought of as identical yet tensioned; sublated yet synthetic. In a word: dialectical. Man identifies with the land, and is in turn shaped by it. On this, Marx noted that, “Nature is the inorganic body of man; […] nature is his body with which he must remain in a continuous interchange in order not to die.” This dialectic of (wo) man and land forms the basis for all human experience.

Returning to our first premise—that individuals possess a productive material-psychological relationship with

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summer 2017 — the land upon which they dwell—we arrive now at our second premise: in our present epoch, an ever-increasing land-alienation is woven deeply into the hegemonic ideo-economic discourse— that ideology of ideas which reinforces the productive ways of capitalist economy. “It alienates from man his own body, external nature, his mental life and his human life,” Marx observed.

Under the epoch of capitalism, individuals are increasingly alienated from the land in ways which surpass those of prior epochs. What was once a life-supportive material-psychological relationship with the land has been, like the subordinate class of capitalist class society, systematically weakened, uprooted, and dispossessed.

Marx once wrote that, “man’s relation to nature is directly his relation to man, and his relation to man is directly his relation to nature, to his own natural function” Following Marx, we might conceptualize land-relations—and land-alienation—historically: land relations mirror social relations which, at their root, are influenced by economic relations. And thus land relations can be seen to ultimately mirror economic relations. The driving economic force in whichever epoch of history man finds himself is thus the primary template for his relationship with the land. Marx and Engels commented on this when, in The German Ideology, they emphasized that,

“social organization [evolves] directly out of production and commerce, which in all ages forms the basis of the State and of the rest of the idealistic superstructure” Here we must add two observations. 1. The spe-

cies-being’s relationship with the land is molded by the epochal character of social-economic history. Feudal land relations helped to shape a specific material-psychological relationship of the individual to her environment; capitalist land relations helped to shape another. 2. Land relations derive from a material necessity for the production and reproduction of human physical life, yet are subject to influence and change, given the extant structuring of productive relations.

Here, we arrive at the conclusion to our present deduction, a key problematic which should follow quite naturally from a restatement of the previous two premises: If human species-existence entails an intrinsic, and epochally-molded, material-psychological relationship with the land; And if the capitalist epoch entails an alienation so total—within both its productive base and its ideological superstructure—that it: “alienates nature from man; and alienates man from himself, from his own life function, his life activity; so it alienates him from the species”; We then find ourselves witness to an enactment of present-day ideological violence so adaptive and teleological, that it appears to defy all moral and ethical bounds. The ideological violence of capitalism is the purposeful violence of a productive mode which has become alien to the species; it is the violence exerted over the species by a logic of profit and of accumulation; and it is the violence which holds all species captive to an economy culpable for a rampant loss of biodiversity, malicious environmental destructions, and hateful social and environmental injustices. Capitalism, as an epochal productive mode, seeks to maintain itself at all costs, legitimating itself with blatant falsities and enslaving the species— all species—under a logic of blind acquisition

58 — forward! and consumption. It is a logic which predicates upon an internecine violence. In A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Marx theorized that: No social order is ever destroyed before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient have been developed, and new superior relations of production never replace older ones before the material conditions for their existence have matured within the framework of the old society. […] The bourgeois mode of production is the last antagonistic form of the social process of production — antagonistic not in the sense of individual antagonism but of an antagonism that emanates from the individuals' social conditions of existence — but the productive forces developing within bourgeois society create also the material conditions for a solution of this antagonism. The prehistory of human society accordingly closes with this social formation.

How are we to contextualize such a statement in the present-day?

Marx himself once noted that, “Communism as a fully developed naturalism is humanism and as a fully developed humanism is naturalism [emphasis added].” Do the seeds of such a naturalism lie dormant within the socialist produktionsweise which itself lies dormant within the present exploitative and alienative productive mode? Or do we bear witness to the fact that the teleological adaptivity of capitalism is such that it has circumvented its own intrinsic death-spiral? Just how successful is capitalism in recognizing superior productive forces and relations, and then neutralizing them? If the violence of the system—an alien system which predicates upon an exploitative labor coercion, environmental destruction, genocidal landgrabs, and continued wars of aggression for profit—knows no bounds, what then is the re-

course of those who oppose such a system? The idea of communism is an idea which entails an eschatology—it envisions an end to exploitative productive relations, an end to coercion, and a reinvigoration of egalitarian production by way of a creativity unfettered. But it does not, either fortunately or unfortunately, dictate. “Communism is not for us a stable state which is to be established,” Marx and Engels wrote, “an ideal to which reality will have to adjust itself.

We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things.”

In response to the force of the ideological violence of capitalism, in which direction lies the real movement of the communist and socialist response? Which direction is forward?

Badiou, Alain. The Communist Hypothesis. Trans. D. Macey

and S. Corcoran. Verso, 2015.

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Phenomenology of Spirit.

Trans. A.V. Miller. Oxford, 1977.

—-. The Philosophy of History. Trans. J. Sibree. Dover, 1956.

Lenin, V.I. “The State and Revolution.” Essential Works of

Lenin: What is to be Done? And Other Writings,

edited by Henry Christman, Dover, 1966, pp. 271 364.

Marx, Karl. “Alienated Labour.” Early Writings. Trans. E.B.

Bottomore. McGraw-Hill, 1964, pp. 120 - 134.

—-.“Private Property and Communism.” Early Writings. Trans.

E.B. Bottomore. McGraw-Hill, 1964, pp. 152 167.

—-. “Rent of Land.” Early Writings. Trans. E.B. Bottomore.

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TASKS OF THE REVOLUTIONARY

SOCIALIST MOVEMENT

JACOB POINTON • Editor

C

urrently in the United States the revolutionary socialist movement stands still, waiting and asking: “Where do we start; what is to be done?” While this or that socialist organization may find their niche and excel in their current way of organizing, they remain fragmented, broken up and scattered across the country; there exists no organized, national body of socialists capable of carrying out the revolution. The question of building a national organization — especially a Party — capable of being the vanguard of the revolutionary socialist movement is para-

mount. But in the face of our current conditions, we run into many obstacles — from bourgeois ideology to an ineffective ‘division of labor’ within the movement and so on. How do we combat these obstacles and find a way to organize on a national scale? Moreover, not to just organize in the nominal sense but to build a working organization of revolutionaries capable of carrying out concrete actions? All of these questions must be answered by a thorough investigation of the prevailing conditions and the whole history of working class movement.

Where do we begin?

Dedicated, knowledgeable revolutionary socialists are not in abundance; what we find is quite the opposite. What exists in terms of dedicated, knowledgeable socialists are a very small amount of individuals or groups of individuals scattered across various geographical locations, who frequently have no knowledge of one another — and even if they do they find organizing over long distances difficult, as is the case. Some of these individuals may be part of already existing socialist organizations (such as the WWP, PSL, etc.) while others may have refrained from joining any at all. This makes no difference to us.

On the other hand, we have a massive amount of people indoctrinated through and through by

bourgeois ideology — people whose political consciousness is a mass of contradictions. But a viable Party organization depends upon having the support of masses of class-conscious workers.

As Marx, Engels, Lenin, and all successful revolutionaries know, what we are dealing with is not the revolutionary movement as it has developed on its own foundations, but rather as it emerges from the current conditions of capitalist society. So the question is: how do we go from a small amount of dedicated and knowledgeable socialists scattered across the country on the one hand, and a mass of semi-conscious or completely non-conscious workers and

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summer 2017 — petty-bourgeois all around on the other, to a national revolutionary Party organization which gains its support and strength from the support of millions of class conscious workers and their class allies? To do this we must organize accord-

ing to the conditions laid out above; that is, we build hundreds — if necessary, thousands — of local cadre bodies capable of bringing the masses of workers to class-consciousness and educating our class allies.

What is a cadre and what do they do?

A cadre is a group of dedicated, active revolutionary thinkers united through a common politics (in our case Marxism) who organize themselves into an organ capable of developing revolutionary thought. A cadre is not a specific party or organization (e.g., PSL or ISO), though the members of cadres can be active within such groups; cadres do not necessarily stand opposed to other worker organizations. Cadre groups do not seek control of any prevailing organizations, institutions, etc, but actively participate in the mass struggles of the working class in a united front, or simply the tactic, “whereby Communists propose to join with all workers belonging to other parties and groups and all unaligned workers in a common struggle to defend the immediate, basic interests of the working class against the bourgeoisie.”

Through this tactic of participating in mass worker/student organizations, cadres have the ability to participate in, as well as facilitate the development of revolutionary struggles and in doing so, awaken class-consciousness among the working class. In ‘What Is to Be Done,’ Lenin expounds the following thesis: “Class political consciousness can be brought to the workers only from without; that is, only from outside the economic struggle, from outside the sphere of relations between workers and employers. The sphere from which alone it is possible to obtain this knowledge is the sphere of relationships (of all classes and strata) to the state and the government, the sphere of the interrelations

between all classes.”

Cadres work to develop and “inject” Marxist-Leninist theory into the various spontaneous and ideological working class movements, seeking to transform “the unconscious working class, that is a ‘class-in-itself’, into a class conscious of its historical role, that is, a ‘class-foritself.’” On its own, the working class movement is subject to petty-bourgeois, utopian, and/ or anarchist ideologies. It cannot escape from an “ideological representation of its goals and means of action.” The development of scientific socialism, and the means in which to achieve it, occurred from without these movements. As was mentioned above, a fundamental task of cadres is the importation of Marxist-Leninist theory into the working class movements. The means of carrying out this importation (i.e., of “sealing the union” between Marxism and the working class) necessarily takes the form of an ideological struggle. But what is meant by ideological struggle? By this we mean making clear the hidden dynamics of the capitalist mode of production, exploitation, etc and the liberation of the ideological domain from bourgeois influence. That is, we wish to transform ideology in order to make it serve the interests of the proletariat. This being said, it is important to make clear that the ideological struggle is first and foremost governed by theoretical formation. By theoretical formation we mean the process of education, study, analysis, and work “by which a militant is put into possession… of the totality of [Marxist-Leninist]

62 — forward! theory.”

Theoretical formation is another fundamental task of the cadres and all Marxist-Leninist organizations. In fact, theoretical formation is primary in its relationship to political, economic, and ideological struggle. For in order to wage a struggle within the domain of ideology and to not succumb to it, a correct conception of ideology, its function, the interests in which it serves, and its greater place within the social formation must be made clear. Theoretical formation presupposes all forms of struggle, but is also affected by it.

Now to get back to the importation thesis. Because revolutionary theory must be “imported” into the working-class in order to successfully construct a revolutionary movement, the correctness of the political line (informed by theoretical formation) is central, the criterion for evaluating its ‘correctness’ being effectivity. Cadres develop their political line and politics through carefully analyzing the social and material conditions in which they are active, focusing on identifying the current class contradictions and social forces.

Constant, ruthless (self-)criticism of revolutionary theory and the political line is fundamental to the cadre. Through this self-criticism, cadres can assess their effectivity throughout the course of the class struggle and alter their actions according to constant developments. It is important to remember that, “We will fall into idealism pure and simple if theory is severed from practice, if theory is not given a practical existence - not only in its application, but also in the forms of organization and education that assure the passage of theory into practice and its realization in practice. We will fall into the same idealism if theory is not permitted, in its specific existence, to nourish itself from all the experiences, from all the results and real discoveries,

of practice. But we will fall into another, equally grave form of idealism — pragmatism — if we do not recognize the irreplaceable specificity of theoretical practice, if we confuse theory with its application…”

The cadre always seeks to demonstrate the radical potential of the contemporary workers’ movement through connecting the political/ economic struggles of workers across domestic and international locations, exposing the contradictions of capitalism and the possibility for radical change; that is, it seeks to cultivate an atmosphere of workers’ power. When agitating in worker organizations, cadre members engage in transforming revolutionary theory into the popular language of the people, leading to ideological struggle as a result of the contradictions within the masses’ consciousness. But one thing is important to note: A cadre exists primarily for the benefit of revolutionaries. Remember, cadres organize “dedicated, active, revolutionary thinkers,” not the masses. In reality, the benefit of the cadre to the masses is indirect at best, at least until the Party organization is realized. In a moment we will explore the relation of the cadre to the future Party. But first we must explore their relation to the concrete conditions of today.

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summer 2017 — Worker-Community Organizations and the Cadres

“If you want to help the “masses” and win the sympathy and support of the “masses,” you should not fear difficulties, or pinpricks, chicanery, insults and persecution from the “leaders,” but must absolutely work wherever the masses are to be found.”

— V.I. Lenin Though cadres play an essential role in the development and formation of the future Party, a broad range of worker-community front organizations also play an important role in the reproduction of local revolutionary cells and the radicalization of workers. Though the front organizations in which the cadres participate may not be explicitly communist (and nothing says they have to be — most probably will not be) they unite workers and fight for immediate material gains on their part and build class consciousness, which allows for the growth and development of the local cadre and the recruitment of potential revolutionaries from the masses. A plethora of such organizations exist today: from trade-unions, student unions, community advocacy groups, environmental rights groups, progressive labor rights groups, etc to explicit anti-capitalist organizations like the PSL, FRSO, ISO, Socialist Alternative, IWW, and so on. At the same time in which cadre members participate in such worker-community organizations and struggle for the immediate gains of the proletariat, they must always in all movements, “bring to the front […] the property question, no matter what its degree of development at the time,” as Marx and Engels wrote in the Mani-

festo. For in order to “inject” Marxist-Leninist theory into the spontaneous and ideological movements of the workers class, cadre members active in various struggles must remember one of our fundamental principles: that communists disdain to conceal their views. We must openly propagandize and agitate in the various workers’ movements. Communists in every situation must openly conduct revolutionary work. As Lenin said in Left Wing Communism, “It is far more difficult – and far more useful – to be a revolutionary when the conditions for direct, open, really mass and really revolutionary struggle do not yet exist, to defend the interests of the revolution (by propaganda, agitation and organization) in non-revolutionary bodies and even in downright reactionary bodies, in non-revolutionary circumstances, among the masses who are incapable of immediately appreciating the need for revolutionary methods of action. The main task of contemporary Communism in Western Europe and America is to learn to seek, to find, to correctly determine the specific path or the particular turn of events that will bring the masses right up against the real, last, decisive, and great revolutionary struggle.”

Worker and community organizations give us a concrete ground on which to launch our offensive. The nature of the revolutionary work conducted in these organizations will obviously vary as conditions vary. However as a general rule, as mentioned above, we must always dialogue with the masses, take every opportunity which presents itself to expose capitalist exploitation and class struggle, and always seek recruitments for the strengthening of the local cadre. This work can be carried out in all situations.

64 — forward!

Serving the People A question the cadres (and the future party) must pay particular attention to is the well-being of the masses; cadres must fight for the well-being of the people in their locality and see to it that their needs are met. Currently, the revolutionary workers’ movement lacks an organic link with the masses. The masses fail to see a future for themselves in revolutionary socialism for revolutionary militants have failed to give the people answers to problems in their daily lives. During the Chinese Revolutionary War, Mao Zedong

said: “If we want to win … we must do a great deal more.

We must lead the peasants’ struggle for land and distribute the land to them, heighten their labour enthusiasm and increase agricultural production, safeguard the interests of the workers, establish co-operatives, develop trade with outside areas, and solve the problems facing the masses– food, shelter and clothing, fuel, rice, cooking oil and salt, sickness and hygiene, and marriage. In short, all the practical problems in the masses’ everyday life should claim our attention.

If we attend to these problems, solve them and satisfy the needs of the masses, we shall really become organizers of the well-being of the masses, and they will truly rally round us and give us their warm support.”

We must only look at the recent history of the revolutionary workers’ movement in the United States to see this theory validated. During the late 60’s and 70’s, the Black Panther Party was truly the vanguard of the oppressed of the nation. Historical analysis shows that many things point to the reason why the BPP rose to such a position (an entire book can be written on it, in fact, it has) but one reason for certain was their focus on the question of the well-being of the masses. Where chapters were located, the Panthers organized free breakfast programs, medical clinics, day care facilities, schools, committees for the self-de-

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summer 2017 — fense of their community (including armed patrols) to combat police brutality and abuse.

These programs were so successful in rousing the support of the people that they became a central focus of the FBI’s Counter Intelligence Program.

Today, we must see to it that cadres are providing answers to questions of the people in their locality, they must serve and pay attention to the well-being of the masses. There are many ways to go about doing so. Cadre members can take active roles in already organized community advocacy and defense groups, or form their own.

Many radical community programs have already

Electoral Patricipation

been organized around the country and have shown to be a success: anti-eviction campaigns, language classes, day-cares, anti-slumlord campaigns, etc (We cannot help but give a shout out to the Philly Socialists, whose model of serving the people deserves to be emulated.) Cadres must work in these programs, recruit, propaganize, conduct ideological struggle, etc… By struggling with the masses and providing them with guidance, answers, assistance, etc. cadres — and above all revolutionary socialism — may be realized as the voice of the people.

The Marxist-Leninist approach to participation in bourgeois elections is simple; it is impossible to rid the democratic republic of bourgeois control through the ballot box, but at the very same time it must not be ruled out as a tool for revolutionary struggle. Lenin wrote in State and Revolution that, “A democratic republic is the best possible politi-

To completely ignore electoral work is one-sided, incomplete, and non-dialectical.

A balance must exist between the two, determined always by the present conditions. Cadres must seek to cement an

cal shell for capitalism, and, therefore, once capital has gained possession of this very best shell it establishes its power so securely, so firmly, that no change of persons, institutions or parties in the bourgeois-democratic republic can shake it.”

And in “Democracy” and Dictatorship, “[Y]ou must take advantage of bourgeois democracy which, compared with feudalism, represents a great historical advance, but not for one minute must you forget the bourgeois character of this “democracy”, it’s historical conditional and limited character. Never share the “superstitious belief” in the “state” and never forget that the state even in the most democratic republic, and not only in a monarchy, is simply a machine for the suppression of one class by another.”

alliance of the most class-conscious and politically active workers within a locality who can begin to run independent, working class candidates who will fight for the immediate gains of the workers and their class allies. However, we must first ask some important questions in order to ensure that the use of elections as one tool in the revolutionary struggle does not degenerate into vulgar elector-

66 — forward! alism, where the simple election of “socialist” candidates functions as the main goal of an organization or party. Some examples of fundamental questions the cadres must ask follows: What do we do if a candidate is elected? How can we ensure the candidates continue to reflect our positions? How do we make sure an ideology of vulgar electoralism doesn’t take root before a mass revolutionary party is even in its infancy?

How can we ensure that participation in elections effectively develops class consciousness?

What it really comes down to is having specific details, based on materialist analysis, not of why we think we should use elections, but how we will use elections. There is a fine line between using elections productively as a tool in the class struggle and falling into the trap of vulgar electo-

ralism. Cadres must thoroughly study the class composition, political and economic situation, etc. of the particular area in question and develop specific tactics for the use of elections before taking spontaneous and hasty steps which could be detrimental. At this stage, inaction in the arena of bourgeois elections on the condition that it coincides with developing solid tactics for their use, is acceptable.

Keeping in mind the reservations made above, if used properly, elections can serve as another opportunity to expose the class struggle within society, the role of the state and bourgeois ideology, and to win the working class some immediate gains. This can all be done prior to, and in anticipation of, the development of a nation-wide revolutionary party.

Cadres and the Nation-wide Revolutionary Party It is not, nor should it be, our objective to force the revolutionary party into existence.

Rather, it is our duty to build the prerequisites for the revolutionary party, to take advantage of pre-revolutionary conditions, and to build the framework of the future party. It is a mistake to believe the party can exist independently of the conditions in which it forms. In our assessment of the current national situation, we, perhaps obviously, find that we operate within pre-revolutionary conditions. With this in mind, our duty is to begin the long process of addressing the current situation, recruiting potential revolutionaries and building the revolutionary socialist movement. All of this points to one conclusion: the training of cadre leaders who understand how to apply Marxist-Leninist principles to the current conditions is of utmost importance.

Cadres leaders must organize independently and in their locality but be interconnected with other cadres as we begin to build a network of

dedicated organizations, which forms the basis for the future national party. Eventually, when the conditions present are prime to do so, cadres can use their networks to begin organizing the revolutionary party.

Although we make an emphasis on cadres affecting local conditions foremost in the current time, we must emphasize, perhaps more so, that local conditions do not occur independently of the national (or for that matter, international) situation. In practice, this means that the frequent and earnest communication of cadres must take place at all possible times; the fostering of firm connections between the cadres is necessary for the success of both the individual cadre and the future party.

What, then, should this communication consist of? The cadre must communicate its experiences to the other cadres. This is not simply what is working but what is not working, as well.

We learn as much in our successes as in our

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summer 2017 â&#x20AC;&#x201D; defeats. The key is to adapt around these experiences so that we may best address our local conditions.

While it is necessary for the cadre to be responsible for its locality, this does not mean that cadres cannot seek the input of other cadres in order to overcome especially challenging problems. Likewise, the cadre must communicate what the general conditions of their locality are. It is important to have a perspective on the national situation at all times as our ultimate aim is to create a nation-wide revolutionary party, and the best way to understand the national situation is to understand the multitude of local conditions and how they interrelate. This understanding leads us to make special emphasis on communication between the cadres even before revolutionary conditions present themselves. It is our duty to be prepared.

68 â&#x20AC;&#x201D; forward!

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70 â&#x20AC;&#x201D; forward!