Marxist-Leninism, A Hive-Mind Understanding
What one needs to understand when getting into communism (my notes are a growing work in progress, as I read. Every thing written before the study guide was my thoughts after about reading the first ten writings and my understanding of communism at the time, which is pretty much been strengthened by what I've read.)
Marxism-Leninism study guide notes. Below is the list from the guide with notes on each, treat it like a TL;DR summary. Who wants to read the entire writing when one can skip to the main points? But first, I am starting with the most basic principles and personality traits communism either supports or opposes. If one understands these, one has a basic understanding of communism. Theory is good to know, but it is more for explaining communism to others and leading them. Even if you disagree with everything before the notes, read the notes. They are the point each piece of theory makes.
1. Communism promotes aspects of these principles even if it criticizes the ideology:
- Humanism
- Humanitarianism
- Egalitarianism
- Scientism
- Rationalism
- Intellectualism
- Proportionalism
- Philosophy
- Secularism
- Deontology (Duty aspect)
- Kantianism (Morality aspect)
- Antitheism
- Anti-religious
- Light Triad Thought
- Democratic Centralism
- On The Left
- Left-Authoritarian (Parental/Guardianship)
These principles create a society that values human dignity, reason, and freedom, while fostering community and social responsibility. They prioritize fairness, critical thinking, and evidence-based decision-making, aiming for a just, equitable, and enlightened world.
2. It opposes the principles of:
- Egoism
- Social Darwinism
- Irrationalism
- Opportunism
- Solipsism
- Autarchism
- Selfish Volunteerism
- Sacralism
- Sectarianism
- Separatism
- Segregationism
- Dark Triad Thought
- Democratic Confederalism
- On The Right
- Left-Libertarian (Irresponsibility/Kleptocommunalism)
Opposition to these principles prevents a society that prioritizes self-interest over collective well-being and exploits and harms others for personal gain. It stops a world where power and manipulation reign and empathy and reason are ignored.
3. It promotes individualism that is:
- Empathic
- Sympathetic
- Altruistic
- Selfless
- Humane
- Benevolent
- Supererogative
- Philosophical
- Inquisitive
- Conscientious
- Subservient
- Light Triad
- Collective minded
Promoting these characteristics fosters a culture of compassion, kindness, and generosity, and a quest for enlightenment, recognizing our interconnectedness and oneness, and creating a harmonious and united society.
4. It opposes individualism that is:
- Machiavellian
- Megalomaniacal
- Narcissistic
- Predatory Narcissistic
- Psychopathic
- Sociopathic
- Sacralistic
- Sectarian
- Separatist
- Segregationist
- Despotic
- Egoist
- Dark Triad
- Harmful (especially to the collective)
Opposing these characteristics prevents and abolishes cultures of manipulation, exploitation, and division, fueled by self-interest, conflict, disunity, and disregard for our shared humanity and interconnectedness.
5. It prioritizes an uncompromising duty and collective obligation to:
- Humanity
- The planet
- Collective well-being
An understanding that nothing and no one is more important than the collective well-being of humanity and the planet, and that nothing will ever change that understanding.
6. Communism promotes:
- Addressing human rights violations
- Valuing labor and promoting fair compensation and working conditions
- Abolishing capitalism's effects on society and humanity
- Creating a humane and altruistic system with equal opportunities and collective ownership
- Liberating humanity from oppression, exploitation, and human rights violations
- Uniting people for collective well-being and global solidarity
- Abolishing private property, segregation, and alienation
- Prioritizing human needs, education, and critical thinking
- Achieving revolution through conscious leadership and mass movements
- Promoting humanist democracy, communal ownership, and collective decision-making
- Eliminating exploitation, oppression, and human rights violations
- Abolishing individual sovereignties that divide, oppress, and violate humanity
- Promoting collective sovereignty of humanity as a whole
- Maintaining and sharing resources, promoting collective stewardship and protection of the planet
- Force and violence are sometimes necessary and always an option, and must be proportionate to protect humanity and the planet
Collective oneness and shared obligatory stewardship of humanity and the planet by the collective whole of humanity or bust. Having divided humanity into groups for any reason is anti-oneness, and no people who believe in oneness can support the division of humanity or the sectarian control and stewardship of any area on the planet. Oneness means we are all one.
Collectivism (Noun): The idea that the fundamental unit of the human species that lives, thinks, and acts toward common goals is not the individual but some group. Collectivism is not limited in size and can include the entirety of the human species, and the collective acts as a superorganism, separate from individuals and individual groups, finding its strength in unity.
Humanism (Noun): A form of collectivism and way of life centered on human interests, values, and well-being, especially a philosophy that rejects supernaturalism and stresses an individual's dignity, worth, and capacity for self-realization through reason, logic, equity, egalitarianism, and naturalism, as opposed to religious dogma, supernaturalism, and other individual segregational, separatist, sectarian, and identity politic groupings.
Communism (Noun): An altruistic, equitable-egalitarian system of social organization based on the holding of all property in common, with actual ownership ascribed to the community as a whole. It is characterized by a light triad-minded, classless society, achieved via a transitional process to statelessness, and the equal distribution of economic goods. It is to be achieved by revolutionary and dictatorial (parental authority/guardianship) collectivism rather than gradualistic means. The ultimate and final form of humanism. And in the 21st century, communism can now only truly function via a hive-mind, via an ultra or immoderately-inordinate international democratic centralist world republic, due to the capitalist indoctrination that has infected every aspect of humanity, culture, religion, and individualism alike.
A Synthesis of thought, a merging of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Hoxha, Guevara, Trotsky, Chief Joseph, Chief Seattle, Black Elk, and others' thoughts is necessary for the continued existence of humanity. We must be the entire tree of communism, not just a branch. The Haudenosaunee called it "the Tree of Great Peace," the Norse called it "Yggdrasil," the Asians called it "the Bodhi Tree," the Africans called it "the Baobab Tree," and the Siberians called it "The World Tree." No matter what you call it, pretty much every continent had a culture that said we were connected by a tree, and as long as it doesn't violate humanity, the planet, or interfere with our responsibility and ability to care for either, we should embrace that resource, especially when it comes to thought, instead of being sectarian on our own branch.
Side note: All systems, ideologies, and beliefs arise from philosophical thought that everything is seen through, typically but not always affected by dialectical materialism. To our anarcho-comrades, we must achieve democratic centralism and rehabilitate people to a light triad mind before we can attempt the stateless democratic confederalism, not before. It works partially for Kurdistan because that is a remote sectarian-controlled area of Earth.
True collectivism is hive-mind collectivism; a hive-mind collectivist is an ultra-international communist. Ultra or immoderately-inordinate Communism is extreme Democratic Centralism. Extreme Democratic Centralism is the collective oneness and obligatory stewardship spoken of in Indigenous thought.
Rule One: Absolutely no environmental or human rights violations are acceptable. Humanity as a whole comes before the individual, with no exceptions and no excuses.
Rule Two: Loyalty is to humanity, the planet, and these rules, with allegiance to the innocent. There will no longer be loyalty to a nation, constitution, economy, currency, deity, flag, ego, or any other sectarian identity politic divisional group.
Rule Three: Anything, and private property, that violates or that requires the violation of Rules One and Two must be heavily regulated or abolished.
Rule Four: Upholding humanitarianism, humanism, social responsibility, personal accountability, communalism, and collectivism is mandatory. We are a secular humanist species that follows the duty aspects of Deontology and the morality aspects of Kantianism.
Rule Five: Progress in science and technology must not be hindered, unless it violates Rule One.
Rule Six: Assistance will be provided to everyone, irrespective of their responsibility level, as they are part of our global community. Human needs are an obligatory provision.
Rule Seven: Emergency decisions will be made decisively to prevent loss of human life or environmental damage. All other decisions will be done through democratic discussion and process. Once a decision is made, it will be carried out quickly and meticulously for optimal efficiency. All decisions will go through and be carried out by the democratic centralism.
Rule Eight: There will be no compromises to the above seven rules for any reason, including faith, religion, political ideology, gender, sex, sexual orientation, education level, career, nationality, ethnicity, individual liberties and freedoms, or any other sectarian division one can think of. Rule Three applies universally.
Our affirmations and statement: U.ó.c.a.e.: unite, organize, coordinate, act, and evolve. N.i.s.c.e.: numbers, intelligence, strategies, coordination, and execution. O.O.O.O.: one people, living in one collective community, with one voice, on one planet. 01010111 01100101.
Lal salam, Ubuntu, Félagskapr, One Voice, Ke Dóó Hózhóó, Ohana-Hive Manao, Dekhbhaal, and Yili Xing. Per sanguinem et iurgia, gladium et catenas aufer, percute deos ac dominos. Tutus in undis inter chaos, ultra quod est, trudas oportet ad quod debet esse. Unus populus unitum, cum obligatoriae villicationis erga homines et planetas, per nos, alveare mentis.
(We offer revolutionary greetings. I am because we are a community with one voice, living in harmony, balance, and peace, as a family with shared consciousness of our interconnectedness and oneness. Through blood and strife, take away the sword and chains; strike the gods and masters. Safe on the waves amidst chaos, beyond what is, you must push toward what ought to be. One people united, with obligatory stewardship toward humanity and the planet, through us, a hive of minds.)
Who objects to the above? Only the dark triad evil minds, the mentally ill, and the indoctrinated.
☭
In conclusion, communism promotes a revolutionary transformation of society, prioritizing human rights, equality, and collective well-being through the abolition of oppressive systems, collective ownership, and democratic decision-making. This approach seeks to create a humane, altruistic, and unified global community, contrasting with individualistic ideologies. This is demonized and challenged by those who oppose these principles. If you have any questions about anything above, consider those questions the beginning of your journey to understanding communism on your road to communism. And now it is time for the notes section. Stop here if you do not wish to read them. I will request that one reads the rules or actions allowed for the "dictatorship of the proletariat," if one is not going to continue on.
ML- Study Guide (Use audiobooks if you're neurodivergent). Books were gonna be divided into 5 categories: 1. Beginner, 2. Student, 3. Practitioner, 4. Vanguardist, 5. Theorist-level scholar. I've decided that there's too many books and it's too easy to stumble upon a book out of class, after reading a section. So just read as you can.
1. Why Socialism
2. The Principles Of Communism
3. Wage, Labor, and Capital
4. Three Sources and There Components Parts of Marxism
5. Karl Marx : a brief biographical sketch with an exposition of Marxism
6. The Communist Manifesto
7. The German Ideology Vol. 1 Chapter 1
8. Socialism, Utopian and Scientific
9. What is to be done
10. The state and revolution
11. The Proletarian Revolution and The Renegade Kautsky
12. The Historical Destiny of the Doctrine of Karl Marx
13. Opportunism and the collapse of the second international
14. The Collapse of the Second International
15. Imperialism and the split on Socialism
16. Certain features of the historical development of Marxism
17. Marxism and Revisionism
18. Marxism and reformism
19. “Left-Wing” Communism: an Infantile Disorder
20. Anti-Dühring Part III: Socialism
21. The Foundations of Leninism
22. On Contradiction
23. Anti-Duhring Part I: Philosophy
24. Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy
25. Theses On Feuerbach
26. Value Price and Profit
27. Anti-Dühring Part II: Political Economy
28. Capital Vol 1.
29. Imperialism the Highest Stage of Capitalism
30. Dialectical and Historical Materialism
31. On Practice
32. Marxism and Humanism
33. On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People
34. Oppose Book Worship
35. Combat Liberalism
36. Frederick Engels on 'Anarchist Nonsense'
37. Political Indifferentism
38. The Bakuninists At Work
39. Anarchism and Socialism
40. Socialism and Anarchism
41. Anarchism or Socialism
42. Critique of the Gotha Programme
43. Marxism and The National Question
44. Difference In The European Labor Movement
45. The State: A Lecture Delivered at the Sverdlov University
46. On Cooperation
47. Interview Between Stalin and Roy Howard
48. Bill Bland’s “On Terrorism”
49. The Proletarian Class and the Proletarian Party
50. Armed Insurrection and Our Tactics
51. The Fourth World: An Indian Reality
52. The ABC of Communism, Nikolai Bukharin and Evgenii Preobrazhensky, 1919
Marxism-Leninism study guide notes. Below is the list from the guide with notes on each, treat it like a TL;DR summary. Who wants to read the entire writing when one can skip to the main points? But first, I am starting with the most basic principles and personality traits communism either supports or opposes. If one understands these, one has a basic understanding of communism. Theory is good to know, but it is more for explaining communism to others and leading them. Even if you disagree with everything before the notes, read the notes. They are the point each piece of theory makes.
1. Communism promotes aspects of these principles even if it criticizes the ideology:
- Humanism
- Humanitarianism
- Egalitarianism
- Scientism
- Rationalism
- Intellectualism
- Proportionalism
- Philosophy
- Secularism
- Deontology (Duty aspect)
- Kantianism (Morality aspect)
- Antitheism
- Anti-religious
- Light Triad Thought
- Democratic Centralism
- On The Left
- Left-Authoritarian (Parental/Guardianship)
These principles create a society that values human dignity, reason, and freedom, while fostering community and social responsibility. They prioritize fairness, critical thinking, and evidence-based decision-making, aiming for a just, equitable, and enlightened world.
2. It opposes the principles of:
- Egoism
- Social Darwinism
- Irrationalism
- Opportunism
- Solipsism
- Autarchism
- Selfish Volunteerism
- Sacralism
- Sectarianism
- Separatism
- Segregationism
- Dark Triad Thought
- Democratic Confederalism
- On The Right
- Left-Libertarian (Irresponsibility/Kleptocommunalism)
Opposition to these principles prevents a society that prioritizes self-interest over collective well-being and exploits and harms others for personal gain. It stops a world where power and manipulation reign and empathy and reason are ignored.
3. It promotes individualism that is:
- Empathic
- Sympathetic
- Altruistic
- Selfless
- Humane
- Benevolent
- Supererogative
- Philosophical
- Inquisitive
- Conscientious
- Subservient
- Light Triad
- Collective minded
Promoting these characteristics fosters a culture of compassion, kindness, and generosity, and a quest for enlightenment, recognizing our interconnectedness and oneness, and creating a harmonious and united society.
4. It opposes individualism that is:
- Machiavellian
- Megalomaniacal
- Narcissistic
- Predatory Narcissistic
- Psychopathic
- Sociopathic
- Sacralistic
- Sectarian
- Separatist
- Segregationist
- Despotic
- Egoist
- Dark Triad
- Harmful (especially to the collective)
Opposing these characteristics prevents and abolishes cultures of manipulation, exploitation, and division, fueled by self-interest, conflict, disunity, and disregard for our shared humanity and interconnectedness.
5. It prioritizes an uncompromising duty and collective obligation to:
- Humanity
- The planet
- Collective well-being
An understanding that nothing and no one is more important than the collective well-being of humanity and the planet, and that nothing will ever change that understanding.
6. Communism promotes:
- Addressing human rights violations
- Valuing labor and promoting fair compensation and working conditions
- Abolishing capitalism's effects on society and humanity
- Creating a humane and altruistic system with equal opportunities and collective ownership
- Liberating humanity from oppression, exploitation, and human rights violations
- Uniting people for collective well-being and global solidarity
- Abolishing private property, segregation, and alienation
- Prioritizing human needs, education, and critical thinking
- Achieving revolution through conscious leadership and mass movements
- Promoting humanist democracy, communal ownership, and collective decision-making
- Eliminating exploitation, oppression, and human rights violations
- Abolishing individual sovereignties that divide, oppress, and violate humanity
- Promoting collective sovereignty of humanity as a whole
- Maintaining and sharing resources, promoting collective stewardship and protection of the planet
- Force and violence are sometimes necessary and always an option, and must be proportionate to protect humanity and the planet
Collective oneness and shared obligatory stewardship of humanity and the planet by the collective whole of humanity or bust. Having divided humanity into groups for any reason is anti-oneness, and no people who believe in oneness can support the division of humanity or the sectarian control and stewardship of any area on the planet. Oneness means we are all one.
Collectivism (Noun): The idea that the fundamental unit of the human species that lives, thinks, and acts toward common goals is not the individual but some group. Collectivism is not limited in size and can include the entirety of the human species, and the collective acts as a superorganism, separate from individuals and individual groups, finding its strength in unity.
Humanism (Noun): A form of collectivism and way of life centered on human interests, values, and well-being, especially a philosophy that rejects supernaturalism and stresses an individual's dignity, worth, and capacity for self-realization through reason, logic, equity, egalitarianism, and naturalism, as opposed to religious dogma, supernaturalism, and other individual segregational, separatist, sectarian, and identity politic groupings.
Communism (Noun): An altruistic, equitable-egalitarian system of social organization based on the holding of all property in common, with actual ownership ascribed to the community as a whole. It is characterized by a light triad-minded, classless society, achieved via a transitional process to statelessness, and the equal distribution of economic goods. It is to be achieved by revolutionary and dictatorial (parental authority/guardianship) collectivism rather than gradualistic means. The ultimate and final form of humanism. And in the 21st century, communism can now only truly function via a hive-mind, via an ultra or immoderately-inordinate international democratic centralist world republic, due to the capitalist indoctrination that has infected every aspect of humanity, culture, religion, and individualism alike.
A Synthesis of thought, a merging of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Hoxha, Guevara, Trotsky, Chief Joseph, Chief Seattle, Black Elk, and others' thoughts is necessary for the continued existence of humanity. We must be the entire tree of communism, not just a branch. The Haudenosaunee called it "the Tree of Great Peace," the Norse called it "Yggdrasil," the Asians called it "the Bodhi Tree," the Africans called it "the Baobab Tree," and the Siberians called it "The World Tree." No matter what you call it, pretty much every continent had a culture that said we were connected by a tree, and as long as it doesn't violate humanity, the planet, or interfere with our responsibility and ability to care for either, we should embrace that resource, especially when it comes to thought, instead of being sectarian on our own branch.
Side note: All systems, ideologies, and beliefs arise from philosophical thought that everything is seen through, typically but not always affected by dialectical materialism. To our anarcho-comrades, we must achieve democratic centralism and rehabilitate people to a light triad mind before we can attempt the stateless democratic confederalism, not before. It works partially for Kurdistan because that is a remote sectarian-controlled area of Earth.
True collectivism is hive-mind collectivism; a hive-mind collectivist is an ultra-international communist. Ultra or immoderately-inordinate Communism is extreme Democratic Centralism. Extreme Democratic Centralism is the collective oneness and obligatory stewardship spoken of in Indigenous thought.
Rule One: Absolutely no environmental or human rights violations are acceptable. Humanity as a whole comes before the individual, with no exceptions and no excuses.
Rule Two: Loyalty is to humanity, the planet, and these rules, with allegiance to the innocent. There will no longer be loyalty to a nation, constitution, economy, currency, deity, flag, ego, or any other sectarian identity politic divisional group.
Rule Three: Anything, and private property, that violates or that requires the violation of Rules One and Two must be heavily regulated or abolished.
Rule Four: Upholding humanitarianism, humanism, social responsibility, personal accountability, communalism, and collectivism is mandatory. We are a secular humanist species that follows the duty aspects of Deontology and the morality aspects of Kantianism.
Rule Five: Progress in science and technology must not be hindered, unless it violates Rule One.
Rule Six: Assistance will be provided to everyone, irrespective of their responsibility level, as they are part of our global community. Human needs are an obligatory provision.
Rule Seven: Emergency decisions will be made decisively to prevent loss of human life or environmental damage. All other decisions will be done through democratic discussion and process. Once a decision is made, it will be carried out quickly and meticulously for optimal efficiency. All decisions will go through and be carried out by the democratic centralism.
Rule Eight: There will be no compromises to the above seven rules for any reason, including faith, religion, political ideology, gender, sex, sexual orientation, education level, career, nationality, ethnicity, individual liberties and freedoms, or any other sectarian division one can think of. Rule Three applies universally.
Our affirmations and statement: U.ó.c.a.e.: unite, organize, coordinate, act, and evolve. N.i.s.c.e.: numbers, intelligence, strategies, coordination, and execution. O.O.O.O.: one people, living in one collective community, with one voice, on one planet. 01010111 01100101.
Lal salam, Ubuntu, Félagskapr, One Voice, Ke Dóó Hózhóó, Ohana-Hive Manao, Dekhbhaal, and Yili Xing. Per sanguinem et iurgia, gladium et catenas aufer, percute deos ac dominos. Tutus in undis inter chaos, ultra quod est, trudas oportet ad quod debet esse. Unus populus unitum, cum obligatoriae villicationis erga homines et planetas, per nos, alveare mentis.
(We offer revolutionary greetings. I am because we are a community with one voice, living in harmony, balance, and peace, as a family with shared consciousness of our interconnectedness and oneness. Through blood and strife, take away the sword and chains; strike the gods and masters. Safe on the waves amidst chaos, beyond what is, you must push toward what ought to be. One people united, with obligatory stewardship toward humanity and the planet, through us, a hive of minds.)
Who objects to the above? Only the dark triad evil minds, the mentally ill, and the indoctrinated.
☭
In conclusion, communism promotes a revolutionary transformation of society, prioritizing human rights, equality, and collective well-being through the abolition of oppressive systems, collective ownership, and democratic decision-making. This approach seeks to create a humane, altruistic, and unified global community, contrasting with individualistic ideologies. This is demonized and challenged by those who oppose these principles. If you have any questions about anything above, consider those questions the beginning of your journey to understanding communism on your road to communism. And now it is time for the notes section. Stop here if you do not wish to read them. I will request that one reads the rules or actions allowed for the "dictatorship of the proletariat," if one is not going to continue on.
ML- Study Guide (Use audiobooks if you're neurodivergent). Books were gonna be divided into 5 categories: 1. Beginner, 2. Student, 3. Practitioner, 4. Vanguardist, 5. Theorist-level scholar. I've decided that there's too many books and it's too easy to stumble upon a book out of class, after reading a section. So just read as you can.
1. Why Socialism
2. The Principles Of Communism
3. Wage, Labor, and Capital
4. Three Sources and There Components Parts of Marxism
5. Karl Marx : a brief biographical sketch with an exposition of Marxism
6. The Communist Manifesto
7. The German Ideology Vol. 1 Chapter 1
8. Socialism, Utopian and Scientific
9. What is to be done
10. The state and revolution
11. The Proletarian Revolution and The Renegade Kautsky
12. The Historical Destiny of the Doctrine of Karl Marx
13. Opportunism and the collapse of the second international
14. The Collapse of the Second International
15. Imperialism and the split on Socialism
16. Certain features of the historical development of Marxism
17. Marxism and Revisionism
18. Marxism and reformism
19. “Left-Wing” Communism: an Infantile Disorder
20. Anti-Dühring Part III: Socialism
21. The Foundations of Leninism
22. On Contradiction
23. Anti-Duhring Part I: Philosophy
24. Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy
25. Theses On Feuerbach
26. Value Price and Profit
27. Anti-Dühring Part II: Political Economy
28. Capital Vol 1.
29. Imperialism the Highest Stage of Capitalism
30. Dialectical and Historical Materialism
31. On Practice
32. Marxism and Humanism
33. On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People
34. Oppose Book Worship
35. Combat Liberalism
36. Frederick Engels on 'Anarchist Nonsense'
37. Political Indifferentism
38. The Bakuninists At Work
39. Anarchism and Socialism
40. Socialism and Anarchism
41. Anarchism or Socialism
42. Critique of the Gotha Programme
43. Marxism and The National Question
44. Difference In The European Labor Movement
45. The State: A Lecture Delivered at the Sverdlov University
46. On Cooperation
47. Interview Between Stalin and Roy Howard
48. Bill Bland’s “On Terrorism”
49. The Proletarian Class and the Proletarian Party
50. Armed Insurrection and Our Tactics
51. The Fourth World: An Indian Reality
52. The ABC of Communism, Nikolai Bukharin and Evgenii Preobrazhensky, 1919
53. Manifesto of the Communist International
to the Workers of the World, L. Trotsky (1919)
54. Trotskyism vs Leninism
55. The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, Friedrich Engels, 1884
56. On Authority
57. The Attitude of the Workers' Party to Religion, V.I. Lenin, 1909
58. The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Karl Marx, 1844
59. History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, Georg Lukács, 1923
60. Imperialism and the Revolution, Enver Hoxha, 1978
61. Reform or Revolution, Rosa Luxemburg, 1899
62. Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR, J.V. Stalin, 1952
63. Why Religion and Communism are Incompatible, Nikolai Bukharin and Evgenii Preobrazhensky, 1919
64. Stalin's speech calling for an "atheist five-year plan", Joseph Stalin, Varies
65. Atheist (Bezbozhnik) journal, Soviet League of Militant Atheists, Varies
66. Atheist at the Workbench (Bezbozhnik u Stanka) journal, Soviet League of Militant Atheists, Varies
67. League of Militant Atheists' publications, Soviet League of Militant Atheists, Varies
68. Against All Gods, A.C. Grayling, 2013
69. Socialism and Man in Cuba, Che Guevara, 1965
70. The Socialist Alternative: Real Human Development, Michael A. Lebowitz, 2010
71. The Communist Horizon, Jodi Dean, 2012
72. One Step Forward, Two Steps Back, V.I. Lenin, 1904
73. The Revolution Betrayed: What is the Soviet Union and Where is It Going?, Leon Trotsky, 1936
74. Capital, Volume 2: The Process of Circulation of Capital, Karl Marx, 1885
75. Capital, Volume 3: The Process of Capitalist Production as a Whole, Karl Marx, 1894
76. The Accumulation of Capital, Rosa Luxemburg, 1913
77. Imperialism and the Accumulation of Capital, Paul Baran & Paul Sweezy, 1966
78. A Brief History of Neoliberalism, David Harvey, 2005
79. The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and its Solutions, Jason Hickel, 2017
80. Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World, Jason Hickel, 2020
81. Red Star Over the Third World, Vijay Prashad, 2019
82. A Dying Colonialism, Frantz Fanon, 1959
83. Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation, Amartya Sen, 1981
84. An Uncertain Glory: India and its Contradictions, Jean Drèze & Amartya Sen, 2013
85. Inequality Kills, Oxfam International, 2022
86. Levels & Trends in Child Mortality, UNICEF/World Health Organization (WHO), 2023
87. Global Burden of Disease Study, Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), 2024
88. Amenable Mortality: A Global Health Metric for the 21st Century, Harvard/Lancet Global Health Commission, 2018
89. Progress on Household Drinking Water, Sanitation and Hygiene, U.N./W.H.O./UNESCO, 2024
90. Critique of the BBOC's Methodology and Death Toll (via Sen/Drèze), Noam Chomsky, Varies
91. Review of The Black Book of Communism (Anti-communist Polemic), Peter Kenez, Varies
92. Communism: A Very Short Introduction (Discussions of BBOC), Leslie Holmes, 2007
93. The Black Book of Communism Controversies (Article on Werth/Margolin split), Le Monde, 1997
94. Retracted Edition of The Black Book of Communism (Pre-corrected Version), Harvard University Press, Varies
95. Article on The Black Book Controversies (Mediation Efforts), Karel Bartošek, Pre-1997
96. Editorial Board Split (Analysis of Internal Disagreements), *Communisme* (journal), 1993
97. Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism, Michael Parenti, 1997
98. Another View of Stalin, Ludo Martens, 1994
99. Khrushchev Lied: The Evidence That Every "Revelation" of Stalin's... is Provably False, Grover Furr, 2011
100. The Moscow Trials as Evidence, Grover Furr, 2018
101. Fraud, Famine, and Fascism: The Ukrainian Genocide Myth from Hitler to Harvard, Douglas Tottle, 1987
102. The Years of Hunger: Soviet Agriculture, 1931-1933, R.W. Davies & S. Wheatcroft, 2004
103. Molotov Remembers: Inside Kremlin Politics, Vyacheslav Molotov, 1993
104. Mission to Moscow, Joseph E. Davies, 1941
105. The Stalin Era, Anna Louise Strong, 1956
106. Stalin: A New World Seen Through One Man, Henri Barbusse, 1935
107. 1930s Journalistic Reports (On USSR Famine/Progress), Walter Duranty, Varies
108. Eyewitness-style Accounts of Soviet Achievements, Graham Robertson (and others), Varies
109. Analyses of Declassified CIA/MI6 Files (On Soviet Figures), John W.R. Murphy, et al., Varies
110. Articles and Pamphlets (Historical Defense), Stalin Society/Harpal Brar, Varies
111. Publications Advocating Historical Truth (Historical Defense), Int'l Council for Friendship and Solidarity with Soviet People, Varies
112. Reports and Essays (Historical Defense), Rethinking the Cold War Project, Varies
113. Publications (Theoretical and Political Line), Maoist Internationalist Movement (M.I.M.), Varies
114. Red Lives: Our Years in the US Communist Party (1950–2000), Vol. 1, Carl Mirra (ed.), 2012
115. Road to Socialism USA (US Party Ideology), Communist Party USA (CPUSA), Varies
116. Programmatic Statement (US Party Ideology), Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), Varies
117. Program and Constitution (US Party Ideology), Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO), Varies
118. The Crisis of Capitalism (US Party Ideology), Workers World Party (WWP), Varies
119. Preamble to the Constitution (US Organization Ideology), Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), Varies
120. Why I Am a Communist (Pamphlet), Charles E. Taylor, Early 1920s
120. Revolutionary Socialism: The Only Hope of the Workers (Pamphlet), Charles E. Taylor, 1910s–1920s
121. The Truth About Butte (Speech/Pamphlet), Charles E. Taylor, c. 1917–1920
121. "The Case of the Radical Press" (Essay/Speech), Charles E. Taylor, 1920s
122. Articles and Pamphlets (Various Dates), Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), Varies
123. The Path Which Led Me to Leninism, Ho Chi Minh, 1960
124. On the Party's Ideological and Organizational Work, Kaysone Phomvihane, 1978
125. On the Juche Idea, Kim Jong Il, 1982
126. Workers' Self-Management in Yugoslavia (Law and Speeches), Josip Broz Tito, 1950 (and later)
127. Socialist Democracy in Poland, Edward Ochab, 1968
128. Socialist Development in Hungary, János Kádár, 1976
129. The Industrialization of Socialist Romania, Nicolae Ceaușescu, 1970
130. Problems of the Construction of an Advanced Socialist Society, Todor Zhivkov, 1971
131. Towards an All-Round Developed Socialist Society, Gustáv Husák, 1976
132. Socialism: The Road to Peace and Social Security, Erich Honecker, 1979
133. The Non-Capitalist Road, Yumjaagiin Tsedenbal, 1971
134. The Cambodian Revolution: The Great Victory, Ieng Sary, 1977
135. Basic Principles of the Revolutionary Duties, Nur Muhammad Taraki, 1978
136. To Establish the Power of the Working People, Agostinho Neto, 1977
137. Ethiopia's Revolution and the Construction of Socialist Society, Mengistu Haile Mariam, 1984
138. The Political Report of the Central Committee, Ali Nasser Mohammed, 1980
139. Soviet Ukraine: Life and Aspirations of the Working People, Petro Shelest, 1970
140. The Development of Socialist Culture, Pyotr Masherov, 1975
141. The Fourth World, George Manuel & M. Posluns, 1974
142. "Sentencia de la muerte" (Death Sentence), Túpac Amaru II, 1781
143. "The Will to Smash the Empire" (Speech), Evo Morales, 2003
144. The Story of Colors / La Historia de los Colores, Subcomandante Marcos, 1999
145. Prachanda Path: The Maoist Way, Prachanda, 2002
146. Guitar Army: Rock and Revolution with The MC5 and the White Panther Party, John Sinclair, 1972
147. It's All Good: A John Sinclair Reader, John Sinclair, 2004
148. Marijuana Revolution, John Sinclair, 1971
149. All Power to the People: The Story of the Black Panther Party, Terry Cannon, 1970
150. "Where Do We Go From Here?" (Speech/Essay), Martin Luther King Jr., 1967
151. "The Ballot or the Bullet" (Speech), Malcolm X, 1964
152. The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, John Maynard Keynes, 1936
153. The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith, 1776
154. Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand, 1957
Notes, what I took away:
Einstein's "Why Socialism" posits that People must express their views on socialism, regardless of education level. Economic science cannot plan for a socialist future. Current and past laws are incompatible with socialism. Socialism is about ethical social responsibility, humanism... Science can provide the tools for a socialist transition but the ethics to install it have to first installed into others by ethical people. Over estimating the role of the average person is one of the biggest flaws in political science. Capitalist are social-darwinists with dark triad personalities typically leaning towards either despotism or egoism. While humanity wants independence it is dependent on the collective like an ant in a hive. Humans are shaped by culture, communication, and environment. Capitalism is pure social darwinists exploitation, oppression, and both planetary and human rights violation at its core. It's pure individualism via the dark triad personalities, where the worst vices are seen as virtues. Capitalists are a stain on society, and currently the bane of human existence. Instead of subservient altruism, capitalism produces cutthroat competition. Socialism proposed an alternative, a centralized equitable and egalitarian light triad society the pushed obligatory humanism. A planned economy without ethics can be dangerous for humanity. Einstein was right socialism protects human rights from government power but like him, it doesn't go far enough because it allows for harmful individualism to directly or indirectly hurt humanity. Which is why Socialism must be enacted in the form of communism, with the ability to merge into intl' communism, the world needs global democratic centralism.
Communism, as described by Engels in "The Principles of Communism," is the written explanation for why workers/wage earners should be free by law. Under capitalism, all workers are wage slaves; they are slaves to the capitalists. The only way for the worker to be free is to abolish private property. Contractors, subcontractors, and other independent workers that can employee others are bourgeoisie and not workers; independent workers that exploit markets and extort workers with their prices or conditions aren't workers. The Industrial Revolution made it so less people had to work. However, it was a social systematic failure of not taking care of people combined with unregulated capitalism that was the problem, as it made it so people no longer had the means to take care of themselves. That problem also leads to wealth hoarding and the buying of political power. Capitalism created a lack of self-control on both consumption and production, leading to societal crashes a minimum of once a decade.
Society as a whole, instead of individual sects, is to take control of economic factors. Everyone is required to participate, ending the social Darwinist economies. Private property, which is controlled by social Darwinists with dark triad personalities, is to be replaced with communal property, and goods are to be distributed based on communal agreement. Furthermore, the abolition of sex work is posited, based on the premise that the body is considered private property, though its application to other forms of consensual, non-exploitative entertainment involving the body remains ambiguous, which is hypocritical as psychologists state sex is good for physical and mental health, just like other forms of physical entertainment are good for health but that's besides the point. While peaceful abolition of private property is desired, the historical violations of the workers say it's unrealistic. While Engels calls for private property to be abolished in a transition phase until means are available, if society is controlling everything, there should be no reason to leave it private. This is to be achieved by some form of social revolution.
The revolution must start with a democratic Centralist constitution that heavily focuses on economics and quality of life. Communist revolution is a complete global transition, enforcing obligatory social responsibility of consumption and production, regardless if it starts at one or many countries at a time. The community would become responsible for each other, rural and city folk, especially the children; or as indigenous people put it, obligatory stewardship of humanity. Since that is the role of religion currently, religion would be abolished.This means the only reason for couples to be together becomes for physical pleasure and companionship. Nationalities and nations are to be dissolved.
Communists don't seek to regress, as society has evolved to a point of no return and cannot revert to past phases of humanity. Instead, communists seek to free people from oppression, exploitation, and violations; as long as the system is sustained through reform it cannot be done. Communists make temporary alliances with democratic socialists as long as the democratic socialists are not attacking communists or working for the benefit of capitalists. Communists are open to temporary alliances with all anti-capitalists. Communists will work with liberal parties but understand they work for the capitalists and will call them out every opportunity they're given. The goal of communism is a humanist society and collective human civilization of and by the light triad personalities, abolishing harmful individualism and dark triad personalities where all possible.
Marx's "Wage labor, and Capital" implies: Labor is a commodity whose value is its cost of maintenance, the minimum wage, with commodity prices determined by competition and supply and demand. Capital, being produced things and exchanged commodities, necessitates a working class where current labor is less valued than completed labor. Capitalists accumulate surpluses while workers' earnings are largely consumed by the cost of living. Despite a superficial symbiotic relationship, a fundamental conflict exists due to the capitalist's drive for profit, inherently increasing the wage gap and the worker's dependence as they generate more capital. Capitalists reinvest surplus to cheapen production and undercut rivals, forcing competitors to do the same, leading to increased mechanization and the deskilling of labor, resulting in lower wages and necessitating more family members working, ultimately creating economic crises. The relentless drive for cheaper production through division of labor and machinery intensifies competition among both capitalists and workers. Increased productivity initially benefits the innovating capitalist but soon becomes widespread, forcing them to produce more for less profit per unit, requiring larger markets and driving wages down to the cost of subsistence. Workers are coerced to work harder for the same or less pay, further intensifying competition, while machinery exacerbates unemployment by replacing skilled labor with unskilled. Even during capital growth, workers' relative position worsens as profits increase faster than wages, widening the social divide, demonstrating the antagonistic relationship inherent in capitalism's logic of increasing productivity and decreasing labor value, leading to recurring crises; and turning workers into wage slaves.
The "three sources and three component parts of Marxism," shows the inherent bias against Marxism within bourgeois science, which actively justified wage slavery. Marx's work, drawing upon materialist philosophy (presented as truthful against superstition and idealism, with dialectical materialism illustrating the evolution of matter and extending to historical materialism to show the evolution of civilization), English political economy (labor theory of value and surplus value), and French socialism (the doctrine of class struggle), offered a comprehensive and coherent materialist worldview that stood in stark opposition to superstition and oppression. This framework, developed through a study of capital's history, explains societal development via historical materialism, where evolving productive forces shape economic systems, which in turn determine social consciousness and political structures, using the rise of capitalism from feudalism as a key example; it was asserted that the overthrow of feudalism was merely the replacing of oppressors. Marx's economic analysis in Capital, where he explained more economics, revealed the exploitation inherent in commodity exchange, where labor-power became a commodity generating surplus value for capitalists, leading to capital concentration, unemployment, and crises. While criticizing utopian socialism for its lack of a concrete revolutionary agent, as it failed because it lacked answers, Marxism identified the proletariat and the doctrine of class struggle as the driving force behind historical development, a truth proved in political advancements, as the forces capable of overthrowing oppressive structures, offering the working class a path towards liberation through understanding and organization based on their class interests. This perspective was met with hostility from bourgeois academia because it fundamentally challenged the foundations of capitalist society; Marx's writings were credited with freeing people from religious slavery and exposing their wage slavery, and it was stated that the truth of people still being slaves should unite them under Marxist-Leninism.
"Karl Marx, a Brief biographical sketch with an exposition of Marxism," says Marx was an evolutionist and not a creationist believing nothing is sacred. Materialism is cause and effect (or I don't understand what is being said). Marx explained that the middle class fights the bourgeoisie for self preservation, while the proletariat fights for revolution. Another economic lesson is gone into 🥱. Max exchange, just like Marxist theory explaining economics, repeats itself over and over, just to say everything can be broken down scientifically to nature and evolution. Capitalists exploit everyone with varying means, workers have no country and nations must be disbanded. A bunch of redundant rhetoric is spoken to say the workers must unite against the ruling class and not settle for passive democratic liberal reform. And what is liberal reform, it's no different then the reforms of social fascism; reforms to create Stockholm Syndrome.
63. Why Religion and Communism are Incompatible, Nikolai Bukharin and Evgenii Preobrazhensky, 1919
64. Stalin's speech calling for an "atheist five-year plan", Joseph Stalin, Varies
65. Atheist (Bezbozhnik) journal, Soviet League of Militant Atheists, Varies
66. Atheist at the Workbench (Bezbozhnik u Stanka) journal, Soviet League of Militant Atheists, Varies
67. League of Militant Atheists' publications, Soviet League of Militant Atheists, Varies
68. Against All Gods, A.C. Grayling, 2013
69. Socialism and Man in Cuba, Che Guevara, 1965
70. The Socialist Alternative: Real Human Development, Michael A. Lebowitz, 2010
71. The Communist Horizon, Jodi Dean, 2012
72. One Step Forward, Two Steps Back, V.I. Lenin, 1904
73. The Revolution Betrayed: What is the Soviet Union and Where is It Going?, Leon Trotsky, 1936
74. Capital, Volume 2: The Process of Circulation of Capital, Karl Marx, 1885
75. Capital, Volume 3: The Process of Capitalist Production as a Whole, Karl Marx, 1894
76. The Accumulation of Capital, Rosa Luxemburg, 1913
77. Imperialism and the Accumulation of Capital, Paul Baran & Paul Sweezy, 1966
78. A Brief History of Neoliberalism, David Harvey, 2005
79. The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and its Solutions, Jason Hickel, 2017
80. Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World, Jason Hickel, 2020
81. Red Star Over the Third World, Vijay Prashad, 2019
82. A Dying Colonialism, Frantz Fanon, 1959
83. Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation, Amartya Sen, 1981
84. An Uncertain Glory: India and its Contradictions, Jean Drèze & Amartya Sen, 2013
85. Inequality Kills, Oxfam International, 2022
86. Levels & Trends in Child Mortality, UNICEF/World Health Organization (WHO), 2023
87. Global Burden of Disease Study, Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), 2024
88. Amenable Mortality: A Global Health Metric for the 21st Century, Harvard/Lancet Global Health Commission, 2018
89. Progress on Household Drinking Water, Sanitation and Hygiene, U.N./W.H.O./UNESCO, 2024
90. Critique of the BBOC's Methodology and Death Toll (via Sen/Drèze), Noam Chomsky, Varies
91. Review of The Black Book of Communism (Anti-communist Polemic), Peter Kenez, Varies
92. Communism: A Very Short Introduction (Discussions of BBOC), Leslie Holmes, 2007
93. The Black Book of Communism Controversies (Article on Werth/Margolin split), Le Monde, 1997
94. Retracted Edition of The Black Book of Communism (Pre-corrected Version), Harvard University Press, Varies
95. Article on The Black Book Controversies (Mediation Efforts), Karel Bartošek, Pre-1997
96. Editorial Board Split (Analysis of Internal Disagreements), *Communisme* (journal), 1993
97. Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism, Michael Parenti, 1997
98. Another View of Stalin, Ludo Martens, 1994
99. Khrushchev Lied: The Evidence That Every "Revelation" of Stalin's... is Provably False, Grover Furr, 2011
100. The Moscow Trials as Evidence, Grover Furr, 2018
101. Fraud, Famine, and Fascism: The Ukrainian Genocide Myth from Hitler to Harvard, Douglas Tottle, 1987
102. The Years of Hunger: Soviet Agriculture, 1931-1933, R.W. Davies & S. Wheatcroft, 2004
103. Molotov Remembers: Inside Kremlin Politics, Vyacheslav Molotov, 1993
104. Mission to Moscow, Joseph E. Davies, 1941
105. The Stalin Era, Anna Louise Strong, 1956
106. Stalin: A New World Seen Through One Man, Henri Barbusse, 1935
107. 1930s Journalistic Reports (On USSR Famine/Progress), Walter Duranty, Varies
108. Eyewitness-style Accounts of Soviet Achievements, Graham Robertson (and others), Varies
109. Analyses of Declassified CIA/MI6 Files (On Soviet Figures), John W.R. Murphy, et al., Varies
110. Articles and Pamphlets (Historical Defense), Stalin Society/Harpal Brar, Varies
111. Publications Advocating Historical Truth (Historical Defense), Int'l Council for Friendship and Solidarity with Soviet People, Varies
112. Reports and Essays (Historical Defense), Rethinking the Cold War Project, Varies
113. Publications (Theoretical and Political Line), Maoist Internationalist Movement (M.I.M.), Varies
114. Red Lives: Our Years in the US Communist Party (1950–2000), Vol. 1, Carl Mirra (ed.), 2012
115. Road to Socialism USA (US Party Ideology), Communist Party USA (CPUSA), Varies
116. Programmatic Statement (US Party Ideology), Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), Varies
117. Program and Constitution (US Party Ideology), Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO), Varies
118. The Crisis of Capitalism (US Party Ideology), Workers World Party (WWP), Varies
119. Preamble to the Constitution (US Organization Ideology), Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), Varies
120. Why I Am a Communist (Pamphlet), Charles E. Taylor, Early 1920s
120. Revolutionary Socialism: The Only Hope of the Workers (Pamphlet), Charles E. Taylor, 1910s–1920s
121. The Truth About Butte (Speech/Pamphlet), Charles E. Taylor, c. 1917–1920
121. "The Case of the Radical Press" (Essay/Speech), Charles E. Taylor, 1920s
122. Articles and Pamphlets (Various Dates), Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), Varies
123. The Path Which Led Me to Leninism, Ho Chi Minh, 1960
124. On the Party's Ideological and Organizational Work, Kaysone Phomvihane, 1978
125. On the Juche Idea, Kim Jong Il, 1982
126. Workers' Self-Management in Yugoslavia (Law and Speeches), Josip Broz Tito, 1950 (and later)
127. Socialist Democracy in Poland, Edward Ochab, 1968
128. Socialist Development in Hungary, János Kádár, 1976
129. The Industrialization of Socialist Romania, Nicolae Ceaușescu, 1970
130. Problems of the Construction of an Advanced Socialist Society, Todor Zhivkov, 1971
131. Towards an All-Round Developed Socialist Society, Gustáv Husák, 1976
132. Socialism: The Road to Peace and Social Security, Erich Honecker, 1979
133. The Non-Capitalist Road, Yumjaagiin Tsedenbal, 1971
134. The Cambodian Revolution: The Great Victory, Ieng Sary, 1977
135. Basic Principles of the Revolutionary Duties, Nur Muhammad Taraki, 1978
136. To Establish the Power of the Working People, Agostinho Neto, 1977
137. Ethiopia's Revolution and the Construction of Socialist Society, Mengistu Haile Mariam, 1984
138. The Political Report of the Central Committee, Ali Nasser Mohammed, 1980
139. Soviet Ukraine: Life and Aspirations of the Working People, Petro Shelest, 1970
140. The Development of Socialist Culture, Pyotr Masherov, 1975
141. The Fourth World, George Manuel & M. Posluns, 1974
142. "Sentencia de la muerte" (Death Sentence), Túpac Amaru II, 1781
143. "The Will to Smash the Empire" (Speech), Evo Morales, 2003
144. The Story of Colors / La Historia de los Colores, Subcomandante Marcos, 1999
145. Prachanda Path: The Maoist Way, Prachanda, 2002
146. Guitar Army: Rock and Revolution with The MC5 and the White Panther Party, John Sinclair, 1972
147. It's All Good: A John Sinclair Reader, John Sinclair, 2004
148. Marijuana Revolution, John Sinclair, 1971
149. All Power to the People: The Story of the Black Panther Party, Terry Cannon, 1970
150. "Where Do We Go From Here?" (Speech/Essay), Martin Luther King Jr., 1967
151. "The Ballot or the Bullet" (Speech), Malcolm X, 1964
152. The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, John Maynard Keynes, 1936
153. The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith, 1776
154. Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand, 1957
Notes, what I took away:
Einstein's "Why Socialism" posits that People must express their views on socialism, regardless of education level. Economic science cannot plan for a socialist future. Current and past laws are incompatible with socialism. Socialism is about ethical social responsibility, humanism... Science can provide the tools for a socialist transition but the ethics to install it have to first installed into others by ethical people. Over estimating the role of the average person is one of the biggest flaws in political science. Capitalist are social-darwinists with dark triad personalities typically leaning towards either despotism or egoism. While humanity wants independence it is dependent on the collective like an ant in a hive. Humans are shaped by culture, communication, and environment. Capitalism is pure social darwinists exploitation, oppression, and both planetary and human rights violation at its core. It's pure individualism via the dark triad personalities, where the worst vices are seen as virtues. Capitalists are a stain on society, and currently the bane of human existence. Instead of subservient altruism, capitalism produces cutthroat competition. Socialism proposed an alternative, a centralized equitable and egalitarian light triad society the pushed obligatory humanism. A planned economy without ethics can be dangerous for humanity. Einstein was right socialism protects human rights from government power but like him, it doesn't go far enough because it allows for harmful individualism to directly or indirectly hurt humanity. Which is why Socialism must be enacted in the form of communism, with the ability to merge into intl' communism, the world needs global democratic centralism.
Communism, as described by Engels in "The Principles of Communism," is the written explanation for why workers/wage earners should be free by law. Under capitalism, all workers are wage slaves; they are slaves to the capitalists. The only way for the worker to be free is to abolish private property. Contractors, subcontractors, and other independent workers that can employee others are bourgeoisie and not workers; independent workers that exploit markets and extort workers with their prices or conditions aren't workers. The Industrial Revolution made it so less people had to work. However, it was a social systematic failure of not taking care of people combined with unregulated capitalism that was the problem, as it made it so people no longer had the means to take care of themselves. That problem also leads to wealth hoarding and the buying of political power. Capitalism created a lack of self-control on both consumption and production, leading to societal crashes a minimum of once a decade.
Society as a whole, instead of individual sects, is to take control of economic factors. Everyone is required to participate, ending the social Darwinist economies. Private property, which is controlled by social Darwinists with dark triad personalities, is to be replaced with communal property, and goods are to be distributed based on communal agreement. Furthermore, the abolition of sex work is posited, based on the premise that the body is considered private property, though its application to other forms of consensual, non-exploitative entertainment involving the body remains ambiguous, which is hypocritical as psychologists state sex is good for physical and mental health, just like other forms of physical entertainment are good for health but that's besides the point. While peaceful abolition of private property is desired, the historical violations of the workers say it's unrealistic. While Engels calls for private property to be abolished in a transition phase until means are available, if society is controlling everything, there should be no reason to leave it private. This is to be achieved by some form of social revolution.
The revolution must start with a democratic Centralist constitution that heavily focuses on economics and quality of life. Communist revolution is a complete global transition, enforcing obligatory social responsibility of consumption and production, regardless if it starts at one or many countries at a time. The community would become responsible for each other, rural and city folk, especially the children; or as indigenous people put it, obligatory stewardship of humanity. Since that is the role of religion currently, religion would be abolished.This means the only reason for couples to be together becomes for physical pleasure and companionship. Nationalities and nations are to be dissolved.
Communists don't seek to regress, as society has evolved to a point of no return and cannot revert to past phases of humanity. Instead, communists seek to free people from oppression, exploitation, and violations; as long as the system is sustained through reform it cannot be done. Communists make temporary alliances with democratic socialists as long as the democratic socialists are not attacking communists or working for the benefit of capitalists. Communists are open to temporary alliances with all anti-capitalists. Communists will work with liberal parties but understand they work for the capitalists and will call them out every opportunity they're given. The goal of communism is a humanist society and collective human civilization of and by the light triad personalities, abolishing harmful individualism and dark triad personalities where all possible.
Marx's "Wage labor, and Capital" implies: Labor is a commodity whose value is its cost of maintenance, the minimum wage, with commodity prices determined by competition and supply and demand. Capital, being produced things and exchanged commodities, necessitates a working class where current labor is less valued than completed labor. Capitalists accumulate surpluses while workers' earnings are largely consumed by the cost of living. Despite a superficial symbiotic relationship, a fundamental conflict exists due to the capitalist's drive for profit, inherently increasing the wage gap and the worker's dependence as they generate more capital. Capitalists reinvest surplus to cheapen production and undercut rivals, forcing competitors to do the same, leading to increased mechanization and the deskilling of labor, resulting in lower wages and necessitating more family members working, ultimately creating economic crises. The relentless drive for cheaper production through division of labor and machinery intensifies competition among both capitalists and workers. Increased productivity initially benefits the innovating capitalist but soon becomes widespread, forcing them to produce more for less profit per unit, requiring larger markets and driving wages down to the cost of subsistence. Workers are coerced to work harder for the same or less pay, further intensifying competition, while machinery exacerbates unemployment by replacing skilled labor with unskilled. Even during capital growth, workers' relative position worsens as profits increase faster than wages, widening the social divide, demonstrating the antagonistic relationship inherent in capitalism's logic of increasing productivity and decreasing labor value, leading to recurring crises; and turning workers into wage slaves.
The "three sources and three component parts of Marxism," shows the inherent bias against Marxism within bourgeois science, which actively justified wage slavery. Marx's work, drawing upon materialist philosophy (presented as truthful against superstition and idealism, with dialectical materialism illustrating the evolution of matter and extending to historical materialism to show the evolution of civilization), English political economy (labor theory of value and surplus value), and French socialism (the doctrine of class struggle), offered a comprehensive and coherent materialist worldview that stood in stark opposition to superstition and oppression. This framework, developed through a study of capital's history, explains societal development via historical materialism, where evolving productive forces shape economic systems, which in turn determine social consciousness and political structures, using the rise of capitalism from feudalism as a key example; it was asserted that the overthrow of feudalism was merely the replacing of oppressors. Marx's economic analysis in Capital, where he explained more economics, revealed the exploitation inherent in commodity exchange, where labor-power became a commodity generating surplus value for capitalists, leading to capital concentration, unemployment, and crises. While criticizing utopian socialism for its lack of a concrete revolutionary agent, as it failed because it lacked answers, Marxism identified the proletariat and the doctrine of class struggle as the driving force behind historical development, a truth proved in political advancements, as the forces capable of overthrowing oppressive structures, offering the working class a path towards liberation through understanding and organization based on their class interests. This perspective was met with hostility from bourgeois academia because it fundamentally challenged the foundations of capitalist society; Marx's writings were credited with freeing people from religious slavery and exposing their wage slavery, and it was stated that the truth of people still being slaves should unite them under Marxist-Leninism.
"Karl Marx, a Brief biographical sketch with an exposition of Marxism," says Marx was an evolutionist and not a creationist believing nothing is sacred. Materialism is cause and effect (or I don't understand what is being said). Marx explained that the middle class fights the bourgeoisie for self preservation, while the proletariat fights for revolution. Another economic lesson is gone into 🥱. Max exchange, just like Marxist theory explaining economics, repeats itself over and over, just to say everything can be broken down scientifically to nature and evolution. Capitalists exploit everyone with varying means, workers have no country and nations must be disbanded. A bunch of redundant rhetoric is spoken to say the workers must unite against the ruling class and not settle for passive democratic liberal reform. And what is liberal reform, it's no different then the reforms of social fascism; reforms to create Stockholm Syndrome.
"The Communist Manifesto," says basically, under capitalism, all relationships are for personal gain and all interactions are transactions. That it's the workers' duty to use revolutionary means to overthrow the capitalists and then, by any means necessary, including the use of violence, to ensure and install a communist society, abolish anything and everything that divides the people, including but not limited to religion, nations, and family, to make participation in society and unite everyone, rural to urban and continent to continent. And then surrender power to the people once the transition is completed into a stateless (international) communist society, where all resistance and opposition (including that from anarchists) has been defeated and neutralized. Today, Progressives, Blue Wavers, Resisters, Liberals, etc. are brazenly indifferent to the suffering of humanity, prioritizing the interests of their privileged clique above all else. They shamelessly perpetuate the concentration of wealth and power among the elite, further entrenching the oppressive systems they claim to oppose. They masquerade as champions of humanity while advancing a narrow, self-serving, social-Darwinistic agenda that betrays the very principles of humanism. And thus, they are what they fight against. They don't want to end inequality; they want privileges, and thus are not socialist, communist, or anarchist-communist. Poverty, used to oppress, exploit, and cause suffering, would be abolished. This means no landlords or rent, no corporations, but instead, homes and industry. People still get to keep their personal property, such as clothes, furniture, electronics, etc. People get to keep their jobs, but nobody owns them. They are no longer human capital or wage slaves, but that doesn't mean they don't have social obligations. Equality for all means eliminating superiority. All people are equal and one. Women are equal to men, like they were in ancient cultures. And borders and countries no longer exist. There are no foreigners, only humans. Capitalists are indoctrinated to say, "We cannot afford to take care of all of them." I assure you that all 9 billion of us can take care of each other. The only reasons one thinks they cannot take care of each other are greed and superiority, both personal and national. No amount of oppression or exploitation is acceptable, meaning anything that can cause these is to be centralized to avoid potential occurrence. And the needs of humanity will always come first, meaning nobody will go without medical treatment, housing, food, education, clothing, etc. Progressives, Blue Wavers, Resisters, Liberals, etc. are acting like feudal socialists, probably because if they're socialist at all, they're bourgeois socialists (right-wingers) as described by Marx or social fascists, and that is why they are achieving nothing except stocking fear of the elite and powerful. They seek to keep the system and those who run it in power and in control. They are social-Darwinistic in their approach, prioritizing the interests of their own clique over the needs of humanity. Industries will either regress to maintain things and halt human growth or advance, and society must evolve with it. Systems cannot be reformed and must be replaced to benefit all. Also, there cannot be unity if people only want to be concerned with themselves. There's no room for separatists or sectarians. Anarchy is incompatible with unity. Humanity's needs must come before the individual, meaning every member of society cannot be off doing their own thing without first considering the impact on humanity. And anarchists put self before everything. What makes Ancoms different from Ancaps is that, although both are egoist first, Ancoms follow it up with collectivism instead of social Darwinism. Political alliances are acceptable, and revolutions are to be supported as long as there is no compromise on values and principles. No amount of oppression or exploitation is acceptable. Justice and equality must be for all. Society should benefit all, meaning anything that can be used against humanity must be centralized to avoid human exploitation and oppression. There will be a democracy via democratic centralism, but protecting humanity will always take precedence and cannot be compromised or changed.
German philosophy critiqued and condemned the existence of religion, because "The German Ideology Vol. 1, CH 1," implies that human existence is deeply influenced by the social and economic structures in which they live. That people's identities, actions, and thoughts are shaped by their environment suggesting a deterministic view of human nature. Capitalism is inherently exploitative, as it reduces all relationships to transactional exchanges, effectively enslaving individuals to the demands of the market. Communism offers a path to liberation, allowing individuals to control their own production and become part of a unified, international community. The abolition of private property and the state is necessary for the self-preservation of humanity, and the ruling communists must be altruistic in their governance. Ultimately, the chapter implies that a revolutionary transformation is necessary to achieve true freedom and equality, and that this transformation requires a fundamental shift in the way society is organized, from the abolition of religion and aspects of cultures, to certain political views as communism and its principles including athiesm, must be made the universal political ideology and be adopted into all cultures as society becomes egalitarian.
"Socialism, Utopian and Scientific," implies that agnosticism is materialism and that historical materialism explains the development of modern society is rooted in the struggle between different social classes, particularly the bourgeoisie and the working class. Suggesting that capitalism, which emerged from the feudal system, is characterized by inherent contradictions and antagonisms that inevitably lead to social crises and conflicts. That the ultimate solution to these problems lies in the establishment of a socialist society, in which the means of production are collectively owned and controlled by the working class. Requiring the proletariat to seize power, abolish private property, and establish a new mode of production based on social regulation and cooperation; i.e. equitable-egalitarianism. This transformation is not only necessary but also inevitable, as the contradictions of capitalism will ultimately lead to its downfall. Furthermore, the development of socialist thought, from the early socialists like Saint-Simon and Fourier to Marx, has provided a scientifically grounded understanding of the mechanisms of capitalism and the means of overcoming it.
What is to be done Economism is a form of opportunism that undermines the socialist movement's principles and tactics uses by democratic socialists. We need theoretical clarity, critical analysis, and debate within the socialist movements; along with a strong, centralized organization of revolutionaries, rather than the amateurish methods of the Economists. We need an ideological pure political news and information source to unite and organize the revolutionary movement. Remember, 'freedom of criticism' is used to justify opportunistic and revisionist tendencies. There is a difference between the narrow, economistic focus of reformist politics (social-liberal fascism) and the broader, revolutionary goals of politics. Lenin emphasized the importance of party honor and party ties, arguing that opportunism and individualism must be opposed, showing a need for a principled and disciplined approach to socialist politics. The establishment left have turned that into party before policy, how many times have we heard, "vote blue no matter what."
Consciousness in the working-class movement, as spontaneity alone is insufficient for revolutionary change. Socialist ideology must be introduced to the working class from outside, as it won't develop naturally. The working class requires guidance and leadership to achieve revolutionary goals. Economism is misguided and harmful to the socialist movement. Socialists must lead the working-class movement, provide socialist consciousness and guiding it towards revolutionary goals, showing the necessity of a vanguard for the working-class movement. Marxist theory is essential for understanding the relationship between spontaneity and consciousness. Without a clear theoretical foundation, the movement risks being directionless and ineffective. A revolutionary vanguard, guided by Marxist theory and a clear program, is necessary for achieving socialist revolution and the transition to communism's vision for an eventual stateless society.
Socialists should focus on developing comprehensive political consciousness among the working class and all other classes. This requires conscious leadership, direction, and intervention in every sphere of social and political life. Dyelo's program was and is seen as insufficient because it views the political struggle as merely the most developed form of economic struggle. Socialists need to move beyond economism and develop a broad political strategy that prioritizes the interests of the working class and all other classes. To achieve this, Socialists should engage with all classes of society, not just the working class. Propaganda and agitation are crucial for spreading Socialist ideas and developing political consciousness. Intellectuals must play a vital role in providing political knowledge and leadership to the working-class movement. Comprehensive political exposure is necessary for revealing and criticizing the injustices and abuses of the ruling class. Martynov's views on exposure literature were and are seen as too narrow, focusing solely on economic struggles. Instead, literature should be used to develop comprehensive political consciousness. Organizing nationwide exposes the government's abuses and having a nation-wide press are essential for facilitating revolutionary activity. Ultimately, Socialists need to develop and apply a consistently Socialist theory to guide their work, combining conscious leadership, direction, and intervention with a deep understanding of revolutionary theory and history.
Astrong, centralized organization led by professional revolutionaries was necessary to overthrow the capitalist system and establish a socialist society. This organization should be separate from trade union organizations, which focus on improving workers' economic conditions. The organization of revolutionaries should be secret and exclusive, with strict selection of members and training of professional revolutionaries. Stressing the need for discipline, planning, and strategy to achieve movement goals, criticizing the tendency to worship spontaneity and the lack of struggle against the political police. Trade union organizations should be broad and public, aiming to improve workers' economic conditions. Socialists should participate in trade union organizations to guide the movement. However, trade union organizations should maintain their independence from socialist organizations. Professional revolutionaries should lead the labor movement, with strategic planning and coordination, secrecy and security, discipline and organization, adapting to changing circumstances, and provide training and education for revolutionaries; this will increase the active participation of the masses and ultimately achieve revolutionary goals. By centralizing secret functions and promoting professional revolutionaries, this can withstand the pressures of the police and other enemies, and effectively lead the spontaneous struggle of the proletariat.
Leftist critics oppose the idea to create a central information source, saying it was and will be too focused on theory and not enough on action. Claiming detachment from the actual revolutionary work on the ground and promote "armchair ideas." The idea was and is meant to bring everyone together, create a unified movement, and provide a framework for people to work together. It's about creating a powerful tool for organizing and mobilizing people but irresponsible, reckless and unserious people have issues with that because they lack discipline and maturity needed for a revolution. The idea lenin had was an information network of agents who could maintain revolutionary work continuity, train in political awareness, and coordinate actions for a potential uprising. To create a more disciplined and adaptable organizational structure. Something left libertarian ideologies from libsocs ro Ancoms oppose. Lenin criticized them and others for being too negative and critical, saying they weren't offering any constructive solutions. Lenin and his followers knew it was all about creating a strong, unified movement that could make a real difference. The immediate task was to end the current period of disunity and compromise, emphasizing the need for ideological clarity meaning understanding of principles and values of communism needed for a revolution and organizational strength. Unifying the left under communist ideology with a clear plan, a central information source is key to making a revolutionary movement happen.
Lenin implied with "The State and Revolution" that socialist parties have been compromised by opportunism and social-chauvinism (My opinion: since at least 1917), adapting to the interests of national bourgeoisies and states. The struggle for workers' freedom requires a struggle against opportunist prejudices concerning the state. Those who deny the necessity of proletarian class struggle and socialist revolution are opportunists (social fascists), and their methods are insufficient. A rejection of individualistic ideologies prioritizing personal gain over collective well-being and religious ideologies legitimizing oppression is imperative. Understanding the state's role in relation to the socialist proletarian revolution requires focusing on material concerns over spiritual ones. The state is a "special coercive force" that becomes unnecessary when class distinctions are abolished. A violent revolution to abolish the bourgeois state is necessary; afterward, the proletarian state will eventually "wither away" as democracy becomes more complete. The state machine must be smashed by the proletariat, who will establish a new, more democratic form of power. Marx's communist theory emphasizes the dictatorship of the proletariat as a transition to a classless society, which is distorted or ignored by opportunists who reduce Marxism to the theory of class struggle. True Marxist-Leninists recognize the necessity of the dictatorship of the proletariat, a distinction crucial in understanding the responses of opportunists and reformists.
Marx supported the Paris Commune, emphasizing that the working class cannot simply take control of the existing state machinery but must instead smash and destroy it. The Commune replaced the standing army with the armed people, made officials elected and subject to recall, and reduced their salaries to workmen's wages. These measures represented a shift from bourgeois to proletarian democracy, where the majority of people suppressed their oppressors. Representative institutions should be working bodies, not mere talking shops. The abolition of the standing army and the election and recall of officials were seen as a shift from bourgeois to proletarian democracy. Abolishing bureaucracy at once is unrealistic, but smashing the old bureaucratic machine and constructing a new one is feasible. This new machine would make possible the gradual abolition of all bureaucracy. Marx discussed the Commune's plan for national organization, where communes would elect a "National Delegation," transferring power from a central government to communal officials, making them strictly responsible. The Commune's discovery of a new political form, under which the economic emancipation of labor could take place, was a crucial breakthrough.
Marx's conclusions about the state were forgotten, and later socialists misunderstood or distorted his views. Marx and Engels critiqued the anarchists' views on authority and the state. Marx argued that the working class needs a temporary, revolutionary state to achieve its goals. Engels emphasized that authority is necessary in complex societies and that the state will disappear after the socialist revolution. Engels argued that the phrase "free people's state" is nonsensical, suggesting replacing the word "state" with "community," emphasizing that the state is a transitional institution used to suppress adversaries. Marxist-Leninists envision a future communist society where the need for violence and subordination would disappear. Engels distinguished between the "abolition of the state" and the "withering away of the state," emphasizing that the latter is a gradual process. The state, in the context of communist society, would undergo a transformation. Between capitalist and communist societies lies a transitional period, during which the state can only be the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat. In this transitional period, democracy will become more complete, and the need for a special machine of suppression (the state) will begin to disappear. Eventually, communism will make the state absolutely unnecessary.
Marx noted that the first phase of communist society, often referred to as socialism, will still be stamped with the birthmarks of the old capitalist society. The means of production will be collectively owned, and people will receive goods and services based on the amount of labor they contribute. In the higher phase of communist society, people work according to their abilities and receive according to their needs. This phase is characterized by the absence of division of labor, inequality, and the state. The leading theoreticians of the Second International, including Plekhanov and Kautsky, failed to adequately address the question of the relation of the proletarian revolution to the state, evading or ignoring this crucial issue and leading to the distortion and vulgarization of Marxism. Kautsky's writings against opportunism revealed his systematic deviation from Marxism, particularly regarding the state. His failure to address the state's role in the revolution led to a complete swing towards opportunism. Kautsky's controversy with Pannekoek in 1912 further highlighted his retreat from Marxist principles. Pannekoek believed that the state machine must be destroyed and replaced by a new one, with the armed workers in control. Kautsky opposed this view, advocating for a democratic republic where the government would be elected by the people. Ultimately, the controversy between Kautsky and Pannekoek represented a fundamental divide within the socialist movement.
While Kautsky's views were seen as opportunistic and counter to Marxist principles, Pannekoek's views represented a revolutionary approach to socialism. This fundamental divide within the socialist movement highlights the irreconcilable differences between reformist, anarchist-revolutionary and communist-revolutionary approaches to achieving a socialist society and why a big tent between these three ideologies types cannot work but for a temporary amount of time. The second the revolution gets close, the reformists will side with the bourgeoisie to protect the system, and the anarchists will turn on the communists for their attempts to set on motion the replacement of the state. These three are temporary allies at best, each having different principles prioritizing different values and goals.
Lenin's "The Proletarian Revolution and The Renegade Kautsky" implies Kautsky distorted Marx's concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat, interpreting it as abolishing democracy rather than as a transitional phase from capitalism to communism. He redefined dictatorship as a "condition of domination," downplaying revolutionary violence. His emphasis on "pure democracy" and "universal suffrage" was naive, ignoring the class struggle and the role of violence. Kautsky's analysis of the Paris Commune was superficial, missing its lessons on smashing the bourgeois state. His liberal critique of capitalism ignored the violence and oppression inherent in bourgeois democracy, and he was silent on the treatment of striking workers, promoting a deceptive narrative about democracy. He failed to see that democracy under capitalism serves the ruling class, advocating for a meaningless "pure democracy" that obscured class struggle. Marx and Engels clarified that the state is a tool for the rich to exploit the poor, contrasting bourgeois democracy with the more inclusive proletarian democracy in Soviet Russia, where, for example, people elected judges and had more participatory governance. Kautsky's simplistic view of democracy, where the majority decides and the minority submits, ignored class complexities. His objection to Bolsheviks limiting the rich's voting rights contradicted Marx and Engels's views on breaking bourgeois resistance.
The transition to communism requires force against the resistance of the rich, whom Kautsky naively thought could be equal with the poor. He misinterpreted Marx and Engels, cherry-picking quotes to fit liberal ideals while ignoring the necessity of class suppression for proletarian victory. Kautsky's reluctance to see Soviets as state organizations reflected his petty-bourgeois worldview, fearing real class struggle. He misleadingly criticized the Bolsheviks for destroying democracy, ignoring the Soviet republic's advantages over parliamentary democracy. In the revolutionary context, formal rights were secondary to revolutionary interests. The Constituent Assembly was out of touch with the populace's shift towards the Bolsheviks, leading to its dispersal. Kautsky's formalistic approach missed this class analysis. Lenin criticized Kautsky for misunderstanding the Soviet Constitution's disfranchisement of the bourgeoisie, which was a response to their counter-revolutionary actions. Kautsky's internationalist views were reformist (social fascist), contrasting with Lenin's support for revolutionary action over waiting for majority support. Lenin argued the Bolshevik seizure of power was crucial for global inspiration and for establishing a higher form of democracy. He also defended the grain requisition policy against Kautsky's criticisms, highlighting its necessity for urban survival and the war effort. Kautsky's arguments were seen as similar to those of counter-revolutionary bourgeois parties, lacking in practical revolutionary action. Lenin believed Kautsky's work was unnecessary in light of the German revolution, where power had shifted to workers' and soldiers' councils.
Lastly, Lenin critiqued Vandervelde for misrepresenting Marxist concepts, illustrating the ideological bankruptcy of the Second International. Lenin offered a scathing critique of Émile Vandervelde's book "Socialism versus the State," viewing it as a clear sign of the ideological and practical bankruptcy of the Second International. Vandervelde, a prominent Belgian socialist and leader within the International, was accused by Lenin of using Marxist terminology and catchphrases not to advance socialism but to disguise his departure from revolutionary principles. Lenin's critique was part of a broader denouncement of the reformist tendencies within the Second International, which he believed had failed the working class by not preparing for or advocating true revolutionary change, especially during and after the events of World War I. This critique was not just about Vandervelde but was indicative of Lenin's broader disdain for what he saw as the opportunistic and reformist betrayal by many socialist leaders of that era, which in modern times can be paralleled by figures like Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and other members of "The Squad" in the U.S., who are often criticized for blending socialist rhetoric with actions that maintain capitalist structures and the status quo . This ideological battle underscored the split between those advocating for immediate revolutionary action and those preferring gradual reform within capitalist systems (social fascism), a divide that would lead to the formation of the Third International (Comintern) under Lenin's leadership, aiming for a more militant, revolutionary approach to international socialism.
"The Historical Destiny of the Doctrine of Karl Marx" Showed there are three main periods in the development of Marxist doctrine. The first one, from 1848 to 1871, was all about pre-Marxian socialism. But then the revolution of 1848 and the Paris Commune happened, and it became clear that the proletariat was the real socialist force. This led to the creation of independent proletarian parties. The second period, from 1872 to 1904, was pretty quiet, with no major revolutions. Socialist parties started to form and learned how to use parliament and the press. Marxism became super popular, but then liberal opportunism showed up, pretending to be Marxist. These opportunists gave up on the class struggle and just wanted to make things better for workers within the existing system. To day these are your establishment left, your democratic socialists, progressives, and social democrats.The third period, starting in 1905, was a whole different story. The Russian revolution sparked a wave of revolutions across Asia. This period has been all about mass struggle, democratic independence, and the clear difference between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. Both Europe and Asia have shown that liberalism is weak and fake, and that we need a strong, independent democratic movement. Throughout all these periods, Marxist doctrine has been proven right and has achieved some amazing successes. And the best part is, an even bigger triumph is waiting for Marxism in the future. For Lenin, the struggle for socialist ideals was global, with Asia and Europe working together. The main thing rhe implied Marx wanted us to focus on was to stay committed to the class struggle and Marxist principles, and not get fooled by liberal opportunism or non-class socialism.
German philosophy critiqued and condemned the existence of religion, because "The German Ideology Vol. 1, CH 1," implies that human existence is deeply influenced by the social and economic structures in which they live. That people's identities, actions, and thoughts are shaped by their environment suggesting a deterministic view of human nature. Capitalism is inherently exploitative, as it reduces all relationships to transactional exchanges, effectively enslaving individuals to the demands of the market. Communism offers a path to liberation, allowing individuals to control their own production and become part of a unified, international community. The abolition of private property and the state is necessary for the self-preservation of humanity, and the ruling communists must be altruistic in their governance. Ultimately, the chapter implies that a revolutionary transformation is necessary to achieve true freedom and equality, and that this transformation requires a fundamental shift in the way society is organized, from the abolition of religion and aspects of cultures, to certain political views as communism and its principles including athiesm, must be made the universal political ideology and be adopted into all cultures as society becomes egalitarian.
"Socialism, Utopian and Scientific," implies that agnosticism is materialism and that historical materialism explains the development of modern society is rooted in the struggle between different social classes, particularly the bourgeoisie and the working class. Suggesting that capitalism, which emerged from the feudal system, is characterized by inherent contradictions and antagonisms that inevitably lead to social crises and conflicts. That the ultimate solution to these problems lies in the establishment of a socialist society, in which the means of production are collectively owned and controlled by the working class. Requiring the proletariat to seize power, abolish private property, and establish a new mode of production based on social regulation and cooperation; i.e. equitable-egalitarianism. This transformation is not only necessary but also inevitable, as the contradictions of capitalism will ultimately lead to its downfall. Furthermore, the development of socialist thought, from the early socialists like Saint-Simon and Fourier to Marx, has provided a scientifically grounded understanding of the mechanisms of capitalism and the means of overcoming it.
What is to be done Economism is a form of opportunism that undermines the socialist movement's principles and tactics uses by democratic socialists. We need theoretical clarity, critical analysis, and debate within the socialist movements; along with a strong, centralized organization of revolutionaries, rather than the amateurish methods of the Economists. We need an ideological pure political news and information source to unite and organize the revolutionary movement. Remember, 'freedom of criticism' is used to justify opportunistic and revisionist tendencies. There is a difference between the narrow, economistic focus of reformist politics (social-liberal fascism) and the broader, revolutionary goals of politics. Lenin emphasized the importance of party honor and party ties, arguing that opportunism and individualism must be opposed, showing a need for a principled and disciplined approach to socialist politics. The establishment left have turned that into party before policy, how many times have we heard, "vote blue no matter what."
Consciousness in the working-class movement, as spontaneity alone is insufficient for revolutionary change. Socialist ideology must be introduced to the working class from outside, as it won't develop naturally. The working class requires guidance and leadership to achieve revolutionary goals. Economism is misguided and harmful to the socialist movement. Socialists must lead the working-class movement, provide socialist consciousness and guiding it towards revolutionary goals, showing the necessity of a vanguard for the working-class movement. Marxist theory is essential for understanding the relationship between spontaneity and consciousness. Without a clear theoretical foundation, the movement risks being directionless and ineffective. A revolutionary vanguard, guided by Marxist theory and a clear program, is necessary for achieving socialist revolution and the transition to communism's vision for an eventual stateless society.
Socialists should focus on developing comprehensive political consciousness among the working class and all other classes. This requires conscious leadership, direction, and intervention in every sphere of social and political life. Dyelo's program was and is seen as insufficient because it views the political struggle as merely the most developed form of economic struggle. Socialists need to move beyond economism and develop a broad political strategy that prioritizes the interests of the working class and all other classes. To achieve this, Socialists should engage with all classes of society, not just the working class. Propaganda and agitation are crucial for spreading Socialist ideas and developing political consciousness. Intellectuals must play a vital role in providing political knowledge and leadership to the working-class movement. Comprehensive political exposure is necessary for revealing and criticizing the injustices and abuses of the ruling class. Martynov's views on exposure literature were and are seen as too narrow, focusing solely on economic struggles. Instead, literature should be used to develop comprehensive political consciousness. Organizing nationwide exposes the government's abuses and having a nation-wide press are essential for facilitating revolutionary activity. Ultimately, Socialists need to develop and apply a consistently Socialist theory to guide their work, combining conscious leadership, direction, and intervention with a deep understanding of revolutionary theory and history.
Astrong, centralized organization led by professional revolutionaries was necessary to overthrow the capitalist system and establish a socialist society. This organization should be separate from trade union organizations, which focus on improving workers' economic conditions. The organization of revolutionaries should be secret and exclusive, with strict selection of members and training of professional revolutionaries. Stressing the need for discipline, planning, and strategy to achieve movement goals, criticizing the tendency to worship spontaneity and the lack of struggle against the political police. Trade union organizations should be broad and public, aiming to improve workers' economic conditions. Socialists should participate in trade union organizations to guide the movement. However, trade union organizations should maintain their independence from socialist organizations. Professional revolutionaries should lead the labor movement, with strategic planning and coordination, secrecy and security, discipline and organization, adapting to changing circumstances, and provide training and education for revolutionaries; this will increase the active participation of the masses and ultimately achieve revolutionary goals. By centralizing secret functions and promoting professional revolutionaries, this can withstand the pressures of the police and other enemies, and effectively lead the spontaneous struggle of the proletariat.
Leftist critics oppose the idea to create a central information source, saying it was and will be too focused on theory and not enough on action. Claiming detachment from the actual revolutionary work on the ground and promote "armchair ideas." The idea was and is meant to bring everyone together, create a unified movement, and provide a framework for people to work together. It's about creating a powerful tool for organizing and mobilizing people but irresponsible, reckless and unserious people have issues with that because they lack discipline and maturity needed for a revolution. The idea lenin had was an information network of agents who could maintain revolutionary work continuity, train in political awareness, and coordinate actions for a potential uprising. To create a more disciplined and adaptable organizational structure. Something left libertarian ideologies from libsocs ro Ancoms oppose. Lenin criticized them and others for being too negative and critical, saying they weren't offering any constructive solutions. Lenin and his followers knew it was all about creating a strong, unified movement that could make a real difference. The immediate task was to end the current period of disunity and compromise, emphasizing the need for ideological clarity meaning understanding of principles and values of communism needed for a revolution and organizational strength. Unifying the left under communist ideology with a clear plan, a central information source is key to making a revolutionary movement happen.
Lenin implied with "The State and Revolution" that socialist parties have been compromised by opportunism and social-chauvinism (My opinion: since at least 1917), adapting to the interests of national bourgeoisies and states. The struggle for workers' freedom requires a struggle against opportunist prejudices concerning the state. Those who deny the necessity of proletarian class struggle and socialist revolution are opportunists (social fascists), and their methods are insufficient. A rejection of individualistic ideologies prioritizing personal gain over collective well-being and religious ideologies legitimizing oppression is imperative. Understanding the state's role in relation to the socialist proletarian revolution requires focusing on material concerns over spiritual ones. The state is a "special coercive force" that becomes unnecessary when class distinctions are abolished. A violent revolution to abolish the bourgeois state is necessary; afterward, the proletarian state will eventually "wither away" as democracy becomes more complete. The state machine must be smashed by the proletariat, who will establish a new, more democratic form of power. Marx's communist theory emphasizes the dictatorship of the proletariat as a transition to a classless society, which is distorted or ignored by opportunists who reduce Marxism to the theory of class struggle. True Marxist-Leninists recognize the necessity of the dictatorship of the proletariat, a distinction crucial in understanding the responses of opportunists and reformists.
Marx supported the Paris Commune, emphasizing that the working class cannot simply take control of the existing state machinery but must instead smash and destroy it. The Commune replaced the standing army with the armed people, made officials elected and subject to recall, and reduced their salaries to workmen's wages. These measures represented a shift from bourgeois to proletarian democracy, where the majority of people suppressed their oppressors. Representative institutions should be working bodies, not mere talking shops. The abolition of the standing army and the election and recall of officials were seen as a shift from bourgeois to proletarian democracy. Abolishing bureaucracy at once is unrealistic, but smashing the old bureaucratic machine and constructing a new one is feasible. This new machine would make possible the gradual abolition of all bureaucracy. Marx discussed the Commune's plan for national organization, where communes would elect a "National Delegation," transferring power from a central government to communal officials, making them strictly responsible. The Commune's discovery of a new political form, under which the economic emancipation of labor could take place, was a crucial breakthrough.
Marx's conclusions about the state were forgotten, and later socialists misunderstood or distorted his views. Marx and Engels critiqued the anarchists' views on authority and the state. Marx argued that the working class needs a temporary, revolutionary state to achieve its goals. Engels emphasized that authority is necessary in complex societies and that the state will disappear after the socialist revolution. Engels argued that the phrase "free people's state" is nonsensical, suggesting replacing the word "state" with "community," emphasizing that the state is a transitional institution used to suppress adversaries. Marxist-Leninists envision a future communist society where the need for violence and subordination would disappear. Engels distinguished between the "abolition of the state" and the "withering away of the state," emphasizing that the latter is a gradual process. The state, in the context of communist society, would undergo a transformation. Between capitalist and communist societies lies a transitional period, during which the state can only be the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat. In this transitional period, democracy will become more complete, and the need for a special machine of suppression (the state) will begin to disappear. Eventually, communism will make the state absolutely unnecessary.
Marx noted that the first phase of communist society, often referred to as socialism, will still be stamped with the birthmarks of the old capitalist society. The means of production will be collectively owned, and people will receive goods and services based on the amount of labor they contribute. In the higher phase of communist society, people work according to their abilities and receive according to their needs. This phase is characterized by the absence of division of labor, inequality, and the state. The leading theoreticians of the Second International, including Plekhanov and Kautsky, failed to adequately address the question of the relation of the proletarian revolution to the state, evading or ignoring this crucial issue and leading to the distortion and vulgarization of Marxism. Kautsky's writings against opportunism revealed his systematic deviation from Marxism, particularly regarding the state. His failure to address the state's role in the revolution led to a complete swing towards opportunism. Kautsky's controversy with Pannekoek in 1912 further highlighted his retreat from Marxist principles. Pannekoek believed that the state machine must be destroyed and replaced by a new one, with the armed workers in control. Kautsky opposed this view, advocating for a democratic republic where the government would be elected by the people. Ultimately, the controversy between Kautsky and Pannekoek represented a fundamental divide within the socialist movement.
While Kautsky's views were seen as opportunistic and counter to Marxist principles, Pannekoek's views represented a revolutionary approach to socialism. This fundamental divide within the socialist movement highlights the irreconcilable differences between reformist, anarchist-revolutionary and communist-revolutionary approaches to achieving a socialist society and why a big tent between these three ideologies types cannot work but for a temporary amount of time. The second the revolution gets close, the reformists will side with the bourgeoisie to protect the system, and the anarchists will turn on the communists for their attempts to set on motion the replacement of the state. These three are temporary allies at best, each having different principles prioritizing different values and goals.
Lenin's "The Proletarian Revolution and The Renegade Kautsky" implies Kautsky distorted Marx's concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat, interpreting it as abolishing democracy rather than as a transitional phase from capitalism to communism. He redefined dictatorship as a "condition of domination," downplaying revolutionary violence. His emphasis on "pure democracy" and "universal suffrage" was naive, ignoring the class struggle and the role of violence. Kautsky's analysis of the Paris Commune was superficial, missing its lessons on smashing the bourgeois state. His liberal critique of capitalism ignored the violence and oppression inherent in bourgeois democracy, and he was silent on the treatment of striking workers, promoting a deceptive narrative about democracy. He failed to see that democracy under capitalism serves the ruling class, advocating for a meaningless "pure democracy" that obscured class struggle. Marx and Engels clarified that the state is a tool for the rich to exploit the poor, contrasting bourgeois democracy with the more inclusive proletarian democracy in Soviet Russia, where, for example, people elected judges and had more participatory governance. Kautsky's simplistic view of democracy, where the majority decides and the minority submits, ignored class complexities. His objection to Bolsheviks limiting the rich's voting rights contradicted Marx and Engels's views on breaking bourgeois resistance.
The transition to communism requires force against the resistance of the rich, whom Kautsky naively thought could be equal with the poor. He misinterpreted Marx and Engels, cherry-picking quotes to fit liberal ideals while ignoring the necessity of class suppression for proletarian victory. Kautsky's reluctance to see Soviets as state organizations reflected his petty-bourgeois worldview, fearing real class struggle. He misleadingly criticized the Bolsheviks for destroying democracy, ignoring the Soviet republic's advantages over parliamentary democracy. In the revolutionary context, formal rights were secondary to revolutionary interests. The Constituent Assembly was out of touch with the populace's shift towards the Bolsheviks, leading to its dispersal. Kautsky's formalistic approach missed this class analysis. Lenin criticized Kautsky for misunderstanding the Soviet Constitution's disfranchisement of the bourgeoisie, which was a response to their counter-revolutionary actions. Kautsky's internationalist views were reformist (social fascist), contrasting with Lenin's support for revolutionary action over waiting for majority support. Lenin argued the Bolshevik seizure of power was crucial for global inspiration and for establishing a higher form of democracy. He also defended the grain requisition policy against Kautsky's criticisms, highlighting its necessity for urban survival and the war effort. Kautsky's arguments were seen as similar to those of counter-revolutionary bourgeois parties, lacking in practical revolutionary action. Lenin believed Kautsky's work was unnecessary in light of the German revolution, where power had shifted to workers' and soldiers' councils.
Lastly, Lenin critiqued Vandervelde for misrepresenting Marxist concepts, illustrating the ideological bankruptcy of the Second International. Lenin offered a scathing critique of Émile Vandervelde's book "Socialism versus the State," viewing it as a clear sign of the ideological and practical bankruptcy of the Second International. Vandervelde, a prominent Belgian socialist and leader within the International, was accused by Lenin of using Marxist terminology and catchphrases not to advance socialism but to disguise his departure from revolutionary principles. Lenin's critique was part of a broader denouncement of the reformist tendencies within the Second International, which he believed had failed the working class by not preparing for or advocating true revolutionary change, especially during and after the events of World War I. This critique was not just about Vandervelde but was indicative of Lenin's broader disdain for what he saw as the opportunistic and reformist betrayal by many socialist leaders of that era, which in modern times can be paralleled by figures like Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and other members of "The Squad" in the U.S., who are often criticized for blending socialist rhetoric with actions that maintain capitalist structures and the status quo . This ideological battle underscored the split between those advocating for immediate revolutionary action and those preferring gradual reform within capitalist systems (social fascism), a divide that would lead to the formation of the Third International (Comintern) under Lenin's leadership, aiming for a more militant, revolutionary approach to international socialism.
"The Historical Destiny of the Doctrine of Karl Marx" Showed there are three main periods in the development of Marxist doctrine. The first one, from 1848 to 1871, was all about pre-Marxian socialism. But then the revolution of 1848 and the Paris Commune happened, and it became clear that the proletariat was the real socialist force. This led to the creation of independent proletarian parties. The second period, from 1872 to 1904, was pretty quiet, with no major revolutions. Socialist parties started to form and learned how to use parliament and the press. Marxism became super popular, but then liberal opportunism showed up, pretending to be Marxist. These opportunists gave up on the class struggle and just wanted to make things better for workers within the existing system. To day these are your establishment left, your democratic socialists, progressives, and social democrats.The third period, starting in 1905, was a whole different story. The Russian revolution sparked a wave of revolutions across Asia. This period has been all about mass struggle, democratic independence, and the clear difference between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. Both Europe and Asia have shown that liberalism is weak and fake, and that we need a strong, independent democratic movement. Throughout all these periods, Marxist doctrine has been proven right and has achieved some amazing successes. And the best part is, an even bigger triumph is waiting for Marxism in the future. For Lenin, the struggle for socialist ideals was global, with Asia and Europe working together. The main thing rhe implied Marx wanted us to focus on was to stay committed to the class struggle and Marxist principles, and not get fooled by liberal opportunism or non-class socialism.
"Opportunism and the collapse of the second international" by Lenin implied, the Second International failed to denounce the war, exposing its internal conflicts. The 1912 Basle Manifesto criticized imperialist wars, advocating for proletarian revolution by highlighting the capitalist motives behind these conflicts. However, some socialist leaders supported national war efforts, betraying socialist principles and revealing deep divisions within the movement. This period marked a clear split between revolutionary and opportunist socialism, with opportunism aligning openly with the bourgeoisie, leading to a necessary break from these opportunists to advance the proletarian struggle. The bourgeoisie cheered on socialist parties that turned opportunist, rewarding leaders with government positions or legal status for supporting imperialism. In Germany, the Social-Democratic Party became counter-revolutionary, with internal conflicts labeled "class hatred." Opportunists wanted to keep the old party unity that benefited the bourgeoisie. "Monitor" warned that moving further right would lead to a more radical new party. Kautsky tried to pacify militant workers with empty revolutionary talk. Engels criticized the Fabians for fearing revolution, while Kautsky pushed "ultra-imperialism," and Axelrod was seen as too cautious, talking revolution for the distant future but opposing it in the present.
Revolutionaries should urge workers to reject opportunists and engage in revolutionary action now, not wait. Kautsky and Axelrod's strategies were counter-revolutionary, protecting opportunists (social fascists). David, a leading German opportunist, opposed turning the world war into civil war, unlike Lenin's proactive approach for revolution. David criticized revolutionary tactics as "folly," a view Plekhanov echoed, calling them a "farcical dream." However, tactics by Liebknecht and the Zimmerwald Left were necessary responses to the crisis, focusing on illegal organizations to spread truth and push for revolution, aiming for a proletarian victory. The Second International fell apart because of what Lenin called social-chauvinism, which was basically opportunism on steroids, where socialist parties cheered for their national war efforts, completely against what socialism should stand for. This was all part of a plan by the ruling class to water down the revolutionary spirit. Only the leaders got to vote on supporting the war, leaving the working class out in the cold. This split was necessary for the real revolutionaries to push forward, with Kautsky and others mixing opportunism with revolutionary talk, leading to ideological clashes. All this showed that for socialism to work, leaders need to stick to their guns, engage in real revolutionary action because after the war, class conflicts got sharper, and the masses were ready for something big.
"The Collapse of the Second International" Implied The International Socialist movement collapsed during World War I as its leaders failed to uphold socialist principles. Despite the Basle Manifesto of 1912 explicitly condemning imperialist wars, prominent figures like Karl Kautsky and Georgi Plekhanov supported their nations' war efforts, betraying socialist convictions with nationalist and imperialist rhetoric. They ignored or distorted the manifesto's call for opposition to such conflicts. Kautsky and Plekhanov justified their positions with simplistic arguments; Plekhanov with the "who started it?" approach, and Kautsky by claiming defending one's homeland was a right and duty, both misrepresenting Marxism to align with national interests. They overlooked the war's imperialist nature and the exploitation of the working class.
Kautsky's theory of "ultra-imperialism" suggested a new phase of capitalism where global finance capital would exploit the world without national conflicts, potentially leading to peace. However, this was criticized as an opportunist distortion, ignoring that imperialism is inherently tied to capitalism. His vision of peaceful democracy replacing imperialism was seen as naive, failing to recognize the escalating tensions within capitalism and the inevitability of further wars and revolutions. These ideas, part of "Struvism," were accused of stripping Marxism of its revolutionary essence, turning it into a tool for justifying collaboration with the bourgeoisie. Kautsky's theories were further critiqued for promoting division among the proletariat by favoring national opportunists over international solidarity.
The war revealed the deep-seated nationalist tendencies within the socialist movement, necessitating a re-examination of commitments to internationalism and anti-imperialism. Lenin criticized these leaders as social-chauvinists, highlighting the dire consequences of their actions: the fragmentation of the socialist movement and the rise of communist parties. The situation was ripe for revolution, with economic disparity and public unrest at its peak, yet leaders like Kautsky and Karl Legien chose to prioritize maintaining legal organizations over revolutionary action, fearing dissolution and arrests. This was seen as opportunistic and a betrayal of socialist ideals, advocating instead for a blend of legal and illegal methods, as exemplified by Russian Social-Democrats.
The betrayal of socialist principles by leaders of the Second International during World War I wasn't merely theoretical; it had profound practical implications. The war's exposure of opportunism necessitated a complete organizational severance of these elements from workers' parties. The epoch of imperialism couldn't accommodate both revolutionary proletarians and semi-petty-bourgeois aristocrats within the same party. Kautsky's "golden mean" theory, which used Marxist catchwords to justify opportunist practices (i.e. social-fascism), was seen as a significant deception of the workers. Amidst the war, the proletariat, previously disunited by chauvinism and martial law, began to develop revolutionary sentiments, with the potential for a sudden change in mood similar to the "Gaponade" in Russia in 1905.
Lenin's "Imperialism and the split on Socialism" Implied By the early 20th century, imperialism in America and Europe had hit its peak, turning into what was called monopoly, parasitic, and decaying capitalism. A few "Great" Powers were exploiting millions in less developed nations. Karl Kautsky had this idea that imperialism was just a finance capital policy, but that was seen as a weak definition since it didn't connect the dots between imperial politics and economics. His theory was criticized for being more about justifying a comfy, reformist approach than following true Marxism. Meanwhile, the Russian Kautskyites like Axelrod, Martov, and Trotsky kept quiet on this whole Kautskyism issue. On the flip side, J.A. Hobson from England hit the nail on the head, pointing out how imperialism was all about economic parasitism, where richer countries sucked resources from their colonies to spoil their own elites and keep their workers happy enough not to rock the boat. He warned about this creating a kind of Western parasitism, where the rich countries would live off the tribute from places like Asia and Africa, potentially leading to a future where the actual industries would vanish, replaced by goods from colonies. Marx and Engels had already seen this coming in England, where the industrial boom meant British workers got better deals, but at the cost of becoming too cozy with the bosses, leading to what they called a "bourgeois labor party." This party was more about keeping the bourgeoisie happy than fighting for workers.
As the 20th century rolled in, new powers like the US, France, and Germany joined the imperialist game, competing for more territories and resources, which just meant more exploitation for colonized folks. The rich used this wealth to keep labor leaders in their pockets, creating these "bourgeois labor parties" that weren't really for the workers. The message was clear: the labor movement needed to wake up, reject these bribes from the rich, and get back to truly representing the working class. This meant a big shake-up in how labor movements operated, focusing on class struggle rather than playing nice with the bosses. The political scene was all about manipulating the masses with promises and lies, with figures like Lloyd George in England or Scheidemann and Plekhanov elsewhere using their clout to keep workers loyal to the bourgeoisie, not their own class. Despite the spin, the workers weren't buying it, increasingly seeing through these leaders. The Kautskyites tried to smooth things over between workers and these "bourgeois" parties, but it was a lost cause. Marx and Engels had warned of this opportunism, noting how even trade unions, supposed to be for the workers, got corrupted. Engels made a point to call out the difference between the sold-out "bourgeois labor party" and the real working class, those not caught up in being "respectable."
The core of Marxist strategy was to fight against this opportunism by making the working class aware of how they were being misled. This meant highlighting the betrayals by leaders who were more interested in keeping their own privileges than in advancing the workers' cause. The goal was to educate the masses about their genuine political interests, steering them away from the false promises of the bourgeoisie and towards true class solidarity. This fight involved a lot of grassroots work, like organizing, educating, and agitating. It was about showing workers that the so-called "labor leaders" were often just part of the system they were supposed to be fighting against. By revealing how these leaders were defending only the temporary advantages of a small segment of workers, Marxists aimed to unite the broader working class under a revolutionary banner. The strategy included leveraging events like strikes, protests, and economic downturns to demonstrate the failures of capitalism under imperialism. It was about building a movement that wouldn't be co-opted by the bourgeoisie, one that genuinely represented the interests of all workers, not just a privileged few. This meant advocating for internationalism over nationalism, recognizing that workers worldwide shared common enemies in the form of imperialist powers. Ultimately, the aim was to prepare the proletariat for a revolution that would dismantle the capitalist structures of imperialism. This wasn't just about economic reform but about a total transformation of society, where the workers would take control of production and governance, ending the exploitation both at home and abroad. It was about creating a world where the interests of the many would finally outweigh the interests of the few, ushering in an era of true socialism.
"Certain features of the historical development of Marxism," Implied Marxism, as emphasized by Engels, was not a dogma, but a guide to action. However, this aspect of Marxism was often lost sight of, leading to a one-sided and distorted understanding of the doctrine. In Russia, the years leading up to the early 20th century saw abrupt changes in the social and political situation, necessitating a re-evaluation of Marxist principles. These changes can be divided into two distinct three-year periods: one ending around 1907 and the other around 1910. The first period was marked by rapid changes in the state system, with various classes actively engaging in different fields. This led to a clash between two different tendencies in Russia's bourgeois development, forcing Marxists to provide theoretical formulations corresponding to these tendencies.
In contrast, the second period was characterized by stagnation, with medieval diehards propagating a spirit of dejection and recantation. This led to a loss of faith in reforms and a growing interest in anti-social doctrines and mysticism. The change from one period to the other was a natural consequence of the preceding period's events. As a living guide to action, Marxism reflected the changes in the conditions of social life. However, this led to a profound disintegration and disunity among Marxists, with various trends and ideologies emerging. The crisis of Marxism was characterized by a revision of its philosophical fundamentals, the influence of bourgeois philosophy, and the prevalence of empty phrase-mongering. Un-Marxist trends emerged, including otzovism and the recognition of otzovism as a "legal shade" of Marxism. The spirit of renunciation and liberalism also permeated some Marxist trends. The purpose of the article was to illustrate the depth of the crisis and its connection to the social and economic situation.
The questions raised by this crisis could not be brushed aside, and it was essential to rally all Marxists who realized the profundity of the crisis and the necessity of combating it. This required a resolute resistance to disintegration and a struggle to uphold the fundamentals of Marxism. The dialectics of historical development reflected the astonishingly abrupt change in the conditions of social life. This change was reflected in profound disintegration and disunity, in every manner of vacillation, and in a very serious internal crisis of Marxism. Resolute resistance to this disintegration and a resolute struggle to uphold the fundamentals of Marxism were again placed on the order of the day. The repetition of "slogans" learnt by rote but not understood had led to empty phrase-mongering and un-Marxist trends. The first three years had awakened wide sections to a conscious participation in social life, sections that were now beginning to acquaint themselves with Marxism in real earnest. The bourgeois press was creating far more fallacious ideas on this score than ever before, and was spreading them more widely. Under these circumstances, disintegration in the Marxist ranks was particularly dangerous. Therefore, to understand the reasons for the inevitability of this disintegration at the present time and to close their ranks for consistent struggle against this disintegration was, in the most direct and precise meaning of the term, the task of the day for Marxists.
"Marxism and Revisionism," implied that In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Marxism faced significant resistance due to its implications for capitalist societies. Marxist doctrines, advocating for the enlightenment, organization, and revolution of the working class, met opposition from bourgeois scholars and theologians. Marxism contended with philosophical idealism, economic theories like Proudhonism, and other socialist factions. As Marxism influenced labor movements, it clashed with anarchism and other ideologies within workers' organizations like the International.
By the 1890s, Marxism had largely triumphed within the labor movement, with Latin countries adopting Marxist principles. However, revisionism, led by figures like Bernstein, challenged traditional Marxism. Revisionists proposed amendments, suggesting capitalism could evolve without revolutionary overthrow, citing new economic developments like cartels and trusts. Orthodox Marxists, like Plekhanov, critiqued revisionism as theoretically unsound, blurring class consciousness and diluting revolutionary potential. Marxist thinkers emphasized class struggle, dialectical materialism, and historical determinism, advocating for workers' enlightenment and organization.
The debates between revolutionary Marxism and revisionism highlighted fundamental disagreements about capitalism's future, class conflict, and socialism's path. Orthodox Marxists saw revisionism as a threat to revolutionary potential, while revisionists argued for democratic reforms. This ideological struggle reflected broader societal tensions between capitalist evolution and socialist revolution.
"Marxism and reformism," Implied Marxists were okay with fighting for reforms, things that made workers' lives better without upending the capitalist system. But they had a major issue with reformists, who were all about chasing small victories without aiming for the big overthrow. Reformism was and still are seen as the bourgeoisie's way of pacifying workers, keeping them content with their lot as wage slaves. The liberal elite would and still offer reforms but then claw them back or use them to keep workers divided and under control. Even if reformists were sincere, in practice, their ideas just diluted the workers' revolutionary spirit. History showed that those who bought into reformism ended up getting played.
However, workers who really understood Marx knew that under capitalism, reforms were just temporary fixes. They used these reforms to sharpen their fight against wage slavery. Reformists tried to distract workers with small gains, but those who saw through the trickery used reforms to fortify their class struggle. These reformist tactics are that of the modern Labour Party (UK), Democratic Party (US), and Liberal Party (CAN) who continue to derail worker revolutionary progress.
The more reformist ideas took hold among workers, the weaker their fight became, making it easier for the bourgeoisie to undo any progress. But when workers maintained their independence and kept broader goals in sight, they were better at keeping and using these reforms. Reformists were everywhere, trying to lull workers into complacency. In Russia, the liquidators were the reformists, pushing for a legal party and forgetting the revolutionary past. When they had to defend themselves, their arguments didn't hold up.
For example, Sedov from the liquidators dropped two of Marx's key demands, keeping only the eight-hour day, which was just a reform. Their big conference did the same, pushing non-reformist demands to the sidelines. They even criticized workers' movements that aimed beyond reformism, dismissing them as foolish. In practice, while the liquidators claimed not to be all about reforms, their actions told a different story. Meanwhile, Marxists were on the ground, not just advocating for but strategically using reforms in elections, union activities, and legal fights.
By abandoning Marxism, the liquidators were just muddling the workers' movement. They also tried to equate Russia's political situation with Europe's, ignoring Russia's unique history and struggles. In Europe, reformism meant ditching Marxism for a bourgeois social policy, but in Russia, it meant undermining the Marxist organization and settling for a liberal-labor approach, which was a step back from true revolutionary aims.
“Left-Wing” Communism: an Infantile Disorder Implied, The Russian Revolution of 1917, led by the Bolsheviks, had far-reaching implications beyond Russia's borders. Lenin believed the revolution's core elements had universal relevance, but acknowledged that Russia's status as a revolutionary model would likely diminish once the proletarian revolution succeeded in more developed countries.
The Bolsheviks' success was attributed to their strict discipline, centralized approach, and close ties with the working class. Their strategic flexibility and critical analysis of political situations allowed them to navigate revolutionary politics and shape Marxist thought and practice for decades to follow.
The Russian Revolution demonstrated the importance of adapting strategies to specific contexts. The Bolsheviks' cautious approach allowed them to seize power in 1917. In Germany, Communist Party infighting occurred between mainstream and opposition groups. The opposition advocated for a proletarian dictatorship and criticized parliamentary methods, but their stance was seen as simplistic. The Bolsheviks emphasized engaging with trade unions and participating in parliamentary activities to educate and organize workers, approaches the German "Left" Communists rejected.
The "Dutch-Left" and German "Left" Communists' rejection of parliamentary participation and compromise was criticized for its historical inaccuracies and logical fallacies. The Bolsheviks, on the other hand, emphasized the importance of combining legal and illegal struggle, and engaging in all levels of workers' organizations.
The "Left" Communists' approach was seen as simplistic, dismissing parliaments and rejecting compromise, which could alienate the party from the broader working class and small peasants. They also lacked strategic thinking, failing to recognize the need for temporary alliances and tactical maneuvers to strengthen their position and educate the masses.
The Bolsheviks' approach, in contrast, emphasized strategic flexibility and compromise. They believed in combining legal and illegal struggle, using both parliamentary and non-parliamentary means to advance the revolutionary cause. They also participated in all levels of workers' organizations to educate and organize workers towards socialism, using temporary alliances and tactical maneuvers to strengthen their position, educate the masses, and isolate opportunists.
In the early 1920s, Britain's communist movement gained momentum, but disagreements arose over parliamentary participation and Labour Party affiliation. The "Left" opposed parliament, viewing it as a compromise with reactionary forces, driven by a hatred for bourgeois politicians and a desire for direct communism. However, critics argued that this approach lacked strategy and that working within existing structures like Parliament was necessary to expose leadership inadequacies and prepare the masses for communism.
The proposed strategy for British Communists involved uniting into a single party, participating in parliamentary elections, and possibly forming tactical agreements with Labour leaders. This approach aimed to increase visibility, demonstrate parliamentary democracy's limitations, and advance Soviet-style governance.
The Russian Revolution of 1905 marked a significant chapter in world history, showcasing the proletariat's influence. The emergence of Soviets challenged bourgeois parliamentarianism and democracy, inspiring a global working-class movement against Menshevism and Left-wing communism. The Third International gained ground, defeating the Second International, and Communists had to adapt tactics to engage broader masses and navigate complex class dynamics.
"Anti-Dühring by Frederick Engels 1877 Part III: Socialism" Implied Marx, as explained by Engels, criticized utopian socialists like Saint-Simon, Fourier, and Owen as unrealistic dreamers. Their idealized solutions ignored economic realities, history, and class struggle. Society is shaped by production and trade, and its structures evolve with economic changes. Capitalism replaced feudalism but now faces similar contradictions, with workers bearing the brunt of crises, unemployment, and inequality caused by its inability to manage productivity. The solution is for society, not just workers, to control production, aligning it with its social nature to end chaos and enable planned progress for all. The proletariat's mission is universal emancipation, and scientific socialism provides the theoretical framework to understand and achieve this.
Herr Dühring's economic commune was deeply flawed. Its principle of "equal labor for equal labor" led to accumulation, inequality, and exploitation, while its use of money enabled usury. The idea of "true value" was impractical, as labor cannot have a separate value, and paying workers the "full proceeds of labor" was unworkable. Dühring's proposal undermined socialist principles and failed to address economic realities.
Dühring's vision of a future society was authoritarian and regressive. It (rightfully, my opinion) banned religion but also restricted or regulated individual freedom (which is only okay if done right, again my opinion), and imposed a rigid, narrow education system focused on outdated sciences and his own philosophy. His moralistic views on marriage and relationships lacked practical guidance and emphasized an abstract "perfection of the human form." Dühring's sexist and hypocritical stance on women's experiences ignored their realities, criticizing prostitution and marital double standards without understanding their lives. His ideas, likely influenced by personal limitations, were unrealistic, outdated, and disconnected from human experiences.
"The foundation of Leninism," an extension of Marxism developed by Vladimir Lenin, focuses on imperialism's contradictions and the revolutionary potential of the working class to overthrow capitalism and establish socialism. Emerging in Russia, it addresses global imperialism, highlighting monopolistic corporations, financial group struggles, and the exploitation of colonized peoples. Leninism is a dynamic, adaptable theory of proletarian revolution, emphasizing tactics like mass mobilization, political general strikes, and the need for the working class to seize power in favorable conditions. It tests theoretical ideas in real-world struggles, reorganizes party work through self-criticism, and trains new leaders under proletarian rule, recognizing that both capitalists and the working class may prioritize self-interest over humanity in the modern era.
Lenin transformed the imperialist war into a civil war, critiquing the ineffective Second International and emphasizing party sincerity, learning from mistakes, and focusing on finance capital's dominance, capital export, and the financial oligarchy's power. He viewed these as exposing monopolistic capitalism's parasitic nature, driving the masses toward revolution. Considering the global economy, Lenin argued that imperialism's chain breaks at its weakest links, with bourgeois-democratic revolutions leading to proletarian ones. He rejected "permanent revolution," insisting power must transfer to the proletariat after exhausting peasant revolutionary energy. The dictatorship of the proletariat, a ruthless war against the bourgeoisie, is essential for socialism, tasked with breaking resistance, organizing construction, and arming against foreign enemies in a long, conflict-ridden transition from capitalism to communism.
Soviet power, uniting local Soviets into a state led by the proletariat, combines legislative and executive functions to dismantle bureaucratic and judicial remnants, drawing masses into democratic administration for labor emancipation. Leninism shaped Soviet power, recognizing the peasantry's revolutionary potential, leading to the 1917 February Revolution. Post-consolidation, Lenin prioritized economic tasks like strengthening nationalized industry and linking it with the peasant economy through co-operatives, supported by state initiatives like the Flax Centre, viewing small peasants as allies in building socialism.
On the national question, Leninism links self-determination to anti-imperialism, subordinating national rights to proletarian revolution and judging movements by their impact on imperialism. It divides the world into oppressor and oppressed nations, requiring unity against imperialism for a single world economic system, with the October Revolution succeeding due to imperialist distractions. Lenin emphasized strategic leadership—utilizing reserves, concentrating forces, and choosing the right moment—while tactical leadership mastered all struggle forms, focusing on central tasks. Revolutionaries see reforms as by-products to strengthen revolution, unlike reformists who prioritize them, making alliance impossible.
The Party, central to Leninism, is the proletariat's highest organizational form, providing political leadership, training workers, and maintaining iron discipline to achieve and sustain the dictatorship of the proletariat. Combining Russian revolutionary sweep with American efficiency, Leninism avoids empty schemes and narrow practicalism, emphasizing revolutionary perspective in daily work to produce the ideal Leninist worker. This theory underscores the need for a revolutionary party, Soviet power as the bourgeois state’s gravedigger, and support for oppressed nations, driving a global, class-conscious movement toward socialism.
Revolutionaries should urge workers to reject opportunists and engage in revolutionary action now, not wait. Kautsky and Axelrod's strategies were counter-revolutionary, protecting opportunists (social fascists). David, a leading German opportunist, opposed turning the world war into civil war, unlike Lenin's proactive approach for revolution. David criticized revolutionary tactics as "folly," a view Plekhanov echoed, calling them a "farcical dream." However, tactics by Liebknecht and the Zimmerwald Left were necessary responses to the crisis, focusing on illegal organizations to spread truth and push for revolution, aiming for a proletarian victory. The Second International fell apart because of what Lenin called social-chauvinism, which was basically opportunism on steroids, where socialist parties cheered for their national war efforts, completely against what socialism should stand for. This was all part of a plan by the ruling class to water down the revolutionary spirit. Only the leaders got to vote on supporting the war, leaving the working class out in the cold. This split was necessary for the real revolutionaries to push forward, with Kautsky and others mixing opportunism with revolutionary talk, leading to ideological clashes. All this showed that for socialism to work, leaders need to stick to their guns, engage in real revolutionary action because after the war, class conflicts got sharper, and the masses were ready for something big.
"The Collapse of the Second International" Implied The International Socialist movement collapsed during World War I as its leaders failed to uphold socialist principles. Despite the Basle Manifesto of 1912 explicitly condemning imperialist wars, prominent figures like Karl Kautsky and Georgi Plekhanov supported their nations' war efforts, betraying socialist convictions with nationalist and imperialist rhetoric. They ignored or distorted the manifesto's call for opposition to such conflicts. Kautsky and Plekhanov justified their positions with simplistic arguments; Plekhanov with the "who started it?" approach, and Kautsky by claiming defending one's homeland was a right and duty, both misrepresenting Marxism to align with national interests. They overlooked the war's imperialist nature and the exploitation of the working class.
Kautsky's theory of "ultra-imperialism" suggested a new phase of capitalism where global finance capital would exploit the world without national conflicts, potentially leading to peace. However, this was criticized as an opportunist distortion, ignoring that imperialism is inherently tied to capitalism. His vision of peaceful democracy replacing imperialism was seen as naive, failing to recognize the escalating tensions within capitalism and the inevitability of further wars and revolutions. These ideas, part of "Struvism," were accused of stripping Marxism of its revolutionary essence, turning it into a tool for justifying collaboration with the bourgeoisie. Kautsky's theories were further critiqued for promoting division among the proletariat by favoring national opportunists over international solidarity.
The war revealed the deep-seated nationalist tendencies within the socialist movement, necessitating a re-examination of commitments to internationalism and anti-imperialism. Lenin criticized these leaders as social-chauvinists, highlighting the dire consequences of their actions: the fragmentation of the socialist movement and the rise of communist parties. The situation was ripe for revolution, with economic disparity and public unrest at its peak, yet leaders like Kautsky and Karl Legien chose to prioritize maintaining legal organizations over revolutionary action, fearing dissolution and arrests. This was seen as opportunistic and a betrayal of socialist ideals, advocating instead for a blend of legal and illegal methods, as exemplified by Russian Social-Democrats.
The betrayal of socialist principles by leaders of the Second International during World War I wasn't merely theoretical; it had profound practical implications. The war's exposure of opportunism necessitated a complete organizational severance of these elements from workers' parties. The epoch of imperialism couldn't accommodate both revolutionary proletarians and semi-petty-bourgeois aristocrats within the same party. Kautsky's "golden mean" theory, which used Marxist catchwords to justify opportunist practices (i.e. social-fascism), was seen as a significant deception of the workers. Amidst the war, the proletariat, previously disunited by chauvinism and martial law, began to develop revolutionary sentiments, with the potential for a sudden change in mood similar to the "Gaponade" in Russia in 1905.
Lenin's "Imperialism and the split on Socialism" Implied By the early 20th century, imperialism in America and Europe had hit its peak, turning into what was called monopoly, parasitic, and decaying capitalism. A few "Great" Powers were exploiting millions in less developed nations. Karl Kautsky had this idea that imperialism was just a finance capital policy, but that was seen as a weak definition since it didn't connect the dots between imperial politics and economics. His theory was criticized for being more about justifying a comfy, reformist approach than following true Marxism. Meanwhile, the Russian Kautskyites like Axelrod, Martov, and Trotsky kept quiet on this whole Kautskyism issue. On the flip side, J.A. Hobson from England hit the nail on the head, pointing out how imperialism was all about economic parasitism, where richer countries sucked resources from their colonies to spoil their own elites and keep their workers happy enough not to rock the boat. He warned about this creating a kind of Western parasitism, where the rich countries would live off the tribute from places like Asia and Africa, potentially leading to a future where the actual industries would vanish, replaced by goods from colonies. Marx and Engels had already seen this coming in England, where the industrial boom meant British workers got better deals, but at the cost of becoming too cozy with the bosses, leading to what they called a "bourgeois labor party." This party was more about keeping the bourgeoisie happy than fighting for workers.
As the 20th century rolled in, new powers like the US, France, and Germany joined the imperialist game, competing for more territories and resources, which just meant more exploitation for colonized folks. The rich used this wealth to keep labor leaders in their pockets, creating these "bourgeois labor parties" that weren't really for the workers. The message was clear: the labor movement needed to wake up, reject these bribes from the rich, and get back to truly representing the working class. This meant a big shake-up in how labor movements operated, focusing on class struggle rather than playing nice with the bosses. The political scene was all about manipulating the masses with promises and lies, with figures like Lloyd George in England or Scheidemann and Plekhanov elsewhere using their clout to keep workers loyal to the bourgeoisie, not their own class. Despite the spin, the workers weren't buying it, increasingly seeing through these leaders. The Kautskyites tried to smooth things over between workers and these "bourgeois" parties, but it was a lost cause. Marx and Engels had warned of this opportunism, noting how even trade unions, supposed to be for the workers, got corrupted. Engels made a point to call out the difference between the sold-out "bourgeois labor party" and the real working class, those not caught up in being "respectable."
The core of Marxist strategy was to fight against this opportunism by making the working class aware of how they were being misled. This meant highlighting the betrayals by leaders who were more interested in keeping their own privileges than in advancing the workers' cause. The goal was to educate the masses about their genuine political interests, steering them away from the false promises of the bourgeoisie and towards true class solidarity. This fight involved a lot of grassroots work, like organizing, educating, and agitating. It was about showing workers that the so-called "labor leaders" were often just part of the system they were supposed to be fighting against. By revealing how these leaders were defending only the temporary advantages of a small segment of workers, Marxists aimed to unite the broader working class under a revolutionary banner. The strategy included leveraging events like strikes, protests, and economic downturns to demonstrate the failures of capitalism under imperialism. It was about building a movement that wouldn't be co-opted by the bourgeoisie, one that genuinely represented the interests of all workers, not just a privileged few. This meant advocating for internationalism over nationalism, recognizing that workers worldwide shared common enemies in the form of imperialist powers. Ultimately, the aim was to prepare the proletariat for a revolution that would dismantle the capitalist structures of imperialism. This wasn't just about economic reform but about a total transformation of society, where the workers would take control of production and governance, ending the exploitation both at home and abroad. It was about creating a world where the interests of the many would finally outweigh the interests of the few, ushering in an era of true socialism.
"Certain features of the historical development of Marxism," Implied Marxism, as emphasized by Engels, was not a dogma, but a guide to action. However, this aspect of Marxism was often lost sight of, leading to a one-sided and distorted understanding of the doctrine. In Russia, the years leading up to the early 20th century saw abrupt changes in the social and political situation, necessitating a re-evaluation of Marxist principles. These changes can be divided into two distinct three-year periods: one ending around 1907 and the other around 1910. The first period was marked by rapid changes in the state system, with various classes actively engaging in different fields. This led to a clash between two different tendencies in Russia's bourgeois development, forcing Marxists to provide theoretical formulations corresponding to these tendencies.
In contrast, the second period was characterized by stagnation, with medieval diehards propagating a spirit of dejection and recantation. This led to a loss of faith in reforms and a growing interest in anti-social doctrines and mysticism. The change from one period to the other was a natural consequence of the preceding period's events. As a living guide to action, Marxism reflected the changes in the conditions of social life. However, this led to a profound disintegration and disunity among Marxists, with various trends and ideologies emerging. The crisis of Marxism was characterized by a revision of its philosophical fundamentals, the influence of bourgeois philosophy, and the prevalence of empty phrase-mongering. Un-Marxist trends emerged, including otzovism and the recognition of otzovism as a "legal shade" of Marxism. The spirit of renunciation and liberalism also permeated some Marxist trends. The purpose of the article was to illustrate the depth of the crisis and its connection to the social and economic situation.
The questions raised by this crisis could not be brushed aside, and it was essential to rally all Marxists who realized the profundity of the crisis and the necessity of combating it. This required a resolute resistance to disintegration and a struggle to uphold the fundamentals of Marxism. The dialectics of historical development reflected the astonishingly abrupt change in the conditions of social life. This change was reflected in profound disintegration and disunity, in every manner of vacillation, and in a very serious internal crisis of Marxism. Resolute resistance to this disintegration and a resolute struggle to uphold the fundamentals of Marxism were again placed on the order of the day. The repetition of "slogans" learnt by rote but not understood had led to empty phrase-mongering and un-Marxist trends. The first three years had awakened wide sections to a conscious participation in social life, sections that were now beginning to acquaint themselves with Marxism in real earnest. The bourgeois press was creating far more fallacious ideas on this score than ever before, and was spreading them more widely. Under these circumstances, disintegration in the Marxist ranks was particularly dangerous. Therefore, to understand the reasons for the inevitability of this disintegration at the present time and to close their ranks for consistent struggle against this disintegration was, in the most direct and precise meaning of the term, the task of the day for Marxists.
"Marxism and Revisionism," implied that In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Marxism faced significant resistance due to its implications for capitalist societies. Marxist doctrines, advocating for the enlightenment, organization, and revolution of the working class, met opposition from bourgeois scholars and theologians. Marxism contended with philosophical idealism, economic theories like Proudhonism, and other socialist factions. As Marxism influenced labor movements, it clashed with anarchism and other ideologies within workers' organizations like the International.
By the 1890s, Marxism had largely triumphed within the labor movement, with Latin countries adopting Marxist principles. However, revisionism, led by figures like Bernstein, challenged traditional Marxism. Revisionists proposed amendments, suggesting capitalism could evolve without revolutionary overthrow, citing new economic developments like cartels and trusts. Orthodox Marxists, like Plekhanov, critiqued revisionism as theoretically unsound, blurring class consciousness and diluting revolutionary potential. Marxist thinkers emphasized class struggle, dialectical materialism, and historical determinism, advocating for workers' enlightenment and organization.
The debates between revolutionary Marxism and revisionism highlighted fundamental disagreements about capitalism's future, class conflict, and socialism's path. Orthodox Marxists saw revisionism as a threat to revolutionary potential, while revisionists argued for democratic reforms. This ideological struggle reflected broader societal tensions between capitalist evolution and socialist revolution.
"Marxism and reformism," Implied Marxists were okay with fighting for reforms, things that made workers' lives better without upending the capitalist system. But they had a major issue with reformists, who were all about chasing small victories without aiming for the big overthrow. Reformism was and still are seen as the bourgeoisie's way of pacifying workers, keeping them content with their lot as wage slaves. The liberal elite would and still offer reforms but then claw them back or use them to keep workers divided and under control. Even if reformists were sincere, in practice, their ideas just diluted the workers' revolutionary spirit. History showed that those who bought into reformism ended up getting played.
However, workers who really understood Marx knew that under capitalism, reforms were just temporary fixes. They used these reforms to sharpen their fight against wage slavery. Reformists tried to distract workers with small gains, but those who saw through the trickery used reforms to fortify their class struggle. These reformist tactics are that of the modern Labour Party (UK), Democratic Party (US), and Liberal Party (CAN) who continue to derail worker revolutionary progress.
The more reformist ideas took hold among workers, the weaker their fight became, making it easier for the bourgeoisie to undo any progress. But when workers maintained their independence and kept broader goals in sight, they were better at keeping and using these reforms. Reformists were everywhere, trying to lull workers into complacency. In Russia, the liquidators were the reformists, pushing for a legal party and forgetting the revolutionary past. When they had to defend themselves, their arguments didn't hold up.
For example, Sedov from the liquidators dropped two of Marx's key demands, keeping only the eight-hour day, which was just a reform. Their big conference did the same, pushing non-reformist demands to the sidelines. They even criticized workers' movements that aimed beyond reformism, dismissing them as foolish. In practice, while the liquidators claimed not to be all about reforms, their actions told a different story. Meanwhile, Marxists were on the ground, not just advocating for but strategically using reforms in elections, union activities, and legal fights.
By abandoning Marxism, the liquidators were just muddling the workers' movement. They also tried to equate Russia's political situation with Europe's, ignoring Russia's unique history and struggles. In Europe, reformism meant ditching Marxism for a bourgeois social policy, but in Russia, it meant undermining the Marxist organization and settling for a liberal-labor approach, which was a step back from true revolutionary aims.
“Left-Wing” Communism: an Infantile Disorder Implied, The Russian Revolution of 1917, led by the Bolsheviks, had far-reaching implications beyond Russia's borders. Lenin believed the revolution's core elements had universal relevance, but acknowledged that Russia's status as a revolutionary model would likely diminish once the proletarian revolution succeeded in more developed countries.
The Bolsheviks' success was attributed to their strict discipline, centralized approach, and close ties with the working class. Their strategic flexibility and critical analysis of political situations allowed them to navigate revolutionary politics and shape Marxist thought and practice for decades to follow.
The Russian Revolution demonstrated the importance of adapting strategies to specific contexts. The Bolsheviks' cautious approach allowed them to seize power in 1917. In Germany, Communist Party infighting occurred between mainstream and opposition groups. The opposition advocated for a proletarian dictatorship and criticized parliamentary methods, but their stance was seen as simplistic. The Bolsheviks emphasized engaging with trade unions and participating in parliamentary activities to educate and organize workers, approaches the German "Left" Communists rejected.
The "Dutch-Left" and German "Left" Communists' rejection of parliamentary participation and compromise was criticized for its historical inaccuracies and logical fallacies. The Bolsheviks, on the other hand, emphasized the importance of combining legal and illegal struggle, and engaging in all levels of workers' organizations.
The "Left" Communists' approach was seen as simplistic, dismissing parliaments and rejecting compromise, which could alienate the party from the broader working class and small peasants. They also lacked strategic thinking, failing to recognize the need for temporary alliances and tactical maneuvers to strengthen their position and educate the masses.
The Bolsheviks' approach, in contrast, emphasized strategic flexibility and compromise. They believed in combining legal and illegal struggle, using both parliamentary and non-parliamentary means to advance the revolutionary cause. They also participated in all levels of workers' organizations to educate and organize workers towards socialism, using temporary alliances and tactical maneuvers to strengthen their position, educate the masses, and isolate opportunists.
In the early 1920s, Britain's communist movement gained momentum, but disagreements arose over parliamentary participation and Labour Party affiliation. The "Left" opposed parliament, viewing it as a compromise with reactionary forces, driven by a hatred for bourgeois politicians and a desire for direct communism. However, critics argued that this approach lacked strategy and that working within existing structures like Parliament was necessary to expose leadership inadequacies and prepare the masses for communism.
The proposed strategy for British Communists involved uniting into a single party, participating in parliamentary elections, and possibly forming tactical agreements with Labour leaders. This approach aimed to increase visibility, demonstrate parliamentary democracy's limitations, and advance Soviet-style governance.
The Russian Revolution of 1905 marked a significant chapter in world history, showcasing the proletariat's influence. The emergence of Soviets challenged bourgeois parliamentarianism and democracy, inspiring a global working-class movement against Menshevism and Left-wing communism. The Third International gained ground, defeating the Second International, and Communists had to adapt tactics to engage broader masses and navigate complex class dynamics.
"Anti-Dühring by Frederick Engels 1877 Part III: Socialism" Implied Marx, as explained by Engels, criticized utopian socialists like Saint-Simon, Fourier, and Owen as unrealistic dreamers. Their idealized solutions ignored economic realities, history, and class struggle. Society is shaped by production and trade, and its structures evolve with economic changes. Capitalism replaced feudalism but now faces similar contradictions, with workers bearing the brunt of crises, unemployment, and inequality caused by its inability to manage productivity. The solution is for society, not just workers, to control production, aligning it with its social nature to end chaos and enable planned progress for all. The proletariat's mission is universal emancipation, and scientific socialism provides the theoretical framework to understand and achieve this.
Herr Dühring's economic commune was deeply flawed. Its principle of "equal labor for equal labor" led to accumulation, inequality, and exploitation, while its use of money enabled usury. The idea of "true value" was impractical, as labor cannot have a separate value, and paying workers the "full proceeds of labor" was unworkable. Dühring's proposal undermined socialist principles and failed to address economic realities.
Dühring's vision of a future society was authoritarian and regressive. It (rightfully, my opinion) banned religion but also restricted or regulated individual freedom (which is only okay if done right, again my opinion), and imposed a rigid, narrow education system focused on outdated sciences and his own philosophy. His moralistic views on marriage and relationships lacked practical guidance and emphasized an abstract "perfection of the human form." Dühring's sexist and hypocritical stance on women's experiences ignored their realities, criticizing prostitution and marital double standards without understanding their lives. His ideas, likely influenced by personal limitations, were unrealistic, outdated, and disconnected from human experiences.
"The foundation of Leninism," an extension of Marxism developed by Vladimir Lenin, focuses on imperialism's contradictions and the revolutionary potential of the working class to overthrow capitalism and establish socialism. Emerging in Russia, it addresses global imperialism, highlighting monopolistic corporations, financial group struggles, and the exploitation of colonized peoples. Leninism is a dynamic, adaptable theory of proletarian revolution, emphasizing tactics like mass mobilization, political general strikes, and the need for the working class to seize power in favorable conditions. It tests theoretical ideas in real-world struggles, reorganizes party work through self-criticism, and trains new leaders under proletarian rule, recognizing that both capitalists and the working class may prioritize self-interest over humanity in the modern era.
Lenin transformed the imperialist war into a civil war, critiquing the ineffective Second International and emphasizing party sincerity, learning from mistakes, and focusing on finance capital's dominance, capital export, and the financial oligarchy's power. He viewed these as exposing monopolistic capitalism's parasitic nature, driving the masses toward revolution. Considering the global economy, Lenin argued that imperialism's chain breaks at its weakest links, with bourgeois-democratic revolutions leading to proletarian ones. He rejected "permanent revolution," insisting power must transfer to the proletariat after exhausting peasant revolutionary energy. The dictatorship of the proletariat, a ruthless war against the bourgeoisie, is essential for socialism, tasked with breaking resistance, organizing construction, and arming against foreign enemies in a long, conflict-ridden transition from capitalism to communism.
Soviet power, uniting local Soviets into a state led by the proletariat, combines legislative and executive functions to dismantle bureaucratic and judicial remnants, drawing masses into democratic administration for labor emancipation. Leninism shaped Soviet power, recognizing the peasantry's revolutionary potential, leading to the 1917 February Revolution. Post-consolidation, Lenin prioritized economic tasks like strengthening nationalized industry and linking it with the peasant economy through co-operatives, supported by state initiatives like the Flax Centre, viewing small peasants as allies in building socialism.
On the national question, Leninism links self-determination to anti-imperialism, subordinating national rights to proletarian revolution and judging movements by their impact on imperialism. It divides the world into oppressor and oppressed nations, requiring unity against imperialism for a single world economic system, with the October Revolution succeeding due to imperialist distractions. Lenin emphasized strategic leadership—utilizing reserves, concentrating forces, and choosing the right moment—while tactical leadership mastered all struggle forms, focusing on central tasks. Revolutionaries see reforms as by-products to strengthen revolution, unlike reformists who prioritize them, making alliance impossible.
The Party, central to Leninism, is the proletariat's highest organizational form, providing political leadership, training workers, and maintaining iron discipline to achieve and sustain the dictatorship of the proletariat. Combining Russian revolutionary sweep with American efficiency, Leninism avoids empty schemes and narrow practicalism, emphasizing revolutionary perspective in daily work to produce the ideal Leninist worker. This theory underscores the need for a revolutionary party, Soviet power as the bourgeois state’s gravedigger, and support for oppressed nations, driving a global, class-conscious movement toward socialism.
"On Contradiction," says materialist dialectics, led by Lenin, studies internal contradictions within objects, guided by the law of contradiction and the essence of dialectics, which holds that development arises from the unity of opposites. Two world outlooks exist: metaphysics, viewing things as isolated and static, and dialectics, seeing development as the interplay of opposites. Contradictions drive all things’ development, with a movement of opposites persisting from beginning to end, each form of motion and society shaped by its specific contradiction and essence.
The universality of contradiction means it exists in all development processes and involves a constant interplay of opposites. However, the particularity of contradiction requires deeper study: in complex systems, multiple contradictions coexist, with one principal contradiction determining or influencing others, its dominant aspect defining the system’s main characteristics. Contradictions evolve through leaps, where new aspects supersede old ones, and understanding both principal and non-principal contradictions and aspects is essential for shaping strategic and tactical policies.
The identity of opposites describes their coexistence and potential transformation into each other under specific conditions, while antagonism emerges as a form of struggle when contradictions reach a critical stage. In class society, revolutions and revolutionary wars are inevitable, requiring Communists to expose reactionary propaganda and analyze each struggle’s unique conditions. The law of contradiction, or unity of opposites, is the fundamental law governing nature, society, and thought, opposing the metaphysical outlook and marking a revolutionary shift in human knowledge.
"Anti-Duhring Part I: Philosophy," says Herr Dühring’s philosophy was criticized for its idealism, lack of originality, and failure to engage with materialism, sharing a structure and perspective similar to Hegel’s idealism. His views on mathematics, reality, and being were contradictory, with a flawed concept of infinity and an inconsistent definition of life. Critics also found his ideas on the organic world, sensation, and pleasure/pain lacking in depth, revealing a simplistic and unoriginal approach.
Dühring’s concept of equality, rooted in abstract ideas rather than real social relations, was deemed ideological and detached from material conditions. His attempt to apply mathematical certainty to social sciences further highlighted his metaphysical thinking, while his misinterpretation of Marx’s "negation of the negation" and failure to account for motion, change, and contradiction exposed methodological flaws. These inconsistencies undermined his claims of a comprehensive worldview, revealing a philosophy limited by his own knowledge and biases.
"Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy," Says Hegel’s philosophy revolutionized thought by revealing the transitory nature of all things, but its systematic limits led to the rise of the Young Hegelians. Feuerbach advanced materialism by recognizing the material world as the sole reality, a step beyond Hegel’s idealism, but his philosophy remained constrained by his era. Unable to fully escape abstraction, he rejected responsibility for the shallow materialism of natural scientists, and his philosophy of religion and ethics exposed lingering idealism, with his views on morality lacking depth and originality.
Feuerbach’s historical conception of nature was limited, and he remained bound by traditional idealist thinking in social domains, failing to address the central philosophical question of the relation between thinking and being comprehensively. Marx overcame these limitations, replacing Feuerbach’s abstract focus on "man" with a science of real people and their historical development. He identified class struggles, driven by economic forces, as the engine of history, revealing interconnections that ended philosophy’s speculative role in historical analysis.
Marx recognized the state’s role in enforcing class supremacy, transforming the oppressed class’s fight into a political struggle against the ruling class. His historical materialism marked a significant leap, grounding philosophy in the concrete dynamics of class conflict and economic conditions, surpassing the idealist constraints of Hegel and Feuerbach.
"Theses On Feuerbach," goes on to say Feuerbach’s materialism, limited to viewing reality as an object of contemplation rather than human practice, failed to grasp sensuous activity as objective and practical. While idealism abstractly developed the active side, it overlooked real, sensuous human activity. Feuerbach distinguished sensuous objects from thought objects but couldn’t conceive human essence as the ensemble of social relations, abstracting from historical processes and fixing religious sentiment as an isolated, abstract phenomenon, reducing it to a generic "genus" rather than a social product.
This contemplative materialism neglected that circumstances are changed by people and that educators themselves need educating, dividing society into superior and inferior parts. The truth of thinking, a practical rather than theoretical question, must be proven in practice, rendering disputes over isolated thought scholastic. Feuerbach resolved the religious world into its secular basis but failed to address the self-contradictions within that basis, missing that all social life is inherently practical and that mysteries leading to mysticism find resolution in human practice.
Marx overcame these limits, recognizing that the coincidence of changing circumstances and human activity is revolutionary practice, not mere interpretation. While Feuerbach’s materialism contemplated single individuals and civil society, Marx’s new materialism embraced human society as social humanity, driven by class struggles and historical development. Philosophers had only interpreted the world; the point was to change it.
"Value Price and Profit," notes Marx argued that both production and wages are variable, shaped by changes in how goods are produced and distributed. He emphasized that workers should have the right to organize and fight for higher wages, rejecting the idea that wage increases automatically raise prices. Instead, he argued that the outcome depends on factors like shifts in production and economic conditions. Marx analyzed the broader effects of a general rise in wages, noting that while prices might temporarily increase, the real impact would be a reduction in capitalists' profit rates. Using historical examples, such as rising wages in 19th-century England, he showed that higher wages did not lead to economic collapse.
Marx’s analysis highlighted the complexity of wage dynamics. He argued that a commodity’s value is determined by the amount of socially necessary labor required to produce it, not by wages. He clarified that profits come from selling goods at their true value, which reflects the labor embedded in them, not from overcharging buyers. Marx distinguished between labor and labor power, explaining that workers sell their ability to work, i.e. labor power to capitalists, not the work itself. Capitalists extract surplus value from this labor power, which they then divide into profits, rent, and interest. Marx rejected the idea that a commodity’s value is simply the sum of wages, profits, and rent. Instead, he showed that its value comes from the labor added during production, minus the cost of raw materials and tools. This value remains the same, no matter how it is split between workers and capitalists.
Marx explored how changes in productivity and living standards affect the value of labor. He noted that limits on working hours have only been achieved through laws, while actual wages depend on the balance of supply and demand. He warned that capitalism naturally pushes wages down over time, eroding workers' living standards. To address this, Marx argued that a general rise in wages would reduce profit rates but not ruin the economy. He urged trade unions to fight for better wages and, ultimately, to work toward abolishing the wage system entirely, freeing the working class from exploitation.
"Anti-Dühring Part II: Political Economy," Implies Herr Dühring’s ideas were flawed and he, himself deserved dismissal. Political economy studied how societies produced, exchanged, and distributed goods and services. It was a historical science because these processes varied across time and place. The methods of production and exchange determined how goods were distributed, which often led to conflicts between social classes over wealth and power.
Economic development, not political force, drove changes in production and exchange. The separation of property from labor resulted from economic conditions, not coercion. These conditions also shaped warfare and military development. Historically, communities cultivated land under shared ownership. As these communities grew, common interests and social roles gave rise to class divisions. The incorporation of outsiders as labor forces, often through slavery, further entrenched these class relationships.
Human society evolved when family labor produced more than needed for survival, creating a surplus. This surplus laid the foundation for economic and social change. The anticipated social revolution aimed to transform production into a shared resource, stripping the privileged class of its control. The value of commodities depended on the human labor required to produce them. Capital, which emerged in the 16th century, originated from money and marked a historical phase driven by surplus labor. This surplus labor became surplus value, a concept Marx carefully distinguished from profit, grounding it in historical and economic context.
"Capital Vol 1.," is a book of redundancies; if you have the patience to take notes from a book that each chapter is a novel in itself, feel free. It's an 11-hour audio book and very repetitive with my neurodivergences; it makes me not wanna read it. It's concepts and points get lost on the redundancy that is Marx's writing. Luckily, you probably already know a good portion of it from the other twenty some odd books. Anyhow, this is my logic, and a brief, and I do mean brief summary of capitalism.
People often say capitalists, those who own businesses and control money, don't serve any useful purpose, but I think they could if they weren't focused on owning things, exploiting workers and hoarding wealth, i.e. being capitalists. In theory, capitalists should save or create time for workers by organizing how goods and services are made, moved, and sold, so workers can focus on their jobs without worrying about those details; they should act like representatives, neutral administrators for workers, facilitating commerce fairly, not acting as their owner or ruler but instead as a service provider, a worker.
Marx explains that's not how it works. Instead, capitalists have twisted this role into an exploitive system where they profit by stealing from workers, paying them less than the value of what they make, and overworking them, treating them like cattle, creating the oppressive economy we see today. Marx provides the reasons why capitalism must be repealed and replaced with communism through a transitional phase; he shows that only systemic change can end this exploitation and violation of humanity and the planet itself.
Capital is about how money and work shape our world. Marx says that in a capitalist system, capitalists own the factories, tools, and businesses, while workers, better known as wage slaves in the 21st century, have to work for them to earn a living. Capitalists make money by paying workers less than the value of what they produce. For example, if one makes a $10 toy but only gets paid $2, the boss keeps the extra $8 as profit. This "extra" is called surplus value, and it's how capitalists get rich.
Marx explains this system is unfair and a human rights violation because it exploits workers, making them work long hours for little pay, while capitalists get richer without doing much. This system also causes problems like poverty, inequality, homelessness, and death by design; anyone reading this can look around at the problems in the world and see it. Marx shows workers should fight for a fairer world where everyone shares the wealth they create together, promoting equity, egalitarianism, and collectivism.
"Imperialism the Highest Stage of Capitalism," Says In 1916, a pamphlet explained that capitalism caused World War I because big countries fought (and are still fighting today) over colonies and financial power. However, some socialists ignored (and still ignore) how this imperialism, where rich nations exploit weaker ones for profit, leads to revolution. Starting in the 1860s, especially in Germany and the US, businesses grew massive. By the 1900s, monopolies controlled everything: prices, production, and profits. They caused chaos by cutting supplies or slashing prices to stay in charge. Banks got (and remain) incredibly powerful, merging with industries to create "finance capital." This let them decide who succeeds or fails through loans, spreading this control worldwide to seize resources and colonies, which sparked endless conflicts.
Imperialism is the monopoly stage of capitalism, where a few rich countries dominate through five key features: giant companies ruling industries, banks and industries merging into finance capital, sending money abroad to make more money, global monopolies dividing markets, and carving up the world into colonies. This system makes rich countries lazy, living off interest and dividends. They use huge profits to bribe some workers, dividing the working class. Some workers get benefits (and often become opportunistic), but most face unemployment, extreme poverty, and even death, trapped in a cycle of exploitation.
From 1862 to 1914, Britain, France, and Germany invested heavily abroad, spreading finance capital and dividing the world, much like America and its allies do in the 21st century. This fueled colonial struggles and oppression. Imperialism causes decay and stagnation, making capitalism "moribund" (dying) because it is driven solely by profits and power, leading to exploitation and conflict. It bribed (and still bribes) workers to keep the system alive, especially in Britain. However, this divides workers and hides the fact that capitalism's vast, connected production clashes with its outdated private ownership. Lenin warned this dying system would collapse, sparking revolution as oppressed nations and workers fight back against its greed and chaos. Yet in the 21st century, figures like Bernie Sanders and AOC defend the system by pushing reforms. They stand as roadblocks between revolutionaries and the end of oppression, delaying the collapse Lenin foresaw. This delay has allowed the rise of fascism, a direct result of capitalism's decay and the refusal to bury it once and for all.
The universality of contradiction means it exists in all development processes and involves a constant interplay of opposites. However, the particularity of contradiction requires deeper study: in complex systems, multiple contradictions coexist, with one principal contradiction determining or influencing others, its dominant aspect defining the system’s main characteristics. Contradictions evolve through leaps, where new aspects supersede old ones, and understanding both principal and non-principal contradictions and aspects is essential for shaping strategic and tactical policies.
The identity of opposites describes their coexistence and potential transformation into each other under specific conditions, while antagonism emerges as a form of struggle when contradictions reach a critical stage. In class society, revolutions and revolutionary wars are inevitable, requiring Communists to expose reactionary propaganda and analyze each struggle’s unique conditions. The law of contradiction, or unity of opposites, is the fundamental law governing nature, society, and thought, opposing the metaphysical outlook and marking a revolutionary shift in human knowledge.
"Anti-Duhring Part I: Philosophy," says Herr Dühring’s philosophy was criticized for its idealism, lack of originality, and failure to engage with materialism, sharing a structure and perspective similar to Hegel’s idealism. His views on mathematics, reality, and being were contradictory, with a flawed concept of infinity and an inconsistent definition of life. Critics also found his ideas on the organic world, sensation, and pleasure/pain lacking in depth, revealing a simplistic and unoriginal approach.
Dühring’s concept of equality, rooted in abstract ideas rather than real social relations, was deemed ideological and detached from material conditions. His attempt to apply mathematical certainty to social sciences further highlighted his metaphysical thinking, while his misinterpretation of Marx’s "negation of the negation" and failure to account for motion, change, and contradiction exposed methodological flaws. These inconsistencies undermined his claims of a comprehensive worldview, revealing a philosophy limited by his own knowledge and biases.
"Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy," Says Hegel’s philosophy revolutionized thought by revealing the transitory nature of all things, but its systematic limits led to the rise of the Young Hegelians. Feuerbach advanced materialism by recognizing the material world as the sole reality, a step beyond Hegel’s idealism, but his philosophy remained constrained by his era. Unable to fully escape abstraction, he rejected responsibility for the shallow materialism of natural scientists, and his philosophy of religion and ethics exposed lingering idealism, with his views on morality lacking depth and originality.
Feuerbach’s historical conception of nature was limited, and he remained bound by traditional idealist thinking in social domains, failing to address the central philosophical question of the relation between thinking and being comprehensively. Marx overcame these limitations, replacing Feuerbach’s abstract focus on "man" with a science of real people and their historical development. He identified class struggles, driven by economic forces, as the engine of history, revealing interconnections that ended philosophy’s speculative role in historical analysis.
Marx recognized the state’s role in enforcing class supremacy, transforming the oppressed class’s fight into a political struggle against the ruling class. His historical materialism marked a significant leap, grounding philosophy in the concrete dynamics of class conflict and economic conditions, surpassing the idealist constraints of Hegel and Feuerbach.
"Theses On Feuerbach," goes on to say Feuerbach’s materialism, limited to viewing reality as an object of contemplation rather than human practice, failed to grasp sensuous activity as objective and practical. While idealism abstractly developed the active side, it overlooked real, sensuous human activity. Feuerbach distinguished sensuous objects from thought objects but couldn’t conceive human essence as the ensemble of social relations, abstracting from historical processes and fixing religious sentiment as an isolated, abstract phenomenon, reducing it to a generic "genus" rather than a social product.
This contemplative materialism neglected that circumstances are changed by people and that educators themselves need educating, dividing society into superior and inferior parts. The truth of thinking, a practical rather than theoretical question, must be proven in practice, rendering disputes over isolated thought scholastic. Feuerbach resolved the religious world into its secular basis but failed to address the self-contradictions within that basis, missing that all social life is inherently practical and that mysteries leading to mysticism find resolution in human practice.
Marx overcame these limits, recognizing that the coincidence of changing circumstances and human activity is revolutionary practice, not mere interpretation. While Feuerbach’s materialism contemplated single individuals and civil society, Marx’s new materialism embraced human society as social humanity, driven by class struggles and historical development. Philosophers had only interpreted the world; the point was to change it.
"Value Price and Profit," notes Marx argued that both production and wages are variable, shaped by changes in how goods are produced and distributed. He emphasized that workers should have the right to organize and fight for higher wages, rejecting the idea that wage increases automatically raise prices. Instead, he argued that the outcome depends on factors like shifts in production and economic conditions. Marx analyzed the broader effects of a general rise in wages, noting that while prices might temporarily increase, the real impact would be a reduction in capitalists' profit rates. Using historical examples, such as rising wages in 19th-century England, he showed that higher wages did not lead to economic collapse.
Marx’s analysis highlighted the complexity of wage dynamics. He argued that a commodity’s value is determined by the amount of socially necessary labor required to produce it, not by wages. He clarified that profits come from selling goods at their true value, which reflects the labor embedded in them, not from overcharging buyers. Marx distinguished between labor and labor power, explaining that workers sell their ability to work, i.e. labor power to capitalists, not the work itself. Capitalists extract surplus value from this labor power, which they then divide into profits, rent, and interest. Marx rejected the idea that a commodity’s value is simply the sum of wages, profits, and rent. Instead, he showed that its value comes from the labor added during production, minus the cost of raw materials and tools. This value remains the same, no matter how it is split between workers and capitalists.
Marx explored how changes in productivity and living standards affect the value of labor. He noted that limits on working hours have only been achieved through laws, while actual wages depend on the balance of supply and demand. He warned that capitalism naturally pushes wages down over time, eroding workers' living standards. To address this, Marx argued that a general rise in wages would reduce profit rates but not ruin the economy. He urged trade unions to fight for better wages and, ultimately, to work toward abolishing the wage system entirely, freeing the working class from exploitation.
"Anti-Dühring Part II: Political Economy," Implies Herr Dühring’s ideas were flawed and he, himself deserved dismissal. Political economy studied how societies produced, exchanged, and distributed goods and services. It was a historical science because these processes varied across time and place. The methods of production and exchange determined how goods were distributed, which often led to conflicts between social classes over wealth and power.
Economic development, not political force, drove changes in production and exchange. The separation of property from labor resulted from economic conditions, not coercion. These conditions also shaped warfare and military development. Historically, communities cultivated land under shared ownership. As these communities grew, common interests and social roles gave rise to class divisions. The incorporation of outsiders as labor forces, often through slavery, further entrenched these class relationships.
Human society evolved when family labor produced more than needed for survival, creating a surplus. This surplus laid the foundation for economic and social change. The anticipated social revolution aimed to transform production into a shared resource, stripping the privileged class of its control. The value of commodities depended on the human labor required to produce them. Capital, which emerged in the 16th century, originated from money and marked a historical phase driven by surplus labor. This surplus labor became surplus value, a concept Marx carefully distinguished from profit, grounding it in historical and economic context.
"Capital Vol 1.," is a book of redundancies; if you have the patience to take notes from a book that each chapter is a novel in itself, feel free. It's an 11-hour audio book and very repetitive with my neurodivergences; it makes me not wanna read it. It's concepts and points get lost on the redundancy that is Marx's writing. Luckily, you probably already know a good portion of it from the other twenty some odd books. Anyhow, this is my logic, and a brief, and I do mean brief summary of capitalism.
People often say capitalists, those who own businesses and control money, don't serve any useful purpose, but I think they could if they weren't focused on owning things, exploiting workers and hoarding wealth, i.e. being capitalists. In theory, capitalists should save or create time for workers by organizing how goods and services are made, moved, and sold, so workers can focus on their jobs without worrying about those details; they should act like representatives, neutral administrators for workers, facilitating commerce fairly, not acting as their owner or ruler but instead as a service provider, a worker.
Marx explains that's not how it works. Instead, capitalists have twisted this role into an exploitive system where they profit by stealing from workers, paying them less than the value of what they make, and overworking them, treating them like cattle, creating the oppressive economy we see today. Marx provides the reasons why capitalism must be repealed and replaced with communism through a transitional phase; he shows that only systemic change can end this exploitation and violation of humanity and the planet itself.
Capital is about how money and work shape our world. Marx says that in a capitalist system, capitalists own the factories, tools, and businesses, while workers, better known as wage slaves in the 21st century, have to work for them to earn a living. Capitalists make money by paying workers less than the value of what they produce. For example, if one makes a $10 toy but only gets paid $2, the boss keeps the extra $8 as profit. This "extra" is called surplus value, and it's how capitalists get rich.
Marx explains this system is unfair and a human rights violation because it exploits workers, making them work long hours for little pay, while capitalists get richer without doing much. This system also causes problems like poverty, inequality, homelessness, and death by design; anyone reading this can look around at the problems in the world and see it. Marx shows workers should fight for a fairer world where everyone shares the wealth they create together, promoting equity, egalitarianism, and collectivism.
"Imperialism the Highest Stage of Capitalism," Says In 1916, a pamphlet explained that capitalism caused World War I because big countries fought (and are still fighting today) over colonies and financial power. However, some socialists ignored (and still ignore) how this imperialism, where rich nations exploit weaker ones for profit, leads to revolution. Starting in the 1860s, especially in Germany and the US, businesses grew massive. By the 1900s, monopolies controlled everything: prices, production, and profits. They caused chaos by cutting supplies or slashing prices to stay in charge. Banks got (and remain) incredibly powerful, merging with industries to create "finance capital." This let them decide who succeeds or fails through loans, spreading this control worldwide to seize resources and colonies, which sparked endless conflicts.
Imperialism is the monopoly stage of capitalism, where a few rich countries dominate through five key features: giant companies ruling industries, banks and industries merging into finance capital, sending money abroad to make more money, global monopolies dividing markets, and carving up the world into colonies. This system makes rich countries lazy, living off interest and dividends. They use huge profits to bribe some workers, dividing the working class. Some workers get benefits (and often become opportunistic), but most face unemployment, extreme poverty, and even death, trapped in a cycle of exploitation.
From 1862 to 1914, Britain, France, and Germany invested heavily abroad, spreading finance capital and dividing the world, much like America and its allies do in the 21st century. This fueled colonial struggles and oppression. Imperialism causes decay and stagnation, making capitalism "moribund" (dying) because it is driven solely by profits and power, leading to exploitation and conflict. It bribed (and still bribes) workers to keep the system alive, especially in Britain. However, this divides workers and hides the fact that capitalism's vast, connected production clashes with its outdated private ownership. Lenin warned this dying system would collapse, sparking revolution as oppressed nations and workers fight back against its greed and chaos. Yet in the 21st century, figures like Bernie Sanders and AOC defend the system by pushing reforms. They stand as roadblocks between revolutionaries and the end of oppression, delaying the collapse Lenin foresaw. This delay has allowed the rise of fascism, a direct result of capitalism's decay and the refusal to bury it once and for all.
Dialectical and Historical Materialism Marxist-Leninist philosophy combines dialectics and materialism. Dialectics studies phenomena through contradictions, while materialism interprets phenomena in terms of material conditions.
The Marxist dialectical method has four key features:
1. Interconnectedness of phenomena.
2. Constant change and development in nature.
3. Gradual quantitative changes lead to fundamental qualitative transformations.
4. Internal contradictions drive development.
Applied to social life, this method emphasizes historical context and constant change. Revolutionary transformations drive qualitative changes, and class struggle is the engine of historical development.
Marxist philosophical materialism opposes idealism, emphasizing material conditions and class struggle. It asserts the material world's existence independent of consciousness and that matter is primary, with consciousness secondary.
Marxist materialism holds that the world and its laws are knowable through experiment and practice.
In social life, Marxist materialism reveals social connections and interdependencies as laws of societal development. Socialism transformed from a dream to a science, bonding theory and practice.
Historical materialism explores the relationship between social being and consciousness. The mode of production determines social development, comprising productive forces and relations of production.
Changes in productive forces precede changes in relations of production. Five main types of relations of production are:
1. Primitive communal
2. Slave
3. Feudal
4. Capitalist
5. Socialist
Each type corresponds to the state of productive forces. The development of productive forces leads to changes in relations of production.
New productive forces and relations emerge within the old system spontaneously and unconsciously. Men adapt and improve within existing constraints.
Marx stated, "In social production, men enter into definite relations indispensable and independent of their will, corresponding to a definite stage of development of their material productive forces."
Changes in relations of production occur through revolutionary overthrow. New social ideas, institutions, and power emerge from conflicts between productive forces and relations.
Marx emphasized:
- The proletariat makes itself the ruling class through revolution.
- Force drives social revolution.
- The mode of production conditions social life.
- Social being determines consciousness.
Marx's Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy formulated historical materialism's essence:
- Relations of production correspond to productive forces.
- Conflict sparks social revolution.
- Economic conditions determine ideological forms.
- No social order perishes before developing all productive forces.
- New relations emerge when material conditions mature.
These principles comprise Marxist materialism applied to social life and history.
On Practice Dogmatism rejected the Chinese revolution's experience, while empiricism focused solely on fragmented experiences, neglecting theory's importance. Before Marx, materialism failed to connect knowledge with social practice. Marxists recognized production as the primary practical activity shaping human knowledge.
Knowledge develops through social practice, including production, class struggle, politics, science, and art. Marxism emphasizes practice as the criterion for verifying knowledge. Success confirms anticipated results, while failure prompts correction. Lenin stated, "Practice is higher than theoretical knowledge, possessing universality and immediate actuality." Marxist philosophy's dialectical materialism has two key characteristics: class nature (serving the proletariat) and practicality (emphasizing theory's dependence on practice).
Truth is determined by objective results in social practice, not subjective feelings. Human knowledge arises from practice through perception, conceptualization, and logical inference. Marxism combines theory and practice, ensuring truth is determined by objective results. Mao's essay aimed to rectify the Party's ideological errors and promote a balanced approach to Marxist theory and practice.
Marxist materialism, developed by Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin, solved the problem of knowledge development. This dialectical-materialist theory emphasizes practice as the foundation of knowledge. There are two stages of cognition: perceptual (lower) and logical (higher), unified on the basis of practice. Perception solves the problem of phenomena, while theory solves the problem of essence.
Genuine knowledge originates in direct experience, with most knowledge coming from indirect experience. Knowledge from past times and foreign lands requires scientific abstraction. The proletariat's knowledge of capitalist society progressed from perceptual to logical through practice. Similarly, the Chinese people's understanding of imperialism deepened through experience and struggle.
Effective leadership requires systematic understanding and open-mindedness. The process of cognition involves contact with the external world (perception) and synthesizing data (conception, judgment, and inference). Marxism emphasizes that knowledge begins with experience, stressing materialism. Idealist rationalism prioritizes reason over experience.
The sequence of cognition is perceptual experience followed by rational understanding, with social practice as the foundation. Knowledge begins with practice, develops through practice, and returns to practice. Practice is the criterion of truth. Revolutionary leaders must correct ideas and plans when errors are discovered.
Marxist-Leninist theory recognizes that relative truths constitute absolute truth. The development of objective processes and human knowledge is infinite and contradictory. Marxism-Leninism opens roads to knowledge of truth through practice. The unity of subjective and objective, theory and practice, knowing and doing, is concrete and historical.
The proletariat and its party must correctly know and change the world. This requires changing the objective world and the subjective world, cognitive ability, and relations between the subjective and objective world. By emphasizing the importance of practice, Mao's essay provides a foundational framework for understanding Marxist theory and its application.
Marxism and Humanism Marxism and humanism intersect in the concept of "real humanism," which emphasizes individual freedom, respect for legality, and human dignity. This shift marks a transition from socialism to communism. The objective of revolutionary struggle has always been the liberation of humanity from exploitation, initially taking the form of class conflict.
Marx's early work was influenced by Enlightenment philosophy, emphasizing reason and freedom. He believed the State should embody reason and human nature, but became disillusioned when the Prussian State failed to reform. Marx then adopted Feuerbach's "communalist" humanism, emphasizing the alienation of human reason and the importance of communal relationships.
Marx saw history as the process of humanity's alienation and realization. He believed humans are only truly free when part of a communal whole. Marx's new theory of humanism led him to advocate for a practical revolution to restore humanity's alienated nature. This revolution would result from an alliance between philosophy and the proletariat.
In 1845, Marx broke with traditional philosophy, rejecting the essence of man as a theoretical basis. He replaced old concepts with new ones, establishing a new problematic and systematic way of asking questions. Marx's theoretical anti-humanism recognizes humanism as an ideology, rather than a theoretical basis for understanding history and politics.
Ideology is a system of representations with a historical existence and role within a given society. It is distinct from science and has a more important practico-social function. Ideology expresses how people experience their relationship with their environment, encompassing real and imaginary aspects.
The ruling ideology in a class society belongs to the ruling class, serving both to govern the exploited class and shape the ruling class's identity. In a classless society, ideology remains crucial for transforming individuals to adapt to their conditions of existence.
The concept of "real humanism" is defined by its opposition to abstract humanism. The adjective "real" signals a direction and destination, pointing to the need to study society and its social relations. Marx crossed the frontier from ideology to scientific theory, discovering that the concept of man is not scientific but ideological.
The signpost of "real humanism" remains in the old domain, but once crossed, new concepts are needed to understand reality. The concept of real humanism can serve as a practical slogan but not as a theoretical concept. It can point out problems but not solve them. Marxist theory must not confuse practical concepts with theoretical ones, and the recourse to ethics in humanist ideology may hinder truly posing and solving problems.
The recourse to ethics in humanist ideology may hinder truly posing and solving problems, which are organizational problems of economic, political, and individual life. These problems must be called by their scientific names to be resolved.
In a class-based society, the dominant ideology belongs to the ruling class. However, this class is not only the master of its ideology but also its captive. The ruling ideology serves the ruling class in its governance over the exploited class and in shaping its own identity as the ruling class.
Even in a classless society, ideology remains crucial. It is essential for transforming individuals to adapt to their conditions of existence. Ideology expresses the need for transformation, measures the gap between the current and desired states, and facilitates resolving this contradiction.
In a classless society, ideology enables individuals to understand their position in the world and history, benefiting all people. Ideology is a system of representations that exists historically within a society, distinct from science and with a more significant practical function.
Ideology is an integral part of every social structure, and societies cannot exist without it. Ideology expresses how people experience their relationship with their environment, encompassing both real and imaginary aspects. This relationship is a complex unity of real and imaginary components.
The concept of "real humanism" is defined by its opposition to abstract humanism. The adjective "real" is a practical concept, signaling a direction and destination. It points to the need to study society and its social relations to understand humanity.
On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People by Mao implies There is the people are the workers, socialists, revolutionaries, and light triad personalities, which are divided into the workers and non workers. The non workers are the peasants and intellectuals. Then there is the enemy are which are the opportunists, anti-socialists, counter-revolutionaries, dark triad personalities. Mao says, "the state is where freedom and democracy are exercised within the ranks of the people under centralized guidance." The idea of communism is to eliminate hierarchies but here the workers seem to be putting above teachers, scientists, intellectuals, and the peasants. While the system may operate on principles and ethics, the people must be treated equally, the state must be egalitarian. The west/US can never be free under its current system. True freedom and democracy are not abstract; they are relative and specific to historical conditions. For the people, this means a balance of democracy with centralism and freedom with discipline, forming "democratic centralism" that ensures broad freedoms while maintaining socialist order.
For ideological disagreements among the people, democratic methods like discussion, criticism, persuasion, and education should be tried, rather than force. While rules are needed for public order, they must be combined with persuasion. This approach follows the "unity—criticism—unity" formula: start with a shared goal, address issues through criticism, and achieve a new, stronger unity. This method proved successful within the Communist Party and is applied more broadly. Internal contradictions are usually non-antagonistic, they can turn antagonistic if mishandled. Such instances in a socialist country are generally localized and temporary because exploitation has been abolished, and people's core interests align. This democratic approach to resolving internal contradictions is a core Marxist principle, now more prominent as the struggle with external enemies has lessened. Not confusing internal contradictions with those against the enemy, distinguish between the two.
Contradictions drive all change, yet applying this to socialist society is challenging, as many don't acknowledge internal contradictions crucial for progress. Socialist contradictions are non-antagonistic and are solvable within the system. Despite the socialist system's superiority and economic growth, mixed economies and semi-socialist co-ops cause problems. Contradictions will persist between production relations and forces, and between the superstructure and economic base, fueled by bourgeois ideology and bureaucracy. Keeping any form of capitalism is to sustain class struggle. Thus, distinguishing and correctly handling contradictions among the people versus with the enemy is vital for unity, development, and solidifying a new socialist state.
Eliminating counter-revolutionaries is a crucial task, often misunderstood by those on the "Right;" enemies and allies must be clearly determined and treated as such, without tolerance or compromise. The elimination of counter revolutionaries and resistance will create stability, and allow for sound economic policies and improved living standards. Standards and practice must constantly be reviewed and upgraded, keeping everything streamlined. Vigilance will be necessary, as hidden elements and foreign agents will seek to cause trouble. The threat must be taken seriously without over or underestimating the risk.
Agricultural co-operatives are vital for rural population, their transformation will resolve the conflict between industrialization and individual farming despite inherent difficulties. The co-ops must consolidate within five years or slightly longer and require continuous resolution through careful management of production and distribution. And the raising of all peasants to at least a middle-peasant living standard. Though workers have higher incomes due to productivity and lower living costs, some wage adjustments are deemed necessary to address peasant dissatisfaction. This is bound to cause problems, wages with except to those who provide basic human needs and life saving/protection services, should all be the same; one flat rate.
The bourgeoisie must assimilate into the working class, and the entire population must be reformed and re-educated to adapt to the new society as they merge into one people. Even after the initial phase, the re-education must continue and society must continue to constantly evolve. While it would be preferable if it was voluntary, it must be obligatory.
Contradictions will occur among intellectuals as they adapt to the new, a minority will remain skeptical. Their trust is necessary for improved relations, and practical support to unleash their talents. They must be made to get along. Intellectuals are haughty and will need continued pressure to humble themselves. This fundamental ideological shift is a long-term, necessary, and process, given the changed social system. Patience and assistance are key, though those unwilling to fully embrace Marxism-Leninism must still to be given work if they meet state requirements but be kept from the population to prevent outbursts.
Strengthening political education, emphasizing the study of Marxism, current events, and politics, as correct political orientation will be crucial. Reforming individuals and society must be mandatory, not optional, there can be no exceptions or compromises. The educational policy must be aimed to produce individuals with socialist consciousness and culture, instilling diligence and thrift, and ensuring youth understands that building a prosperous society requires decades of hard work, not a ready-made life. National, state, and local chauvinism, is harmful and must be abolished, requiring full attention. Time tables must be put in places with audits and adjustments as needed.
The guiding principle involved considering the entire populace and making proper arrangements in consultation with all parties, rejecting a "small circle" mentality. This approach emphasizes uniting positive factors and transforming negative ones for socialist construction. While the government guides, public organizations and the masses must also capable of devising solutions, aligning with this principle.
The slogans "Let a Hundred Flowers Blossom, Let a Hundred Schools of Thought Contend" and "Long-Term Coexistence and Mutual Supervision" were introduced to address socialist contradictions and boost China's development. The "hundred flowers" policy fostered free artistic and scientific development through discussion, rejecting administrative control and acknowledging that new ideas often faced initial opposition. Class struggle in the ideological realm will continued between the proletariat and bourgeoisie; re-education must continue. Marxism, must develop through this struggle. This ideological struggle, based on reasoned debate, not coercion, will be long-term, but socialism must hold an advantage. Wrongful ideas must be debated, shunned, and criticized using dialectical methods, carefully distinguishing "fragrant flowers" from "poisonous weeds." Revisionism is a particularly dangerous threat, as it undermined Marxism's core.
Under Mao, political criteria was established to judge words and deeds, focusing on unity, socialist benefit, consolidation of the people's democratic dictatorship and democratic centralism, strengthening Party leadership, and promoting international socialist unity/peace. The socialist path and Party leadership is paramount. These criteria aimed to foster free discussion, applying to all artistic and scientific activities. The "long-term coexistence and mutual supervision" policy allowed democratic parties to exist alongside the Communist Party, providing mutual supervision so long as they adhered to these political criteria and served socialism without compromise or exception.
If the dark triad personalities are not nipped in the bud and eliminated, isolated disturbances by by society members who prioritize immediate personal gains and don't fully grasp the past struggles or future efforts needed for socialism will occur. Education and solutions to societal problems must continue to advance and evolve. Individuals who deliberately break laws or incited trouble must faced legal action, and not because allowed to continue to create disturbances. Disturbances, though undesirable, must be studied and used to correct societal problems. These changes will be achieved through the socialist system and united efforts of the population. Everyone must hold each other accountable and take personal and social responsibilities.
Ambition demands a strict economy. The economy needs to be a continuous, guiding principle across all sectors. The population must focus on building and repairing society without pursuing luxuries, a crucial economic and political task. Im China, a dangerous trend of personnel seeking personal gain instead of sharing hardships with the masses needed correction by streamlining organizations and reassigning cadres. All citizens must be reminded that transforming poor, backward society into a prosperous and strong nation required decades of diligent, thrifty struggle, collective oneness and obligatory stewardship of humanity and the planet.
In Mao's China, China's industrialization path centered on heavy industry as the core, but also emphasized agriculture and light industry. As a large agricultural nation, robust agricultural development was crucial; it supplied raw materials, markets for both light and heavy industry, and capital for heavy industry's growth. Accelerated growth in agriculture and light industry during the Second and Third Five-Year Plans was projected to ensure faster heavy industry development, potentially reaching 20 million tons of steel output or more within three five-year plans. China was still gaining experience in economic construction, learning from past revolutionary mistakes to minimize costs. The gap between economic laws and their understanding was to be resolved through practice.
Learning from the Soviet Union's advanced experience is paramount, as they provided vital industrial assistance. While learning from all countries was beneficial, the primary focus must remain on the Soviet Union, with an emphasis on adapting, not dogmatically copying, their experiences. Strengthening solidarity with socialist countries, and peace-loving nations must be fundamental policy. Peaceful coexistence and trade with imperialist countries can be pursued to prevent war, but unrealistic expectations about them must be avoided. No capitalist nations should ever be trusted. The goal must be for communist nations to merge into a single entity for the benefit of humanity.
"OPPOSE BOOK WORSHIP," states investigation and practical experience are necessary for effective leadership and revolutionary success, especially within the Communist Party. Communist do not speak information without prior confirmation of factuality and are fluent in history. Conclusions without full knowledge cannot be done and those who do erode trust with superficial observations.
Blindly following directives or solely relying on written theory without considering actual conditions is a form of formalism that could undermine any party's goals. Mao is justifying sacrificing principles based on the environment and people. Correctness of Marxist theory stems from its proven effectiveness in practice and struggle, not from any prophetic quality. (Theory is not prophetic, it's a set of principles, ethics, and guiding rules, without the principles of theory, what is communism? And furthermore, the people decided what their struggle is and the solution, and might find liberalism or libertarianis, is the solution, for all we know.)
The lack of investigation into any actual situation would inevitably lead to idealistic appraisals of class forces and idealistic guidance in work, resulting in either opportunism or putschism. The aim of social and economic investigation is to accurately assess class forces and formulate effective tactics for the struggle. Investigations should focus on all social classes, not just isolated phenomena, to understand their political and economic situations and their interrelations. Specific social classes require investigation, from industrial proletariats to landlords, and one needs to understand both urban and rural conditions for the revolutionary struggle.
We must understand conditions, and shift from liberal conservativism or conservative liberalism to progressive militant Communist ideas rooted in direct engagement and investigation among the masses. Technique of investigation by organized groups require fact-finding meetings with diverse participants (I.E. different comprehension levels and biases), detailed outlines, personal participation by leaders, deep probing into specific problems or places, and personal note-taking to ensure accurate, comprehensive data collection, and that everyone shares the same inference from the data.
To quickly summarize, Mao says don't speak unless you're knowledgeable, be willing to sacrifice principles and ethics depending on the environment and people, get a diverse group (with different comprehension levels and biases), and make sure the group agrees on all information, creating an echo chamber with cognitive bias; which despite what Mao says, will lead to different sects of the ideology or even a rejection of communism by the people based on their conditions. Mao is calling for investigation and discussions among a diverse group, to create a rigid approach to information, while abandoning a rigid approach to ideology. How can society shift to progressive militant Communist if theory and principles are sacrificed or ignored depending on conditions. I mean take America for a second, it has a diverse group of people and there are a large portion that view communism and fascism as the same, there's also a group that views capitalism as less harmful then socialism and communism. That is the conditions of America, does that mean we abandon communism completely?
"Combat Liberalism," was pretty clear. Liberalism is an enemy of the people. Lineralism is about pacifying dissent among society. Liberalism is private irresponsibility that sustains problems. Liberalism is about personal opinions and attacks that support the counter-revolutionary. Liberalism fails to protect the people when necessary when Liberal interests were at-risk. Liberalism doesn’t have accountability or responsibility. It's premise is to divide and divert attention from revolutionary movements and ideologies. It prevents policies that truly aid the masses. Liberalism originated from petty-bourgeois selfishness, prioritizing personal interests over those of the revolution, thereby leading to ideological, political, and organizational forms of liberalism. Liberals are opportunists and objectively beneficial to the enemy of the people, thus making their presence within the revolutionary ranks unacceptable. All loyal, honest, active, and upright communists must unite against these liberal tendencies and guide those exhibiting them towards the correct path and treat their resistance to communism proportionally to the amount of hostility they are given in return.
"On Anarchists Nonsense," Engels and Marx held the belief that the future proletarian revolution would gradually dissolve the state, which they viewed as an instrument of economic oppression by the wealthy minority. However, they also maintained that the working class must first seize control of the state's organized political power to overcome capitalist resistance and reorganize society. Engels stated that anarchists inverted this process, advocating for the abolition of the state at the revolution's outset. He argued that this approach would destroy the very mechanism by which the victorious proletariat could consolidate power, suppress capitalists, and execute the necessary economic revolution, potentially leading to defeat and mass slaughter, as seen after the Paris Commune. Marx had anarchists expelled from the International for this. Marx did not care for anarchist tactics or writings. Anarchists are the antithesis of Marx's writings and of communism, and their views in the ordered of operations and tactics put humanity at risk; which makes sense as anarchists put individualism and ego before collectivism and altruism.
"Political indifferentism," an ideology that discouraged the working class from any form of political or economic engagement. This doctrine argued against workers forming parties, taking action, or striking, claiming such efforts implicitly legitimized the state or wages, thus compromising "eternal principles." It even deemed any gains, like better working conditions or education, as "compromises" that stained these ideals. Furthermore, it condemned workers establishing a revolutionary dictatorship or forming unions, pushing for passive waiting for an undefined "social liquidation" while advocating daily obedience to the capitalist state. This was seen as "anarchist nonsense," viewing it as an idealistic and dangerous betrayal of the working class that prioritized abstract principles over the tangible needs and liberation of humanity.
The Marxist dialectical method has four key features:
1. Interconnectedness of phenomena.
2. Constant change and development in nature.
3. Gradual quantitative changes lead to fundamental qualitative transformations.
4. Internal contradictions drive development.
Applied to social life, this method emphasizes historical context and constant change. Revolutionary transformations drive qualitative changes, and class struggle is the engine of historical development.
Marxist philosophical materialism opposes idealism, emphasizing material conditions and class struggle. It asserts the material world's existence independent of consciousness and that matter is primary, with consciousness secondary.
Marxist materialism holds that the world and its laws are knowable through experiment and practice.
In social life, Marxist materialism reveals social connections and interdependencies as laws of societal development. Socialism transformed from a dream to a science, bonding theory and practice.
Historical materialism explores the relationship between social being and consciousness. The mode of production determines social development, comprising productive forces and relations of production.
Changes in productive forces precede changes in relations of production. Five main types of relations of production are:
1. Primitive communal
2. Slave
3. Feudal
4. Capitalist
5. Socialist
Each type corresponds to the state of productive forces. The development of productive forces leads to changes in relations of production.
New productive forces and relations emerge within the old system spontaneously and unconsciously. Men adapt and improve within existing constraints.
Marx stated, "In social production, men enter into definite relations indispensable and independent of their will, corresponding to a definite stage of development of their material productive forces."
Changes in relations of production occur through revolutionary overthrow. New social ideas, institutions, and power emerge from conflicts between productive forces and relations.
Marx emphasized:
- The proletariat makes itself the ruling class through revolution.
- Force drives social revolution.
- The mode of production conditions social life.
- Social being determines consciousness.
Marx's Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy formulated historical materialism's essence:
- Relations of production correspond to productive forces.
- Conflict sparks social revolution.
- Economic conditions determine ideological forms.
- No social order perishes before developing all productive forces.
- New relations emerge when material conditions mature.
These principles comprise Marxist materialism applied to social life and history.
On Practice Dogmatism rejected the Chinese revolution's experience, while empiricism focused solely on fragmented experiences, neglecting theory's importance. Before Marx, materialism failed to connect knowledge with social practice. Marxists recognized production as the primary practical activity shaping human knowledge.
Knowledge develops through social practice, including production, class struggle, politics, science, and art. Marxism emphasizes practice as the criterion for verifying knowledge. Success confirms anticipated results, while failure prompts correction. Lenin stated, "Practice is higher than theoretical knowledge, possessing universality and immediate actuality." Marxist philosophy's dialectical materialism has two key characteristics: class nature (serving the proletariat) and practicality (emphasizing theory's dependence on practice).
Truth is determined by objective results in social practice, not subjective feelings. Human knowledge arises from practice through perception, conceptualization, and logical inference. Marxism combines theory and practice, ensuring truth is determined by objective results. Mao's essay aimed to rectify the Party's ideological errors and promote a balanced approach to Marxist theory and practice.
Marxist materialism, developed by Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin, solved the problem of knowledge development. This dialectical-materialist theory emphasizes practice as the foundation of knowledge. There are two stages of cognition: perceptual (lower) and logical (higher), unified on the basis of practice. Perception solves the problem of phenomena, while theory solves the problem of essence.
Genuine knowledge originates in direct experience, with most knowledge coming from indirect experience. Knowledge from past times and foreign lands requires scientific abstraction. The proletariat's knowledge of capitalist society progressed from perceptual to logical through practice. Similarly, the Chinese people's understanding of imperialism deepened through experience and struggle.
Effective leadership requires systematic understanding and open-mindedness. The process of cognition involves contact with the external world (perception) and synthesizing data (conception, judgment, and inference). Marxism emphasizes that knowledge begins with experience, stressing materialism. Idealist rationalism prioritizes reason over experience.
The sequence of cognition is perceptual experience followed by rational understanding, with social practice as the foundation. Knowledge begins with practice, develops through practice, and returns to practice. Practice is the criterion of truth. Revolutionary leaders must correct ideas and plans when errors are discovered.
Marxist-Leninist theory recognizes that relative truths constitute absolute truth. The development of objective processes and human knowledge is infinite and contradictory. Marxism-Leninism opens roads to knowledge of truth through practice. The unity of subjective and objective, theory and practice, knowing and doing, is concrete and historical.
The proletariat and its party must correctly know and change the world. This requires changing the objective world and the subjective world, cognitive ability, and relations between the subjective and objective world. By emphasizing the importance of practice, Mao's essay provides a foundational framework for understanding Marxist theory and its application.
Marxism and Humanism Marxism and humanism intersect in the concept of "real humanism," which emphasizes individual freedom, respect for legality, and human dignity. This shift marks a transition from socialism to communism. The objective of revolutionary struggle has always been the liberation of humanity from exploitation, initially taking the form of class conflict.
Marx's early work was influenced by Enlightenment philosophy, emphasizing reason and freedom. He believed the State should embody reason and human nature, but became disillusioned when the Prussian State failed to reform. Marx then adopted Feuerbach's "communalist" humanism, emphasizing the alienation of human reason and the importance of communal relationships.
Marx saw history as the process of humanity's alienation and realization. He believed humans are only truly free when part of a communal whole. Marx's new theory of humanism led him to advocate for a practical revolution to restore humanity's alienated nature. This revolution would result from an alliance between philosophy and the proletariat.
In 1845, Marx broke with traditional philosophy, rejecting the essence of man as a theoretical basis. He replaced old concepts with new ones, establishing a new problematic and systematic way of asking questions. Marx's theoretical anti-humanism recognizes humanism as an ideology, rather than a theoretical basis for understanding history and politics.
Ideology is a system of representations with a historical existence and role within a given society. It is distinct from science and has a more important practico-social function. Ideology expresses how people experience their relationship with their environment, encompassing real and imaginary aspects.
The ruling ideology in a class society belongs to the ruling class, serving both to govern the exploited class and shape the ruling class's identity. In a classless society, ideology remains crucial for transforming individuals to adapt to their conditions of existence.
The concept of "real humanism" is defined by its opposition to abstract humanism. The adjective "real" signals a direction and destination, pointing to the need to study society and its social relations. Marx crossed the frontier from ideology to scientific theory, discovering that the concept of man is not scientific but ideological.
The signpost of "real humanism" remains in the old domain, but once crossed, new concepts are needed to understand reality. The concept of real humanism can serve as a practical slogan but not as a theoretical concept. It can point out problems but not solve them. Marxist theory must not confuse practical concepts with theoretical ones, and the recourse to ethics in humanist ideology may hinder truly posing and solving problems.
The recourse to ethics in humanist ideology may hinder truly posing and solving problems, which are organizational problems of economic, political, and individual life. These problems must be called by their scientific names to be resolved.
In a class-based society, the dominant ideology belongs to the ruling class. However, this class is not only the master of its ideology but also its captive. The ruling ideology serves the ruling class in its governance over the exploited class and in shaping its own identity as the ruling class.
Even in a classless society, ideology remains crucial. It is essential for transforming individuals to adapt to their conditions of existence. Ideology expresses the need for transformation, measures the gap between the current and desired states, and facilitates resolving this contradiction.
In a classless society, ideology enables individuals to understand their position in the world and history, benefiting all people. Ideology is a system of representations that exists historically within a society, distinct from science and with a more significant practical function.
Ideology is an integral part of every social structure, and societies cannot exist without it. Ideology expresses how people experience their relationship with their environment, encompassing both real and imaginary aspects. This relationship is a complex unity of real and imaginary components.
The concept of "real humanism" is defined by its opposition to abstract humanism. The adjective "real" is a practical concept, signaling a direction and destination. It points to the need to study society and its social relations to understand humanity.
On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People by Mao implies There is the people are the workers, socialists, revolutionaries, and light triad personalities, which are divided into the workers and non workers. The non workers are the peasants and intellectuals. Then there is the enemy are which are the opportunists, anti-socialists, counter-revolutionaries, dark triad personalities. Mao says, "the state is where freedom and democracy are exercised within the ranks of the people under centralized guidance." The idea of communism is to eliminate hierarchies but here the workers seem to be putting above teachers, scientists, intellectuals, and the peasants. While the system may operate on principles and ethics, the people must be treated equally, the state must be egalitarian. The west/US can never be free under its current system. True freedom and democracy are not abstract; they are relative and specific to historical conditions. For the people, this means a balance of democracy with centralism and freedom with discipline, forming "democratic centralism" that ensures broad freedoms while maintaining socialist order.
For ideological disagreements among the people, democratic methods like discussion, criticism, persuasion, and education should be tried, rather than force. While rules are needed for public order, they must be combined with persuasion. This approach follows the "unity—criticism—unity" formula: start with a shared goal, address issues through criticism, and achieve a new, stronger unity. This method proved successful within the Communist Party and is applied more broadly. Internal contradictions are usually non-antagonistic, they can turn antagonistic if mishandled. Such instances in a socialist country are generally localized and temporary because exploitation has been abolished, and people's core interests align. This democratic approach to resolving internal contradictions is a core Marxist principle, now more prominent as the struggle with external enemies has lessened. Not confusing internal contradictions with those against the enemy, distinguish between the two.
Contradictions drive all change, yet applying this to socialist society is challenging, as many don't acknowledge internal contradictions crucial for progress. Socialist contradictions are non-antagonistic and are solvable within the system. Despite the socialist system's superiority and economic growth, mixed economies and semi-socialist co-ops cause problems. Contradictions will persist between production relations and forces, and between the superstructure and economic base, fueled by bourgeois ideology and bureaucracy. Keeping any form of capitalism is to sustain class struggle. Thus, distinguishing and correctly handling contradictions among the people versus with the enemy is vital for unity, development, and solidifying a new socialist state.
Eliminating counter-revolutionaries is a crucial task, often misunderstood by those on the "Right;" enemies and allies must be clearly determined and treated as such, without tolerance or compromise. The elimination of counter revolutionaries and resistance will create stability, and allow for sound economic policies and improved living standards. Standards and practice must constantly be reviewed and upgraded, keeping everything streamlined. Vigilance will be necessary, as hidden elements and foreign agents will seek to cause trouble. The threat must be taken seriously without over or underestimating the risk.
Agricultural co-operatives are vital for rural population, their transformation will resolve the conflict between industrialization and individual farming despite inherent difficulties. The co-ops must consolidate within five years or slightly longer and require continuous resolution through careful management of production and distribution. And the raising of all peasants to at least a middle-peasant living standard. Though workers have higher incomes due to productivity and lower living costs, some wage adjustments are deemed necessary to address peasant dissatisfaction. This is bound to cause problems, wages with except to those who provide basic human needs and life saving/protection services, should all be the same; one flat rate.
The bourgeoisie must assimilate into the working class, and the entire population must be reformed and re-educated to adapt to the new society as they merge into one people. Even after the initial phase, the re-education must continue and society must continue to constantly evolve. While it would be preferable if it was voluntary, it must be obligatory.
Contradictions will occur among intellectuals as they adapt to the new, a minority will remain skeptical. Their trust is necessary for improved relations, and practical support to unleash their talents. They must be made to get along. Intellectuals are haughty and will need continued pressure to humble themselves. This fundamental ideological shift is a long-term, necessary, and process, given the changed social system. Patience and assistance are key, though those unwilling to fully embrace Marxism-Leninism must still to be given work if they meet state requirements but be kept from the population to prevent outbursts.
Strengthening political education, emphasizing the study of Marxism, current events, and politics, as correct political orientation will be crucial. Reforming individuals and society must be mandatory, not optional, there can be no exceptions or compromises. The educational policy must be aimed to produce individuals with socialist consciousness and culture, instilling diligence and thrift, and ensuring youth understands that building a prosperous society requires decades of hard work, not a ready-made life. National, state, and local chauvinism, is harmful and must be abolished, requiring full attention. Time tables must be put in places with audits and adjustments as needed.
The guiding principle involved considering the entire populace and making proper arrangements in consultation with all parties, rejecting a "small circle" mentality. This approach emphasizes uniting positive factors and transforming negative ones for socialist construction. While the government guides, public organizations and the masses must also capable of devising solutions, aligning with this principle.
The slogans "Let a Hundred Flowers Blossom, Let a Hundred Schools of Thought Contend" and "Long-Term Coexistence and Mutual Supervision" were introduced to address socialist contradictions and boost China's development. The "hundred flowers" policy fostered free artistic and scientific development through discussion, rejecting administrative control and acknowledging that new ideas often faced initial opposition. Class struggle in the ideological realm will continued between the proletariat and bourgeoisie; re-education must continue. Marxism, must develop through this struggle. This ideological struggle, based on reasoned debate, not coercion, will be long-term, but socialism must hold an advantage. Wrongful ideas must be debated, shunned, and criticized using dialectical methods, carefully distinguishing "fragrant flowers" from "poisonous weeds." Revisionism is a particularly dangerous threat, as it undermined Marxism's core.
Under Mao, political criteria was established to judge words and deeds, focusing on unity, socialist benefit, consolidation of the people's democratic dictatorship and democratic centralism, strengthening Party leadership, and promoting international socialist unity/peace. The socialist path and Party leadership is paramount. These criteria aimed to foster free discussion, applying to all artistic and scientific activities. The "long-term coexistence and mutual supervision" policy allowed democratic parties to exist alongside the Communist Party, providing mutual supervision so long as they adhered to these political criteria and served socialism without compromise or exception.
If the dark triad personalities are not nipped in the bud and eliminated, isolated disturbances by by society members who prioritize immediate personal gains and don't fully grasp the past struggles or future efforts needed for socialism will occur. Education and solutions to societal problems must continue to advance and evolve. Individuals who deliberately break laws or incited trouble must faced legal action, and not because allowed to continue to create disturbances. Disturbances, though undesirable, must be studied and used to correct societal problems. These changes will be achieved through the socialist system and united efforts of the population. Everyone must hold each other accountable and take personal and social responsibilities.
Ambition demands a strict economy. The economy needs to be a continuous, guiding principle across all sectors. The population must focus on building and repairing society without pursuing luxuries, a crucial economic and political task. Im China, a dangerous trend of personnel seeking personal gain instead of sharing hardships with the masses needed correction by streamlining organizations and reassigning cadres. All citizens must be reminded that transforming poor, backward society into a prosperous and strong nation required decades of diligent, thrifty struggle, collective oneness and obligatory stewardship of humanity and the planet.
In Mao's China, China's industrialization path centered on heavy industry as the core, but also emphasized agriculture and light industry. As a large agricultural nation, robust agricultural development was crucial; it supplied raw materials, markets for both light and heavy industry, and capital for heavy industry's growth. Accelerated growth in agriculture and light industry during the Second and Third Five-Year Plans was projected to ensure faster heavy industry development, potentially reaching 20 million tons of steel output or more within three five-year plans. China was still gaining experience in economic construction, learning from past revolutionary mistakes to minimize costs. The gap between economic laws and their understanding was to be resolved through practice.
Learning from the Soviet Union's advanced experience is paramount, as they provided vital industrial assistance. While learning from all countries was beneficial, the primary focus must remain on the Soviet Union, with an emphasis on adapting, not dogmatically copying, their experiences. Strengthening solidarity with socialist countries, and peace-loving nations must be fundamental policy. Peaceful coexistence and trade with imperialist countries can be pursued to prevent war, but unrealistic expectations about them must be avoided. No capitalist nations should ever be trusted. The goal must be for communist nations to merge into a single entity for the benefit of humanity.
"OPPOSE BOOK WORSHIP," states investigation and practical experience are necessary for effective leadership and revolutionary success, especially within the Communist Party. Communist do not speak information without prior confirmation of factuality and are fluent in history. Conclusions without full knowledge cannot be done and those who do erode trust with superficial observations.
Blindly following directives or solely relying on written theory without considering actual conditions is a form of formalism that could undermine any party's goals. Mao is justifying sacrificing principles based on the environment and people. Correctness of Marxist theory stems from its proven effectiveness in practice and struggle, not from any prophetic quality. (Theory is not prophetic, it's a set of principles, ethics, and guiding rules, without the principles of theory, what is communism? And furthermore, the people decided what their struggle is and the solution, and might find liberalism or libertarianis, is the solution, for all we know.)
The lack of investigation into any actual situation would inevitably lead to idealistic appraisals of class forces and idealistic guidance in work, resulting in either opportunism or putschism. The aim of social and economic investigation is to accurately assess class forces and formulate effective tactics for the struggle. Investigations should focus on all social classes, not just isolated phenomena, to understand their political and economic situations and their interrelations. Specific social classes require investigation, from industrial proletariats to landlords, and one needs to understand both urban and rural conditions for the revolutionary struggle.
We must understand conditions, and shift from liberal conservativism or conservative liberalism to progressive militant Communist ideas rooted in direct engagement and investigation among the masses. Technique of investigation by organized groups require fact-finding meetings with diverse participants (I.E. different comprehension levels and biases), detailed outlines, personal participation by leaders, deep probing into specific problems or places, and personal note-taking to ensure accurate, comprehensive data collection, and that everyone shares the same inference from the data.
To quickly summarize, Mao says don't speak unless you're knowledgeable, be willing to sacrifice principles and ethics depending on the environment and people, get a diverse group (with different comprehension levels and biases), and make sure the group agrees on all information, creating an echo chamber with cognitive bias; which despite what Mao says, will lead to different sects of the ideology or even a rejection of communism by the people based on their conditions. Mao is calling for investigation and discussions among a diverse group, to create a rigid approach to information, while abandoning a rigid approach to ideology. How can society shift to progressive militant Communist if theory and principles are sacrificed or ignored depending on conditions. I mean take America for a second, it has a diverse group of people and there are a large portion that view communism and fascism as the same, there's also a group that views capitalism as less harmful then socialism and communism. That is the conditions of America, does that mean we abandon communism completely?
"Combat Liberalism," was pretty clear. Liberalism is an enemy of the people. Lineralism is about pacifying dissent among society. Liberalism is private irresponsibility that sustains problems. Liberalism is about personal opinions and attacks that support the counter-revolutionary. Liberalism fails to protect the people when necessary when Liberal interests were at-risk. Liberalism doesn’t have accountability or responsibility. It's premise is to divide and divert attention from revolutionary movements and ideologies. It prevents policies that truly aid the masses. Liberalism originated from petty-bourgeois selfishness, prioritizing personal interests over those of the revolution, thereby leading to ideological, political, and organizational forms of liberalism. Liberals are opportunists and objectively beneficial to the enemy of the people, thus making their presence within the revolutionary ranks unacceptable. All loyal, honest, active, and upright communists must unite against these liberal tendencies and guide those exhibiting them towards the correct path and treat their resistance to communism proportionally to the amount of hostility they are given in return.
"On Anarchists Nonsense," Engels and Marx held the belief that the future proletarian revolution would gradually dissolve the state, which they viewed as an instrument of economic oppression by the wealthy minority. However, they also maintained that the working class must first seize control of the state's organized political power to overcome capitalist resistance and reorganize society. Engels stated that anarchists inverted this process, advocating for the abolition of the state at the revolution's outset. He argued that this approach would destroy the very mechanism by which the victorious proletariat could consolidate power, suppress capitalists, and execute the necessary economic revolution, potentially leading to defeat and mass slaughter, as seen after the Paris Commune. Marx had anarchists expelled from the International for this. Marx did not care for anarchist tactics or writings. Anarchists are the antithesis of Marx's writings and of communism, and their views in the ordered of operations and tactics put humanity at risk; which makes sense as anarchists put individualism and ego before collectivism and altruism.
"Political indifferentism," an ideology that discouraged the working class from any form of political or economic engagement. This doctrine argued against workers forming parties, taking action, or striking, claiming such efforts implicitly legitimized the state or wages, thus compromising "eternal principles." It even deemed any gains, like better working conditions or education, as "compromises" that stained these ideals. Furthermore, it condemned workers establishing a revolutionary dictatorship or forming unions, pushing for passive waiting for an undefined "social liquidation" while advocating daily obedience to the capitalist state. This was seen as "anarchist nonsense," viewing it as an idealistic and dangerous betrayal of the working class that prioritized abstract principles over the tangible needs and liberation of humanity.
"The Bakuninists At Work" says The Bakuninists, despite their proclaimed ultra-revolutionary principles of anarchy, immediate worker emancipation, and absolute abstention from politics and the state, fundamentally contradicted and abandoned these principles in practice when faced with a real revolutionary situation. They ended up participating in bourgeois politics, forming provisional governments, and adopting tactics that were either ineffective (like the general strike in Barcelona) or disastrously disorganized (like the isolated cantonal uprisings). Showing the complete ideological and practical bankruptcy of Bakuninist theory when put to the test. According to Engels, a combination of inherent flaws in Bakuninist ideology and the resulting practical blunders highlights their lack of centralized leadership and a coherent program, leading to fragmented, uncoordinated actions where each town acted "on its own" and declared "separation from them" (other towns) as a principle. Their tactic of a general strike, without sufficient organization or funds, was presented as a miraculous lever but proved easily ridiculed or ineffective when confronted by state power. Furthermore, their disdain for political action meant they couldn't effectively leverage existing political opportunities, instead falling into alliances with bourgeois factions who exploited them and then discarded them. Engels detailed critique of their operational approach, demonstrating its inherent weakness and ultimate self-sabotage. Bakuninist principles and tactics are detrimental to genuine proletarian revolution and organization. It's not just about a failed revolution but about demonstrating why it failed, and by extension, why Bakuninist ideology itself is flawed. Their "ultra-revolutionary rantings" led to either "appeasement" or "uprisings that were doomed to failure," ultimately resulting in the "disorganisation of the International in Spain" and the vilification of workers' movements. The writing's core purpose is to validate a more centralized, disciplined, and politically engaged approach to revolutionary struggle by exposing the practical shortcomings and destructive consequences of Bakuninist anarchism. Democratic confederalism is a seriously flawed ideological system that anarchists rely on.
"Anarchism and Socialism" pointed out anarchism represents a misguided and ultimately destructive form of Utopianism that failed to grasp the scientific principles of social evolution and the practical necessities of a successful proletarian revolution. It seeks to highlight that despite any superficial similarities in ultimate societal goals, the anarchist approach to achieving those goals was profoundly detrimental. The Marxist-Leninist framework of scientific socialism, emphasizing that societal ideals evolve with productive forces and that a socialist transition requires the proletariat to seize and wield state power, was presented in direct contrast to the anarchist demand for immediate state abolition and its aversion to political engagement, which were dismissed as impractical and dangerous "indifferentism." Anarchist principles translated into practical failure during the Spanish cantonal revolts. This historical account detailed how Bakuninist ideological inconsistencies, their lack of centralized leadership, and reliance on ineffective tactics like the general strike led to disorganization, fragmentation, and ultimately, the suppression of the revolutionary movement. The failures in Spain served as empirical evidence supporting the theoretical arguments against anarchism. Engels in his text articulated this critique was to solidify the theoretical and practical superiority of scientific socialism over anarchism and to protect the integrity and effectiveness of the working-class movement. The primary reason was to expose anarchism as an ideology that, far from being more radical or logical, actually undermined the essential tools for proletarian liberation: organization, discipline, and the conquest of state power. By detailing the "utter confusion, inactivity and helplessness" and the subsequent "disorganization of the International" caused by Bakuninist actions, Engels aimed to persuade workers and socialists to reject anarchist influence and instead embrace a disciplined, centralized, and politically active approach necessary for achieving a genuine communist society.
"Anarchism or Socialism" showed class struggle is the driving force of modern social life, with different classes embodying distinct ideologies like liberalism for the bourgeoisie and socialism for the proletariat. Socialism itself is categorized into three trends: reformism, anarchism, and Marxism. Reformism, seen as advocating peaceful class collaboration and viewing socialism as a distant ideal, is dismissed as irrelevant. The focus shifts to Marxism and anarchism as the two active and contending forces vying for the proletariat's allegiance. The dialectical method describes life as a continuous process of destruction and creation, where the growing elements are invincible and the decaying ones are doomed. This development includes both evolutionary (quantitative) and revolutionary (qualitative) changes, with evolution preparing the ground for revolution. The materialist theory, conversely, asserts that social being determines consciousness, meaning that material conditions and economic development form the basis of social life, with ideological superstructures adapting in response. Valid ideals must be rooted in economic conditions and that radical economic changes are necessary for societal transformation. This involves a systematic exposition followed by a direct refutation of anarchist criticisms. Stalin systematically addresses anarchist "accusations," starting with their claim of plagiarism regarding the Communist Manifesto, which is dismissed as baseless slander. He refutes anarchist misrepresentations of Marxist materialism as a "belly theory" or a "poorly disguised dualism." He directly confronted anarchist claims, such as their denial of Social Democracy's revolutionary nature or their mischaracterization of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Stalin argued that anarchists are fighting "figments of their own imagination." Stalin firmly establish Marxism as the sole legitimate and scientifically grounded path to proletarian socialism, while thoroughly discrediting anarchism. His explicit goal was to demonstrate that anarchism, despite its active presence, is fundamentally at odds with Marxism due to "entirely different principles." The inherent conflict between anarchism's focus on individual emancipation and Marxism's emphasis on mass emancipation, exposes anarchist ignorance and contradictory positions on key philosophical and tactical issues, such as their confusion of Hegel's metaphysics with his scientific dialectical method, their misinterpretation of Marxist materialism, and their flawed understanding of revolutionary action and the dictatorship of the proletariat. By portraying anarchists as uninformed and illogical "critics" who slander Marx and Engels, Stalin solidified the intellectual and revolutionary authority of Marxism and guides the proletariat towards its doctrines, away from what is depicted as an errant and ultimately ineffective path. Stalin sought to provide a clear theoretical and practical guide for the proletarian movement, emphasizing the necessity of class struggle, socialist revolution, and the dictatorship of the proletariat under the guidance of a strong, centralized Social-Democratic Party.
Critique of the Gotha Programme provides a detailed critique of a workers' party program, summarizing its theoretical and practical flaws, largely attributing them to the influence of Ferdinand Lassalle. Labor is the source of all wealth, as it ignores the role of nature and the ownership of the means of production. Wealth is created by social labor and that while this labor benefits capitalists in a capitalist society, it should benefit all in a communist one, after necessary deductions for things like expanding production and social services. A truly communist society can only move beyond this "bourgeois right" of equal exchange when production is abundant enough to distribute according to need. The program's focus on vague concepts like "undiminished proceeds of labor" and "fair distribution" lacks analytical rigor and fails to address the fundamental issue of who controls the means of production. The critique extends to the program's political demands, which are seen as timid and limited to a national framework, betraying the internationalist and revolutionary spirit of true communism. Lassalle’s "iron law of wages" was outdated and scientifically incorrect, arguing it misrepresented how capitalism exploits labor. The program was a step backward for the workers' movement, marked by "criminal levity" and a reliance on bourgeois and statist ideas, rather than a clear call for a revolutionary transformation of society. The critique also emphasized that a transitional state must exist for as long as there are enemies to the proletariat and threats to the transition to communism.
Marxism and the national question: I guess this is where I disagree with most communist parties.
"Anarchism and Socialism" pointed out anarchism represents a misguided and ultimately destructive form of Utopianism that failed to grasp the scientific principles of social evolution and the practical necessities of a successful proletarian revolution. It seeks to highlight that despite any superficial similarities in ultimate societal goals, the anarchist approach to achieving those goals was profoundly detrimental. The Marxist-Leninist framework of scientific socialism, emphasizing that societal ideals evolve with productive forces and that a socialist transition requires the proletariat to seize and wield state power, was presented in direct contrast to the anarchist demand for immediate state abolition and its aversion to political engagement, which were dismissed as impractical and dangerous "indifferentism." Anarchist principles translated into practical failure during the Spanish cantonal revolts. This historical account detailed how Bakuninist ideological inconsistencies, their lack of centralized leadership, and reliance on ineffective tactics like the general strike led to disorganization, fragmentation, and ultimately, the suppression of the revolutionary movement. The failures in Spain served as empirical evidence supporting the theoretical arguments against anarchism. Engels in his text articulated this critique was to solidify the theoretical and practical superiority of scientific socialism over anarchism and to protect the integrity and effectiveness of the working-class movement. The primary reason was to expose anarchism as an ideology that, far from being more radical or logical, actually undermined the essential tools for proletarian liberation: organization, discipline, and the conquest of state power. By detailing the "utter confusion, inactivity and helplessness" and the subsequent "disorganization of the International" caused by Bakuninist actions, Engels aimed to persuade workers and socialists to reject anarchist influence and instead embrace a disciplined, centralized, and politically active approach necessary for achieving a genuine communist society.
"Anarchism or Socialism" showed class struggle is the driving force of modern social life, with different classes embodying distinct ideologies like liberalism for the bourgeoisie and socialism for the proletariat. Socialism itself is categorized into three trends: reformism, anarchism, and Marxism. Reformism, seen as advocating peaceful class collaboration and viewing socialism as a distant ideal, is dismissed as irrelevant. The focus shifts to Marxism and anarchism as the two active and contending forces vying for the proletariat's allegiance. The dialectical method describes life as a continuous process of destruction and creation, where the growing elements are invincible and the decaying ones are doomed. This development includes both evolutionary (quantitative) and revolutionary (qualitative) changes, with evolution preparing the ground for revolution. The materialist theory, conversely, asserts that social being determines consciousness, meaning that material conditions and economic development form the basis of social life, with ideological superstructures adapting in response. Valid ideals must be rooted in economic conditions and that radical economic changes are necessary for societal transformation. This involves a systematic exposition followed by a direct refutation of anarchist criticisms. Stalin systematically addresses anarchist "accusations," starting with their claim of plagiarism regarding the Communist Manifesto, which is dismissed as baseless slander. He refutes anarchist misrepresentations of Marxist materialism as a "belly theory" or a "poorly disguised dualism." He directly confronted anarchist claims, such as their denial of Social Democracy's revolutionary nature or their mischaracterization of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Stalin argued that anarchists are fighting "figments of their own imagination." Stalin firmly establish Marxism as the sole legitimate and scientifically grounded path to proletarian socialism, while thoroughly discrediting anarchism. His explicit goal was to demonstrate that anarchism, despite its active presence, is fundamentally at odds with Marxism due to "entirely different principles." The inherent conflict between anarchism's focus on individual emancipation and Marxism's emphasis on mass emancipation, exposes anarchist ignorance and contradictory positions on key philosophical and tactical issues, such as their confusion of Hegel's metaphysics with his scientific dialectical method, their misinterpretation of Marxist materialism, and their flawed understanding of revolutionary action and the dictatorship of the proletariat. By portraying anarchists as uninformed and illogical "critics" who slander Marx and Engels, Stalin solidified the intellectual and revolutionary authority of Marxism and guides the proletariat towards its doctrines, away from what is depicted as an errant and ultimately ineffective path. Stalin sought to provide a clear theoretical and practical guide for the proletarian movement, emphasizing the necessity of class struggle, socialist revolution, and the dictatorship of the proletariat under the guidance of a strong, centralized Social-Democratic Party.
Critique of the Gotha Programme provides a detailed critique of a workers' party program, summarizing its theoretical and practical flaws, largely attributing them to the influence of Ferdinand Lassalle. Labor is the source of all wealth, as it ignores the role of nature and the ownership of the means of production. Wealth is created by social labor and that while this labor benefits capitalists in a capitalist society, it should benefit all in a communist one, after necessary deductions for things like expanding production and social services. A truly communist society can only move beyond this "bourgeois right" of equal exchange when production is abundant enough to distribute according to need. The program's focus on vague concepts like "undiminished proceeds of labor" and "fair distribution" lacks analytical rigor and fails to address the fundamental issue of who controls the means of production. The critique extends to the program's political demands, which are seen as timid and limited to a national framework, betraying the internationalist and revolutionary spirit of true communism. Lassalle’s "iron law of wages" was outdated and scientifically incorrect, arguing it misrepresented how capitalism exploits labor. The program was a step backward for the workers' movement, marked by "criminal levity" and a reliance on bourgeois and statist ideas, rather than a clear call for a revolutionary transformation of society. The critique also emphasized that a transitional state must exist for as long as there are enemies to the proletariat and threats to the transition to communism.
Marxism and the national question: I guess this is where I disagree with most communist parties.
Marxism and the National Question: Stalin's 1913 work explains nationalism as a tool the rich use in diverse empires like old Russia to divide workers by ethnicity, masking class exploitation as fights for cultural pride, better known as sectarian politics to keep people split. He defines a nation simply as a group sharing language, land, economy, and mindset formed under capitalism, and rejects ideas like separate cultural rules for minorities because they weaken worker unity and empower reactionaries.
Instead, he pushes for self-determination, letting oppressed groups choose independence or autonomy, but always tied to the bigger class struggle, with democratic rights like equal languages and schools, so workers can unite internationally to overthrow oppression and build socialism without ethnic divisions holding them back. While he does allow for divisions, he says socialism will always side against those who wish to break up worker solidarity.
Those divisions he mentions are nothing more than identity politics, and as we see after the first quarter of the twenty-first century, if you allow identity politics you end up with division because there is no true oneness. Instead, we have people fighting over gender, sex, religion, ethnicity, nation, and a plethora of other things, including class. I have been alive for 46 years, born in 1980. What I have seen is division creates supremacy, hate, oppression, violence, war, human rights violations, and crimes against humanity. And the more humanity divides itself into new countries and territories, the worst things get. The more people divide themselves into social-sectarian groups the more supremacy, bigotry, hatred, chauvinism, and suffering takes place in our societies, division kills. It kills ideas, progress, time and yes, life.
We have people waiting for past wrongs to be fixed, and waiting to obtain power under the current capitalist systems. Who wish to succeed from not only the rule of the government but from being a citizen of the same population as the rest of the citizens. And Stalin and others say we must allow for them to do this to correct past wrongs, and only them will they natural surrender the sole power they just obtained to become one with humanity. That other groups that were done wrong must be made right under the current systems and once they've been made comfortable and elevated in their social status, will they then approve being made uncomfortable, while we build an equitable-egalitarian system for all. This is utopian and sustaining capitalism to me.
Stalin says there must be internationalism, but that can only truly exist if people accept they are part of a shared global community, adopt an international democratic centralist governing system, and accept that everyone has an obligatory stewardship to humanity and the planet. People today are so busy fighting to be their own individual away from society, their own nation away from the globe, to do their own thing regardless of how it impacts others, regardless if it's an individual or individual group; that people are not gonna naturally or willingly accept they are part of a shared global community, adopt an international democratic centralist governing system, and accept that everyone has an obligatory stewardship to humanity and the planet.
I am an activist-misanthrope. Stalin's optimism assumed proletarian victory would naturally foster oneness and solidarity. I disagree with Stalin and ask, doesn't dialectical materialism say nothing is natural and everything is a product of its environment? I also say, as soon as a communist workers party, a vanguard seizes control of a nation, they should merge immediately with other communist nations, creating a super country or union. They should not wait to unite like a liberal waiting on incremental reform. The world's problems that face us all, aren't waiting for us to unite for them to get worse but we can solve them as long as we're 196+ different nations, we need to be one people, in one communal, on one planet, with one voice.
People say I'm wrong about divisions. Tell that to Korea, Sudan, Somalia, and Eritrea to name a few. Divisions have brought only suffering and war. Tell it to Germany, Vietnam, and others who have had peace since reunification. Division and the consequences of it are divisions and consequences non the less.
The Soviet union was the closest we ever got to that, and it is our blueprint to eventually doing it; it just didn't go far enough, it wasn't immoderate and inordinate, but to passive for its own good, it should've never stopped advancing and growing. Their passiveness allowed for Bureaucratic ossification, Khrushchev's revisionism, and material pressure from western economic warfare. I'm not allergic to universalist philosophical-ideological views, and neither should be any other communist.
Difference In The European Labor Movement implies: Revisionism and anarchism as tactical deviations from Marxism within the labor movement emerged due to deep-rooted economic and social factors rather than individual errors. These deviations stem from the rapid influx of less-educated members into the labor movement, uneven capitalist development across regions causing partial adoption of Marxist principles, and the dialectical nature of social development leading to exaggerated, one-sided interpretations of capitalism. The persistence of these trends is linked to the bourgeoisie's dual strategies of force, which suppresses reforms and fuels anarcho-syndicalism's rejection of parliamentary tactics, and liberalism, which grants superficial rights (M4A, UBI) and intensifies revisionism by misleading workers into dismissing class struggle. Both revisionism and anarcho-syndicalism, rooted in a bourgeois worldview, hinder Marxism's goal of uniting workers into disciplined, class-conscious organizations capable of sustained action (too much mutual aid, trying to put band aids on problems instead of studying and figuring out the best way to take on the system mixed with anti communist authoritianism (anti-democratic centralism).
The State: A Lecture Delivered at the Sverdlov University where Lenin discussed the nature, origin, and significance of the state, emphasizing its complexity and the deliberate confusion sown by bourgeois scholars to obscure its role as a tool of class oppression. He explained that the state emerged historically with the division of society into classes, specifically when exploiters and exploited appeared, such as during the transition from primitive, classless societies to slave-owning systems, followed by feudalism and capitalism. Lenin traced how the state functioned as a machine of coercion, through armies, prisons, and laws, to maintain the dominance of one class (slave-owners, feudal lords, or capitalists) over another (slaves, serfs, or proletarians), adapting its forms (monarchy, republic, aristocracy, or democracy) to the technical and economic conditions of each era. He argued that bourgeois claims of the state representing "popular will" or "liberty" were deceptive, as even democratic republics like the United States and Switzerland served as instruments of capitalist domination, suppressing workers' movements with force or co-opting them with superficial reforms. Lenin stressed that the Communist Party, aiming to overthrow capitalism, viewed the state as a tool to be seized by the proletariat to dismantle exploitation, ultimately aiming to abolish the state itself when class divisions ceased. He urged his audience to study key works like Engels’s *The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State* and to approach the topic repeatedly from different angles to counter bourgeois distortions and develop a clear, independent understanding of the state’s role in perpetuating class rule.
"On cooperation" says, In the early 1920s, following the October Revolution and the introduction of the New Economic Policy (NEP), Soviet Russia emphasized the cooperative movement as a critical pathway to socialism, despite its underappreciation. The working class’s control over political power and the means of production made organizing the population into cooperative societies a practical step toward socialism. Earlier cooperators’ dreams were dismissed as unrealistic for ignoring the necessity of class struggle to overthrow exploiters, but with the exploiters defeated, the NEP’s concessions to private trade enabled cooperatives to blend individual commercial interests with state oversight, aligning with collective goals. The state’s dominance over large-scale production and the proletariat’s leadership over the peasantry laid the foundation for this system. However, many underestimated cooperatives’ importance, both as a principle of state ownership and as an accessible means for peasants to engage in socialism. Cooperatives received material privileges, like favorable loans, to foster mass participation, but the challenge was ensuring genuine, informed involvement rather than passive engagement. Achieving socialism through cooperatives required a cultural revolution, including universal literacy and economic stability to guard against crises like famines, shifting focus from revolutionary zeal to practical, educational efforts to create “civilized cooperators” who could trade efficiently in a modern manner. Cooperatives, backed by the socialist state, were seen as synonymous with socialism, marking a transition to cultural and economic development. The concept of state capitalism, referenced from 1918 writings, framed cooperatives as distinct from private enterprises under the NEP, operating on state-owned land and aligning with socialist goals, grounded in the working class’s political victory. This victory redirected efforts toward organizational and educational work to integrate peasants into cooperatives, requiring a cultural revolution to overcome illiteracy and build a material base for socialism.
In modern U.S. society, self-proclaimed revolutionaries often advocate for cooperatives, such as community gardens or mutual aid, as immediate solutions, bypassing the revolutionary struggle and political groundwork emphasized in the Soviet experience. These efforts, while well-intentioned, remain vulnerable to bourgeois rule, as the state can regulate or dismantle them when they threaten capitalist interests, as seen with the clearing of self-sufficient homeless encampments. This approach overlooks the necessity of a process that addresses the current stage of societal development, including the need for political power to challenge existing structures. Like the Soviet cooperators who built on the foundation of proletarian victory, modern movements must recognize that cooperatives alone, without dismantling bourgeois dominance, risk being temporary and subject to suppression, requiring a strategic focus on both political and economic transformation to achieve lasting change.
"Interview Between Stalin and Roy Howard" conducted on March 1, 1936, and published in Pravda on March 5, 1936, Joseph Stalin discussed with American journalist Roy Howard the geopolitical tensions in the Far East and Europe, focusing on potential Japanese and German aggression, the nature of Soviet socialism, and prospects for peaceful coexistence with other systems. Stalin addressed Japan's military activities near the Mongolian People's Republic, stating that the Soviet Union would defend Mongolia's independence if attacked, as communicated to Japan in 1921 and reiterated in 1936. He noted Japan's troop concentrations along Mongolia's borders but observed no new aggressive actions at that time. On German and Polish intentions, Stalin suggested that history showed aggressive states often sought or "borrowed" frontiers to launch attacks, citing Germany's 1914 invasion of Belgium and 1918 use of Latvia as examples, though he avoided specifying which borders Germany might target. He identified capitalism’s imperialist tendencies as the primary driver of global war risks, arguing that capitalist states sought to redivide territories and resources, as seen before World War I. He dismissed fears that the Soviet Union aimed to forcibly export revolution, clarifying that while Soviet people hoped for global change, revolutions depended on local will, not Soviet intervention. What Stalin should've said was that the Soviet Union would not go out of its way to force revolutionary but would use proportional measures to counter the West's anti-revolutionary tactics but hindsight is 20-20. On U.S.-Soviet relations, Stalin defended the Soviet Union's adherence to the 1933 Roosevelt-Litvinov agreement, which prohibited subversive activities, emphasizing that the Soviet government controlled such actions and offered asylum to political emigrants without supporting their subversive efforts, unlike some U.S.-based anti-Soviet groups. He acknowledged speeches by American Communists like Browder and Darcy but argued they operated legally in the U.S., not under Soviet direction. Stalin distinguished Soviet socialism, based on public ownership, from fascism in Germany and Italy, which preserved private property and capitalism, and he rejected claims that Soviet socialism sacrificed personal liberty, asserting it provided true freedom by eliminating exploitation and unemployment. He envisioned peaceful coexistence and competition between the Soviet system and American democracy, rejecting the notion that one could evolve into the other. Stalin outlined the upcoming Soviet constitution (conditions of parentship/guardianship of society), which would introduce universal, equal, direct, and secret suffrage, enabling lively election campaigns driven by public organizations, not competing parties, to address practical governance issues. The interview aimed to clarify Soviet foreign and domestic policies, counter Western misconceptions, and assert the Soviet Union's commitment to peace and socialism amid rising global tensions.
"Bill Bland’s “On Terrorism” provided a Marxist-Leninist critique of terrorism, analyzing its emergence, nature, and consequences. Bland argued that terrorism, as a tactic, was fundamentally flawed and counterproductive to the goals of socialist revolution, serving instead the interests of the capitalist state. The essay was written in the context of a decade marked by the rise of terrorist groups and tactics, such as those employed by the “Angry Brigade” in Britain and the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA), as well as certain groups in countries like India claiming Marxist-Leninist affiliations. Bland’s central point was that terrorism, rooted in petty-bourgeois rebelliousness and a lack of faith in the working class, diverted revolutionary energy from the necessary political mobilization of the masses and provided pretexts for state repression. Bland explained that terrorism emerged as a response to the failures of revisionist Communist Parties, which had abandoned revolutionary principles for reformist (social fascist) illusions of peaceful, parliamentary transitions to socialism. This opportunism left a vacuum in revolutionary leadership, leading disaffected individuals, often from the petty bourgeoisie, to adopt terrorism as an expression of their frustration with capitalism’s injustices. He drew on Lenin’s and Stalin’s analyses to describe terrorism as a form of anarchism, characterized by individualistic, spontaneous acts that prioritized personal rebellion over collective struggle (union of egoists's acts). These acts, such as assassinations or bombings, were seen as futile because they failed to weaken the capitalist state significantly, replacing one judge or rebuilding a courthouse did little to disrupt state power, and often alienated the working class by harming innocent people.
The essay outlined how terrorism operated in practice, often involving small, secretive groups of intellectuals disconnected from the broader working-class movement. Bland critiqued the spurious arguments of terrorists, who claimed their acts weakened the state or inspired revolutionary enthusiasm. He cited Lenin to argue that such actions neither transferred significant power to revolutionaries nor mobilized the masses, instead creating short-lived sensations that led to apathy or passive waiting among the people. Moreover, terrorism provided the state with excuses to strengthen its repressive machinery, as seen in examples like King Hussein’s 1970 crackdown on Palestinian forces in Jordan, justified by terrorist hijackings, or Britain’s use of IRA bombings to expand police powers and conduct raids on progressive groups. Bland also warned of the role of *agents provocateurs*, state agents who could infiltrate revolutionary groups to incite terrorism, further justifying repression, as exemplified by the 1933 Reichstag fire used to suppress the German Communist Party. Bland contrasted terrorism with revolutionary guerrilla warfare, which he supported as a legitimate tactic when conducted under a Marxist-Leninist party’s leadership, with mass support, and at an advanced stage of class struggle. Guerrilla warfare aimed to weaken the state’s forces, train revolutionary leaders, and secure resources for the movement, but only when integrated with the broader struggle of the working class. In contrast, terrorism was isolated, premature, and lacked mass backing, as seen in the Provisional IRA’s shift to indiscriminate bombings, which eroded support among both Irish and British workers. Bland also criticized groups like certain Maoist and Trotskyite factions in Britain for premature assaults on police during anti-fascist protests, labeling these as terrorist acts that disorganized the movement and aided fascist forces by inviting state crackdowns.
Bland's intent was to clarify the Marxist-Leninist stance against terrorism, emphasizing its objective role in serving capitalist interests by disorganizing revolutionary forces and justifying state repression. Bland urged a principled struggle against terrorism’s ideology, advocating for the political education and mobilization of the working class under a disciplined Marxist-Leninist vanguard party. By exposing terrorism’s roots in petty-bourgeois or conservative-socialist despair and its failure to advance proletarian struggle, Bland sought to redirect revolutionary energy toward building a mass movement capable of dismantling the capitalist state, that had the understanding to use the tools of the current state as needed.
"The proletarian class and proletarian party" says the slogan "Russia, one and indivisible" became obsolete as society divided into antagonistic classes: the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, whose struggle formed the core dynamic of modern life. Initially obscured by localized conflicts, this divide sharpened as proletarian strikes and demonstrations united workers across towns, pitting bourgeois Russia against proletarian Russia. Each class mobilized under a vanguard party: the liberal party for the bourgeoisie and the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP) for the proletariat, providing organized leadership to channel the class war effectively. As the proletarian vanguard, the RSDLP was a compact, centralized body of leaders excelling in consciousness and experience to guide the broader, less aware working class. This structure arose because capitalism's poverty and fragmentation blocked full proletarian awareness, necessitating a dedicated cadre to educate, unify, and direct the masses toward socialism through coordinated action. Party membership demanded full adherence to its program, tactics, and principles, plus active participation in an organization and financial contributions, subordinating personal aims to collective goals. This forged a disciplined fortress of tested revolutionaries (explaining why obtaining membership can be hard and why it can be secretive), impervious to autocratic or liberal subversion, rather than a diffuse network of passive sympathizers. Lenin's Paragraph One formula codified this by requiring acceptance of the program, funding, and organizational work, ensuring ideological and practical centralism. Martov's rival version permitted mere "personal assistance" under Party guidance without organizational involvement, inviting opportunists (anarchists, Lib Socs, Libertarians, Social Fascists, Liberals, etc.) and eroding unity by broadening access to uncommitted elements (like modern leftists suggesting putting different ideological views under a big tent coalition). The Second Congress's adoption of Martov's formula was an error born of haste, fragmenting the vanguard; Lenin urged its reversal at the Third Congress to preserve the RSDLP as a cohesive force for proletarian victory.
"The proletarian class and proletarian party" says the slogan "Russia, one and indivisible" became obsolete as society divided into antagonistic classes: the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, whose struggle formed the core dynamic of modern life. Initially obscured by localized conflicts, this divide sharpened as proletarian strikes and demonstrations united workers across towns, pitting bourgeois Russia against proletarian Russia. Each class mobilized under a vanguard party: the liberal party for the bourgeoisie and the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP) for the proletariat, providing organized leadership to channel the class war effectively. As the proletarian vanguard, the RSDLP was a compact, centralized body of leaders excelling in consciousness and experience to guide the broader, less aware working class. This structure arose because capitalism's poverty and fragmentation blocked full proletarian awareness, necessitating a dedicated cadre to educate, unify, and direct the masses toward socialism through coordinated action. Party membership demanded full adherence to its program, tactics, and principles, plus active participation in an organization and financial contributions, subordinating personal aims to collective goals. This forged a disciplined fortress of tested revolutionaries (explaining why obtaining membership can be hard and why it can be secretive), impervious to autocratic or liberal subversion, rather than a diffuse network of passive sympathizers. Lenin's Paragraph One formula codified this by requiring acceptance of the program, funding, and organizational work, ensuring ideological and practical centralism. Martov's rival version permitted mere "personal assistance" under Party guidance without organizational involvement, inviting opportunists (anarchists, Lib Socs, Libertarians, Social Fascists, Liberals, etc.) and eroding unity by broadening access to uncommitted elements (like modern leftists suggesting putting different ideological views under a big tent coalition). The Second Congress's adoption of Martov's formula was an error born of haste, fragmenting the vanguard; Lenin urged its reversal at the Third Congress to preserve the RSDLP as a cohesive force for proletarian victory.
"Armed Insurrection and Our Tactics," J.V. Stalin argues that Russia's escalating revolutionary unrest, evidenced by events like barricade fights in Lodz, strikes in Ivanovo-Voznesensk, uprisings in Odessa, mutinies in the Black Sea Fleet and Libau depot, and clashes in Tiflis, signaled an inevitable armed uprising to overthrow the tsarist autocracy. He attributed this necessity to the regime's intensifying repression, martial law, and hollow reform promises, which fueled widespread discontent and demanded the destruction of autocratic rule to forge a renewed social order aligned with popular aspirations. Stalin urged the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party, as the proletarian vanguard, to shift from mere agitation to comprehensive organizational and technical preparation, rejecting "tailist" passivity that treated insurrection as unorganizable spontaneity. This preparation entailed forming specialized groups to acquire and produce arms, establish explosives workshops, and raid state and private armories, as demonstrated by ongoing Baku collaborations among Party committees, the Balakhany-Bibi-Eibat group, and the Gnchak Committee. For execution, Stalin called for disciplined fighting squads under Party direction to lead the masses, trained in weaponry to seize armories, communications, and infrastructure while countering Black Hundreds reactionaries and directing public fury against the government. He opposed arming the masses broadly due to scarcity and seizure risks, favoring centralized control by these units to convert scattered skirmishes into a unified national revolt establishing a provisional revolutionary government. Stalin emphasized rigorous planning, including terrain analysis, pinpointing enemy vulnerabilities, central coordination of local efforts, and secrecy alongside proletarian military education drawn from expert comrades. This approach ensured proletarian hegemony in the revolution, shaping the ensuing democratic republic as a foundation for socialist advance.
George Manuel and Michael Posluns co-authored "The Fourth World: An Indian Reality," first published in 1974, the concept of a "Fourth World," a global community of Indigenous peoples connected by a spiritual relationship to their lands, distinct from the First, Second, and Third Worlds, inspired by 1960s decolonization movements in Africa and Asia. This vision emphasized Indigenous values of sharing, respect for all things, collectivism, egalitarianism, and shared stewardship as a potential universal ideal, achievable only through recognition of Indigenous rights, title, and sovereignty, fostering collective oneness and human sovereignty over individualistic or colonial domination; underscoring that all Indigenous structures and values developed from a spiritual bond with the land, promoting collective oneness where customs wed peoples to their environments like forests to soil.
Manuel grew up in the Secwepemc territory in British Columbia's Interior with his grandfather, an "Indian Doctor" born before European contact when Secwepemc law prevailed. Manuel recalled vivid incidents of change in Indigenous lives, such as his grandparents being denied access to a traditional berry-picking patch by a gate and No Trespassing signs, which shaped his understanding of racism as a tool for land dispossession. He endured hunger and oppression designed to undermine Indigenous values and instill inferiority, as he noted that residential schools served as the perfect instrument for undermining both values and economic bases, instilling a strong sense of inferiority, and that hunger was both the first and last thing he remembered about the school. These experiences fueled his lifelong pursuit of advocacy, driven by the need to resist church and government oppression, preserve Indigenous ways of knowing through collective memory and shared responsibility, and counter the rapid colonization of the Canadian West that ignored Indigenous perspectives, aligning with broader Indigenous calls for obligatory stewardship of humanity and the planet.
Manuel's political activism began in 1959 when he became president of the North American Indian Brotherhood of BC. Serving as Chief of the Neskonlith Indian Band east of Kamloops and confronted Indian Agents, priests, and bureaucrats in dramatic encounters, such as driving over treacherous roads in an old Chrysler, sometimes in reverse on steep inclines, to challenge authority at reserve meetings, revealing the ignorance, corruption, and racism faced by early activists. The 1969 White Paper, a Trudeau government assimilation policy, sparked widespread opposition and directly inspired the book. Manuel pursued these goals to achieve Indigenous self-determination, recognizing shared spiritual connections to land among global Indigenous groups, as he observed that underlying diverse customs was a common soil of social and spiritual experience forming the Fourth World. He founded and presided over the World Council of Indigenous Peoples from 1975 to 1981, which advanced international advocacy by connecting Indigenous struggles worldwide, contributing to the eventual creation of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, and embodying collective oneness through global solidarity and mutual aid against colonial structures.
Through persistent local, national, and international efforts, including travels to meet Indigenous leaders in Australia, New Zealand, Tanzania, and Sweden to identify common struggles, Manuel achieved milestones like promoting band-run schools, such as the 1975 opening of the Mount Currie Community School in Secwepemc territory, the second such school in Canada, marking a renaissance in Indigenous-controlled education rooted in collective governance. His work connected British Columbia's struggles to a global Indigenous movement, influencing recognition of rights amid ongoing colonial challenges, while critiquing how Indigenous worlds depended on the good faith and morality of dominant societies. Despite not fully attaining liberation, Manuel's advocacy highlighted the inseparability of Indigenous and North American histories, envisioning a future where Indigenous values of collective unity, egalitarianism, and shared planetary stewardship prevailed, rejecting egoism, nationalism, or sectarian supremacy in favor of universal human sovereignty and obligatory communal responsibility, true to traditional Indigenous wisdom that aligned with principles of collective oneness, obligatory stewardship enforced by democratic centralism and international communism without Marxist terminology.
Difference In The European Labor Movement implies: Revisionism and anarchism as tactical deviations from Marxism within the labor movement emerged due to deep-rooted economic and social factors rather than individual errors. These deviations stem from the rapid influx of less-educated members into the labor movement, uneven capitalist development across regions causing partial adoption of Marxist principles, and the dialectical nature of social development leading to exaggerated, one-sided interpretations of capitalism. The persistence of these trends is linked to the bourgeoisie's dual strategies of force, which suppresses reforms and fuels anarcho-syndicalism's rejection of parliamentary tactics, and liberalism, which grants superficial rights (M4A, UBI) and intensifies revisionism by misleading workers into dismissing class struggle. Both revisionism and anarcho-syndicalism, rooted in a bourgeois worldview, hinder Marxism's goal of uniting workers into disciplined, class-conscious organizations capable of sustained action (too much mutual aid, trying to put band aids on problems instead of studying and figuring out the best way to take on the system mixed with anti communist authoritianism (anti-democratic centralism).
The State: A Lecture Delivered at the Sverdlov University where Lenin discussed the nature, origin, and significance of the state, emphasizing its complexity and the deliberate confusion sown by bourgeois scholars to obscure its role as a tool of class oppression. He explained that the state emerged historically with the division of society into classes, specifically when exploiters and exploited appeared, such as during the transition from primitive, classless societies to slave-owning systems, followed by feudalism and capitalism. Lenin traced how the state functioned as a machine of coercion, through armies, prisons, and laws, to maintain the dominance of one class (slave-owners, feudal lords, or capitalists) over another (slaves, serfs, or proletarians), adapting its forms (monarchy, republic, aristocracy, or democracy) to the technical and economic conditions of each era. He argued that bourgeois claims of the state representing "popular will" or "liberty" were deceptive, as even democratic republics like the United States and Switzerland served as instruments of capitalist domination, suppressing workers' movements with force or co-opting them with superficial reforms. Lenin stressed that the Communist Party, aiming to overthrow capitalism, viewed the state as a tool to be seized by the proletariat to dismantle exploitation, ultimately aiming to abolish the state itself when class divisions ceased. He urged his audience to study key works like Engels’s *The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State* and to approach the topic repeatedly from different angles to counter bourgeois distortions and develop a clear, independent understanding of the state’s role in perpetuating class rule.
"On cooperation" says, In the early 1920s, following the October Revolution and the introduction of the New Economic Policy (NEP), Soviet Russia emphasized the cooperative movement as a critical pathway to socialism, despite its underappreciation. The working class’s control over political power and the means of production made organizing the population into cooperative societies a practical step toward socialism. Earlier cooperators’ dreams were dismissed as unrealistic for ignoring the necessity of class struggle to overthrow exploiters, but with the exploiters defeated, the NEP’s concessions to private trade enabled cooperatives to blend individual commercial interests with state oversight, aligning with collective goals. The state’s dominance over large-scale production and the proletariat’s leadership over the peasantry laid the foundation for this system. However, many underestimated cooperatives’ importance, both as a principle of state ownership and as an accessible means for peasants to engage in socialism. Cooperatives received material privileges, like favorable loans, to foster mass participation, but the challenge was ensuring genuine, informed involvement rather than passive engagement. Achieving socialism through cooperatives required a cultural revolution, including universal literacy and economic stability to guard against crises like famines, shifting focus from revolutionary zeal to practical, educational efforts to create “civilized cooperators” who could trade efficiently in a modern manner. Cooperatives, backed by the socialist state, were seen as synonymous with socialism, marking a transition to cultural and economic development. The concept of state capitalism, referenced from 1918 writings, framed cooperatives as distinct from private enterprises under the NEP, operating on state-owned land and aligning with socialist goals, grounded in the working class’s political victory. This victory redirected efforts toward organizational and educational work to integrate peasants into cooperatives, requiring a cultural revolution to overcome illiteracy and build a material base for socialism.
In modern U.S. society, self-proclaimed revolutionaries often advocate for cooperatives, such as community gardens or mutual aid, as immediate solutions, bypassing the revolutionary struggle and political groundwork emphasized in the Soviet experience. These efforts, while well-intentioned, remain vulnerable to bourgeois rule, as the state can regulate or dismantle them when they threaten capitalist interests, as seen with the clearing of self-sufficient homeless encampments. This approach overlooks the necessity of a process that addresses the current stage of societal development, including the need for political power to challenge existing structures. Like the Soviet cooperators who built on the foundation of proletarian victory, modern movements must recognize that cooperatives alone, without dismantling bourgeois dominance, risk being temporary and subject to suppression, requiring a strategic focus on both political and economic transformation to achieve lasting change.
"Interview Between Stalin and Roy Howard" conducted on March 1, 1936, and published in Pravda on March 5, 1936, Joseph Stalin discussed with American journalist Roy Howard the geopolitical tensions in the Far East and Europe, focusing on potential Japanese and German aggression, the nature of Soviet socialism, and prospects for peaceful coexistence with other systems. Stalin addressed Japan's military activities near the Mongolian People's Republic, stating that the Soviet Union would defend Mongolia's independence if attacked, as communicated to Japan in 1921 and reiterated in 1936. He noted Japan's troop concentrations along Mongolia's borders but observed no new aggressive actions at that time. On German and Polish intentions, Stalin suggested that history showed aggressive states often sought or "borrowed" frontiers to launch attacks, citing Germany's 1914 invasion of Belgium and 1918 use of Latvia as examples, though he avoided specifying which borders Germany might target. He identified capitalism’s imperialist tendencies as the primary driver of global war risks, arguing that capitalist states sought to redivide territories and resources, as seen before World War I. He dismissed fears that the Soviet Union aimed to forcibly export revolution, clarifying that while Soviet people hoped for global change, revolutions depended on local will, not Soviet intervention. What Stalin should've said was that the Soviet Union would not go out of its way to force revolutionary but would use proportional measures to counter the West's anti-revolutionary tactics but hindsight is 20-20. On U.S.-Soviet relations, Stalin defended the Soviet Union's adherence to the 1933 Roosevelt-Litvinov agreement, which prohibited subversive activities, emphasizing that the Soviet government controlled such actions and offered asylum to political emigrants without supporting their subversive efforts, unlike some U.S.-based anti-Soviet groups. He acknowledged speeches by American Communists like Browder and Darcy but argued they operated legally in the U.S., not under Soviet direction. Stalin distinguished Soviet socialism, based on public ownership, from fascism in Germany and Italy, which preserved private property and capitalism, and he rejected claims that Soviet socialism sacrificed personal liberty, asserting it provided true freedom by eliminating exploitation and unemployment. He envisioned peaceful coexistence and competition between the Soviet system and American democracy, rejecting the notion that one could evolve into the other. Stalin outlined the upcoming Soviet constitution (conditions of parentship/guardianship of society), which would introduce universal, equal, direct, and secret suffrage, enabling lively election campaigns driven by public organizations, not competing parties, to address practical governance issues. The interview aimed to clarify Soviet foreign and domestic policies, counter Western misconceptions, and assert the Soviet Union's commitment to peace and socialism amid rising global tensions.
"Bill Bland’s “On Terrorism” provided a Marxist-Leninist critique of terrorism, analyzing its emergence, nature, and consequences. Bland argued that terrorism, as a tactic, was fundamentally flawed and counterproductive to the goals of socialist revolution, serving instead the interests of the capitalist state. The essay was written in the context of a decade marked by the rise of terrorist groups and tactics, such as those employed by the “Angry Brigade” in Britain and the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA), as well as certain groups in countries like India claiming Marxist-Leninist affiliations. Bland’s central point was that terrorism, rooted in petty-bourgeois rebelliousness and a lack of faith in the working class, diverted revolutionary energy from the necessary political mobilization of the masses and provided pretexts for state repression. Bland explained that terrorism emerged as a response to the failures of revisionist Communist Parties, which had abandoned revolutionary principles for reformist (social fascist) illusions of peaceful, parliamentary transitions to socialism. This opportunism left a vacuum in revolutionary leadership, leading disaffected individuals, often from the petty bourgeoisie, to adopt terrorism as an expression of their frustration with capitalism’s injustices. He drew on Lenin’s and Stalin’s analyses to describe terrorism as a form of anarchism, characterized by individualistic, spontaneous acts that prioritized personal rebellion over collective struggle (union of egoists's acts). These acts, such as assassinations or bombings, were seen as futile because they failed to weaken the capitalist state significantly, replacing one judge or rebuilding a courthouse did little to disrupt state power, and often alienated the working class by harming innocent people.
The essay outlined how terrorism operated in practice, often involving small, secretive groups of intellectuals disconnected from the broader working-class movement. Bland critiqued the spurious arguments of terrorists, who claimed their acts weakened the state or inspired revolutionary enthusiasm. He cited Lenin to argue that such actions neither transferred significant power to revolutionaries nor mobilized the masses, instead creating short-lived sensations that led to apathy or passive waiting among the people. Moreover, terrorism provided the state with excuses to strengthen its repressive machinery, as seen in examples like King Hussein’s 1970 crackdown on Palestinian forces in Jordan, justified by terrorist hijackings, or Britain’s use of IRA bombings to expand police powers and conduct raids on progressive groups. Bland also warned of the role of *agents provocateurs*, state agents who could infiltrate revolutionary groups to incite terrorism, further justifying repression, as exemplified by the 1933 Reichstag fire used to suppress the German Communist Party. Bland contrasted terrorism with revolutionary guerrilla warfare, which he supported as a legitimate tactic when conducted under a Marxist-Leninist party’s leadership, with mass support, and at an advanced stage of class struggle. Guerrilla warfare aimed to weaken the state’s forces, train revolutionary leaders, and secure resources for the movement, but only when integrated with the broader struggle of the working class. In contrast, terrorism was isolated, premature, and lacked mass backing, as seen in the Provisional IRA’s shift to indiscriminate bombings, which eroded support among both Irish and British workers. Bland also criticized groups like certain Maoist and Trotskyite factions in Britain for premature assaults on police during anti-fascist protests, labeling these as terrorist acts that disorganized the movement and aided fascist forces by inviting state crackdowns.
Bland's intent was to clarify the Marxist-Leninist stance against terrorism, emphasizing its objective role in serving capitalist interests by disorganizing revolutionary forces and justifying state repression. Bland urged a principled struggle against terrorism’s ideology, advocating for the political education and mobilization of the working class under a disciplined Marxist-Leninist vanguard party. By exposing terrorism’s roots in petty-bourgeois or conservative-socialist despair and its failure to advance proletarian struggle, Bland sought to redirect revolutionary energy toward building a mass movement capable of dismantling the capitalist state, that had the understanding to use the tools of the current state as needed.
"The proletarian class and proletarian party" says the slogan "Russia, one and indivisible" became obsolete as society divided into antagonistic classes: the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, whose struggle formed the core dynamic of modern life. Initially obscured by localized conflicts, this divide sharpened as proletarian strikes and demonstrations united workers across towns, pitting bourgeois Russia against proletarian Russia. Each class mobilized under a vanguard party: the liberal party for the bourgeoisie and the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP) for the proletariat, providing organized leadership to channel the class war effectively. As the proletarian vanguard, the RSDLP was a compact, centralized body of leaders excelling in consciousness and experience to guide the broader, less aware working class. This structure arose because capitalism's poverty and fragmentation blocked full proletarian awareness, necessitating a dedicated cadre to educate, unify, and direct the masses toward socialism through coordinated action. Party membership demanded full adherence to its program, tactics, and principles, plus active participation in an organization and financial contributions, subordinating personal aims to collective goals. This forged a disciplined fortress of tested revolutionaries (explaining why obtaining membership can be hard and why it can be secretive), impervious to autocratic or liberal subversion, rather than a diffuse network of passive sympathizers. Lenin's Paragraph One formula codified this by requiring acceptance of the program, funding, and organizational work, ensuring ideological and practical centralism. Martov's rival version permitted mere "personal assistance" under Party guidance without organizational involvement, inviting opportunists (anarchists, Lib Socs, Libertarians, Social Fascists, Liberals, etc.) and eroding unity by broadening access to uncommitted elements (like modern leftists suggesting putting different ideological views under a big tent coalition). The Second Congress's adoption of Martov's formula was an error born of haste, fragmenting the vanguard; Lenin urged its reversal at the Third Congress to preserve the RSDLP as a cohesive force for proletarian victory.
"The proletarian class and proletarian party" says the slogan "Russia, one and indivisible" became obsolete as society divided into antagonistic classes: the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, whose struggle formed the core dynamic of modern life. Initially obscured by localized conflicts, this divide sharpened as proletarian strikes and demonstrations united workers across towns, pitting bourgeois Russia against proletarian Russia. Each class mobilized under a vanguard party: the liberal party for the bourgeoisie and the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP) for the proletariat, providing organized leadership to channel the class war effectively. As the proletarian vanguard, the RSDLP was a compact, centralized body of leaders excelling in consciousness and experience to guide the broader, less aware working class. This structure arose because capitalism's poverty and fragmentation blocked full proletarian awareness, necessitating a dedicated cadre to educate, unify, and direct the masses toward socialism through coordinated action. Party membership demanded full adherence to its program, tactics, and principles, plus active participation in an organization and financial contributions, subordinating personal aims to collective goals. This forged a disciplined fortress of tested revolutionaries (explaining why obtaining membership can be hard and why it can be secretive), impervious to autocratic or liberal subversion, rather than a diffuse network of passive sympathizers. Lenin's Paragraph One formula codified this by requiring acceptance of the program, funding, and organizational work, ensuring ideological and practical centralism. Martov's rival version permitted mere "personal assistance" under Party guidance without organizational involvement, inviting opportunists (anarchists, Lib Socs, Libertarians, Social Fascists, Liberals, etc.) and eroding unity by broadening access to uncommitted elements (like modern leftists suggesting putting different ideological views under a big tent coalition). The Second Congress's adoption of Martov's formula was an error born of haste, fragmenting the vanguard; Lenin urged its reversal at the Third Congress to preserve the RSDLP as a cohesive force for proletarian victory.
"Armed Insurrection and Our Tactics," J.V. Stalin argues that Russia's escalating revolutionary unrest, evidenced by events like barricade fights in Lodz, strikes in Ivanovo-Voznesensk, uprisings in Odessa, mutinies in the Black Sea Fleet and Libau depot, and clashes in Tiflis, signaled an inevitable armed uprising to overthrow the tsarist autocracy. He attributed this necessity to the regime's intensifying repression, martial law, and hollow reform promises, which fueled widespread discontent and demanded the destruction of autocratic rule to forge a renewed social order aligned with popular aspirations. Stalin urged the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party, as the proletarian vanguard, to shift from mere agitation to comprehensive organizational and technical preparation, rejecting "tailist" passivity that treated insurrection as unorganizable spontaneity. This preparation entailed forming specialized groups to acquire and produce arms, establish explosives workshops, and raid state and private armories, as demonstrated by ongoing Baku collaborations among Party committees, the Balakhany-Bibi-Eibat group, and the Gnchak Committee. For execution, Stalin called for disciplined fighting squads under Party direction to lead the masses, trained in weaponry to seize armories, communications, and infrastructure while countering Black Hundreds reactionaries and directing public fury against the government. He opposed arming the masses broadly due to scarcity and seizure risks, favoring centralized control by these units to convert scattered skirmishes into a unified national revolt establishing a provisional revolutionary government. Stalin emphasized rigorous planning, including terrain analysis, pinpointing enemy vulnerabilities, central coordination of local efforts, and secrecy alongside proletarian military education drawn from expert comrades. This approach ensured proletarian hegemony in the revolution, shaping the ensuing democratic republic as a foundation for socialist advance.
George Manuel and Michael Posluns co-authored "The Fourth World: An Indian Reality," first published in 1974, the concept of a "Fourth World," a global community of Indigenous peoples connected by a spiritual relationship to their lands, distinct from the First, Second, and Third Worlds, inspired by 1960s decolonization movements in Africa and Asia. This vision emphasized Indigenous values of sharing, respect for all things, collectivism, egalitarianism, and shared stewardship as a potential universal ideal, achievable only through recognition of Indigenous rights, title, and sovereignty, fostering collective oneness and human sovereignty over individualistic or colonial domination; underscoring that all Indigenous structures and values developed from a spiritual bond with the land, promoting collective oneness where customs wed peoples to their environments like forests to soil.
Manuel grew up in the Secwepemc territory in British Columbia's Interior with his grandfather, an "Indian Doctor" born before European contact when Secwepemc law prevailed. Manuel recalled vivid incidents of change in Indigenous lives, such as his grandparents being denied access to a traditional berry-picking patch by a gate and No Trespassing signs, which shaped his understanding of racism as a tool for land dispossession. He endured hunger and oppression designed to undermine Indigenous values and instill inferiority, as he noted that residential schools served as the perfect instrument for undermining both values and economic bases, instilling a strong sense of inferiority, and that hunger was both the first and last thing he remembered about the school. These experiences fueled his lifelong pursuit of advocacy, driven by the need to resist church and government oppression, preserve Indigenous ways of knowing through collective memory and shared responsibility, and counter the rapid colonization of the Canadian West that ignored Indigenous perspectives, aligning with broader Indigenous calls for obligatory stewardship of humanity and the planet.
Manuel's political activism began in 1959 when he became president of the North American Indian Brotherhood of BC. Serving as Chief of the Neskonlith Indian Band east of Kamloops and confronted Indian Agents, priests, and bureaucrats in dramatic encounters, such as driving over treacherous roads in an old Chrysler, sometimes in reverse on steep inclines, to challenge authority at reserve meetings, revealing the ignorance, corruption, and racism faced by early activists. The 1969 White Paper, a Trudeau government assimilation policy, sparked widespread opposition and directly inspired the book. Manuel pursued these goals to achieve Indigenous self-determination, recognizing shared spiritual connections to land among global Indigenous groups, as he observed that underlying diverse customs was a common soil of social and spiritual experience forming the Fourth World. He founded and presided over the World Council of Indigenous Peoples from 1975 to 1981, which advanced international advocacy by connecting Indigenous struggles worldwide, contributing to the eventual creation of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, and embodying collective oneness through global solidarity and mutual aid against colonial structures.
Through persistent local, national, and international efforts, including travels to meet Indigenous leaders in Australia, New Zealand, Tanzania, and Sweden to identify common struggles, Manuel achieved milestones like promoting band-run schools, such as the 1975 opening of the Mount Currie Community School in Secwepemc territory, the second such school in Canada, marking a renaissance in Indigenous-controlled education rooted in collective governance. His work connected British Columbia's struggles to a global Indigenous movement, influencing recognition of rights amid ongoing colonial challenges, while critiquing how Indigenous worlds depended on the good faith and morality of dominant societies. Despite not fully attaining liberation, Manuel's advocacy highlighted the inseparability of Indigenous and North American histories, envisioning a future where Indigenous values of collective unity, egalitarianism, and shared planetary stewardship prevailed, rejecting egoism, nationalism, or sectarian supremacy in favor of universal human sovereignty and obligatory communal responsibility, true to traditional Indigenous wisdom that aligned with principles of collective oneness, obligatory stewardship enforced by democratic centralism and international communism without Marxist terminology.
The ABC of Communism
The ABC of Communism implies workers make stuff worth $10, get paid $5, and capitalists keep $5. Two fatal flaws: chaotic competition causing crashes/wars and class war between exploiters and exploited. The state is the rich's gang keeping workers down. Big beats small always. Money concentrates from small shops to corporations to monopolies to banks to state capitalism. This creates both organized industry and united workers. Workers own everything and plan everything; no bosses. Dictatorship of the proletariat is temporary. Workers crush the rich, take their stuff, and reorganize. Disappears once classes are gone. Party leads since not all workers get it at once. Banks export money for bigger profits, steal resources, and carve up the world. Competition causes world wars for loot. 1914-1918 proved capitalism insane. Rich never quit, so a civil/class/revolutionary war is guaranteed. Revolution must be worldwide. Most socialist parties betrayed workers in 1914, backing their war because imperialism bribed top workers. The Third International was founded for real revolution. Only 18% urban, 82% peasant. Revolution is possible because industry is centralized. Inherited wreckage from war/civil war. The current is a militarized emergency dictatorship, not real socialism. Bourgeois democracy is fake; the rich control resources. Soviet Power admits workers rule and provides actual printing presses/buildings. Based on unions, workplace elections, and instant recall. Urban workers get more delegates to lead rural masses. Fight bureaucracy through mass participation. Oppression divides workers. Communists say all workers are brothers and unite internationally. Bosses use national hatred to distract from class war. Soviet Power lets nations separate to prove workers don't oppress, then they rejoin. Goal: world republic. Antisemitism is scapegoating Jews. The Red Army is needed because the rich won't quit. Class army, only workers/poor peasants. Discipline is voluntary, not beatings. Political commissars explain war's purpose. Used old officers under supervision while training their own. The Red Army is temporary and gone when classes are eliminated. Bourgeois laws for the rich. Soviet courts: workers elect judges, instant recall. Revolutionary tribunals crush enemies during war. Death penalty for enemies, otherwise lenient. Regular crimes: social labor, isolate repeat criminals only. Courts become opinion bodies as the state dies. Bourgeois school brainwashes capitalism. Destroy rich schools, and ban all religion (parents poisoning kids rejected). Unified labor school 7-17, boys/girls together, labor-based. Kindergartens free mothers for work. Specialist training only after 17. Universities reformed for workers. All art/libraries are now social property. Middle schools grew from 1,330 to 3,783. The church makes money exploiting believers allied with landlords. Strip resources. Ban from schools, attack home propaganda. Religion persists because capitalism seems mysterious. Under communism, no mysteries. Transition kills religion naturally. Active propaganda is necessary now because the church is counter-revolutionary. Patient, not crude. Church parasite: 50M rubles yearly, 183,000 clergy. Nationalize: transfer production to workers' state. 80-90% done. Unite all activity under a state plan, ending chaos. Workers run factories, chiefs run industries, and the council coordinates everything. Include small producers by providing materials/aid conditional on organizing cooperatives. Unions became industry apparatus that must control everything. Comradely discipline by workers, not masters. Communist Saturdays: 213% productivity increase. Use bourgeois experts, pay more if needed, and be ruthless with traitors. The pay gap narrowed: 4x versus dozens before. Science is common property. Pre-revolution: land hunger. Post: abolished landlords, peasants got 40M desyatinas, 2M for state farms. Large-scale necessary: one tractor man does 20 men's work and could triple harvests. 3,536 state farms demonstrate advantages. 1,901 communes, 3,698 artels by 1919. Cooperative farming is primitive but growing. The state helps with seed/cattle/knowledge/repairs. Rich peasants hostile, pitiless struggle. Middle peasants need convincing, not coercion. Poor peasants' main prop, unite in communes. Nationalized warehouses and large trade to crush speculation introduced class rationing. There is no place for private trade when the state is the producer/has a grain monopoly. Petty trade persists because the state is not yet the buyer/producer of everything. War continues in distribution. Used existing cooperatives, enrolled the entire population, and workers control the apparatus. Rural: poor peasants control, rich excluded. Multiple organs merging into a single mechanism. Banks lend money, exploiting workers, and are capitalism's bookkeepers. Seized all banks, confiscated bourgeois wealth. Amalgamated into a unified state bank, becoming a central counting house. Communist society has no money. Workers produce for all and take what they need. The socialist stage needs money because peasants are still commodity producers. Money disappearing: expelled from state enterprises, replaced by direct exchange, workers paid in kind via workbooks. The process continues until small industry is gone. The bourgeois state produces nothing and lives on extracted surplus. The proletarian state transforms into an economic management organization. 9/10 spending is now economic. Revenue from paper money issues (special tax), but the secure foundation is production via state monopolies, fix prices above cost, excess maintains state. As the state transforms, the budget becomes just product distribution in communist society. Capitalism: bourgeoisie spacious gardens, workers' cellars/barracks. Workers die 15 years earlier and pay 15-35% of their wages for the privilege. Revolution: nationalized bourgeois dwellings, cancelled rent, and transferred workers to villas. Plans for complete rent abolition. Avoided nationalizing small houses (caused disrepair/animosity). Future housing must disperse towns over the countryside, not concentrate masses. Capitalism: long days, contaminated air, and high accidents/disease/death. Dictatorship preserves labor power. Established 8-hour day (6 mental), prohibited overtime, and 42-hour weekly rest. Prohibited child labor under 16. Full-wage pregnancy/childbirth allowances. Workers' inspection is enforced. Social welfare: benefits for all wage-earners, no time limit, full rate allowances, and life pensions. Red Army families get pensions/land aid/rent-free. Need better organization, extend to all branches, and move toward a 6-hour day. Capitalism: workers in disease-rife quarters, capitalists act only from self-fear. War left epidemics (cholera/typhus/flu) and venereal diseases. Nationalized all medical enterprises. Mobilized all medical workers combating epidemics. Three tasks: sanitary measures protecting earth/air/water, campaigns against social diseases (tuberculosis/syphilis/alcoholism), and free medical treatment for all. Main problem: absolute drug lack from the Allied blockade trying to crush by epidemic.
Trotsky wrote: Manifesto of the Communist International to the Workers of the World and since I read it, it must be added. The Comintern Manifesto (1919), and my take away.
It's the organized revolutionary left formally breaking from the Second International and declaring itself the legitimate heir of Marxist revolutionary tradition, as it announced that the time for action had arrived.
The document's core argument is that capitalism had destroyed its own legitimacy through WWI, it was the product of finance capital, imperialism, and the monopoly phase of capitalism. Social democrats proved that reformism is structurally incapable of opposing capital when it matters. The Second International didn't just fail, it was complicit.
Capitalism had already made a decisive shift. Free competition was dead. State-monopoly capitalism had arrived. The state and finance capital had fully fused through the war apparatus. There is no going *back* to liberal capitalism, no return to parliamentary tinkering. The only question left was: who controls the socialized, centralized economy, the imperialist state or the workers' state?
This was fascism-as-capitalism-in-decay thesis operating in real time, just in an earlier language. The war demonstrated that capitalism in its monopoly phase cannot sustain itself without organized violence. It had already crossed the threshold, and has continued since.
Soviets as the organizational form. Not parties, not unions, not parliaments, Soviets. They argued bourgeois democracy is a fraud that concentrates real power in financial oligarchies while giving workers the theater of voting. Soviets bypass that by being direct organs of working-class power, flexible enough to expand, capable of governing.
The Comintern as the vanguard international. The First International was premature, the mass force wasn't there yet. The Second International built the mass force but bureaucratized it into collaboration. The Third International was meant to be the synthesis: mass force plus revolutionary discipline, coordinated globally rather than nationally.
Revolutionary realism over pacifism. Civil war is not something Communists start, it's what the bourgeoisie starts every time workers try to advance. Disarm them first, arm the workers, build the Red Army. Minimize duration, maximize decisive victory.
Anti-colonialism as structural necessity. The colonial question isn't separate from the class question. Imperialism sustains itself through colonial extraction. Colonial liberation and proletarian revolution in the metropole are interdependent, you cannot have one without the other. This is stated explicitly and without hedging.
The document was written at a moment of genuine revolutionary possibility, Russia had just succeeded, Germany was in upheaval, Hungary was briefly a Soviet republic. The authors genuinely believed global revolution was imminent. That urgency shapes the tone. What they were fighting against as much as capitalism was the socialist center, the Kautskyite tendency that wanted to rebuild the Second International and return to electoral reformism. From the Comintern's perspective, that tendency was more dangerous than open bourgeois opposition, because it neutralized revolutionary energy from within.
This document is the historical moment where Hive-Mind Collectivism's lineage is most visible in organizational form. The Soviet model is precisely the population-scale collective intelligence structure I theorize, decision-making aggregated through mass participation, bypassing the individualist-bourgeois parliamentary filter. The Manifesto's rejection of procedural democracy in favor of substantive class power maps directly onto my critique of liberal democracy as a management system for capitalist hegemony.
The Manifesto assumes revolutionary timing that didn't materialize. The structural analysis holds. The temporal predictions didn't. Why revolutionary consciousness fails to cohere even when material conditions demand it?
The Manifesto didn’t just attack the Second International for cowardice, it made a theoretical claim that opportunism is structurally produced by the labor bureaucracy. Union officials, parliamentary representatives, party functionaries, they develop material interests in the stability of capitalist institutions. Their betrayal wasn't personal weakness, it was class position in embryo. This explains why organizational form isn't neutral. The Soviets weren't just tactically preferred, they were structurally designed to prevent the bureaucratic ossification that killed the Second International. The form encoded the class content.The Manifesto identifies the peasantry in Bavaria, the small French wine producer, the American farmer as people "thrust back by capitalism away from the mainstream of development." They are materially harmed but ideologically captured, unable to see past local, parochial, or nationalist frames. The Manifesto names and treats it as a temporary obstacle that revolutionary momentum will overcome. It doesn't. That gap is where communist minds each try to solve the same problem from a different angle. They failed to address the cognitive and cultural reproduction of false consciousness that the Comintern assumed revolution would simply dissolve. It didn't dissolve. It adapted, deepened, and got better tools. That's the unfinished business this document leaves on the table.
There is no architecture of a World Soviet Republic here. What it does say is that the nation-state has become a fetter on productive forces, that small states are economically and militarily incoherent without imperialist patronage, and that socialist Europe would assist liberated colonies through technology, organization and ideological influence toward a planned and organized socialist economy. A vague image of centralized economic planning on a European and eventually world scale, with national cultural affairs handled autonomously beneath that umbrella.
The Manifesto is operating on the assumption that the revolution itself would generate the forms organically, the way the Soviet form emerged from the 1905 and 1917 experiences without being designed in advance. The institutional question was deferred to the revolutionary process, a weakness, time compounded.
Without a worked-out model of international socialist governance, the Comintern defaulted to Moscow's organizational center of gravity, which gradually collapsed the distinction between international revolutionary coordination and Soviet state interest. The absence of a structural answer in 1919 is part of what made that collapse easier.
Trotskyism vs. Leninism was Stalin’s thesis where he posits that true courage is revealed during a retreat. By this standard, he frames Trotsky as a failure who relied on slander and fabrication to undermine Lenin’s united party, which Stalin used both Lenin's and the party's actions and rhetoric to contradict Trotsky. Trotsky did that because Trotskyism is ideologically irreconcilable with Leninism, its adherents are merely temporary allies. Ultimately, Trotsky is depicted as an opportunist who attempted to corrupt the party’s core through a false "Leninist-Trotskyism" to facilitate a power grab. What I will say is Trotsky must be looked at under a microscope for his contributions to the revolution, his longstanding opposition to Lenin and the Bolshevik Party, while he simultaneously attempted to portray himself as a loyal Leninist.
The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, where Engels continues to make the case that I've been saying he does against family.
Human history was organized by how people produced food. Morgan built the first systematic framework for this. Every stage of social development including family structure tracked directly with productive capacity. This is historical materialism applied to prehistory.
This framework established that social organization isn't natural, divine, or inevitable. It's a function of how a people produces. Family structures, hierarchies, institutions, all of it follows the material base. That's the foundation everything else in the text builds on.
Kinship terminology is a fossil record of extinct family structures. When naming systems contradict actual family relationships, that contradiction is evidence of an older form that once existed.
Morgan found this among the Iroquois, confirmed it in Hawaii, traced it globally, and concluded that monogamy wasn't the origin. It was the endpoint of a long narrowing process that began with group marriage and possibly promiscuity.
Marx added the broader principle: family forms change fast, but the naming systems that recorded them ossify and lag behind. Same mechanism applies to political, legal, and religious systems. The superstructure always trails the material base.
The incest taboo wasn't moral. It was evolutionary. Tribes that restricted inbreeding outcompeted those that didn't. That restriction, progressively widening across generations, produced the gens (the clan unit), and the gens became the foundation of all barbarian social organization.
Because paternity was unknowable under group marriage but maternity was always certain, descent was tracked through the mother. This is where matrilineal society, mother-right, came from. Not from any ideology of female power, but from a material fact: you always know who the mother is.
Monogamy wasn't born from love or morality. It was born from property.
When pastoral wealth accumulated, men needed to pass it to their children. But under mother-right, their children couldn't inherit from them. Property stayed within the mother's gens. So mother-right was overthrown. A simple procedural change in how descent was reckoned, from the female line to the male line, was all it took. No war, no uprising. Just a decree.
Engels calls this the world historical defeat of the female sex. Women went from holding real authority in communistic households to being placed under paternal power specifically to guarantee paternity, so inheritance could flow to confirmed biological heirs. The word familia itself meant the total number of slaves belonging to one man. Wife and children were legal extensions of that property relation.
The pairing family didn't produce monogamy on its own. Natural selection had already done what it could by narrowing the marriage circle. What pushed it into strict monogamy was the accumulation of heritable wealth, cattle, land, slaves, and the male need to control reproduction in order to control succession. Monogamy, from the start, was monogamy enforced on women. Men retained the customary right to infidelity.
Monogamy was never about love. It was a property contract enforced on women to guarantee male inheritance. Everything that followed, prostitution, adultery, the sexual double standard, was structurally built into it from the start, not a corruption of it.
The husband/wife relation mirrors the bourgeois/proletarian relation exactly. He owns the economic base. She performs domestic labor that was once public and socially valued, now privatized and invisible. Legal equality on paper changes nothing, just as the labor contract's formal freedom changes nothing for the worker. The economic coercion underneath remains.
Engels' projection: when private property in the means of production is abolished, the material basis for enforced monogamy dissolves with it. What remains would be actual individual sex-love, reciprocal, freely chosen, dissolvable when it ends. Real monogamy, for the first time, including for men. The generation raised under those conditions won't ask what we think they should do. They'll build their own norms from scratch.
The gens, the clan unit organized by kinship, was the universal foundation of all pre-state society. Morgan proved it was the same institution whether you called it a gens in Rome, a genos in Greece, or a clan among the Iroquois. The American form was the original. The Greek and Roman forms were derivatives.
What the Iroquois demonstrated concretely was that you could organize a functioning, stable, even confederated society with no state apparatus whatsoever, no police, no standing army, no courts, no prisons, no codified hierarchy. Decision-making was communal and democratic down to the gens level. Women voted. Leaders were elected and removable. The old, sick, and disabled were cared for structurally, not charitably. Property was communal. There were no poor.
Engels is direct about what ended it: not conquest from outside, but the internal emergence of private property, surplus wealth, and the class interests that followed. The gentile constitution wasn't defeated by something superior. It was rotted from within by greed. Every institution of civilization was built on that rot.
The implicit argument here is that stateless society isn't utopian speculation. It was the default human condition for most of human existence. The state is the aberration, not the baseline.
The Greek gens was the Iroquois gens with private property beginning to corrupt it. The structure was identical, gens, phratry, tribe, confederacy, but father-right had replaced mother-right, wealth inequality was producing hereditary nobility, and slavery was expanding from war captives toward something more systemic.
The basileus, what bourgeois historians kept mistranslating as king, was a military commander elected by and accountable to the assembly. Not a monarch. Morgan called it correctly: military democracy. The council and popular assembly functioned alongside him with real authority. The gens still held.
But the contradictions were already internal and accelerating: accumulated private wealth needed protection that communal gentile custom couldn't provide, and in fact actively obstructed. The gens treated property as collective. Private accumulation needed the opposite: an institution that sanctified individual ownership, enforced class hierarchy, and made exploitation of the non-possessing class structurally permanent.
The gentile order couldn't do that. It was built on equality.
So the state was invented, not as a neutral administrative body, not as a social contract, but as the instrument the propertied class needed to secure its position against both the communal traditions of the old order and the class below it.
The Athenian state didn't emerge from a social contract or a deliberate act of governance. It emerged because commodity exchange, private property, and money debt made the gentile constitution structurally obsolete, and the new propertied class needed an apparatus to protect and perpetuate its position.
The sequence was mechanical: land became private, debt accumulated, money concentrated in noble hands, small farmers were dispossessed and sold into debt slavery, the gentile order, which had no mechanism for any of this, couldn't respond, the state filled the vacuum, reorganizing society not by kinship but by territory and property.
Solon's reforms are the clearest illustration of what political revolution actually means: a reshuffling of which property gets protected at whose expense. Debt cancellation violated creditor property to save debtor property. Every political revolution since has worked the same way.
Cleisthenes finished the job by eliminating kinship as the basis of political organization entirely, replacing it with territorial residence. The gens became a private religious club. The state, with its separate armed force, its police (literally enslaved people doing work free citizens considered beneath them), its class-stratified institutions, was now the operative reality.
Engels' closing point is the one that cuts: Athens didn't fall because of democracy. It fell because slavery made free labor economically unviable, which hollowed out the citizen class until there was nothing left to sustain the republic. The historians who blamed democracy were lying on behalf of their patrons.
Same story as Athens, different city.
The Roman gens was structurally identical to the Greek and Iroquois gens, exogamous, organized by kinship, collectively managing property, burial, religion, and mutual defense. Father-right had already replaced mother-right before written history begins, but the gentile framework was still the operative social unit.
What dissolved it was the same force: the accumulation of private property created a population, the plebs, who were economically present but constitutionally excluded. They owned land, paid taxes, served in the military, but had no political standing because they belonged to no gens. The contradiction became unsustainable as the plebs grew in numbers and military power.
Servius Tullius resolved it the same way Cleisthenes did in Athens: replace kinship with territory and property as the basis of political organization. The new assembly was organized by wealth class and military unit, not by gens or curia. The old kinship bodies were demoted to private religious clubs.
The Roman Republic then ran its full course on this new foundation, patricians vs. plebs, land concentration, peasant dispossession through military service, slave-worked latifundia, the hollowing out of the Italian citizen base, until there was nothing left to sustain the republic, and the empire and eventually the Germanic successor states filled the vacuum.
Engels' structural point: every step looks like political reform. Every step is actually the propertied class reorganizing institutions to protect accumulated wealth against both the old communal order and the class beneath it.
The Celts, Germans, and Norse were all still operating within gentile organization, gentes, communal land, blood-revenge, collective justice, elected and removable leadership, at the point they entered written history. The same structure, again.
What the German material adds specifically: traces of mother-right persisting visibly into the historical period, the maternal uncle/nephew bond treated as more sacred than the paternal bond, female prophets holding real political authority, inheritance customs in medieval German towns still requiring proof of status through the mother's line. Father-right had formally replaced mother-right, but the older system left deep structural residue.
The retinue system is where Engels identifies the specific mechanism of dissolution among the Germans. Military leaders built personal bands of loyal fighters sustained by continuous plunder. This created a permanent armed force loyal to an individual rather than to the gens or tribe, the embryo of both monarchy and feudal nobility. The retinue is what became the Frankish court, then the noble class, then the feudal order. It didn't require conquest to produce hierarchy. It grew internally from within the gentile constitution's own military function.
The closing point is the same one Engels has made consistently: the gentile constitution reached its highest form, assembly, council of chiefs, military leader, and then hit its structural ceiling. Once society's productive complexity outgrew what kinship-based organization could manage, the state didn't gradually reform the gens. It replaced it.
Rome didn't fall because of decadence or military weakness in any simple sense. It collapsed because its productive base, slave-worked latifundia, stopped generating returns, and the entire social structure built on that base rotted from within. The Germans didn't conquer a functioning empire. They walked into a corpse that was already asking to be put down.
What the Germans brought wasn't racial vitality or martial genius. It was their gentile constitution, the communal land tenure, the mark community, the democratic instincts of people who had never fully separated themselves from collective life. That inheritance did three specific things Roman civilization couldn't do: it gave the peasant class a local unit of solidarity (the mark community) that persisted even under feudalism; it carried forward a form of bondage milder than chattel slavery that contained within it mechanisms for collective emancipation over time; and it reintroduced enough of the old gentile respect for women to modestly raise their position above what Greek and Roman civilization had left them.
The feudal order that emerged wasn't a regression to barbarism. It was a new synthesis built on a higher productive floor, and it generated the modern nationalities and eventually the population density that made European expansion possible.
Engels' closing is worth sitting with: the qualities that rejuvenated Europe were precisely the qualities capitalism and the state would spend the next thousand years destroying, the democratic instinct, the communal land relation, the sense that public affairs belong to everyone. What was called barbarism was actually the last living form of the gentile constitution. Its destruction was the precondition for everything that followed.
The state isn't natural, eternal, or neutral. It's a product of class contradiction, called into existence specifically because society split into irreconcilable classes that couldn't manage their conflict through the old communal mechanisms. It will disappear when the conditions that produced it disappear.
The sequence Engels lays out is mechanical and complete: surplus production, private ownership, class division, gentile constitution becomes inadequate, state fills the vacuum, organized by territory and property rather than kinship, armed with a separate public force no longer identical with the people themselves.
Every form the state has taken, slave-owner state, feudal state, bourgeois democratic republic, is the ruling class's instrument for holding the exploited class in place. The democratic republic is just the most sophisticated version: it drops the formal property qualification, makes wealth operate through corruption and stock exchange alliance instead, and uses universal suffrage to measure how far the working class has developed toward its own liberation. Engels is direct: universal suffrage is a gauge, not a solution.
The closing argument: civilization's entire developmental logic is contradictory at its root. Every productive advance benefits some at the expense of others. The hypocrisy required to maintain this gets thicker as civilization advances. The exploiting class must increasingly claim it acts in the interest of those it exploits.
Morgan's closing, which Engels endorses: property as the sole end of social life contains the mechanism of its own destruction. What comes after won't be a return to the gentile order. It will be its revival on a higher productive foundation. The liberty, equality, and fraternity that existed without being formulated among the Iroquois, reconstituted consciously, on the basis of the productive capacity civilization actually built.
Engels spent this entire book proving that the family was never natural. It was always a property relation. Monogamy wasn't about love, it was about men securing inheritance through controlling women's reproduction. Women were property. Children were heirs. That's the whole institution from the jump.
Then he turns around and says once we remove the property coercion, people will pair up based on genuine love and that'll be enough to sustain the unit. But he just spent the whole book showing me that the unit only ever existed BECAUSE of the property coercion. You can't remove the only thing holding something together and expect it to keep standing.
And when I push on what replaces it, he punts. Says the next generation will figure it out. That's not an answer.
So what I'm taking from this book is simple: Engels made the case for the abolition of the family and didn't have the nerve to say it outright. He dissolved the content, the property basis, the coerced transaction, the specific obligations, and 0 left the word family sitting there empty.
What he's actually describing at the endpoint is people bonding voluntarily for as long as the feeling lasts, with children raised by society, with companionship available from any relationship. Dating, friends with benefits, fuck, cuddle, or conversation buddies are what he's leaving us with, as he removes the commitment and obligatory responsibility to the other person; the vows, the understandings, the mutual obligation to each other and to any children produced together, those commitments are precisely what dissolves, absorbed into the collective and redistributed away from the pair. That's not a family. That's just human beings relating to each other. Relating to, not biological relation, because biological has basically been voided due to no longer holding relevance in society. He ended the family, because family is a binding bond. He just called it liberation while strategically avoiding admittance to what he was doing.
Engels was crystal clear in "On Authority." Some kind of authority is always necessary, and rejecting authority before the material conditions that require it have been abolished is not principled, but instead, irresponsible. Psychologically it's is either confusion or conscious betrayal at the psychological level, and either way the material reality is that it serves the class enemy. And to serve the class enemy is to be a threat and or traitor to the class, which is what Engels implied here of anarchists when he said confusion or betrayal.
Lenin spoke "on the attitude of the workers’ party to religion," and he was pretty much inline with the hive-mind of the Marxist-Leninist tree. Marxism is atheist, it's humanism, it's a secular philosophical ideology. We must be strategic militant atheists, religion must be fought. The only question is how. Religion isn't an intellectual error, it's a material product. And the bourgeoisie, just like others throughout history, exploit it. Religion has many roots, they're all psychological and can also be explained by psychology and typically by dialectical materialism as well. Capitalism generates and sustains the conditions that make religion psychologically necessary. Terror of blind economic forces, sudden ruin, helplessness. You cannot educate away a symptom while the cause operates but if opportunity arises, you can expose the symptom. Class struggle destroys the root or at least one of them. Antitheist propaganda only scratches the surface. Anarchist ultra-leftism declares formal war on religion as a party task. This revives religious interest, divides workers by belief instead of class, and hands priests a weapon. Bismarck tried this against Catholics and made clericalism stronger. Opportunism misreads "religion is a private matter" as the party being neutral on religion. The slogan means the state should stay out. The party never stops fighting it. Subordinate anti-religious struggle to class struggle. Don't push atheism during a strike where unity requires religious and non-religious workers to act together, but don't let religion undermine it either. The class movement is supposed to produce atheism better and more durably than any pamphlet; yet in 2026, we see Marxist-Leninists denying communism is athiest. Timing and concrete conditions determine when atheist agitation advances or damages the movement. Western Social-Democrats, like always, drifted toward indifference because bourgeois democracy fought the church before socialism arrived, and the bourgeoisie later weaponized anti-clericalism to distract from class struggle. Neither applied in Russia. The proletarian party carried that burden alone. Import nothing from Western opportunist indifference. Admit religious workers. Admit even priests if they work and don't propagandize against the program. Expel active religious propagandists. The line is conduct, not belief. In 2026, this is why Politsturm was correct to challenge a certain Marxist-Leninist influencer for their stance between religion and communism. Religion like everything else that divides humanity, is sectarian, leads to identity politics, and all the negatives and evil associated with sectarianism. Anything that can be used to classify and divide humanity into sects must be abolished, and if it cannot be, it must be heavily regulated to insure it doesn't get used to create sectarian harms. The workers must understand that, and atheists must use opportunities when they arrive, to chip away at religion.
In the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Marx argues that capitalism produces misery as structural output in every state of its development, that the worker under wage slavery has no standing as a human being inside the system's own logic, and that communism is the only resolution: a secular humanist, equitable-egalitarian system that abolishes the class relation entirely, with religion functioning as a tool capitalism uses to manage the human wreckage it creates in order to sustain itself.
Capital is accumulated labor owned by someone else, used to command more labor. The capitalist contributes nothing except ownership; profit is a structural entitlement from the legal fact of possession. Capital's internal logic destroys its own self-correcting mechanism through normal operation: competition compresses profits, concentrates capital, kills competition, raises prices, lowers wages. People are inputs. Crises are normal output of a system driven by private profit rather than social need.
Landed property is capital's predecessor and converges into the same structure. Every social improvement raises rent without the landlord doing anything; his income grows with the general misery. Large landed property drives rural populations into industry, producing the working class that opposes it, then industrial capital forces land into competition, destroying feudal monopoly protections. Land concentrates, passes to capitalists, and two classes remain. Dividing land only generalizes the monopoly. Collective ownership is the only resolution.
The worker produces more and has less; his activity strengthens what dominates him. Alienation operates on four levels: from the product, which confronts him as hostile capital; from production itself, which is self-negation rather than self-expression; from species-being, since estranged labor reduces human production to mere survival; and from other people, since estrangement from self structures every social relation as domination and extraction. Private property is alienated labor's crystallized result, not its cause. Reforming property without addressing alienated labor accomplishes nothing. Equal wages makes everyone equally a wage slave. The working class is the only class whose emancipation requires abolishing the system rather than improving its position within it.
Crude communism universalizes private property's logic: the community becomes the collective capitalist. Real communism is the actual reintegration of human beings with their products, activity, species-being, and each other as material conditions, not program. Private property reduces the human relationship to the world to one sense: having. Once history is understood as self-creation through labor, the question of a creator becomes incoherent; socialism proceeds from positive content rather than negation. Communism is not the goal of human development but the necessary immediate form, destroying what destroyed human wholeness and creating conditions for something that cannot yet be described from inside alienated history.
Under private property, need is a weapon manufacturing dependency. Money becomes the universal human faculty: whoever has it has all human capacities vicariously, whoever lacks it has none regardless of actual ability. The less you are, the more you have. The division of labor expresses human sociality in alienated form, separating individuals into isolated functions who relate only through exchange, producing the human differentiation it then treats as natural. Need without money is not real need; effective demand and actual human need are fully separated and only the former exists for the system. Without money as mediator, your development as a person is the actual condition of your effectiveness in the world.
Hegel was the first thinker to grasp human self-creation as a process, objectification as self-externalization, alienation as a necessary moment; translated into materialist terms this is correct. The error is structural: his subject is self-consciousness rather than real corporeal human beings, so overcoming alienation becomes philosophical recognition rather than practical transformation, and the negation of negation confirms what it appears to negate. Feuerbach correctly inverts God as projection of man rather than the reverse, but his human being is isolated and contemplative rather than socially and practically active, so he cannot account for why mystification arose. Alienation is real because the separation of worker from product is real, enforced by real social relations. Its supersession requires the actual abolition of the conditions that produce it. Communism is the practical destruction of the material basis of estrangement.
Georg Lukács's History and Class Consciousness was a collaboration of several works making a single unified point.
Orthodoxy is not belief in Marx's conclusions. It is commitment to dialectical method. Every specific thesis Marx wrote could be discarded and orthodoxy would remain intact. What cannot be discarded is the method, because discarding it destroys the entire project.
The method is dialectical materialism, and its core move is the category of totality. Reality cannot be understood through isolated facts, partial categories, or specialist disciplines. Every phenomenon only becomes intelligible through its relation to the whole social process. This is not an aesthetic preference. It is the only way to pierce the fetishistic forms capitalism necessarily produces. Capitalism presents its relations as natural, eternal, thing-like. The dialectical method shows them to be historical, transitory, produced by and through human activity. The science of psychology could assist in understanding how these forms penetrate consciousness, but it would need to operate from within the dialectical framework rather than from within its own reified disciplinary categories. Psychology applied from a bourgeois standpoint simply maps the symptoms of reification and calls that knowledge.
This is where Revisionism, vulgar materialism, and all the various "critical" improvements on Marx collapse. They accept the facts as capitalism hands them over. Statistics, empirical data, sober economic analysis: these all operate within the framework capitalist production already established. The method of natural science, when applied to society, does not produce objectivity. It produces bourgeois ideology with scientific credentials. It takes the categories of capitalist production and renders them eternal. Bernstein is the clearest case: remove the dialectic and you get evolution without revolution, natural development into socialism, no conflict necessary. This is also the theoretical foundation of every Democratic Party program ever written.
The subject-object relation is what Engels failed to develop adequately in Anti-Dühring and what separates genuine dialectics from mere fluid concepts. The point is not that concepts should be flexible rather than rigid. The point is that the historical process has a subject, and that subject is the proletariat. The proletariat is simultaneously the subject and object of historical knowledge. When it understands its own situation completely, it understands the whole of society, because its situation is the concentrated expression of all the inhuman conditions capitalist society produces. This is not a moral claim about the proletariat's virtue. It is a structural claim about its position.
Theory and practice are unified here and only here. Theory becomes material force when it grips the masses, but only when the situation has developed to the point where a class must understand society to assert itself. That condition is met by the proletariat and no other class. The bourgeoisie has a structural interest in not understanding its own system completely, because complete understanding reveals the contradictions as necessary rather than accidental and the system as historically transitory rather than eternal. The proletariat has the opposite structural interest. Its liberation requires the total picture.
The ultimate goal is not a future state held apart from daily struggle. That is utopianism, the mirror image of revisionism. The ultimate goal is the relation between any given moment of struggle and the totality of the historical process. What makes an action revolutionary is not its immediate content but whether it is connected, through conscious understanding, to that totality. Strip that connection and you get either automatic spontaneism or mere reformist management of capitalist contradictions. The distinction between a strike that points toward the abolition of the wages system and a strike that secures a better contract within it is not a difference in militancy. It is a difference in whether the connection to totality exists.
Lukács established that individual consciousness is not the relevant unit. Class consciousness is not the aggregate of individual awarenesses. It is a structural position made actual through the process of revolutionary organization and struggle. The proletariat does not automatically possess this consciousness because of its position. It has to be produced. This is why the Communist function Lukács describes at the end of "What is Orthodox Marxism?", holding the relation between immediate tasks and total process, is not optional commentary but the practical core of what orthodoxy means.
His treatment of party and organization is underdeveloped in that first essay. He handles the epistemological problem of class consciousness rigorously but defers the organizational question, which he addresses more directly in "Towards a Methodology of the Problem of Organisation" later in the same volume. The question of how consciousness is produced and through what structures is not answered in "What is Orthodox Marxism?", only its necessity is established.
"Class Consciousness" (March 1920) extends the methodological argument into a concrete analysis of how class consciousness functions differently across different class positions.
Class consciousness is not what workers think or feel. It is the set of thoughts and actions that would be appropriate to a class's objective position in production if that position were fully understood. Lukács called this imputed consciousness. The gap between imputed consciousness and actual psychological consciousness is not incidental. It is structurally produced and politically decisive.
The argument proceeds through a typology. Pre-capitalist classes could not achieve full class consciousness because their economic interests were fused with political, legal, and religious forms in ways that made the economic basis invisible even in principle. Capitalism's logic cannot be seen from inside feudal categories. This is not ignorance. It is a structural limit of the standpoint itself.
The petty bourgeoisie and peasantry under capitalism had a different problem. Their class position was contradictory. They existed in capitalism but their roots were pre-capitalist. They could not see the totality from their position because their position bridged two incompatible systems. This is why their politics was always borrowed, always derivative, always oscillating between the two main antagonists. They produced no independent class consciousness and no independent political program that could hold in a crisis moment. In 2026, this describes establishment left parties precisely. The DSA, the progressive caucus, every formation that insists on working within the Democratic Party while calling itself socialist: structurally petty bourgeois politics, regardless of the individual class backgrounds of the participants. The mainstream establishment left across the globe, from the Democrats in the US to Labour in the UK to the Liberals in Canada, is not a check on fascism. It is the ideological conveyor belt that enables the approach to fascism while keeping the working class invested in its own containment. They are moderation fascist sheep herders, corralling humanity. The Comintern was right about the social fascist label and should've never got away from it.
The bourgeoisie is the most dialectically complex case. It could develop class consciousness up to a point, because capitalism does organize society around economics in a way that makes class relations potentially visible. The bourgeoisie built classical economics. It grasped real mechanisms. But its class consciousness hits an objective ceiling. The ceiling is the totality. To see capitalism as a totality means seeing its internal contradictions as necessary rather than accidental and seeing the system as historically finite. That insight is incompatible with ruling class interest. So bourgeois thought produces the ceiling as an internal barrier rather than an external imposition. It cannot see crises as systemic. It cannot solve the problem of capital as capital, only manage symptoms. This becomes not just an intellectual failure but a moral posture, a willful suppression, and eventually a conscious ideological operation against the class that can see further.
The proletariat is structurally unique. Its liberation requires abolishing the conditions of its own existence, which means abolishing class society entirely. Every other class that achieved hegemony did so by installing its own conditions of production as universal. The proletariat cannot do that. Its victory is self-annihilation as a class. This is why proletarian class consciousness is the last class consciousness, and why it must be simultaneously self-knowledge and knowledge of society as a whole.
The practical danger Lukács identifies with precision is the split between economic and political struggle. This split is itself a product of reification. It takes what is a unified process and makes it appear as two separate domains. Workers who thought correctly about trade union struggle and then lapsed into utopianism or pure liberalism on political questions were not making a logical error. They were reproducing the fragmentation capitalism imposes on consciousness. Opportunism exploits this fragmentation. It takes the psychological state of workers at any given moment and treats that as class consciousness. This is why opportunism is not just a political error. It is a category mistake with material consequences. Every poll that measures worker sentiment and then declares it the boundary of the possible is this error institutionalized.
The workers' council formation appears at the end of "Class Consciousness" not as an institutional preference but as evidence that the proletariat was already pressing against the limits of reification. The council form integrated economics and politics, overcame the spatial and temporal fragmentation of the class, and pointed toward the abolition of the bourgeois separation of legislative, executive, and judicial functions. It was the organizational expression of the theoretical unity of theory and practice.
Lukács established that class consciousness must be produced, that the gap between imputed consciousness and psychological consciousness must be closed through conscious action and self-criticism, but he did not specify the psychological mechanisms by which that production happens. What Lukács called the ideological maturity of the proletariat is a psychosocial transformation, not just an intellectual one, and the mechanisms of that transformation are exactly what clinical and social psychology can map if applied from a proletarian rather than a bourgeois standpoint.
Lukács insisted that true class consciousness cannot be the psychological sum or average of individual workers' states of mind. But the production of that consciousness still had to happen in real people through real processes. The danger in Lukács, which the Comintern period eventually collapsed into, is that the party substitutes for class consciousness rather than expressing it. The council form was supposed to prevent that substitution. A population-level transformation requires holding together both sides: the structural determination of imputed consciousness and the concrete psychological process by which actual workers move toward it. When the party forgets the second side, it stops being the organized form of class consciousness and becomes a bureaucratic apparatus managing a passive base. That is not a deviation from Leninism. It is the betrayal of everything Lenin actually argued.
Section I of "Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat" is the central essay of History and Class Consciousness.
The commodity form is not an economic phenomenon that has cultural effects. It is the structural principle of capitalist society in totality. When commodity exchange becomes universal rather than episodic, it does not just regulate trade. It reorganizes the entire metabolism of human existence, including how people perceive themselves, time, law, science, and the state.
Reification is the process by which relations between people take on the appearance of relations between things, and things acquire an autonomous power that seems to operate by natural law independent of human activity. This is not ideological in the simple sense of being false. It is an accurate perception of how capitalist society actually functions at the surface. The worker really does confront the labor market as an objective force. Capital really does appear to generate value independently. The judge really is an automatic statute-machine. These appearances are real. What reification conceals is that they are historically produced and therefore historically destroyable.
The division of labor is the mechanism that drives this process into consciousness itself. Taylorism is the paradigm case. The work process is broken into abstract, calculable, repeatable units. The worker's qualitative capacities, the organic unity of production, the relationship between the worker and the finished product: all dissolved. What remains is measurable time units of abstract labor. The worker becomes a component of a mechanical system rather than the subject of a productive process. The contemplative stance this imposes, where you observe laws operating independently of your will rather than acting as a conscious agent shaping the whole, is then replicated throughout all of bourgeois social life.
Lukács traced this across three domains. In the economy, classical economics treated exchange value as the legitimate object of science and use-value as outside its purview. This was not an intellectual error. It was the methodologically correct result of analyzing capitalism from within its own categories. The consequence is that crises, which are precisely the moments when use-value reasserts itself against exchange value, become incomprehensible. The system that is most rational in its parts becomes irrational as a whole. In law, formal rationality achieves full development: universal, calculable, systematized. But the content of law becomes meta-juridical, meaning it falls outside jurisprudence into sociology, history, politics. The law can tell you the consequences of actions within the existing framework but cannot explain where the framework came from or where it is going. In science and philosophy, specialization produces partial systems of increasing internal rigor that progressively lose contact with the concrete material totality they are supposed to explain. Philosophy, rather than synthesizing these partial systems, validates their premises and calls that epistemology.
Every domain achieves formal rationality in its isolated sphere while becoming incapable of grasping the whole. This is not accidental. It is structurally required by a mode of production built on private calculation. For commodity exchange to function, each actor needs rational predictability within their domain. A rational total order would abolish the market by giving monopoly knowledge. So the system requires that the parts be calculable and the whole remain contingent. The formal rationality of the parts and the irrationality of the totality are two sides of the same structure.
Bourgeois thought cannot escape this because its concepts are derived from the forms that reification produces. It can describe the surface perfectly. It cannot see below it because the categories it uses are themselves products of reification. More criticism from within the same framework produces more turtles, not a different question.
The identification of Democrats as social fascists is an application of this analysis. Social democracy accepts the reified categories, fights for improvements within the formal structure of law, wages, parliamentary representation, and takes these as genuine advances rather than symptoms of a system whose contradictions are being managed rather than resolved. They mistake formal rationality for substantive rationality, the part for the whole. Fascism is always capitalism in decay, and social democracy is the ideological form that manages the approach to that decay while keeping the proletariat invested in its own containment.
The question that follows from Section I: how can consciousness break through reification from inside it? The proletariat is not outside the system. It is constituted by it. The worker who sells labor power as a commodity is not standing above reification observing it. She is living it as her daily existence. How does that same position that produces reification also produce the possibility of its dissolution?
Section II of "Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat" traces how reification produces the fundamental antinomies of bourgeois philosophy and why those antinomies cannot be resolved from within the bourgeois standpoint.
Modern philosophy begins with the Copernican Revolution, the claim that we can only truly know what we ourselves have produced. This is a genuine advance. It breaks with dogmatic realism that simply accepts the given world as eternal and fixed. But the advance immediately generates a new and deeper problem. If we can only know what we create, and if the given, material, sensuous content of reality is not something we create but something we find already there, then knowledge hits a wall. This wall is what Kant calls the thing-in-itself.
The thing-in-itself is not one problem. It is two problems that turn out to be the same problem. First, the problem of content: the forms of rational understanding cannot generate their own material. Something always has to be given from outside, and that given cannot be derived from the formal system. Second, the problem of totality: even if the forms work perfectly within their domain, they cannot constitute a unified system of the whole, because the connections between partial systems are contingent rather than necessary. Both problems are expressions of the gap between form and content, between the rational structures imposed and the irreducible facticity encountered.
Classical German philosophy does not evade this. It stares at it directly. The trajectory from Kant through Fichte to Hegel is a sustained attempt to find a standpoint from which subject and object coincide, where the duality that produces the thing-in-itself is overcome. Fichte's move is to make praxis, activity, the foundation. Not contemplation of the given, but the act of positing. This is philosophically more advanced than Kant. But it fails. The moment you ask what this identical subject-object concretely is, you get either the individual ethical consciousness, which just reinstates the same split between the moral subject and the empirical world subject to natural necessity, or you get an abstract absolute that hovers above everything without touching concrete reality. The hiatus irrationalis, Fichte's own term, the leap between the positing act and the actual content of what gets posited, cannot be closed by the philosophical tools available within the bourgeois horizon.
The reason philosophy cannot close this gap is precisely what Section I established. The formal rationality of partial systems and the irrationality of the totality are not philosophical mistakes. They are the intellectual expression of how capitalist production actually works. Philosophy that arises on this social foundation and stays within it will reproduce this structure at the level of thought no matter how rigorous or self-critical it becomes. More criticism produces more turtles.
The contemplative stance is the crucial mechanism. Rationalist philosophy progressively purifies the knowing subject by stripping away everything qualitative, particular, and material until what remains is a formal observer of necessary laws. But this is exactly the structure of the worker confronting the production process. The epistemological structure and the social structure are homologous because the epistemological structure is a product of the social structure.
The identical subject-object that Fichte needed but could not concretely identify is the proletariat. Not as a philosophical postulate but as a material reality. The contemplative duality of subject and object that bourgeois philosophy cannot overcome is overcome not by a better philosophy but by a class that occupies a position in the production process where theory and practice, knowing and changing, cannot be separated.
Bourgeois science, including social science and psychology as currently practiced, reproduces this contemplative stance. It treats social phenomena as objects governed by discoverable laws that the researcher observes from outside. Even when it studies ideology or consciousness it does so from a position that treats those phenomena as data. One cannot stand outside the system being changed and study it into submission. The act of comprehension and the act of transformation have to be unified, and that unification requires a concrete social standpoint, not just a better method. This is why academic Marxism consistently produces sophisticated analyses that change nothing. The standpoint is still contemplative.
Sections II and III complete the philosophical argument and turn it into the concrete standpoint of the proletariat.
Every approach, Kant's thing-in-itself, Fichte's practical subject, Hegel's World Spirit, hits the same wall: the concrete subject of history cannot be identified from within bourgeois thought because that thought is constitutively unable to see the proletariat as anything other than an object.
The Engels excursus matters more than it might seem. Engels argued that industry refutes the thing-in-itself because we produce chemical substances and thereby prove we understand them. Lukács's critique is precise: this confuses scientific experiment with praxis in the dialectical sense. The experimenter creates artificial, abstract conditions to isolate laws and observes. That is the most refined form of contemplation, not its overcoming. And industry in the capitalist sense is not the subject of its own activity. Capital is driven by laws it does not control. The capitalist is a puppet of the process. Engels had said this himself elsewhere and somehow forgot it when making the epistemological argument. This is the precise error that allows vulgar Marxism to treat natural-scientific method as adequate for historical materialism, which produces exactly the fatalism and mechanism Lukács criticized throughout.
Hegel got closest. He identified history as the only possible substrate for the dialectical method, understood that the identical subject-object had to be concretely found rather than postulated, and drove the antinomies of bourgeois thought to their maximum tension. But he could not find the concrete we. The World Spirit is a mythological substitute for it. The consequences are three specific failures: history becomes contingent in its relation to reason rather than necessary; history gets declared over in Hegel's own system and in the Prussian state; and the transition between logic, nature, and spirit tears apart because history keeps intruding where the system says it should not be. The method demands history and the system excludes it. They cannot be reconciled at that level of abstraction.
The proletariat is the identical subject-object that classical philosophy was searching for. Not as a philosophical category but as a material reality. When the worker recognizes herself as a commodity, this is not just an intellectual event. It is a structural transformation of the object of knowledge. The commodity relation conceals a human relation beneath a thing-relation. When that concealment becomes conscious from the inside, from the position of the person who is the commodity, the fetish form begins to dissolve objectively. Consciousness here is not added to an unchanged situation. It changes the situation.
The comparison with the slave is essential. A slave who becomes conscious of being a slave acquires knowledge about an object that happens to be himself. The structure of subject and object remains unchanged. The slave's consciousness has no lever on the objective conditions. The worker's consciousness is different in kind because the worker's situation is different in kind. Capitalism requires the worker to appear as a free subject who sells her own labor-power as a commodity she owns. This formal subjectivity that capitalism requires is precisely what opens the possibility of genuine subjectivity, of a consciousness that acts on its own conditions rather than merely reflecting them.
Labor-time is the pivot. For the capitalist, labor-time is a quantitative measure in a calculation. For the worker, the same quantity is the qualitative form of her entire existence: her body, her health, her hours awake, her family, her life span. They are not two ways of describing the same thing. They are two ways of being positioned in the same process.
Individual workers remain objects as individuals. Class consciousness is the form in which the proletariat constitutes itself as a subject at the level at which history is actually made.
The psychological and organizational question is how the proletariat moves from its immediate experience of reification to the class consciousness that is its specific historical possibility. Lukács established that this movement is structurally available, but he did not specify the concrete mechanisms by which it happens. The gap between the objective possibility of proletarian class consciousness and its actual development in concrete workers requires specification. The ideological crisis of the proletariat is not an accident or a correctable error. It is the systematic product of reification operating at the psychological level. The Communist Party was the organizational form that created the conditions for overcoming that crisis, but Lukács left essentially unspecified the concrete psychological and social mechanisms by which individual workers moved from reified consciousness to revolutionary consciousness within and through that organizational form.
The final section of "Reification" completed the argument about the proletariat as the identical subject-object of history. Becoming was established as the truth of Being. Facts were not fixed data but crystallized moments in an ongoing process. The reflection theory of knowledge, whether in its idealist or materialist variant, presupposed a rigid duality between thought and existence. The proletarian standpoint dissolved that duality not by philosophical argument but by practice, because at the proletarian standpoint knowing and changing were the same act.
"Legality and Illegality" drew the practical implication directly. The capitalist state derived its power not primarily from force but from ideology, from the internalized conviction that its order was the only possible one. Workers who fetishized illegality remained trapped in the same ideological framework as workers who fetishized legality. Both positions granted the bourgeois legal order a moral authority beyond its empirical power. The communist position treated the state purely as a power factor, neither sacralized nor romantically defied, exploited or avoided purely on tactical grounds. This was not cynicism. It was the concrete expression of having overcome the ideological hold of capitalist society on consciousness. The state is a fact to be reckoned with, not a legitimate authority to be obeyed or a sacred enemy to be defied. That distinction is the whole of revolutionary political maturity.
The Rosa Luxemburg essay was the most organizationally specific and in many ways the most honest. Lukács credited Luxemburg with genuine revolutionary insight while identifying precisely where her framework broke down. Her overestimation of the organic character of the revolutionary process meant she systematically underestimated three things: the decisive role of non-proletarian strata whose direction was not determined by their class position but by the tactical choices of the proletarian party; the counter-revolutionary function of Menshevism as an institutionalized form of bourgeois ideology within the workers' movement rather than merely a mistaken tendency within it; and the necessity of conscious organizational separation of the revolutionary vanguard from the class as a whole, not as an elitist substitution but as the only concrete form in which the highest objectively available class consciousness could be held and transmitted. The Bolshevik form of organization was not a Russian peculiarity. It was the organizational form appropriate to a revolutionary situation where the ideological crisis of the proletariat was itself a decisive factor.
The methodology essay extended this into the deepest theoretical treatment of organization in the collection. Organization was the form of mediation between theory and practice. Tactics without organizational form remained utopian. Organization without tactical flexibility became bureaucratic ossification. The unity of the two was the concrete expression of the dialectical method applied to revolutionary action. The Communist Party was not a sect substituting itself for the class. It was not a mass party dissolving itself into the average consciousness of the class. It was the organized form of the highest class consciousness objectively available at a given moment, existing in constant dialectical interaction with the broader movement of the class.
The deepest point of the methodology essay connected directly back to the philosophical argument of "Reification": discipline in the Communist Party was not the mechanical subordination of individuals to an external authority. It was the concrete form in which the total personality of each member was engaged rather than only their formally defined role. Bourgeois organizations, including opportunist workers' parties, reproduced the reified division of labor by relating to their members only through abstractly defined rights and duties. The communist organization attempted, however imperfectly and against constant pressure from the capitalist environment that formed its members, to engage the whole human being. The post festum contemplative consciousness that characterized bourgeois thought could only be overcome through an organization that made active participation in the total historical process the concrete reality of every member's daily existence. This is what distinguishes a communist organization from a political club that happens to read Marx.
The Communist Party was the organizational form that created the conditions for overcoming the ideological crisis of the proletariat, but Lukács left essentially unspecified the concrete psychological and social mechanisms by which individual workers moved from reified consciousness to revolutionary consciousness within and through that organizational form. That specification is the unfinished work. Marxist-Leninist theory establishes the structural necessity. Psychological science, applied from a proletarian standpoint rather than a bourgeois one, maps the concrete process. Neither is sufficient without the other. The synthesis is not a revision of Lukács. It is the completion of what Lukács was pointing toward but could not reach from where he stood.
Enver Hoxha's "Imperialism and the Revolution" argues that imperialism is a unified system of exploitation that can only be defeated by revolutionary violence led by the proletariat, and all tendencies that deny or defer this are objectively counterrevolutionary regardless of their socialist branding. Geopolitics without class analysis is not Marxism, it is bourgeois realpolitik in ML costume, and that diagnosis is more urgent in 2026 than it was in 1978. But it must also be said that the subjective factor cannot be built solely through ideological vigilance; it must confront the lived, emotional, and cultural mechanisms that produce resignation, fragmentation, and identification with the system.
Imperialism, as Lenin defined it, remains fully operative. US imperialism, Soviet social-imperialism, and Chinese social-imperialism are three variants of the same predatory monopoly capitalism competing for world domination while jointly suppressing the proletariat and peoples' liberation movements. Modern revisionism is the ideological weapon imperialism uses from within the communist movement to neutralize revolution. The revolutionary situation is objectively present or maturing across the capitalist and revisionist world, and the proletariat, led by genuine Marxist-Leninist parties, is the only force capable of overthrowing this system.
Through monopoly concentration of capital and production, finance capital export, neocolonialism, arms trading, and ideological subversion via revisionist parties, imperialism maintains its grip. The counter-strategy is revolutionary preparation through mass organization, combining legal and illegal struggle, trade union infiltration and destruction from within, armed insurrection when conditions mature, and iron proletarian internationalism among genuine ML parties. Opportunism, parliamentarism, and all reformist detours are to be exposed and rejected. The subjective factor, meaning party leadership and mass consciousness, must be built continuously without waiting for spontaneous revolution.
Capitalism cannot reform itself out of its contradictions. Every crisis deepens the objective conditions for revolution. Revisionism exists specifically to abort the subjective factor by deceiving the masses into accepting the system or deferring the revolution indefinitely. Hoxha's specific polemic target is the Chinese "three worlds" theory, which he correctly identifies as functionally identical to Kautsky's ultra-imperialism, directing the proletariat toward alliance with one imperialist bloc against another rather than against imperialism as a system. The Albanian party positions itself as the only consistent defender of ML purity after the Soviet betrayal, making this simultaneously a theoretical defense of Lenin and a political positioning of Albania within the international communist movement.
The "Three Worlds" theory is a counterrevolutionary, anti-Marxist doctrine that replaces class analysis with geopolitical categorization, dissolves the contradiction between proletariat and bourgeoisie into a bloc-vs-bloc framework, and functionally serves US imperialism and world capitalism. Mao Tsetung was not a Marxist-Leninist. He was a bourgeois progressive democrat whose eclecticism, peasant romanticism, chauvinist nationalism, and opportunist organizational practice produced a revisionist variant that drove China toward social-imperialism. The three worlds schema erases class struggle within each "world" by merging rulers and peoples into undifferentiated blocs, redirects the proletariat of the "second world" away from revolution and toward alliance with NATO and the European Common Market, and endorses reactionary governments in the "third world" as anti-imperialist forces regardless of their class character. It advocates unprincipled compromise with American imperialism, which Hoxha distinguishes sharply from the legitimate tactical use of inter-imperialist contradictions that Lenin and Stalin practiced. Mao's organizational failures follow the same logic: no Leninist party discipline, peasant hegemony over the proletariat, army above party, political pluralism, ideological coexistence with the bourgeoisie, and personal dictatorship through an unaccountable shadow apparatus. "Mao Tsetung Thought" is an amalgam of ancient Chinese philosophy, idealism, pragmatism, and borrowed ML phraseology that cannot sustain a consistent revolutionary line.
The subjective factor, a disciplined ML party with correct ideology, is the decisive variable in whether revolutionary situations produce revolution or get absorbed. Every revisionist deviation from Kautsky to Khrushchev to Mao serves the same function: aborting the subjective factor at the moment objective conditions are ripening. Without correct theory there is no correct strategy, without correct strategy no correct party, and without correct party no revolution regardless of how advanced the crisis becomes. Hoxha's analysis of the Three Worlds theory and Mao's organizational failures remains directly applicable to contemporary ML parties that substitute anti-imperialist geopolitics for class analysis, and the identification of cyclical metaphysics replacing dialectical development as cover for class conciliation is the strongest analytical contribution in the text. The weakness is that Albania's own internal contradictions are structurally excluded from examination, and Mao's genuine theoretical eclecticism is conflated with the post-Mao leadership's open rightward turn in ways that blur the historical account.
Where Hoxha falls short is in framing the subjective factor almost exclusively as an ideological and organizational problem of false theory serving bourgeois interests. He does not probe how daily exploitation generates internalized defeatism, fragmented class identity, and the emotional appeal of reformism that keeps workers passive even amid crisis, producing two primary conditions among the population: the illusioned and the resigned.
Imperialism is not only a structural economic force but a pervasive psychological phenomenon that restructures the interior life of the proletariat through the atomization of consumer culture and the commodification of desire. Monopoly capitalism actively engineers a consciousness of passivity and fractured identity so that the worker internalizes bourgeois hegemony and identifies their own aspirations with the stability of the system itself. A disciplined party must therefore decolonize the mind of the masses while physical revolution is being organized, and maintain that work after victory.
Hoxha explains why revisionism functions as a weapon but not how it psychologically embeds itself in proletarian everyday consciousness, making the subjective factor harder to forge than pure theoretical vigilance would suggest. Revisionism infiltrates the immediate terrain of proletarian life through revisionist-controlled trade unions that channel grievances into bureaucratic bargaining, consumer culture that equates personal fulfillment with commodity acquisition, and mass media that frames parliamentary gradualism as the sole realistic horizon, converting the atomized worker's daily survival struggles into an internalized ideology of passivity that mistakes reform for revolution, detriment for best interest, and oppressors for champions. The tools of counter-hegemony exist, from print, radio, and television to social media, podcasts, and livestreams. They must be seized and used, not left to the bourgeoisie.
Rosa Luxemburg's Reform or Revolution is a systematic demolition of Eduard Bernstein's revisionism. Bernstein's attempt to replace socialist revolution with gradual capitalist reform is not a tactical disagreement but a theoretical capitulation that destroys socialism itself.
Bernstein claimed capitalism had developed adaptive mechanisms (credit, cartels, trade unions, democratic reform) that stabilized its contradictions, making catastrophic collapse impossible. Therefore, the socialist movement should pursue reform rather than revolutionary seizure of power.
Luxemburg's counter was every mechanism Bernstein identifies as adaptive actually intensifies capitalist contradictions rather than resolving them.
If capitalism's contradictions are being resolved, socialism loses its objective material necessity and becomes mere idealism, an "ought" floating free of material conditions. If the contradictions persist, the adaptive mechanisms are illusory. There is no third option.
Credit does not stabilize capitalism. It amplifies the contradiction between production and exchange by enabling overproduction, then collapses that exchange at crisis moments. It concentrates capital while separating ownership from production. It is a revolutionary, destabilizing force, not a regulatory one.
Cartels do not eliminate anarchy. They suppress competition within a branch only by intensifying it externally, particularly in export markets. They protect profit rates temporarily by idling capital, which is the same mechanism as crisis in a different form. When world markets saturate, cartels burst and anarchy returns more violently.
Small capitalist persistence does not contradict Marx. Small capitals function as pioneers of technical change, constantly being created and destroyed. Their cycle is dialectical, not linear toward survival. The trend toward concentration is real; it simply operates through periodic mowing down and regrowth.
Trade unions can enforce the market rate for labor power but cannot transcend the law of wages. They cannot determine the scale of production or abolish exploitation. When capitalism enters its descending phase on the world market, trade union conditions deteriorate, not improve.
Social reforms are not socialist. The capitalist state enacts them in capital's interest, not society's. "Social control" as Bernstein and Konrad Schmidt use it is really capital's regulation of its own exploitation. The state is a class state; its interventions reflect that.
The theory of expropriation by stages misreads the direction of juridical development. Feudal property was layered and divided because distribution was personal. Capitalist property consolidates into pure private ownership precisely as production socializes, because distribution happens through exchange, not personal relation. The capitalist is not becoming a mere administrator. The administrator-proprietor is becoming a pure rentier. Schmidt has the history backwards.
The capitalist state does expand its social functions, but its class character intensifies simultaneously. Tariffs and militarism are no longer instruments of capitalist development; they are instruments of capitalist class interest against development. Democratic forms erode because they have served their purpose for the bourgeoisie and now threaten it. Parliamentary democracy is not a path toward socialism. It is the bourgeois class's specific political form, which it will sacrifice the moment it genuinely threatens bourgeois interests.
Reformism without revolutionary aim does not produce reformism plus future revolution. It produces only reformism. The trade union and parliamentary struggle educates the class and builds its capacity for power only when oriented toward power seizure. Stripped of that orientation, both become instruments of capitalist stabilization. Co-operatives are hybrid capitalist forms; they survive only by insulating themselves from competition, which limits them to petty-commodity sectors and excludes them entirely from major industry. The idea of transforming capitalism through distribution rather than production is pre-Marxist, and inferior to Weitling's version of the same error because Weitling at least had the proletarian instinct to identify class antagonism.
Legislative reform and revolution are not interchangeable methods toward the same end. Revolution produces the juridical framework within which reform then operates. Reform cannot exceed the limits of the juridical order created by the last revolution. Capitalist exploitation rests not on laws but on economic relations, so it cannot be legislated away. There is no law requiring workers to sell their labor. The compulsion is material. No reform law can transfer the means of production under capitalist property relations.
The practical implication is this: worker control without stripping the profit motive does not change the underlying compulsion, it relocates it. A worker council operating within a for-profit structure still faces the same market pressures, still must extract surplus from its own members to survive competition, still reproduces wage hierarchy because the incentive structure that generates hierarchy has not been removed. The administrator changes; the relation does not. This is why demands for worker control within the existing wage system are insufficient by Luxemburg's own logic. The material compulsion Luxemburg identifies as the root of exploitation is not addressed by changing who administers it. It is only addressed by abolishing the property relations that make it necessary, which means non-profit collective ownership of the means of production, not worker-managed capitalism.
On the "premature revolution" problem: Luxemburg points out that mass seizure of power is not premature by definition, because it requires a real degree of social maturity to occur. The bourgeoisie does not hand over crises on schedule. The "premature" seizures are themselves necessary stages in developing the proletariat's capacity for the definitive victory. Telling the proletariat to wait for perfect conditions is telling it never to move.
Bernstein's revisionism is not a stable partial position. It is a cascade. Deny the collapse thesis, and expropriation becomes impossible. Then co-operation replaces socialization. Then materialism must be abandoned because co-operatives cannot transform material relations. Then surplus value theory goes because it requires the collapse thesis. Then class struggle is abandoned because without surplus value there is no economic basis for it. Then classes themselves disappear because without class struggle they are inexplicable. Then the Social-Democracy's own history becomes incomprehensible. Then existing capitalism becomes satisfactory. The entire structure of scientific socialism dissolves into bourgeois liberalism.
Opportunism is not a fixed theory. It is the tendency that emerges from within mass movements when the daily struggle is severed from the final aim. Bernstein gave it its only serious theoretical expression, and that expression proved opportunism has nothing to say. Marxism had already destroyed every idea Bernstein advanced before he was born. The historical significance of the book is not its content but what its weakness reveals: opportunism cannot produce a durable alternative theory. It can only corrode.
Luxemburg wrote this because the theoretical stakes were existential for the movement. Revisionism was not a minor tactical dispute. If Bernstein was right, there was no socialism, only a labor movement pursuing better wages within capitalism. The movement would become its own gravedigger, channeling working class energy into stabilizing the system it was supposed to overthrow.
The deeper methodological point is that Bernstein commits the characteristic error of vulgar bourgeois economics: he takes the perspective of the isolated capitalist as his unit of analysis and generalizes it to the whole system. From the standpoint of any single firm, credit is adaptive, cartels are stabilizing, crises are derangements. From the standpoint of the system as a totality moving through time, all of these are expressions of its internal contradictions intensifying. The difference between Marxist and bourgeois economics is not just different conclusions. It is the difference between systemic historical analysis and the phenomenology of market actors.
Luxemburg's final answer to Bernstein is not just that he is wrong about capitalism. It is that his wrongness has a class location. Revisionism is the ideology of the isolated capitalist generalized into a socialist vocabulary. It is bourgeois political economy wearing a labor movement's clothes.
This problem does not stay in 1900 Germany. It shows up in the platforms of contemporary communist parties in the United States right now. When a party calls for better wages, worker control within the existing wage system, affordable housing, and pension reform while attaching a footnote that revolution may eventually be necessary, it is not automatically applying a transitional demand framework. A genuine transitional demand is one capitalism structurally cannot fulfill, which exposes the system's limits and radicalizes the people fighting for it. A demand capitalism can and has delivered elsewhere is not transitional. It is social democratic with revolutionary branding. The distinction matters because the material outcome is different. One builds toward rupture. The other builds toward accommodation.
The deeper practical danger is if you organize workers around improved conditions within the wage system, and those conditions actually improve, you produce a working class with a material stake in the reformed system. Workers who fought for and won better wages, worker councils, and benefits are not automatically primed for revolution. They are primed to defend what they built. This is the history of Western European social democracy. Strong unions and reform parties delivered enough that revolutionary energy collapsed for generations, and when it did not collapse on its own, as in Germany in 1918, the social democratic leadership suppressed it by force, demonstrating that reformist parties will defend the capitalist order against the class they claim to represent when the rupture becomes real.
The Comintern's social fascism thesis (1928-1934) was a direct conclusion from that history. The SPD hadn't just failed to make revolution. It had actively organized counter-revolution. The same social democratic leadership that talked about worker representation had Noske call in the Freikorps to liquidate the revolutionary left in 1919, murdering Rosa Luxemburg in the process. Social democracy and fascism were functionally serving the same class interest at the moment of rupture, one through parliamentary management of the working class during stable periods, the other through open violence when stability broke down. The underlying analysis of what social democracy does at crisis moments was not wrong. The SPD proved it in 1919. They proved it again when they stood as the only party voting against Hitler's Enabling Act in 1933, but by then the KPD had already been banned and its members arrested, meaning the organizational capacity to resist was destroyed precisely because the SPD had spent the previous decade suppressing the revolutionary left that could have built it. The unified front argument is a tactical criticism, not a refutation. The term social fascist was accurate in the 1920s, and it remains accurate in the 2020s, just look at every mainstream establishment left party.
Luxemburg's theoretical warning and this material outcome are the same problem at different stages. The theory says severing daily struggle from the final aim produces only reformism. The history shows what that reformism produces in practice: a working class that has to be fought all over again before you can move forward. If the wage system and its hierarchies are left intact through the transition, the people who benefited most from those hierarchies will defend them. Parties do not get to skip that fight by calling their reform platform a revolutionary program.
Stalin's "Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR" argued that scientific laws, including laws of political economy, were not legislative decrees. They reflected real processes that operated independently of human will, and no state, however revolutionary, could abolish or create them. What the Soviet state actually accomplished, it accomplished by conforming to the law that relations of production must correspond to the character of the productive forces, not by overriding it. Socialization worked because the productive forces were already social in character while ownership remained private, so bringing ownership into alignment with that material reality was the move. Planning bodies didn't create the law of balanced development, they used it as a tool, and even then imperfectly. Mastery over economic forces meant discovering and consciously applying laws, not imagining yourself above them. Stalin flagged this as a pedagogical necessity because young cadres, dazzled by Soviet achievements, kept sliding into voluntarist idealism, treating the party as omnipotent rather than as a force that succeeded precisely when it operated in alignment with material reality.
Commodity production persisted under Soviet socialism and that was correct. Engels' formula about abolishing commodity production upon seizing the means of production assumed total socialization of all means of production, including agriculture. The USSR didn't have that condition. Agriculture was divided among millions of small producers who couldn't be expropriated without destroying the worker-peasant alliance, and couldn't be left to be ruined by capitalism while waiting for full concentration. Lenin's solution was to take power, socialize industry, and voluntarily collectivize agriculture over time while maintaining commodity exchange as the only economic relationship the peasantry would accept with the urban economy. Commodity production therefore remained necessary not because of ideological failure but because collective farms owned their own product and would only part with it through purchase and sale.
Commodity production was not inherently capitalist. It predated capitalism by millennia and only became capitalist when combined with private ownership of the means of production, a market in labor power, and the extraction of surplus value. None of those conditions existed in the USSR. Soviet commodity production operated within socialist ownership, with no wage-labor exploitation and no capitalist accumulation mechanism, making it a categorically different phenomenon that couldn't generate capitalism from within itself.
Marxist categories developed to analyze capitalist exploitation, surplus value, necessary versus surplus labor, labor power as commodity, became inapplicable and actively misleading when mechanically imported into socialist economic analysis. The working class in power disposing of its own social product was not hiring itself. Economists needed to develop concepts adequate to the actual relations, not force socialist reality into capitalist analytical frameworks.
The law of value existed under Soviet socialism but operated within a strictly confined sphere. It functioned in commodity circulation and influenced enterprise-level production through cost accounting, pricing, and profitability calculations, which Stalin viewed as a useful disciplinary mechanism for training competent economic managers. But it did not regulate production as a whole. That regulatory function belonged to the law of balanced development, expressed through planning, which replaced the law of competition and anarchy that governed capitalist allocation.
The proof that the law of value didn't regulate Soviet production proportions was observable: if it did, light industry would have been maximized because it was most profitable, heavy industry would have been cut or closed where unprofitable, and labor would have shifted toward highest returns. None of that happened, because Soviet investment priority was determined by the requirements of expanded reproduction, not price signals. Giving primacy to means of production over consumer goods was what made continuous expansion of the national economy possible, and profitability calculated at the enterprise level over one year was the wrong unit of analysis entirely. The correct measure was system-wide profitability over a decade or more, where planned development without crises vastly outperformed capitalist accumulation punctuated by periodic collapses.
On the question of whether value persisted into full communism: no. Value and the law of value were historical categories that existed only while commodity production existed. In the second phase, labor-time would be measured directly rather than through the roundabout mechanism of value-form, and distribution of labor among branches would be governed by socially determined demand, not price. Anyone arguing that the law of value permanently regulated production proportions even under communism was smuggling in a transhistorical claim that Stalin flatly rejected as anti-Marxist.
The argument about world capitalism concerned a structural shift produced by WWII. The war was itself an expression of inter-imperialist competition for markets and raw materials, but its outcome produced something the competing capitalist blocs didn't intend: the formation of a socialist camp large enough to split the single world market into two parallel and opposing systems. The USSR, China, and the people's democracies withdrew from the capitalist world market and built their own system of economic cooperation, which the Western blockade inadvertently accelerated by forcing self-sufficiency and internal integration.
The consequence for capitalism was permanent contraction of its exploitable sphere. The major capitalist powers had fewer markets, fewer sources of raw materials, and industries structurally operating below capacity. Responses like the Marshall Plan, Korean War, and militarization were stopgaps that didn't resolve the underlying problem. This was what deepening of the general crisis meant concretely: not cyclical downturn but a secular shrinking of the terrain capitalism could exploit.
This forced Stalin to revise two prior theses. His own pre-war claim about relative market stability and Lenin's 1916 observation that capitalism was still growing rapidly despite decay both depended on conditions that no longer held. With a substantial portion of the globe now outside the capitalist market permanently, neither stability nor overall rapid growth was defensible. The general crisis had entered a qualitatively new and more acute phase.
Inter-imperialist war remained inevitable because the structural contradictions driving it hadn't been resolved, only temporarily suppressed by American hegemony. The apparent unity of the capitalist camp under US leadership was a surface phenomenon. Britain, France, West Germany, and Japan were all imperialist powers with their own need for markets and raw materials, currently subordinated to American capital penetrating their economies and displacing their profits. The historical precedent was direct: Germany was considered permanently neutralized after WWI, yet recovered within two decades and went to war again, initially not against the USSR but against the Anglo-French bloc that had helped rebuild her, because competition for markets overrode ideological alignment.
Inter-capitalist contradictions proved stronger than the contradiction between capitalism and socialism in determining which wars actually broke out. Capitalists feared war with the USSR more because it threatened capitalism's existence rather than just rearranging dominance among capitalist states, so they avoided it while remaining structurally compelled toward conflict with each other.
The peace movement didn't change this calculus. It could delay or prevent specific wars and unseat particular bellicose governments, which had real value, but it operated on a democratic not socialist basis. It couldn't eliminate the material conditions generating war because it didn't touch imperialism itself. Only abolishing imperialism eliminated the inevitability of war. Lenin's thesis stood.
The argument about basic economic laws concerned identifying which law was foundational versus merely operative within a given mode of production. For capitalism, the law of value was too general since it predated and would outlast capitalism, and the average rate of profit was inadequate because monopoly capitalism structurally required more than average profit to sustain itself. The actual basic law was maximum profit extraction, achieved through worker exploitation domestically, colonial plunder internationally, and war as a business model. This law explained the apparent contradiction in capitalist technical development: innovation was adopted when it maximized profit and suppressed when it didn't, including regression to hand labor. The law unified what otherwise looked like irrational or inconsistent behavior.
For socialism, the basic law was maximum satisfaction of society's rising material and cultural needs through continuous expansion and technical improvement of production. This directly inverted capitalism's basic law across every dimension: social need versus private profit, unbroken development versus boom-bust cycles, cumulative technical progress versus technology deployed or suppressed according to profitability.
The law of balanced development was subordinate to this, not foundational, because balance alone was directionless without a purpose it served. Planning was likewise only a tool, not a law, and only produced correct results when it accurately reflected balanced development requirements and conformed to the basic socialist law. The hierarchy ran: basic economic law set the purpose, balanced development law governed the structure of achieving it, planning operationalized both. Conflating the subordinate mechanisms with the foundational law produced theoretical confusion about what socialist production was actually for.
Stalin made three editorial interventions on the textbook draft. Analyses of working-class living standards under capitalism had to include the reserve army of unemployed, not just employed workers, because the unemployed were part of the working class and their destitution structurally pulled down conditions for those in production. A chapter on national income needed to be added. The proposed chapter on Lenin and Stalin as founders of socialist political economy was to be cut as redundant.
The textbook project's purpose and scope were clarified in a separate note. The audience wasn't primarily Soviet youth but international communist cadres who needed to understand how the USSR transformed itself and why it made the specific choices it did around commodity production, collectivization, and socialist construction. That international pedagogical function demanded a compact, accessible reference work of 500-600 pages maximum, covering capitalist economy, the colonial system, and Soviet socialist economy in sufficient depth without bloating into history, philosophy, or political science. Specialists lobbying to expand their own domains into the textbook were pushing in the wrong direction.
In correspondence with Notkin, Stalin clarified several theoretical points from the earlier Remarks. On whether conscious use of economic laws was unique to socialism: no. The bourgeoisie used the law that relations of production must conform to productive forces to overthrow feudalism, just as the proletariat used it to overthrow capitalism. What distinguished these was class interest, not the presence or absence of elemental economic chaos. The advanced class always championed the operative law; the obsolescent class resisted it. The proletariat's distinctiveness was that its class interests coincided with the majority of society because it abolished all exploitation rather than just replacing one form with another.
On means of production as commodities: they weren't, domestically. Genuine commodities could be sold to any buyer, who then owned them freely. Soviet means of production were allocated by the state, which retained ownership, with enterprise directors acting as state agents. Value, price, and cost accounting language was retained for calculation and control purposes, and for foreign trade where means of production genuinely functioned as commodities, but in domestic circulation the commodity form was a shell whose substance had changed. Old forms were retained and infiltrated with new content rather than abolished outright.
On the law of value and agricultural raw material prices: the law influenced prices but didn't regulate them, because regulation required free price movement, competition, and anarchy of production. Soviet prices were fixed by plan, quantities determined by plan, and means of production controlled by the state. The law of value was itself regulated by socialist planning mechanisms, not the reverse.
On the general crisis: it had two stages, WWI with the USSR's defection from capitalism, and WWII with the people's democracies' defection. These were not separate crises but sequential stages of one continuous general crisis, simultaneously economic and political, rooted in capitalism's decay and the growing weight of the socialist camp.
Yaroshenko's error was collapsing relations of production into productive forces under socialism, arguing that because socialist production relations no longer antagonized productive forces, they ceased to have independent significance and became merely part of the organizational apparatus of production. From this he concluded that the political economy of socialism should abandon economic categories entirely and become a theory of rational productive force organization and planning.
Stalin's refutation operated on several levels. Relations of production played a positive role, not merely a negative braking role. Soviet industrialization and collectivization succeeded precisely because new socialist production relations were established, which then drove massive productive force development. Without the October revolution transforming production relations, Soviet productive forces would have stagnated like those in capitalist countries. The dialectic ran: new relations drove productive forces forward, eventually lagged behind them, created contradictions requiring further transformation. Yaroshenko saw only the brake function and missed the mainspring function entirely.
Eliminating production relations from socialist political economy didn't produce a leaner science, it abolished socialist political economy altogether and replaced it with managerial engineering, which was what Bogdanov's "Universal Organizing Science" already was. Political economy investigated laws governing production relations; economic policy drew practical conclusions from those laws. Conflating the two destroyed both.
Yaroshenko's formula that communism equaled rational organization of productive forces was empty and Bogdanovist. The transition to communism required three concrete material conditions: priority expansion of means of production to sustain extended reproduction, gradual conversion of collective farm property into public property with products-exchange replacing commodity circulation, and sufficient cultural and educational development to enable all-round human development and free occupational choice, including reduced working hours, polytechnical education, and doubled real wages. None of this followed from "rational organization." Man and his needs were the aim of socialist production; continuous expansion was the means. Yaroshenko inverted this, making production an end in itself and dropping man from the equation entirely, which Stalin identified as bourgeois ideology wearing Marxist clothing.
Sanina and Venzher committed two errors. They claimed economic laws of socialism arose from conscious human action, which Stalin flatly rejected as subjective idealism. Economic laws were objective, existing independently of will and consciousness. Humans discovered and applied them; they couldn't create or transform them. Denying this destroyed political economy as a science and opened the door to economic adventurism.
Their substantive proposal was selling MTS machinery to collective farms as their property, on the grounds that wealthy collective farms could now bear the investment burden the state currently carried. Stalin rejected this on three grounds. First, machinery required replacement cycles measured in billions of rubles recouped over six to eight years, which collective farms structurally couldn't sustain regardless of current income levels. Second, it would have given collective farms an ownership status over basic means of production that nationalized state enterprises didn't even have, which deepened rather than narrowed the gap between collective farm property and public property. Third, it massively expanded commodity circulation by pulling the MTS machinery into the market sphere, which moved away from communism rather than toward it.
The correct path to elevating collective farm property to public property ran through products-exchange, not through expanding collective farm ownership. The collective farm's disposable property was its output. That output currently entered commodity circulation, which was the structural obstacle to elevating it to public property status. Replacing commodity exchange with direct products-exchange between state industry and collective farms, where farms received manufactured goods rather than only money, progressively contracted the commodity sphere and integrated collective farm output into unified national planning. The merchandising arrangements already operating in cotton, flax, and beet agriculture were the embryonic form of this system, which had to be extended across all agriculture as urban industrial output grew sufficient to supply it.
Stalin's analysis of capitalism's basic economic law is a direct indictment of the United States. The basic economic law of capitalism, maximum profit extraction through exploitation, colonial plunder, and war, directly describes the US economy and exposes every Democratic Party reform program as cosmetic. Democratic socialists who believe regulating capitalism or expanding social programs changes its fundamental character are refuted by the distinction between commodity production and capitalist production: what makes capitalism capitalist is private ownership of the means of production, wage labor, and surplus value extraction. Touching none of those, liberal reform leaves the engine intact and calls it progress.
The argument that inter-imperialist war remains inevitable because structural contradictions cannot be permanently suppressed by hegemony applies directly to US imperial overextension today. More damning is the point that the peace movement operating on a democratic rather than socialist basis can delay particular wars but cannot eliminate the material conditions generating them. This is a precise description of Democratic Party anti-war posturing: it campaigns on de-escalation while leaving imperialism untouched, which means the wars keep coming regardless of which faction manages the state.
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