My active political life and serious study of social issues began in July of 1968 when I was 12. By the time of my 13th birthday, that November, I had already come across all of the worn-out, threadbare arguments the unstudied throw in the face of Reds. Now, when I’m nearly 58, I’m starting to get tired of them.
I need to clarify some points: First, just because a lot of people repeat the same lines, doesn’t mean they’re wrong. In fact, it means that, on some level at least, the arguments are reasonable. I get that. Second, I understand that very often the questions or arguments are sincere; unfortunately, the same argument is often advanced with a smugness that grates and sometimes makes it hard for me to separate someone genuinely interested in an answer from someone trying to score points. Third, I understand that my personal frustration doesn’t help anyone: it is, as my brother would have said, a subjective reaction (the word “subjective” was as much a curse for him as “unscientific” was for my father).
So I’ve decided to gather up the most common of these, in no particular order, and put my answers where I can just point to them. I may add additional arguments and questions as they occur to me.
1. You on the Left should stop squabbling among yourselves and work together.
..a: Work together to do what, exactly? The real issue, I think, is fetishising terms. “Red” “Leftist” “Socialist.” It’s not about the word, it’s about the content of one’s program. Let me put it in terms some of you may be more familiar with: If someone labeling himself a Christian is celebrating the life of Jesus, as he thinks, by promoting tolerance, understanding, forgiveness, charity, and love; and another is celebrating the life of Jesus, as he thinks, by promoting hatred for homosexuals, contempt for the poor, and attacks on reproductive rights of women, the fact that both use the same term to identify themselves seems beside the point, doesn’t it? More precisely, if I am fighting to break the working class from the hold of the bourgeois parties and mobilize its independent strength, and another is working to get a Democrat elected to make sure the Republican loses, then the fact that we both use the word socialist to describe ourselves seems beside the point, doesn’t it?
..b: The revolution will be made by the working class, not the “Reds.” For this to happen, what the working class needs above all is an understanding of its social role, or, to use the parlance of Marxism, its historic mission, and that is the job of Reds: analysis of events and communication. A group, calling itself whatever, that attempts to prevent the working class from coming to this understanding, isn’t a group you ally yourself with, it is a group you fight.
..c: Point ..b above, in turn, requires constant study, and the sharpening of one’s own understanding. What you call “squabbling among yourselves” is a vital part of this, like using a whetstone to sharpen a knife.
2. The problem with socialism is that human beings must carry it out.
I’ve never understood this one. I suspect it’s saying that greed and competition, rather than sharing and cooperation, are inevitable. But the whole point of socialism is that it is based on an understanding of humanity—that we are social animals above all, and that our means of gaining sustenance and shelter and so on dominate all other considerations until those problems are solved. If you disagree with that understanding (e.g., you think that greed is biological rather than social; or that people simply cannot be cooperative over the long run), then I think you’re wrong, but say so and we’ll talk about it.
3. If you can’t make predictions with absolute certainty, it isn’t science.
This generally comes up in the context of predicting when a revolution will take place, or when an economic crisis will break out. One might identify a potentially revolutionary situation, but say that we can’t know for certain if an insurrection will occur. That’s when, inevitably, someone will say, “Science is about exact predictions and if you can’t make them, it isn’t science.” Well, okay then. I live in Minnesota. Next time the National Weather Center tells me that conditions are right for a tornado, I will point out that they have not said with absolute certainty that a tornado will touch down, and so it isn’t science, and so I’ll ignore the warning. Oh, wait, no I won’t.
4. What’s to prevent a dictatorship from forming?
Short answer: The power of the armed working class. The followup question will inevitably involve the Russian Revolution. The answer to that cannot be a sound bite; volumes have been devoted to the question of what conditions provided the opportunity (almost the requirement) for dictatorial measures. I can briefly mention devastation by years of war and by the invasion of 21 armies representing 11 nations resulting in the massive destruction of infrastructure and production capacity; the betrayal of the German, British, and French revolutions resulting in the isolation of the Soviet Union, and other matters. But, really, the answer is, if you seriously want to know, you’ll have to study the issue. Start with Trotsky’s The Revolution Betrayed.
ETA: I’ve done a series of blog posts on this. They start here.
5. Who gets to decide what is fair distribution, and how resources are shared?
Whenever this comes up, I can’t help but think I’m hearing from someone who is less worried about how to organize a society in which, at a minimum, we all get what we need, and more worried about his or her own comfortable advantages, and would rather hang onto those even if it means the continuation and extension of human misery and oppression. Still, I’ll do my best to answer it. The answer is:
I don’t know. How can anyone know in advance? This is like demanding of the Founding Fathers that they detail the means of separation of powers before issuing the Declaration of Independence. We have to get to a place where the solution is possible first. Humanity goes into revolution without a definite plan, but with the understanding that the old forms of organizing society have become intolerable, and that a new way is possible. Every revolution in history has shown this.
Let me expand on that a little. Revolution occurs when an old economic form has so outlived itself that it has become unbearable, and a new, socially progressive class forces its will on society. But it never does so with a prepared plan. In the US, the colonies declared independence from Britain in 1776, and it took the Continental Congress until 1787 to decide on a Constitution, which still didn’t finish the matter, and that was remarkably fast. Cromwell cut off the head of Charles I, abolished the House of Lords, and created the first capitalist state without a clue where to go, and, indeed, his protectorate was followed by the restoration of Charles II, and years of trial and error before the world’s first capitalist ruling class could establish itself and imprint itself on society. In the case of the French Revolution, even with the examples before them, and even with such luminous minds as Marat, Robespierre, and Bebeuf, they could only stumble about, and had to pass through the experience of Napoleonic despotism before the fundamental questions of how a capitalist state ran could be settled. By those standards, we are way ahead, because many of the questions we do know the answers to. We know that these decisions will be based on democratically elected committees, that they will involve full freedom of discussion, that doing away with the anarchy of capitalist production will provide the possibility of planning, and thus of being able to address the problems scientifically, that the form of the Soviet, though necessarily having the same problem as any other form of representation (the gap between the wishes of the masses, and the understanding of those of wishes by their representatives), reduces that problem to minimum, and that, as we’re cooperating to work out the answers, no one will be suffering from want, and we know that, as we build a society based on plenty, or, as it is now called, “post-scarcity” there will no longer be any objective reason for individuals to seek power in order to get—what they could get anyway.
This argument is not new. If you study US history of the 19th Century, you will find many times repeated, “We cannot free the slaves until we know exactly what to do with the Freedmen, and how we’re going to implement that.” But of course, such a plan was impossible, and freeing the slaves was necessary. That’s one thing about us human monkeys: when push comes to shove, we really do, more often than not, do what is necessary, even if we can’t foresee every detail of how it will work out.
The demand for an exact blueprint of how each and every decision will be arrived at is a poor excuse for maintaining the status quo. Never mind that we live in a world teetering on the edge of nuclear war, in which homelessness is growing, in which we’re plunging toward environmental catastrophe, in which war has become constant, in which human misery is increasing exponentially, in which the very democratic rights and freedoms that capitalism won for us it is now taking way. Never mind that, we must continue all of those things until you can tell me exactly how many individuals will sit on the committee that decides where to build the next sidewalk, and whether we should continue to produce Dom Perignon, and, if so, who gets each bottle. As an excuse for permitting the destruction of human civilization, this one doesn’t measure up very well.
6. If you hate the police so much, isn’t it hypocritical to call them when you’re in trouble?
It is June 29, 1863 and you are a civilian living in York, Pennsylvania. The tension caused by the occupation by Confederate forces under Jubal Early causes a fight to break out between you and another civilian. With your life threatened, you call for help. A Confederate soldier, perhaps a provost martial, comes to your aid, breaks up the fight, and saves your life.
Does this somehow change the fact that the Confederate army is fighting in defense of slavery? Would you suddenly turn into a Southern sympathizer?
The police exist to defend capitalist property relations, which means they exist, above all, to repress the working class. That this or that police officer might, under certain circumstances, do something helpful doesn’t alter their primary mission.
7. Why do you want to take my stuff?
..a: “Possession” does not equal “ownership.” The first is the relationship between a person and a thing, the other a relation among people. Ownership, or, more precisely, property, has to do with courts, jails, people with guns; in other words, the State. It is not possession that is being challenged, it is ownership. And if I can use my drum whenever I feel like it, why do I care that I no longer “own” it?
..b: The real answer, however, is that when Marxists talk about the abolition of private property, we are talking about it in a limited way. The general formulation in Marxist literature is “The abolition of private property in the means of production.” What that means is public ownership of factories, raw materials, and infrastructure that are used socially to produce goods that are needed socially but owned privately in order for the capitalist to then sell to realize a profit. Socialists do not want to take your favorite end table. And if it was made, for example, by an individual craftsman working with a few tools by himself in a small shop, no one wants to interfere with that, either. It isn’t about your car, it is about the local Ford plant; we want it to be run in the interest of those who work there, and of society in general.
..c The subject of the small, family farmer sometimes comes up in this regard, and the snide part of me wants to reply, “I don’t know, go ask them, and see how they both feel about it.” More seriously, there is some truth in the snide–the degree to which the small family farmer has been destroyed by agribusiness is nothing short of appalling. Socialists believe the agribusinesses should become cooperatives, owned and run in the interests of those who work them and society in general. As for the individual farmer, we believe in encouraging them to combine for the purposes of more efficient production, but, this not being a devastated and ruined Soviet Union suffering from ten years of mismanagement, there is no need to force them to do anything they don’t care to do. No kulaks; no problem.
8. But isn’t that stealing?
..a: Yes, just as the capitalist steals the surplus value from every worker he employs. The followup argument, that the worker enters into the agreement voluntarily, ignores the fact that the worker has no choice but to sell his labor power; his only choice is to whom to sell it. That sort of undercuts the “voluntary” part.
..b: An examination of history will reveal that capitalism itself came to power by stealing from the landed aristocracy. Sometimes, in some places, this stealing had a legal cover; other times it was more brutal and blatant. While capitalism cannot be “blamed” for this (no social class has ever achieved power without appropriating, ie, stealing, from the class it is replacing), we can justly raise the cry of hypocrisy when capitalists whine about socialists being in favor of theft.
..c: Even assuming you’re right, are you claiming that refraining from stealing from 1% of the population is preferable to global catastrophe? If Marxists are correct, those are the choices. For my part, I say, “Go with the stealing.”
..d. And in any case, I will not take my morality from the mouths of those who benefit from keeping me in chains.
9. Without competition/greed/the need to survive, what is to keep someone from doing nothing?
..a: Peer pressure. Seriously. How do you feel when you’re working on a joint project and someone is being a burden? In nearly all such cases, it is dealt with by glares and remarks. We’re social beings, and we don’t like it when our peers are pissed off at us.
..b: “Work” can be reasonably divided into two classes: what is done for love, and what is done only out of necessity. If unemployment were not an issue, if the full power of humanity were to cooperate on creating and using technology to relieve us of the burden of tedious or unpleasant occupations that were needful to society, just how much of those would be left that require a person? Me, I’ll gladly put in my three hours a week supervising the robots who are cleaning up after dogs.
..c: Continuing from ..b, if some things have to be done, and no one is excited about doing them, then let’s set it up so that the more unpleasant the task (as determined by the difficulty finding people to do it), the fewer hours are required. If we haven’t yet fully automated coal mining, then maybe an hour a week divided among thousands of people would do what is required; whereas a less unpleasant task, such as tech crew for a space shuttle, might involve six or seven hours. Adjust hours and jobs by trial and error until everyone is happy. If you want to know who administers this, see (5) above. This is just to show that solutions are possible; it isn’t intended to predict what will end up happening.
..d: The real point, however, is that I simply don’t believe people are as grasping and as ready to take advantage as many seem to think. We really do like to cooperate—anyone who has been in Minnesota in the winter knows this. We live in a society where greed, where “taking advantage,” is not only encouraged, but quite nearly required. In so very many cases, if you want to do better in life, you must do so at someone else’s expense. What if it were the case that, if you want to do better, you must bring everyone else up with you? Think about that for a while.
10. Do you support violence to instigate social change?
I don’t know. Do you support violence to prevent social change?
11. The problem is, socialism is incompatible with human nature.
Please forgive the tone of my response to this one, but, for the son of an anthropologist, it is especially annoying. To the extent that the “human nature” argument has any validity at all, it is a variant on #2 above. It has, however, the additional feature of being disguised mysticism. It is never accompanied by scientific evidence, or by any actual explanation. Where does this purported “human nature” come from? God?
When you ask for details, it always turns out that these aspects of “human nature” being spoken of are characteristics learned from living in class society. And when you push for just what makes these things incompatible with socialism, it turns out that they aren’t thinking of socialism, they’re thinking of Christianity.
12. We don’t actually have capitalism, you know.
Interestingly, this same method was used by various so-called radicals to oppose the Russian Revolution. Philosophically, it is called idealism, and provides a good example of how philosophical errors become errors of analysis, and, in turn, incorrect and sometimes downright inhuman actions.
Idealism takes the idea as its departure point, rather than the objective world. “A socialist revolution looks this this. Capitalism looks like that. If it doesn’t match this idealized image in my head, than it must not be that thing.” The problem here comes from imagining this thing called “capitalism” and then, when the world refuses to go along with the ideal, rejecting reality rather than making an effort to understand it. In analyzing the workers state after the Russian revolution, or capitalism as it has developed historically, we need to dig into what are the essential elements that make that economy function. Therefore this nonsense of “we don’t have capitalism,” while unscientific rubbish, is useful unscientific rubbish, because it forces us to ask: when we identify an economic system, what do we mean?
For society to exist, articles of human need (food, clothing, shelter, &c) must be created and distributed. While production and distribution can be considered separately, as a rule the mode of production determines the form of distribution. There are many different ways to drive the production of goods. They could be created by the ownership, backed by the threat of violence, of human beings, in which all value beyond what is necessary to keep the slave alive is appropriated by the slave owner. Or by arrangement of land ownership—if you are going to eat, you must grow food, some of which you will give to your lord in exchange for being permitted to live on and work the land. We call such systems feudal. Another way of seeing to it that goods are produced puts exchange at the center—that is, I am going to gather what is needed to produce something (tools, raw material, and labor) and then I will produce it with the intention, not of using it, but of exchanging it for something that I can use—for example, money. We call this “capitalism.” An item that is mass-produced for exchange is called a commodity. When commodity production is the dominant economic form of a society, we refer to that society as capitalist. For production-for-exchange to work, the capitalist must be able to appropriate the surplus value, otherwise he has no incentive to produce, and production stops.
What does dominant mean in this context? Well, it doesn’t mean unfettered—that is, unaffected by regulations forced from the government; or by the activity of the working class. Such a thing has never existed and cannot exist. It does not have to do with the degree of interconnectedness with the state, and the nature of those interconnections —the state, as the executive committee of the ruling class in whatever form the economy takes, must serve that class as best as it is able, and this requires deep and ever deepening connections between the mechanisms of rule and the mechanisms of production, distribution, and finance. Nor does it have to do with a headcount of the people involved: in the United States and many other countries today, for example, it is actually a minority of capitalists and a minority of the workforce that is directly involved in commodity production. Nor does it mean exclusive—there can be and usually are other forms of production happening along side capitalism: individuals who create craft items for barter; co-ops who produce goods for each other’s consumption; there is even socialism, which for this purpose we can define as production based on need, rather than exchange, and so on. But if all of these other modes of production suddenly, for some reason, vanished from the United States; the economy would scarcely notice; whereas if all production for exchange vanished, society would collapse. For this reason, we refer to our society as capitalist.
13. What is the difference between socialism and communism?
I refer to communism as the goal, as a society that functions based on “from each according to his ability to each according to his need.” The society that exists after the State has withered away; in which money, at least as we understand it now, is no longer useful; a true cooperative culture. I use communism to mean, in essence, a world-wide classless society: there is no “working class” as such, because labor and the fruits of labor are shared. National boundaries no longer exist. I am aware that some people consider this Utopian; for me, it is sad to think that so many people believe that a society in which we can finally begin to address the creation of a true human culture, in which poverty, untreated disease, and homelessness no longer exist, in which there is true equality, in which the full creative force of each individual can express itself according to that individual’s wishes, is Utopian. To me, it is simply the starting point for the adulthood, or at least the adolescence, of humanity.
I refer to socialism as a step toward that goal: as a society in which the working class controls the mechanisms of the State as well as the means of production, in which banks and basic industry are nationalized under workers control, and distribution of human wants has been put on an equal footing. The effort of society. then, is to increase the productive forces, improve how they benefit everyone. While the notion of socialism in one country is an absurdity, it is entirely reasonable, during the transition period, for a set of nations to work cooperatively to build socialism and defend themselves against attacks by the remaining imperialists.
Though it isn’t part of the question as it is usually asked, I use “workers state” to refer to the post-revolutionary condition of a given nation, where the working class, through the revolutionary party, has taken state power, and has to face the tasks of reaching out to the working class of other nations, defend against any counter-revolutionary forces, and begin to build socialism.
14, What will you do with those who want to accumulate wealth?
This is one that I have a lot of trouble answering, because it’s so hard to get my head around. I feel like I’ve just said, “Hey, let’s quit playing baseball and play some basketball,” and after explaining the rules of basketball, someone says, “But if you don’t touch home plate, what’s to prevent someone from throwing you out?” Let me try, though. What we mean by wealth under capitalism is an accumulation of commodities. Since commodities (by the strict definition) will no longer exist, there cannot be such an accumulation. I suppose, then, this question could mean, “what about someone who wants to accumulate a lot of stuff?” To that, well, my immediate response is, if someone wants more things than he could ever use, so long as it isn’t hurting anyone else, why not? I mean, there are certainly people who enjoy collecting sea shells or pezz dispensers, and they seem pretty harmless. If there is someone who wants more stuff than he can use and particularly wants to deny it to others for no reason except to be mean, that seems like sort of a strange, off-the-wall kind of sickness, but I admit it could exist. In that case, how would this person, with no state power, go about enforcing this wish?
Historically, Man has always lived in fear of not having enough, which has led to all sorts of pathologies, including and especially the competitive desire to have more stuff. Once this fear is removed by combined effort of humankind, there is simply no reason to expect those pathologies to continue. And with no means available to gratify them if they do exist, there is no danger in any case. Remember that, traditionally, wealth has been property, which means it has been protected by the armed might of the state. In a socialist society, wealth is social. We accumulate it for all of us, to be used by all of us, and there is no need for a state to protect it.
15. Okay, I understand what you’re saying, but revolutions are violent and terrible events.
Let’s set aside the question of just who revolutions are terrible for, and against whom the violence is directed. And we’ll also ignore the issue of the systemic violence of war and oppression that capital has inflicted on us for hundreds of years. The real point is that, so far, society has found no other way to advance itself. The image of a group of revolutionaries simply deciding to take State power, popular as it might be, reflects Blanqism, and has nothing whatever in common with Marxism. Marxists believe that at a certain point in the relations between an historically exhausted class and an historically progressive class, they will clash. With the best will in the world, neither I nor anyone else can prevent that. What we—by which I mean, those who act consciously in an effort to influence history—can do, is work for the revolution to be successful. Because however unpleasant you might consider a revolution (and I certainly concede that the aftermath of a revolution is difficult under the best of conditions), a failed revolution is far more horrific in its results, and doesn’t carry with it the promise that the difficulty will result in better lives for those who follow. Obviously, you may disagree that revolution is inevitable; that is something we can talk about. But please remember that Marxists do not see their role as creating revolution, but rather as guiding it to a successful conclusion. I realize that I’ve gone through this whole thing so far without a quote, so here’s one from Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution: “Without a guiding organisation, the energy of the masses would dissipate like steam not enclosed in a piston-box. But nevertheless what moves things is not the piston or the box, but the steam.”
16. You mentioned the Russian Revolution in an earlier question, but what about China, Korea, Cuba, Venezuela, and the other Communist countries?
The real question, to me, is, what do these countries have in common that would lead one to call them communist? So far as I can tell, the only thing they have in common is that at the head of the state is someone who identifies as a socialist, a communist, a Marxist. Is that really how we analyze a social-economy, by the name the leader of the state calls himself? I can call myself an astronaut, but that won’t turn my car into a spaceship. What defined the Russian Revolution was not that the Bolsheviks were Marxists, but that, for the first time (or the second, if we count the Paris Commune) the working class took power in its own name. This has not happened in North Korea, or Cuba, or even China.
Venezuela is a purely capitalist state in every sense, led (at this moment) by a bourgeois nationalist who uses Marxist rhetoric. With Cuba, it is helpful to remember that after the nationalist revolution, the first thing Castro did was attempt to make an alliance with the US. When his overtures were rejected, he suddenly discovered he was a Marxist and asked the Soviet Union for help, which help was granted in exchange for nationalizing some industries and various other concessions. But it was still a bourgeois nationalist revolution, resulting in a system where, in many cases, the state takes the place of the individual capitalist. .
The Chinese revolution was huge and complex and earth-shaking. The capitalist government of Chiang was overthrown, but, unlike the Russian Revolution, the leadership (Mao, heavily influenced by Stalin) based itself on a peasant, rather than a working class program, thus producing a deformed workers state. That it was unable to actually build socialism was inevitable, as Trotskyists warned at the time: the peasantry, as a class, cannot play an independent historical role. Of course, China has long since abandoned any shade of its radical past beyond the name of the ruling clique.
North Korea, Vietnam, are products of their own history, but generally the result of efforts to fight imperialism. Each country has its own unique history, which must be studied, as well as the actual functioning of the production and distribution, in order to make generalizations that reflect the actual conditions. So what we find these countries have in common is nothing more than socialist, or communist, or Marxist rhetoric among their leaders. Why the rhetoric? It is hard, after a hundred years, to understand the tremendous wave of hope and excitement felt by millions upon millions of workers at the news of the Russian Revolution. It is no wonder that opportunists will use that to advance their agenda, especially if that agenda includes elements of anti-imperialism. But if we are to understand society well enough to consciously change it, we need to dig deeper than just accepting what political leaders say at face value.
17. In such a complex society as ours, reducing all of our problems to a single cause, capitalism, just doesn’t make sense.
..a To be clear, there are problems socialism will simply solve, eg imperialist war, exploitation of labor, income inequality, unemployment, preservation of basic human rights. There are other problems that socialism can provide the opportunity to solve, that are insoluble under capitalism: eg racism, sexism, climate change, health care, housing, mental health (many of which can and must be attacked as part of the fight for socialism).
..b In the mid 19th Century some of the problems that concerned liberal and radical US thinkers were: Abolition of slavery. How to keep from forcing Northern citizens to act as slave-catchers. How to provide infrastructure (ie, the railroad) to the west. How to create tariffs and trade laws that would help build up industry, especially in the northeast. A national banking system to benefit eastern capitalism and western expansion. Strengthening the power of the federal government in order to benefit eastern industry. Every single one of these could not be solved until the slave power was broken, because the domination of the slave power in Congress, especially the Senate, was blocking them because they conflicted with the expansion of slavery. At that time, to say, “every one of your concerns reduces itself, in the last analysis, to the need to break the power of the slave-owners” would have been exactly correct. (This leaves out the Great Unspoken: the policy toward the native peoples, but I think my argument still stands.)
18. If you hate capitalism, why do you sell your books in the capitalist free market?
Seriously? Because, against my will, I live in a capitalist society. This means that, to live, one must either sell the product of one’s own labor, sell the product of someone else’s labor, or sell one’s labor-power. I make no judgments about any inherent morality or immorality in any of those, that’s simply the society we live in. One cannot overthrow capitalism by pretending it doesn’t exist.
19. You’re using products, like your computer, created under capitalism! Isn’t that hypocritical?
Cromwell fed his Model Army with food produced under feudal property relations while he fought to overthrow those relations and create a capitalist state. How would you have suggested he proceed?
20. Capitalism is working fine in Sweden, Iceland, Norway, and so on. Why not just do that?
..a There is no question that, in certain countries, the working class, through terrible struggle and through the creation of labor parties, was able to win significant and important concessions from capital that have made those societies far more humane. This was a product of the post WWII conditions, that is, a time when capitalism, having gone through this slaughter, and massive destruction of property, had given itself a certain amount of flexibility. Alas, thanks above all to the betrayals of the Stalinists in the US Communist Party, the same upsurge in the US (1946-48 strike wave, see also the Progressive Party ), was not able to produce a political arm, which has crippled the ability of the US working class to win similar concessions (although it still did win some: see medicaid, medicare, &c). The idea of doing so now, when capitalism has so little flexibility that it is taking away every tiny thing once gained, is utterly absurd. Now, if you believe the best way forward is to recreate those conditions, in other words, to have a third world war (nuclear this time) merely so capitalism can continue its bloodbath while being a bit gentler in the more privileged countries, I’m going to have to fight you on that.
..b Capitalism is international, and, as an international system, is rattling itself apart like a machine whose control mechanism has broken. Rather than the Scandinavian countries being a model for what the US should do, the US is a predictor of what will inevitably happen there. We can already see it in the virulent anti-immigrant stances that are more and more common there. Such reactionary positions are not independent of attacks on the working class domestically, but are part of the same process. In other words, the reformists in most of those countries have either lost power, or are moving sharply to the right.
..c And by the way, for those who claim the Scandinavian countries are socialist: Uh, no. They do not have public ownership of production, state power in the hands of the working class, or state monopoly on trade—and those are only the foundations upon which socialism can be built, not even addressing distribution. Socialism does not mean capitalism that isn’t quite as brutal as it is elsewhere. It is a sign of the poverty of political understanding in the US, and additionally a sign of the utter brutality of the US ruling class, that anyone could look at those countries and consider them socialist. As a side note, I have yet to meet anyone from Sweden or Norway or Iceland or Denmark or Finland who claims to live in a socialist country.
One final note: The real irony in this position is that it is always advanced as an argument to rely on the electoral system, instead of the independent, militant mass movement of the working class that won those concessions in the first place.
21. Socialism is a fine goal, but in the meantime, you shouldn’t object to support for a left-wing politician just because he isn’t pure enough.
To be strictly scientific about it: Pure enough schmur enough.
Okay, no, that is, in fact, a perfectly reasonable question, and it comes up a lot, and it deserves an answer. Here’s how I see it.
..a I believe capitalism is broken, exhausted, rotten. Thus I believe that the choice comes down to: the needs of the masses, or preservation of the system. One or the other. I will object to and fight every politician who I believe will choose preserving the system over the needs of the masses. So far, I have never heard of a politician who would not make that choice.
..b I believe the working class needs to count on and depend upon only themselves, their own strength; that counting on change coming from above thanks to some politician or collection of politicians weakens the unity and fighting spirit of the oppressed. It is not simply a question of, “Here is something that will benefit them,” even if it certainly will, such as universal health care or universal basic income; it is a question, in the last analysis, of who do you trust. Telling the working class to trust anyone but themselves is betrayal. And, in terms of what they need, a unified, militant, determined working class is always able to make its own decision about what they need; one job of the revolutionary party is to listen, and to give those needs a conscious and concentrated expression. “Peace, Bread, and Land” was not a slogan imposed by the Bolsheviks on the workers, soldiers, and peasants of Russia, but the product of listening to them.
22. All “isms” have their flaws.
Just…wow. As justification for the status quo, as an excuse for not fighting against an economic system that has become incapable of giving hundreds of millions, probably billions of human beings the basic things they need for a minimally decent life, that one combines intellectual laziness, aloof superiority, dishonesty, and cynicism. Well done.
23. Why do you think destroying capitalism will automatically end racism?
I don’t. Furthermore, I have never in my life met anyone who did. My theory is that, with many of you, any time someone says, “racial oppression has its origins in class society,” your ears shut down and you fill in the rest of the sentence with what you expect to be there: something about the revolution will fix it and we should ignore it in the meantime. I’ll repeat: I’ve never met anyone who said that. And anyone who did, is wrong.
Racial oppression has its origin in class society. The theory of race first appeared in the work of such anthropologists as Francois Bernie in the 17th Century, but was largely ignored until the late 18th Century work of Johann Friederich Blumenbach started to take hold in the early 19th century for its value in justifying African slavery, after the unprecedented and highly influential attack on slavery by the U.S. Declaration of Independence. The more modern forms of racial oppression were deliberate and created for profit. I am linking to a speech by Martin Luther King Jr. not in order to say, “MLK said it so you must believe.” I differ with many, many things he said—his name at the end of a quote does not make it convincing to me. But this, in his speech at the conclusion of the Selma to Montgomery march in 1965, is the most succinct, precise, elegant, and accurate summation of the history and causes of 20th Century racial oppression I’ve ever come across. The part I’m referring to starts in paragraph nine. But read the whole speech; it is amazing. I’ll wait. (And I should also add a recommendation for the book he refers to, The Strange Career of Jim Crow.)
That speaks to the causes of racism and racial oppression. As to the cure, no, the institution of full legal, political, and economic equality will not end racism. It will, however, create the conditions for ending it, mostly through education. I argue that socialism is necessary, but not sufficient. When racism is no longer profitable, it will become possible to eliminate it for good, but it will still take work. It is ingrained in so much of society that expecting it to simply vanish within a generation is idealism.
And in the meantime, am I suggesting that it be ignored, that no fight for racial equality take place, that those who are doubly and triply oppressed just suck it up and deal and wait for the Great Day of Liberation? Not even close. The fight for equality must be, above all, put on a class basis, and be made under a socialist program, and used as part of the fight to unite the entire working class against the system of greed and exploitation, and that means the entire working class must demand justice and full equality—two things capitalism is unable to provide. This fight helps bring us together, and, just incidentally, is the only way we can make any sort of real progress toward equality. If, in the course of this fight, we run into bigotry or other forms of backwardness among white workers, then this is exactly the way to address it. We begin the attack on racism with the simple question: Whose interest is being served by your race hatred? Does it help you? Or does it help the boss who is trying to keep your wages down and make sure you don’t work together? Those who believe that racism is endemic to the white working class are invited to look into the great steel strike of 1946, and what it produced in benefits to workers, in class solidarity across racial lines, and in combating racial prejudice, especially among white workers who, a generation before, had been rural southerners, many of whom were members of the Ku Klux Klan. And then look into the early years of the UAW, especially in Detroit. Study the Wobblies, and the rise of the CIO. One central demand in all of these cases was: the same pay, benefits, and working conditions for everyone regardless of race. If you do not believe that winning those demands is an important step toward racial equality, then your sense of entitlement must be off the chart. We know that working class unity can combat both racial inequality and racism itself, because it has done so.
Of course, those who benefit from class oppression, who are enjoying their six-figure (or more) salaries, are unlikely to go along with any program that seeks to improve the lives of the oppressed—their idea of equality means trying to reach the level of those above them, not working to raise those below them. That’s okay. We don’t need them. The working class creates all of the wealth there is, and, when united under a program based on what we need rather than what capitalism can give, that represents a force that is unstoppable.
24. Won’t socialism kill innovation?
..a As society is currently configured, for a new thing to be produced it must be brought to the market, which requires an investment of that particular abstraction of resources called “capital.” Thus the inventor or developer must convince a group of venture capitalists that the new product can and likely will return a profit on this investment. In certain ways, this works well; but it means that anything that is potentially useful to society but cannot be made to turn a profit is unlikely to see the light of day (see Tesla vs Westinghouse, for example). Instead of a group of venture capitalists, let us replace them with a group of democratically elected concerned citizens, and instead of asking, “is this likely to turn enough of a profit to justify the risk of our capital?” they ask, “is this likely to be enough of a benefit to society to justify investing some portion of our social resources?” I can’t see any way that is unfeasible, or worse in any way.
..b This question often carries with it the implication that money is the primary reason for the development of new and exciting things. No one who has hung around with engineers for any length of time can seriously believe that.
25. Revolutions just put a new group of elites in power and do nothing for the underclass. Why would a socialist revolution be different?
To understand social revolution we need to go beyond surface impressions. “A new group of elites” and “do nothing” are too general even for a discussion of generalities, and indicate a facile understanding of history. Social revolution is the process by which a social class takes power from and expropriates a different social class. That to do this requires the support of the masses is obvious, but because the masses are involved does not mean they are necessarily in power. Thus, in most revolutions, we have the forward movement of the new class, which is then required to put the brakes on (usually violently) to make sure the masses, who have carried out the revolution, don’t go too far. This is not, as the original statement implies, to mean nothing worthwhile has been accomplished.
To point out that the English Civil War, after cutting off the King’s head and disbanding the House of Lords, turned itself on the Levelers and the Diggers; or that the French Revolution turned against the sans-culottes is accurate as far as it goes. But it ignores that in both cases a new social class took state power, and that this new class was historically progressive. Without the bourgeoisie in power, we could not have bourgeois democracy, which for all its limitations was a tremendous step forward from monarchy. Need I point out that never in history has democracy been achieved through democratic means?
So I would submit that, for precision’s sake, we substitute one generality for another. Instead of “A new group of elites” let us say, “a new and progressive social class.” What is different about socialist revolution, then, is that the new social class is, for the first time, the overwhelming majority of the population. The general movement, in other words, is the same: a new class replaces the old at the helm of the state; but when the new social class taking power is the proletariat–ie, the ones who were previously used to help another class seize power–the case is altered. If, then, we accept that social classes (people with significantly different roles in the processes of producing and distributing society’s wants) are the fundamental division within society, we see that past revolutions do not contradict, but rather confirm that a socialist revolution would place the working class in power.
26. We live in a democracy, therefore the government represents us.
The logic here is what fascinates—the mechanical formality, starting with rigid definitions and proceeding step by careful step to absurdity. The old scholastics of the middle ages would certainly have approved, but if we don’t want to do our political analysis using the method of St. Thomas Aquinas, we need to do better.
Here’s how the logic works:
1. We live in what is called a democracy (or a democratic republic, if you want to be fussy).
2. By definition, this means we elect those who govern us, and can thus elect anyone we want to carry out our will.
3. Therefore, those in office are carrying out our will.
4. Therefore, most Americans are in favor of massive income inequality, genocide, making the Earth uninhabitable, right-wing censorship, pseudo-left censorship, a barbaric health care system, murderous police, the loss of democratic rights, homelessness, letting COVID kill us by the hundreds of thousands, and continuous war.
That there are those who follow this chain and believe—or act as if they believe—that it represents reality continues to astound me. But it is common enough that it is worth taking a look at.
..a In a bourgeois democracy, the bourgeois always takes precedence over the democracy. Theoretically, we know that if the rights and privileges of the ruling class are threatened—particularly the right to make unlimited profit—democracy narrows, shrinks, and becomes more limited. In practice, we are watching it happen before our eyes.
The whole world saw what happened when Senator Sanders dared to suggest that capitalism could become not quite so mean all the time. That he was never a real threat to capitalism and would in fact have done nothing significant for the working class made no difference; his pretensions had to be crushed using legal and quasi-legal means. He isn’t the first to discover the ruthlessness of the American bourgeoisie and the Democratic Party in particular when it comes to making sure Wall Street never feels the least pinch! Gene McCarthy (honestly or not) spoke for those who wanted an end to the Vietnam war and was destroyed. Bill Clinton, swine though he is, made tiny, halfhearted efforts toward improving health care and suddenly a sex scandal emerged. &c &c,
..b The media are part of the capitalist system, controlled by a few (and getting fewer) mega corporations, all of whom have, at the top of their agenda, convincing us that there is no possibility of any political change outside of the two capitalist parties. Billions and billions of dollars go into this every year (whether conspiratorially or simply by natural selection of editors and publishers is irrelevant). While I disagree with those who believe propaganda is all-powerful, it is silly to think that propaganda on such a massive scale is without effect.
..c At the very least, one ought to reflect on the significance of the fact that every political gain since Reconstruction—unemployment insurance, civil rights, medicare, welfare, &c—has come as a result of direct struggles by the working masses, not by selecting the right candidate.
27. It is absurd to call Marxism a science.
guest comment by Don Barry
“There is no royal road to science, and only those who do not dread the fatiguing climb of its steep paths have a chance of gaining its luminous summits.” – Marx
Is Marxism a Science? First, we must acknowledge that from our “impartial” critics, so long as society is divided by classes any expectation of an impartial view of paid intelligentsia of a bourgeoisie of a science that critiques that very division of classes is a hopeless expectation. Even the “Marxism” that claims a role in certain professional academic disciplines is so divorced and distorted from the original that it invites the question of why academia must mention it at all, if the only point to do so is to falsify it.
As Lenin asked it, to expect impartiality here is to be as naïve as to expect an impartial answer from capitalists on whether workers’ wages ought not to be increased by decreasing their profits.
We must also acknowledge that while Marxism does not articulate significant parts of its richness with the symbology and formal precision of mathematics, as in physics, neither do certain higher phenomenological forms of chemistry, most of biology, all of psychology and sociology.
And some forms of science that have highly mathematical formalism, like meteorology, have significant and understandable limitation to their future prediction.
What are the aspects that define Marxism as a science, if not mathematical formalism?
Do the laws developed by it provide objective mechanisms for socioeconomic development?
Do these laws explain the previous historical evolution of human development?
Do these laws make possible predictions about future human development?
Until the mid 19th century, it was popular to consider that the possibility of such an explanatory framework was impossible, given the complexities of individual behavior and therefore presumably the even greater complexity of an entire society of individuals.
But large ensembles often admit certain simplifications over individual components. The behavior of an individual gas molecule is unimaginably complex, the behavior of the gas of which it is a part has certain well-defined conservation laws and aggregate properties.
Karl Marx’s science, like others, formed from a synthesis and extension of other great human intellectual triumphs. There were three great emerging disciplines whose own conundrums found unity in their combination.
These were the British school of political economy, most notably of Adam Smith and David Ricardo; the utopian socialism of the French Henri de Saint-Simon and Charles Fourier and the Welsh Robert Owen; and the German dialectical philosophy of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.
What led to the emergence of these great questions at that particular historical juncture? The preceding decades had witnessed a new political force, the mercantile layer, emerging as a new class form, the bourgeoisie. And this layer came into conflict with existing class structure, most notably in the revolutions of America and France in which that class structure was smashed.
The bourgeoisie was able to articulate humane banners of equality for the first time in human history: “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” “Liberté, égalité, fraternité.” But the new social forms did not realize these aspirations.
But in liberating human labor from the rigid confines of preexisting society, in illustrating that “society” was not some unchanging vehicle but something subject to self-examination and change, it made possible the understanding not only of past and existing society, but in the forms and possibilities of its future change.
Marx’s early work provided the basic schema in the first sentence of his Communist Manifesto. “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.
Not the personality of this or that feudal lord. Not the intriguing of the crown consort or the disinherited progeny, though all these certainly exert an influence.
“The king,” wrote Leon Trotsky in 1933 in applying Marx, “is king only because the interests and prejudices of millions of people are refracted through his person. When the flood of development sweeps away these interrelations, then the king appears to be only a washed-out man with a flabby lower lip.”
The details of understanding that flood of development historically and quantitatively would consume the remainder of Marx’s life, and continue with the work of his significant students, most notably among them, Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky.
They found expression in the three volumes of Marx’s “Capital,” in the work of Marx and Engels in founding the first two great working class internationals, in the great movement that won the working class leadership of Russia in 1917 under Lenin and Trotsky and founded the third working class international, and finally in Trotsky’s historic struggle against Stalin’s betrayal of that revolution in Russia, together with the founding of the Fourth International to carry forward the spotless banner of socialist internationalism into the current period.
Marx’s theory also explains the development of social structures through the development of the productive forces. “In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. … At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or—this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms—with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution.”
The Marxist method made objective the science of social process and of the intervention of its most advanced members into their evolution. The subjective intervention of a revolutionary party must be harmonized with the objective possibilities presented by the unfolding of the historical process.
On that basis was the October Revolution realized.
Those who demand concrete predictions of tomorrow’s stock market as the concrete validation of Marxism have no interest in the core of what it offers as explanatory framework. “The philosophers have merely interpreted the world,” Marx wrote three years before the Communist Manifesto. “The point is to change it.”
Trotsky would point to what Marxist analysis could and could not do just four months before his 1940 assassination. “Every historical prognosis is always conditional, and the more concrete the prognosis, the more conditional it is. A prognosis is not a promissory note which can be cashed on a given date. Prognosis outlines only the definite trends of the development. But along with these trends a different order of forces and tendencies operate, which at a certain moment begin to predominate. All those who seek exact predictions of concrete events should consult the astrologists. Marxist prognosis aids only in orientation.”
Darwin’s great synthesis and explanatory contribution to biology was to explain speciation, almost a century before DNA was discovered, as the result of natural variation selected by the survival and reproduction of those most fit to their environment. His achievement provides a harmonious unity to biological speciation, refinements in the underlying mechanism give new orientation to the specifics and possibilities of its unfolding within particular populations.
Twenty miles away from Darwin on the outskirts of London, Karl Marx worked towards his own triumph at the same time. Lenin would write of it, “The Marxist doctrine is omnipotent because it is true. It is comprehensive and harmonious, and provides men with an integral world outlook irreconcilable with any form of superstition, reaction, or defense of bourgeois oppression. It is the legitimate successor to the best that man produced in the nineteenth century, as represented by German philosophy, English political economy and French socialism.”
In explaining and simplifying “all hitherto existing society” and in particular elaborating the specific economic relations within the simplified class structure of oppressor and worker unleashed by the revolutions whose embers were still warm when he was born, Marx made possible the active political orientation of a leadership dedicated to realizing the next historical epoch of man: a classless society dedicated to realizing and fanning to flames the bright sparks of the previous one: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.
28. What is your program?
The program changes and develops according to changing social conditions, but let’s go with this:
- Nationalization of banks and basic industry under democratic workers control without compensation
- The State to be in the hands of democratically elected workers councils, representatives to be paid no more than the workers they represent, and subject to immediate recall.
- Free universal health care, including full access to birth control and abortion
- Universal employment at a living wage, hours to be reduced as needed (without reduction of wages) to combat unemployment.
- Universal housing, including mental health care as needed for the homeless.
- Free universal higher education, including immediate cancellation of all student debt.
- Withdrawal of all US troops from everywhere.
- Disarm and disband all police forces, replacing them with workers defense guards responsible to workers councils.
- Immediately disband the CIA, the NSA, the FBI, and all other intelligence agencies (read: anti-democratic tools of US Imperialism).
- Free access to cultural institutions such as museums.
- Drastically increase resources for the sciences, especially those dealing with climate change.
- Full unilateral nuclear disarmament.
In my opinion, given points 1 and 2, there is nothing here that is remotely impossible.