Conceiving new communism: What’s the baby? And what’s the bathwater?
Posted by kasama on August 14, 2011
We have reposted the essay by Mike Ely calling for a reconceived communism. In answer to that, John-John raises a series of questions which we would like to engage here (while expanding and paraphrasing a bit).
What should we keep, what should we reject? Is the past a model, or mainly a negative example? How deep does the theoretical knife go?
The following are drawn from John-John‘s language (and do not necessarily represent the views of Kasama or this site as a whole)?
- If you want to make a ‘new start’ for communism, then why bother with “all this old and rather dated stuff” codified as Marxism-Leninism-Maoism (MLM)?
- Why talk about Lenin and Stalin and Mao at all?
- Aren’t such old reference points (Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin Mao, Russian Revolution, Chinese revolution, Cultural revolution) the things that divide us, without contributing to clarity? Do they have relevance for how dividing lines and controversies should be drawn today?
- Aren’t the lessons drawn from the past exhausted — and doesn’t the whole topic of summation frankly bore the hell out of younger people who could potentially be attracted to communism? Shouldn’t they develop their communist politics from their own practice?
- Didn’t Marxism-Leninism and Marxism-Leninism-Maoism have had enough chances in the twentieth century — and what does it have to show for it? Won’t revolutionary theory and practice take forms that need not be communist?
- We can talk about Mao insights and accomplishment all we like, but at the end of the day, isn’t China is a capitalist power with Mao’s face is on their currency? Isn’t the outcome a proof that the process and the ideology was a loser? Is this then a name we want to rally round?
- Also don’t the problems of a new beginning involve settling accounts with undemocratic nature of most leninist parties, the cult of personality in Maoism, and the extreme authoritarianism of most communist groups and states?
- Also while there may be value in talking about revollutions in Nepal and Peru — but aren’t those country profoundly different and distance from advanced capitalist countries? And haven’t those revolutions been riddled with problems? What value is there in implying that peasant communist wars have lessons and models for socialist revolution in urban worlds?
- Do we want to adopt the same militant atheism that drove so many people away from communism and toward reactionaries in the twentieth century?
What are the assumptions of these questions? Are they true? If not, why not?
What are the implications of these questions? Are they true? If not why not?
Will a new communist revival happened based on the development of previous Marxism (mainly on continutity and further development), or on the basis of the rejection of previous Marxism (mainly on discontinuity and fresh invention from scratch)?
Let’s dig in on this. State your mind. Make your case. And if we don’t get it deep enough, lets resolve to take it deeper.
What do we keep from the past theory? What do we uphold of old strategic assumptions and organizational forms?
Democratic centralism? United Front? Two stage revolution or one state revolution or change without seizing a state? Politics at close quarters with the controversies of the state, or at distance from the state? One revolutionary party or an ecosystem of entwined movements? Protracted war for change, or preparations pending a revolutionary situation?
What tools do we save, pickup, sharpen and deploy? And which ones do we discard and disavow?
Many of us have strong views on this — why not pull them out to compare, contrast and transform?
IFKaramazov said
I read this blog often, and although I don’t comment much, I couldn’t help but say something on this post. This is exactly the stuff we need to be working out for the future. So this is just my two cents. I’m sure most will probably violently disagree, but here it is anyway.
P.1/P.2 – There’s a lot to be said for this, but before I do, take it a step further – if you want to achieve communism, why even use the name communism at all? Because that name has been indelibly associated with Marx, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao as well. Any time you raise the red flag, you’re going to have people associating it with all its historical predecessors. Why not do away with all that and start fresh?
The reason you don’t do that, I think, is because it is just a form of political surrender. Think about the way the Republicans demonized the word “liberal” in American politics, so lots of American liberals now call themselves “progressives” to represent the same basic ideas as they had back in the 1970s. And now you have people like Glenn Beck going on and demonizing “progressives.” Well, either you keep letting yourself be beaten back and chased away or you resist.
Take Friedrich Nietzsche. Whatever you think of him, his name was hideously abused. His sister, who became his literary executor after his descent into madness and later death, managed to link her brother’s name with Mussolini’s fascism and Hitler’s Nazism. Hitler even attended her funeral. Who would have thought that his name could be saved from historical condemnation along with everything else the Nazis had tainted? Yet the work of Walter Kaufmann returned him to philosophical respectability.
Or take the Democratic Party post-1860. The Party that had considered negotiating with the CSA was lost for quite a time, but then you have Woodrow Wilson, who restored some respectability to the brand, and later on FDR.
I doubt it will be so simple with socialism, but the trend is already there. Ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union, socialism can be associated with socialism as it is desired to be, rather than with a state capitalist machine that insists on taking up the mantle of socialism. As Eugene V. Debs once said, “There is nothing that helps the Socialist Party so much as receiving an occasional deathblow.”
Now, that said, to an extent I don’t think it is necessary to bring up Mao, Stalin, or many of the others – politically. You can push for a socialist platform without bringing up foreign theorists and politicians. In fact, most countries have a socialist tradition you can appeal to, if anything. The basic idea is to end exploitation and promote a fair and just distribution of resources, and that can be done without speaking to anything from the 19th Century.
Lenin and Marx, however, had a lot of good things to say, and their theories are still highly useful in the theoretical side of things, either to be defended or critiqued. Besides, many of the people who are going to be hideously put off by the name “Marx” aren’t going to be easy converts to socialism anyway. Some people exist in too insulated a world to be reached. However, post-USSR, interest in socialism (which is no longer just “the enemy”) is rising in the US, at least among the young.
P.3 – Yes, the socialist movement seems pretty intent on dividing itself against itself, doesn’t it? I don’t really know what to say to this, other than that it is ironic. Whether or not the differences are relevant to us today, we really need to focus on solidarity more than on seemingly “perfected” but in truth highly subjective theories. There are general principles we all accept, and that should be our emphasis.
P.4 – Two things. One, this is actually insulting to the intelligence of younger people. The bright ones who are legitimately interested in politics are going to be interested in the history of ideas in general. Marx and Lenin, in that respect, are hardly dead. Two, see P.1/P.2. We don’t need to preach the gospel of Marx the way Christians do their savoir, after all. We’re selling a social blueprint, not a cult.
If a person is attracted to “communism,” they’re going to be interested in more than what it has to offer them. And if they’re only interested in what it has to offer them, then they’re not really going to be “communists.” This just overlooks the point.
Yes, we have to engage on a more political level, rather than retreating into academic discussions of whether Marx or Lenin or Mao was “right”, but this doesn’t mean that communism has to “rebrand” itself as though it were some kind of corporate monster trying to market a product. Ideas proliferate. Targeting our audience and calibrating our message is a matter of narrative (fairly intrinsic to human psychology) and strategy, not commodity. It doesn’t need to be jazzed up to “sell.” Please, let’s not submit socialism to co-opting by capitalist ideology.
P.5 – Yes, revolutionary theory and practice can take non-socialist forms. One of them is called “fascism.” Revolutionary change takes many forms. The American, Russian, French, Revolutions and Spanish Civil War were all revolutionary. The problem is that the strategic and tactical concerns which come into play in any revolution make a transition to democratic egalitarianism – especially in the face of international hostility – a rather difficult proposition. This doesn’t mean that ML or MLM are doomed to failure. It does mean they are going to encounter significant hardships before they do succeed. After all, the English Civil War and the American Revolution weren’t too far apart in the grand scheme of things, yet their respective outcomes were very different. Social composition, technical sophistication, etc. come into play as much as the ideology driving the revolutionary group.
P.6 – For a theory to succeed, it needs to be based on a correct understanding of sociological and psychological realities. You can’t run the same experiment on cobalt, lithium, and chlorine and expect the same result. I don’t know if Maoism is at all the right theory. I have my suspicions that it is not, but I cannot speak to this point in detail.
P.7 – Here’s a question. Capitalism is an unjust system. Yet, in traditional Marxist theory, it is the engine by which a society creates the surplus goods and developed means of production necessary to enable the transition to socialism. How is this example of using a gross injustice to justify a better world significantly different from the idea of using a Leninist vanguard party to force a transition to socialism in a society which otherwise may well remain feudalist or capitalist? There are legitimate critiques of democracy which have been raised by philosophers for thousands of years. If you really believe that the only legitimate means of altering society by some sort of mass, unified uprising representing the will of an overwhelming majority of the people. Well, then whether or not that is even possible, we certainly won’t see it in our lifetimes. There is much more at play in human society and human psychology than class and material resources. The whole thing is far too utopian for me.
P.8 – Again, on this point I am too ignorant to speak intelligently.
P.9 – I could actually try to come up with a thoughtful response to this, but I really have no serious inclination to reach out to the religious. They’ve had their run of the world for most of the entire Holocene Era. The results are….well, they lie all around us.
The conclusions I draw from this, among other human and historical tendencies, is that Lenin’s approach is basically the right one. The failures which befell the Soviet Union need not have been chalked up to problems with the particular theory so much as the inherent problem of any theory to be insufficient to account for all the factors within any given society and the quirks of different personalities.
If you want to know why the revolutionary movements came to grief in the backwards parts of the world, consider that it wasn’t the theory so much as the raw material people were working with. “Democracy” didn’t work so well in post-Imperial Germany, did it? And how is it doing in Iraq and Afghanistan? This isn’t to accuse underdeveloped nations of being less intelligent or capable, it’s to point out that the cultural norms are going to impact everything that happens within the culture. You can’t transform them in a day, a year, or even ten years. If you look at the United States, sometimes you can’t even change them in a century.
jfsp said
Point 9. Atheism does not play well, especially in the black and latino communities. I’ve always wondered how the radical left was going to overcome this obstacle.
PatrickSMcNally said
P9: A general atheistic, scientific viewpoint is essential for any would-be revolutionary party, but it is not necessary to be as militant today as a century ago. A century ago the Christian church in one form or another was almost the ultimate bastion of power around the world. Today we can open newspapers to read about priests playing with boys in unholy ways. That is part of a broader cultural change which has happened in the last century and was certainly influenced by the old wave of revolution, but has also penetrated many social corners where we don’t think of revolution having occurred. There’s no point in refighting old battles. The viewpoint which saw Christianity as a central support of the conservative social order is not as applicable today as it was then, even when it may still hold some truth.
The Left needs to stay current with a changing world. These days if you run across any arguments which place the Catholic Church at the center of world power then they are more likely to be coming from PrisonPlanet or David Icke as part of an assertion that the Jesuits mastermined 911 to create a New World Order. The Catholic Church definitely was once the center of power in Europe, but not anymore. That should have some influence on how honest Left-wing atheism is handled. But atheism should still remain the basic viewpoint.
Александр Енько said
IFKaramazov: that Lenin’s approach is basically the right one.
Agree. The right way is deep exploration of Soviet Union experience. Finding good and bad there will lead us to a new knowledge.
Jay Rothermel said
John-John [this is not from John Steele] raises some important questions communists today need to grapple with.
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Advancing communism via our “own practice” without reference to the continuity of 20th century Marxism-Leninism takes us where?
It will take us into the subjectivity and atomisation of common sense, reformism and utopia, the pre-Marx world of a very unscientific socialism. The socialism where everyone has a tract or a book ["The Philosophy of Poverty", one was called] and is recruiting to their own phalanx-of-one.
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” Isn’t the outcome a proof that the process and the ideology was a loser?”
Only if we are reading history backward. Only if we are paving over the reality of concrete social relations and struggles that occurred and need to be summed-up, hoping that by telling young people what came before was all a mistake or misunderstanding, they will give us more credence. The opposite is true among young people who have attended our Cleveland Marxist Reading Group meetings. Parenthetically, the ISO tells its contacts that anything other than Russia 1917-1921 was not socialism or communism, and to thus not worry about getting the grit of reality under their fingernails by grapply with the whole rich history of 20th century communism [just capitalism in disguise].
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“….undemocratic nature of most leninist parties, the cult of personality in Maoism, and the extreme authoritarianism of most communist groups and states?”
One is tempted to say, “compared to what?” but that would be flippant and unfair.
But it is correct to ask, as Leninists, “democratic” to what end? To carry out the line of the party, or to carry out a continual re-hasing of second thoughts and prevaracations? Lines winning majority support must be acted upon. Organizations must have constitutions mandating regular [every 1-2 years] conventions where the course and direction of the world class struggle and the current line of the party are discussed, enriched, and the line is corrected if necessary. The idea that parties can go along without conventions, national leadership meetings, and national and regional party educational conferences is absurb, undemocratic, and de-politicizing.
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“Why talk about Lenin and Stalin and Mao at all?”
Marx/Engels/Lenin/Stalin/Trotsky/Mao are divisive, yes. But who is the “us” that is being divided? Quakers and syndicalists? Earth Firsters and Platypi? Vegetarians and logical positivists?
How can we achieve any class clarity today without reference to how it was done in the past? How did communists under various circumstances in different countries use their Marxist-Leninist tools? For instance, the early congresses of the Comintern in Lenin’s time did not discuss the same issues we are talking about today, but unless we study and get into the skin of those comrades, we are not going to internalize their communist skills and habits of thought; we are not going to know how to apply theory unless we know how theory has been applied to real circumstances before, and how programs, strategies, and tactics were carried out, summed-up, and corrected by others before us.
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“Do we want to adopt the same militant atheism that drove so many people away from communism and toward reactionaries in the twentieth century?”
We need to recruit people based on their willingness to submit to the discipline of the organization and carry out its line loyally. The religion question will take care of itself.
I will quote Lenin from 1905, because he said it better than I ever could: “…..under no circumstances ought we to fall into the error of posing the religious question in an abstract, idealistic fashion, as an “intellectual” question unconnected with the class struggle, as is not infrequently done by the radical-democrats from among the bourgeoisie. It would be stupid to think that, in a society based on the endless oppression and coarsening of the worker masses, religious prejudices could be dispelled by purely propaganda methods. It would be bourgeois narrow-mindedness to forget that the yoke of religion that weighs upon mankind is merely a product and reflection of the economic yoke within society. No number of pamphlets and no amount of preaching can enlighten the proletariat, if it is not enlightened by its own struggle against the dark forces of capitalism. Unity in this really revolutionary struggle of the oppressed class for the creation of a paradise on earth is more important to us than unity of proletarian opinion on paradise in heaven. ”
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“Will a new communist revival happened based on the development of previous Marxism (mainly on continutity and further development), or on the basis of the rejection of previous Marxism (mainly on discontinuity and fresh invention from scratch)?”
A new revival will come from the interpenetrating of past lessons/continuity and new resistance/rebellion/struggles/opportunities. When people in struggle today meet communists in the same struggle with them, we will get a hearing laying out a correct way to develop these struggles so they do not collapse or get shunted into reformist recall initiatives or voting for lesser evils.
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One concept we need to break with so that we can clearly sum-up and judge the whole history of our movement in the 20th century is the idea that socialism ended in the USSR in 1956 and in the PRC in 1976. These concepts never had a basis in historical reality; the commanding heights of an economy are not transformed like that. These 1956/1976 dates were rhetorical flourishes in factional battles that have been treated as sacrosanct since their inception, and have never been taken seriously outside the Maoist miliue.
Eddy1701 said
I think we ought to take a firm stance on religion and avoid compromising with an institution we consider (quite reasonably in my opinion) harmful and fraudulent merely for the sake of populist appeals.
The reactionaries already have the upper hand on religious matters simply because they are part of their natural habitat. They (at least most of those who make religion the core of their reactionary movement) genuinely believe in God and his commandments and they deeply value the institutions of religion both as the bedrock for a stable society and the means to their own salvation.
Compared to that, our own attempts to appeal to the religious mindset will inevitably strike our audience as rather insincere and watered-down. Given the choice between communists paying lip service to religion for political gain and reactionaries driven by sincere belief, the faithful will choose the latter.
Why would they want something that strikes them as a mealy-mouthed surrogate when they can get the real thing?
Jay Rothermel said
I think a lot of people awakening to politics are sick and tired of all questions being reduced to questions of Biblical morality. That is a tremendous advantage now if we do not reduce ourselves to the Ditchkins caricature of a scold and a know-it-all out to engage against religion rationally when the material foundations of religion today [capitalism] are not rational at all.
Sunsara Taylor’s excellent article on the Secular Student Alliance Conference is well worth reading:
My own thoughts on atheist can be found here:
for what its worth.
Jay Rothermel said
not sure why links did not appear in my post, but here they are
http://sunsara.blogspot.com/2011/08/my-thoughts-on-secular-student-alliance.html
http://marxistupdate.blogspot.com/2011/07/atheism-and-marxism-personal-view.html
Mike E said
The controversial part of Sunsara’s piece is its rant around pornography — a highly simplistic and rigid position on a political-cultural landscape that has undergone massive shifts on the question of erotic depiction. Its a huge controversy among people who want liberation — and one we should engage at some point here.
old commie said
I think it would be more productive if we talked about materialism rather than atheism, As a retired scientist, I really don’t care much about arguments about supernatural beings; there isn’t any real evidence, so even trying to discuss the subject doesn’t get you anywhere. Instead, we should insist that all the problems and issues we talk to everyone about be discussed from the viewpoint that they have natural causes. (p)
This does not mean that we ridicule peole’s religious explanations for things. Rather, we need to look at where their ideas come from, and look for common ground to discuss them. I remember one very interesting discussion I had with a Jehovah’s Witness, where we were talking about the Flood and Noah. I pointed out to him that, at the end of the Ice Age, there was an enormous fllood caused by the rising Mediterranean overflowing into the Black Sea. So that there was a scientific basis for his beliefs, but that they had been distorted because people didn’t know what was really going on. I wasn’t trying to get him to renounce his religious beliefs (that wasn’t possible on such short notice), I just wanted to get him thinking about things, and not just blindly accept what he had been told.(p)
I think we have to do the same thing when we are talking to most people about socialism; we need to point out specific things in our society that are socialistic, even if they are not socialism. Such as free public education, and publicly owned utilities. And get them thinking about socialist ideas.(p)
Unlike many of the writers/commenters on kasama, no one I personally talk to knows anything about Marxist socialism except the capitalist propaganda. So it’s important to find some points of agreement, and very patiently work from there. My aim is not to set up a vanguard of dedicated communist revolutionaries. Rather, I am trying to create a situation where, when a revolutionary situation arises, ordinary people will be saying that socialism might work, so let’s give it a try. We’ve got an awful lot of educational work to do!
Rhys said
Some thoughts on points 7 and 8:
Re the undemocratic nature of Leninist parties is, imho, the wrong way of looking at it. Parties, including bourgeois democratic ones, have democratic and centralist features and both features are required. The more important and difficult question is whether a revolutionary state can co-exist in a multi party polity. And part of this involves the question of whether more than one party can represent the interests of the working class.
The problem with a one party state is its exclusiveness. Any party (bourgeois, proletarian, calothumpian…) has a right to determine who can be in and who cannot be. Revolutionaries in any society and at any stage in history have been a small minority. Communist parties, being advanced detachments of the working class are no different; of necessity they exclude the great majority from membership.
In the Russian and Chinese revolutions the working class was a small minority of the population and the communist parties were, inevitably, markedly superior (educationally, culturally). This was magnified by the backward nature of these societies where the gap between the Party, especially its leading cadres, and the masses was enormous. This gap bred arrogance on the one hand and faith (a blind faith which will ultimately lead to disillusionment) on the other. This was one of the things Mao tried to confront when he launched the cultural revolution.
The social democratic strategy that Marx and Engels had was to deal with the need to develop the consciousness of the masses to a stage where they could rule. This approach was taken over by revolutionary Social Democracy after their death and degenerated with the advent of WW1 into modern social democracy which has been embraced by revisionism. The other side of this degeneration, its attempted remedy, was the Leninist parties. In the west or developed world at least this remedy has failed and has contributed to our isolation. The failure is two sided however – Leninist one party rule on the one hand and modern social democracy on the other.
The modern working class is vastly better educated and more sophisticated than its 19th C European counterparts and is unlikely to tolerate solutions to power that were developed to deal with problems inherent in semi feudal societies. If we can’t get that we will remain isolated.
Hannu said
Those who still are against a multi-party system during socialism, do not see the difference, I think, between a state with several parties and a state with several “Communist” Parties. Ideally there should always only be one “Communist Party”, that represents the goal of Communism. But there will always also be more than one party, regardless if you outlaw them or not. To outlaw non-communist organisations and view as they did in the Soviet Union and, to some extent, in Maoist China had and will have disastrous consequences.