Posted March 10, 2017

    In his Inaugural Address, Trump declared that “it is the right of all nations to put their own interests first.”  True enough.  However, no nation has the right to defend its national interests in a form detached from internationalist consciousness.  All nations have the moral obligation to seek mutually beneficial trade with other nations, and to defend their interests in the context of negotiations based on mutual respect and respect for the sovereignty of other nations.

     Moreover, those nations that have benefitted from colonial domination have a historic and social debt to those nations that have been victimized by it.  There can be no moral justification for the United States, having economically benefitted from trade with slave states and slave nations and from inserting itself into semi-colonial structures established by Spanish conquest and colonial domination of Latin America, to now proclaim that it has a right to protect the advantages and privileges that have been accumulated at the expense of other peoples.  As Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa asserted at the 2017 Summit of CELAC (Community of Latin American and Caribbean States), the protection of their economies by nations historically colonized is necessary for their sovereignty, and it is fundamentally different from economic protection by a superpower, the exercise of which will have serious negative repercussions for the nations of the world (read more on Rafael Correa).

       The dominant school of thought in foreign relations during the twentieth century has maintained that nations must be guided primarily by interests rather than moral considerations, and that a nation does not have a right to sacrifice its interests in the name of a moral principle (see Morgenthau 1973:3-15).  This indeed has been the guiding principle of the major powers throughout the history of the modern world-system.  But the belief that each nation should pursue its economic interests, leaving moral considerations aside, ensures the unsustainability of the world-system in the long term.  No world-system could be sustainable, if the political entities that compose it, in the conduct of foreign policy, were to ignore the values that are shared by all. In the case of the modern world-system, universal values have been articulated and enshrined in important documents and declarations of international associations, and they include moral concepts such as the rights of all nations to sovereignty and to economic and social development.  All nations have the obligation to respect these rights and to develop their foreign policy accordingly. The global elite does not understand this moral duty, and as a result, they are leading humanity to chaos, violence and possible extinction. In an earlier stage, the amoral conduct of the global elite was sanctioned by historians and social scientists.  Today, however, it is increasingly evident that philosophers, historians and social scientists have the duty to condemn policies that ignore universal human values.

       The possibility and the necessity of a U.S. foreign policy of North-South cooperation, in accordance with the universally accepted principles of the sovereignty and equality of nations, the social and economic rights of persons, and the duty of humanity to defend itself and to defend nature, must be declared and explained to the people. It is the duty of the Left to formulate and proclaim this explanation, so that the people, who are increasingly rejecting neoliberal globalization, will have a concrete alternative to the neofascism of Trump.

Reference
 
Morgenthau, Hans J.  1973.  Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace, Fifth Edition.  New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Posted March 13, 2017

      In the forging of independence movements in the colonies of what would later become the Third World, movement leaders and intellectuals defined the issue of independence in a form that integrated issues of national liberation and class.  The leaders understood that national liberation could not be achieved without a national unity that overcame class differences.  Although the leaders and intellectuals came mostly from the national bourgeoisie and petit bourgeoisie, they recognized that the attainment of their goals could not be accomplished without significant mass participation, and this required the formulation of platforms that addressed the specific needs of peasants and workers, as felt and understood by them.

      In the Caribbean, where African slavery was significant, as well as in those African colonies in which there were significant numbers of European settlers, race also was an inescapable factor.  Accordingly, the movements also embraced the principle of racial equality. 

       Thus, the Third World movements of national liberation were born with an integrating dynamic, in which the most politically astute understood the necessity of integrating issues of national liberation, class and race.  They evolved in this integrated form from the end of the eighteenth century to the twentieth.  Other issues later emerged: women during the twentieth century; and ecology and the original peoples of America during the second half of the twentieth century.   As a result of the historic integrating dynamic of the movements, leaders were able to include these new sectors and issues, such that by the beginning of the twenty-first century the movements of the Third World had accomplished an integration of issues of national liberation, class, race and ethnicity, gender and ecology.

       The integration of the issue of women faced challenges.  The women’s movement emerged in the West, so Third World women leaders, who always had been present but not as spokespersons for the cause of women, had to formulate their proposals in ways that made clear that they were not the unwitting transmitters of a form of cultural imperialism.  They thus re-formulated the Western women’s agenda, not only because it was an intelligent political strategy, but also because doing so reflected their deepest beliefs, as citizens of the emerging Third World.  As one dimension of this, they left aside the issue of lesbianism, not wanting to create divisions among the people and to risk rejection of the demands and issues that affected the great majority of women (see “The rights of women” 11/11/13; “Gender and revolution” 1/21/2016). 

        The integration of the issue of ecology also was complicated.  In its initial formulation in the West, the ecology movement viewed economic growth and environmental protection as opposites.  But the Third World, in conditions of underdevelopment, had to increase production. Recognizing the essential validity of the claims of the ecology movement, the Third World arrived to the notion that it was necessary to expand production, but in a sustainable form, thus giving birth to the concept of sustainable development, which today is a central demand of the Third World movements of national and social liberation (see “Sustainable development” 11/12/13).

      The integration of the indigenous movements of America into the struggle of Third World national and social liberation was the least complicated.  It emerged late, in the last decades of the twentieth century, by which time the integrating dynamic had been consolidated as a movement tendency.  The historic exclusion of indigenous nations from the Latin American movements of peasants and workers came to be recognized as unjust and as an historic error.

        Thus, the Third World movements arrived to be movements that integrated the various issues that today are in debate, except for the issue of gay rights.  On this issue, there is some marginal discussion and debate in the Third World, but by and large it is left aside as potentially undermining the necessary unity of the people.

       In the Third World, the various issues are integrated around the organizing principle of the nation.  The theoretical integration does not give primacy to race, nor to gender, nor to class, as occurs with grand narratives developed in the West.  Rather, primacy is given to the nation: the right of the nation to exist and to be sovereign; the historic development of the nation; the values that are the foundation of the nation; the place of the nation in the world; and the values that ought to guide relations with other nations, especially respect for their sovereignty.  

     Patriotism, therefore, is fundamental to the Third World movements: love for the nation; loyalty to the nation; and heroic sacrifice in defense of the nation.  In the Third World narratives, patriotism is the foundation of commitment to the cause of justice that is formulated with respect to the various issues of national liberation, class, gender, race and ethnicity, and ecology.

     The Third World example of giving centrality and primacy to the nation could serve as an inspiration for those committed to social justice in the North.  All modern nations have a story that includes a struggle for democracy in some form or other, even those nations that became colonizing or imperialist nations in the world-system.  These stories can be the foundation for national narratives that mobilize the peoples in defense of the true and the right.

     The integrated movements of national and social liberation of the Third World are comprehensive.  Not only do they integrate a number of key issues, but they also have a historical and global perspective. They possess consciousness of the historic development of the nation, largely understood as a dialectal and evolving contradiction between domination and democracy.  And they possess global consciousness, with a scientifically-based understanding of the position and function of the nation in the modern world-system.

      When we intellectuals and activists in the North look at the Third World revolutions, we should appreciate what they have accomplished, for in truth, in spite of the significant political, economic and military obstacles they have encountered, they have accomplished much more than have the movements of the North.  If we were to ask how they did it, we would find that they constructed an integrated movement that was attentive to the sensibilities of each sector of the people.  This could inspire us to formulate narratives for our own peoples that are integral and comprehensive, rooted in knowledge and in historical and global consciousness.

     Perhaps the most important lesson to be learned by the Left in the North from the Third World is the centering of the concept and sentiment of patriotism.  In these times, we should note the importance of patriotism in the neofascism of Trump and his team.  They want to defend the nation, against foreign companies that steal our jobs and sell their products in our land; and against immigrants who enter the country without an adequate process of regulation.  So they have a patriotic discourse that is effective among the people.  But their patriotism is narrow, for it wants to ignore the rights of other nations. The Left can effectively counter their narrow patriotism not with a belief that patriotism is an antiquated sentiment, possessed only by those who lack sophistication; nor with a posture that gives insincere lip service to narrow patriotism.  Rather, neofascism can be effectively countered with a form of patriotism that is guided by an internationalist spirit, that recognizes that all nations have rights, and that proclaims that such was the full intention of the American promise of democracy, even though the founders of the American republic could not, in the context of their times, grasp its full implications.  We today, with the greater wisdom that results from experience, must further develop the great work that the Founding Fathers began.

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Posted March 14, 2017
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     In his address to the Congress on February 27, Donald Trump attacked the U.S. government.  He maintained that it: imposes high taxes on corporations, restricting the capacity of corporations to invest in production, thus reducing their capacity to generate jobs for the people; regulates corporations excessively, limiting their capacity to produce goods and generate jobs; and demands high taxes of the middle class.  But, according to Trump, even though the government does too much with respect to taxes and regulations, it does not do enough with respect to the application of force:  the government has failed to enforce laws with respect to ordinary crime, international migration, and drug trafficking, thus creating insecurity for the communities of the nation; it does not have sufficient military expenditures; and it does not adequately support law enforcement officers.

      The Trumpian critique, a state too strong with respect to the economy but too weak with respect to the application of force, has been a central motif of U.S. conservativism since the end of World War II.  Support for a strong military has been constant since 1945, and it received a boost with the simplistic worldview of Reagan and the post-September 11 “war on terrorism.”  With respect to the economy, the prevailing view from 1945 to 1979 was that government had an important role to play in regulating production and redistributing income; during this time, the conservative view a present in the public debate, but clearly a minority view.  With the post-1980 turn to neoliberalism and the Washington consensus, the conservative view, with its orientation of reducing the role of the state in the economy, became ascendant.

      So our people have been subjected to an ideological attack on the state for some time, and it has created much confusion among the people. As a result, the discourse of the Left ought to include an explanation of the function of the state in society.

      We ought to understand that the true function of the state in a democracy is to represent to the interests of the people.  But immediately there is a confused situation, because in representative democracies, the state pretends to represent the people, when in fact it represents the interests of corporations.  This situation dates back to the Constitution of 1789, which established the substitution of the appearance for the essence of democracy.  In those days, the central mechanisms for ensuring elite control were large-voting districts, restriction of the franchise, and a checking of the power of the democratically-elected congress by the senate and the judiciary, whose members were not elected; and by a president, elected indirectly.  In our time, the substitution of the appearance for the essence of democracy is achieved through corporate campaign contributions, creating a situation of the dependency of elected officials on corporate support; and by corporate control of the media and think tanks, which more than shaping public opinion, frame the issues concerning which the public has opinion (see “The US popular movement of 1775-77” 11/1/13; “American counterrevolution, 1777-87” 11/4/13; “Balance of power” 11/5/13; “Popular democracy” 11/6/13).

       So the Left must develop an effective discourse that exposes the essentially undemocratic character of the political process of representative democracy.  And it must make specific proposals for a more genuinely democratic process that would make possible the control of the government by the people.  The Green Party Platform, although characterized by the lack of historical consciousness and Eurocentrism, has good proposals with respect to the democratic reform of the electoral process in the United States (“The Green Party Platform” 8/26/2016; “Can the Green Party evolve?” 8/29/2016).

      If we can envision a situation of power in the hands of the people, then we can envision what the state could be: a powerful collective force in defense of the interests of the people.  Unlike the private sector, governments have the capacity to mobilize resources in defense of political goals.  Governments can mobilize resources to build transportation and communication networks, to develop systems of education and health, and to invest in production and scientific development.  To be sure, its legitimate functions will include the application of force, in order to ensure national defense and safe communities, but this function is one of many, and it must be fulfilled in ways that are integral to community and national development.  

       The Trump proposals give excessive emphasis on the application of force and insufficient attention to other functions, exploiting the confusions of the people that have resulted from years of ideological attack on the state.  Some of the people sense that the Trump emphasis on force is not the right road, but they do not have sufficient understanding to formulate an alternative approach that is comprehensive and politically effective.  The result is a divided people, with hostile and superficial debate.

      So the Left must call people to unity, in a form that embraces the divisive rhetoric of neither side.  It must call the people to the establishment of a government that faithfully fulfills its functions, under the direction of the people, and in accordance with the interests of the people.  It must invoke a vision of a government of, by, and for the people, a government that would function as a political balance to the power of the corporations and the corporate elite, which has demonstrated, since the age of the robber barons in the second half of the nineteenth century, its indifference to fundamental ethical and moral values and to the good of the nation and humanity.

Posted March 16, 2017

       This is the final in a series of nineteen posts on the Trump administration.  In these posts, in addition to describing the Trump project, I have maintained that the rise of Trump is in part a consequence of the failure of the Left to formulate an alternative narrative.  Historically, radical thought emerged as a critique of liberalism and conservatism for their inadequacy in bringing to fruition the promises of the bourgeois democratic revolutions, a critique formulated from the vantage point of the working and lower classes. Today, the Left has a duty to fulfill its historic function, and to formulate an alternative narrative from the Left, in accordance with the promise of democracy, and in the name of the people.

     The Left narrative should be integral, global and historical.  It should be formulated on the basis of encounter with the social movements of the Third World, which speak on behalf of a humanity that is neocolonized, dispossessed and excluded.  In response to the prevailing ahistorical and ethnocentric public discourse in the nations of the North, the narrative of the Left should explain the historical development of the structures of the world-system.  As a rejoinder to the myopic concept of American exceptionalism, the Left narrative ought to explain the historic insertion of the United States in colonial/neocolonial structures, thus facilitating its spectacular ascent. In recognition of the fears and anxieties of the people, the alternative narrative should explain the global structural sources of the new form of terrorism as well as uncontrolled international migration, and it should offer analytically sound and politically intelligent proposals with respect to these two phenomena.  In response to the ideological attack on the state of recent decades, the alternative narrative should explain the necessary role of the state as defender of the interests of the people, and that this role includes regulation and active engagement in the economy.  And as a rejection of imperialist and neoliberal polices, the Left narrative ought to affirm the obligation of all nations to develop foreign policies that respect the sovereignty of all nations, as a necessary precondition for a politically stable world-system.

     Writing in a similar vein, Laurence Davis, College Lecturer in Government at University College Cork, Ireland, maintains that the current historic moment calls for an alternative proposal that is bold, radical and popular.  In “Only a bold and popular left radicalism can stop the rise of fascism,” he maintains that neoliberal globalization has collapsed, and that two alternative worlds are struggling to be born.  The first is signaled by the new fascism represented by Trump; the second, which has various signs and manifestations, is a more just, democratic and sustainable world that is rooted in commitment to equality, democracy and solidarity.   

      Davis maintains that for the latter to prevail, a bold Left radicalism is required.

And he maintains that this will require a reconnection with our revolutionary roots, with the history of revolutionary ideas and revolutionary movements.

      I am in agreement with Davis, but I would go further.  I believe that present conditions make possible and necessary a politically effective alternative political party of the Left.  Its success in attracting the support of the people would depend on its capacity to formulate explanations and proposals that are analytically sound and politically astute, taking advantage of the current historic moment, which is characterized by the demonstrated moral and intellectual incapacity of the global elite to respond to the sustained crisis of the world-system, and by the growing disgust of the people with the established order and the political establishment. 

      Alternative political parties, therefore, must be formed in the nations of the North.  They should be political parties dedicated to taking power from corporations and putting it in the hands of the people’s delegates, a process that should be projected as requiring twenty or twenty-five years.  The new parties should not be merely electoral parties, but political parties that also educate and organize the people.  Accordingly, they should generate manifestos that provide grand narratives that scientifically explain the sustained structural crisis of the world-system in historical and global context.  And they should develop platforms that constructively address the concerns and anxieties that are rooted in the confusions of the people.  They should develop a discourse that is sensitive to the values of the people, a discourse that is confident, without being arrogant or morally righteous; and hopeful, without being idealist.  The new political parties should form and lift up exceptional leaders who have the gifts of the great revolutionaries of the past, whose teachings are constantly informing the discourses of the present.

     For further reflection on these themes, see “A socialist revolution in the USA” 2/1/2016.

     The ascent to power of Donald Trump and his cabinet of the extreme Right is the culmination of a turn to the Right that began in the late 1970s.  It never should have happened.  From 1965 to 1972, popular sectors formed a revolutionary movement that sought to expand and deepen the meaning of democracy, declared as the foundation of the American Republic in 1776.  That popular revolution, which reached its zenith in 1968, should have provided the intellectual and moral foundation for a progressive turn by the U.S. republic.  But instead, the popular revolution collapsed, victimized by its limitations and errors.  Since 1980, the political culture has been dominated by political parties and think tanks intimately tied to international corporations, imposing a free-market mythology and wars of aggression on the world, thus leaving the political process susceptible to the exploitation of the fears and limited understanding of the people through a discourse that proclaims “America First” and scapegoats the most vulnerable.

     The revolution of 1968 had two principal components, the African-American movement and the student anti-war movement.  These two spawned a revitalization of the women’s movement and the emergence of the Native American movement, the Chicano movement, and the ecology movement.

      The African-American movement emerged in response to the denial of fundamental rights to U.S. citizens of African descent, including legally sanctioned and mandated discrimination and segregation the U.S. South.  The movement had originated in the urban North during World War I, and it expanded to the urban South in the 1950s, on the basis of the expansion and increasing strength of black churches, colleges and protest institutions in the urban South in the post-World War II era.  From the outset, the movement was committed to the protection of the citizenship rights of all, regardless of race, and including social and economic as well as political and civil rights; and it called for foreign policies that respected the sovereign equality of all nations, including the nations of Africa, Asia and Latin America.  In the period 1955 to 1965, the movement gave strategic emphasis to civil and political rights in the South.  Beginning in 1966, the movement turned to demands for black control of black institutions, in response to the failure of white allies of the period 1955-65 to support further reforms following the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965; and it renewed its call for an anti-imperialist foreign policy, in reaction to the Vietnam War (see “The unresolved issue of race in the USA” 6/23/2015).    

     The student/anti-war movement emerged as a student movement in the early 1960s, and it evolved to become an anti-war movement in the late 1960s, as the U.S. war against Vietnam escalated.  The movement emerged as a consequence of the contradiction between, on the one hand, U.S. pretensions to democracy, and on the other hand, and the denial of rights of black citizens and the unleashing of the colonialist war in Indochina.  This contradiction was increasingly evident to white middle class students, who had internalized the democratic narrative of the nation, as a result the upward mobility experienced by their families, many of which were part of the great European migrations to the United States of the period 1865 to 1925 (see “The New Left and its errors” 5/13/2016). 

     The popular movement of the period 1966 to 1972 had all the elements necessary for a successful popular and democratic revolution.  The key ideas were formulated: the need for the people to take power from the elite; the obligation of a democratic society to protect the political, civil, social and economic rights of all citizens; and the obligation of the nation to respect the sovereignty and equality of all nations.  But such key ideas were expressed as part of a confused mix, which included critical strategic errors that limited the possibilities for the movement to gain greater support among the people.  The charismatic leader who might have been capable of putting together the key pieces and unifying the movement toward the necessary road, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated in 1968.  The black power movement was silenced by systematic oppression in the period 1970 to 1972, and the student/anti-war movement dissipated as the war wound down and the compulsory military draft for young men was eliminated.

       Following the national and global turn to the right in 1980, Rev. Jesse Jackson attempted to resurrect Dr. King’s Poor People’s Campaign with a Rainbow Coalition, an alliance of the various popular sectors.  Jackson understood that it was a question of the people taking power and directing the state to the protection of social and economic rights of all and to a foreign policy of cooperation with Third World nations seeking true independence.  But a charismatic leader understands all that needs to be done, and Jackson did not grasp that the Rainbow Coalition must be developed as a mass organization and as an alternative political party.

     Looking back on the fall of the Revolution of 1968, it is evident that white society did not learn from the insights of the African-American movement.  White society did not discern the colonial foundation to U.S. economic development or the limited scope of the U.S. understanding of democracy, so fundamental to the black nationalist critique.  Accordingly, white society has not embraced an anti-imperialist foreign policy or the concept of the protection of the social and economic rights of all.

     As a result of the impact of the popular revolution of 1968, white society abandoned legally sanctioned racial discrimination, and white discourse rejected blatant forms of racism.  But white society continued to be characterized by racism in a subtler form.  The failure of white society to encounter the African-American movement and learn from its insights was itself a manifestation of a subtle form of racism.  There were other signs as well, such as the tendency to attribute the lower educational and occupational attainment of blacks to a distinctive lower class black culture, thus nullifying a societal obligation to act decisively to protect social and economic rights (see “On racism and affirmative action” 6/26/2015).  

      But it was an error for the post-1965 African-American movement to focus on the new and subtler forms of racism, even though true. The focus should have been on the unfinished agenda of the African-American movement: the forming of a popular coalition for the protection of the social and economic rights of all and for an anti-imperialist foreign policy.  If it were not for historic errors, the black and student movements would be vibrant today, supporting an alternative political party that is committed to the political education of the people and to policies of North-South cooperation and the protection of social and economic rights, offering an alternative to the “America First” mentality that looks for scapegoats.

      Today, the Left frames issues in ways that are not intelligently formulated to create a broad-based popular coalition.  It calls for the protection of the rights of immigrants without analyzing the causes of uncontrolled international migration and without offering proposals for its control.  It condemns police violence against blacks, without acknowledging that police have killed more unarmed whites than blacks, and with apparent unawareness that the issue here is the militarization of the police in local communities in general (see Kuzmarov 2012).  It has failed to formulate these issues in ways that are sensitive to the perception of them in the various popular sectors, with proposals for: cooperation with other nations in the development of policies designed to ensure legal, controlled and safe international migration; the promotion of economic and social development in peripheral nations, so that the problem of international migration (and also factory relocation) is addressed at its source; and programs of local community control of police and greater integration of police and criminal justice institutions in the community.  The Left has framed these issues in a narrow way that promotes divisions among the people, which is the worst thing that a progressive movement can do, because divisions among the people invariably serves the interests of the elite.

      In response to the national turn to the Right in 1980s, the Left has failed to formulate an historical, global and comprehensive analysis of the neocolonial world-system, explaining the sources of its contradictions from the vantage point of the popular sectors in both core and peripheral zones of the world-economy.  The Left has moved to identity politics, rather than a concept of a popular coalition in the tradition of the Poor People’s Campaign and the Rainbow Coalition.  Its critique is superficial; it condemns racism, the denial immigrants’ rights, and neoliberal policies, without explaining to the people that these phenomena are symptoms of a neocolonial world-system in prolonged, structural crisis.  The Left offers no real remedies to the people (“The need for a popular coalition” 6/27/2015).

      The election of Donald Trump, and the increasingly right-wing policies that are likely to follow (dressed in populist rhetoric), will perhaps be a wake-up call to the Left, leading to a critical self-reflection on its perspective, concepts, methods and strategies.  What is needed today is an alternative political party of the Left that can offer an effective challenge to the Right, through a manifesto with such innovative explanatory power that it galvanizes the people to social movement and calls upon them to form a coalition that unites the various sectors of the people, a great popular coalition that seeks to take power in the name of the people, so that the rights of all persons and nations can be protected, and humanity can be saved.

Reference
 
Kuzmarov, Jeremy.  2012.  Modernizing Repression: Police Training and Nation Building in the American Century.  University of Massachusetts Press.
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     Since 1980, in response to the structural crisis of the world-system, the two major political parties in the United States have abandoned the working and middle classes and have defended the interests of international corporations.  The Left, however, has failed to offer to the people a comprehensive political, intellectual and moral alternative. These dynamics have given rise to the ascent to political power of Donald Trump and his cabinet of the extreme Right, with a scapegoating rhetoric and a discourse that suggests an economic and militarist nationalism.  The failure of the Left to provide an alternative to the Trump phenomenon is deeply rooted in the history of the United States.

     The American Revolution was consolidated as a bourgeois revolution, in spite of ample popular participation and local control of the revolution by the popular sectors during the two years immediately prior to the Declaration of Independence in 1776.  The reestablishment of bourgeois control of the American Revolution, symbolized by the Constitution of 1787, meant that political and economic structures of the nation would serve elite interests, and ideological justifications of the political-economic system would emerge (see “The US popular movement of 1775-77” 11/1/13; “American counterrevolution, 1777-87” 11/4/13; “Balance of power” 11/5/13).  

     As the new nation experienced a spectacular ascent in the world-economy for the next two centuries (see “Slavery, development, and US ascent” 8/30/2013; “Cotton” 9/9 2013; “The military-industrial complex” 8/29/2013), the dominant narrative portrayed it as a land of opportunity, obscuring the fact that its economic development was based on: a lucrative trading relation with slaveholders in the Caribbean and the U.S. South; a territorial expansion through conquest of indigenous nations and Mexico; and imperialist penetration of the Latin American republics.  The narrative effectively denied the role of slavery, colonialism and neocolonialism in providing economic opportunities for European settlers and migrants and their descendants in North America.  Popular movements formed by workers, farmers, African Americans, women, Native Americans, and Mexican Americans challenged the dominant narrative, but they were successful only in forcing political and ideological adjustments, and not in constructing an alternative narrative that would comprehensively understand the global structural sources of the U.S. ascent and provide a more progressive and democratic alternative.

      During the last 150 years, cultural structures have emerged that have facilitated the continued obscurity of the bourgeois and colonial character of the U.S republic.  The bureaucratization of the university fragmented knowledge into the disciplines of philosophy, history, economics, political science, sociology and anthropology, preventing the emergence of a universal philosophical historical social science capable of grasping the essential character of the nation.  At the same time, the development of a consumer society facilitated individualism, materialism, and ahistorical and a-theoretical popular consciousness.  

      The U.S. Left has been victimized by these dynamics, rendering it incapable of responding to the crisis of the world-system in a form that could lead the people in the development of a more democratic nation with a commitment to international solidarity.  Seven errors of the Left have contributed to its incapacity to offer to the people a scientifically-informed and politically-effective alternative.

     (1) Subtle Eurocentrism.  For the most party the U.S. Left has not studied revolutions of the Third World and the speeches and writings of Third World charismatic leaders and intellectuals.  It thus does not understand the historic development of the fundamental structures of domination of the neocolonial world-system, so clearly understood from the vantage point of the colonized and neocolonized.  This blindness leaves the Left confused about the world, unable to discern meaning in human history (as Marx did); or to grasp the necessary strategies for political action (as did Lenin).  Its commentaries are ahistorical, a-theoretical and superficial, not having explanatory power. 

     (2)  Protesting and protesting.  The Left is oriented to protesting, to speaking truth to power, rather than seeking to take power, so that control of the state could be used to transform society in accordance with the needs and interests of the people.  It shouts slogans, persuading no one; and it disdains explaining to the people the necessity and the possibility of taking power.

     The ahistorical, a-theoretical, and vocal Left likely will be visible in abundance in the United States with the taking of power by Trump and his team.  The Trump team will behave badly, and the Left will shout disapproval.  But the Left is not able to offer an historically informed and practical alternative that makes sense to the people.

     (3)  Tendencies to post-modernism and post-structuralism.  The Left discerns that knowledge is rooted in social position.  But it incorrectly moves from this insight to a rejection of grand narratives and of any hope for universal knowledge.  It disdains any effort to find meaning in human history and in the history of each nation.

     As a result, the Left does not discern the possibility of formulating a universal understanding on the foundation of personal encounter with persons of different horizons.  Seeing all understanding as partial and interested, the Left is not aware that there are persons driven by a desire to understand and not by defense of particular interests, and that from such commitment to understanding, universal knowledge emerges.  It does not see that, in other lands, the formulation of universal knowledge and universal values has been the foundation of movements and revolutions dedicated to the emancipation of the people.  

      Similarly, the Left views nations and states as social fictions, not recognizing that the nation, although a social construction, fosters real emotions among the people; nor seeing that the state is a principal actor in the world-system.  Disdaining all efforts to define the nation-state as a major actor in a world-historical narrative, the Left forfeits any possibility of leading the people toward the taking of political power in order that it can act in defense of the people, transforming states that promote and defend bourgeois and corporate interests.
  
     (4) Romanticizing the people.  The Left does not know the strengths and limitations of the people.  Although the people possess a dignity that enables them to persist in daily personal struggles to attain their human needs, the people cannot figure out for themselves what needs to be done to protect their rights and to provide for their needs. They must be led to an understanding of the necessary road by a vanguard, which comes from the people and which possesses the personal, intellectual and moral qualities that enable it to discern what must be done.  The people are capable of recognizing the correct road when it is formulated by their leaders, and they are capable heroic sacrifice in defense of the necessary road.

     (5) Subtle anti-intellectualism.  The vanguard is formed by charismatic leaders with exceptional capacities to understand, whose consciousness was formed by reading the writings of intellectuals that were driven by a desire to understand and to defend social justice.  But the Left does not appreciate the necessary role of intellectual work in the formation of the leaders of the people.

     (6) Localism.  Having lost faith in the capacity of national projects to attain the emancipation of the people, the Left celebrates local projects, such as cooperatives and alternative communities.  These are good things to do, but by themselves, they will not be enough.

     (7)  Cynicism.  The Left tends to believe that revolutionary leaders betray the revolution and the people when the people have brought them to power.   The Left comes to this conclusion quickly, without analyzing the complex situations that triumphant revolutions confront, including the opposition of national and international elites as well as global structural patterns that reinforce the dependency of the nation and the poverty of the people.

    In periods prior to the popular revolutions of the last 200 years, similar kinds of confusions abounded.  But charismatic leaders emerged, drawing upon the insights of intellectuals, to lead the people toward that unity of thought and action necessary for social transformation.  In the present situation of generalized confusion among the people, intellectuals of the United States ought to engage in sustained encounter with the revolutions of the Third World, seeking to establish the intellectual conditions that would make possible the emergence of charismatic leaders in the nation.

     On the basis of such encounter, the Left would be able arrive to understand that it must form an alternative political party, capable of explaining to the people the necessary steps.  The alternative political party would develop in the context of representative democracy, but it would be unlike other parties, because it would be oriented to the education and organization of the people, generating pamphlets and organizing people’s schools.  The leaders of the new party would model an alternative and more genuine form of political leadership.  The alternative political party would be preparing itself for the taking of power, a process that likely would be pushed forward by the inability of the power elite to respond to the contradictions of the neocolonial world-system.

      For more reflection on an alternative political party, see “Popular democratic socialist revolution” 1/15/2016 and “A socialist revolution in the USA” 2/1/2016 in the category Revolution as well as the concluding paragraph of “The infantile disorder of the Left” 12/19/2016.

      There are various factors that facilitate that, in the societies of the North, we find it difficult to appreciate that we should turn to a study of Lenin to discern what should be done.  

      (1) The fall of the Bolshevik revolution after the death of Lenin. Lenin’s final struggle was against the state bureaucracy, many members of which were oriented to attending to their interests as a class, rather than the interests of society as a whole.  When Lenin died, the Russian Revolution fell to a bureaucratic counterrevolution that put Stalin at the head, creating a situation in which a ruling class pretends to represent the interests of workers and peasants, when in reality it promotes its own class interests.  Without an adequate understanding of these dynamics, we tend to believe that Lenin’s concepts were indirectly responsible for the subsequent emergence of Stalinism.  The teaching of political science in U.S. universities in the post-World War II era reinforced this view, inasmuch as it was based on a frame of reference that contrasted liberal democracy with communist and fascist totalitarianism, brushing aside reflection on the bureaucratic counterrevolution against Lenin (Katznelson 1997:234-37).  But the writings of Trotsky and the Trotskyites provide a basis for making a distinction between Leninism and Stalinism (Grant 1997; Lenin 1995; Trotsky 1972, 2008).  

     (2)  The undemocratic result of the democratic revolutions.  Led by the emerging bourgeoisie, the democratic revolutions of the West triumphed because of the ample participation of artisans, workers and farmers, who had been recruited to the revolution by a discourse that promised liberty and justice for all.  Following the triumph of the democratic revolutions, the bourgeoisie was able to consolidate its control, although it maintained a rhetoric that pretended to be committed to a democratic system of government, limiting its definition of democracy in order to effectively accomplish this ideological deception.  On such foundation, there emerged a system directed by politicians who were skillful in adopting a discourse that pretended to promote the interests of the people, while they in reality were defending bourgeois interests (see “American counterrevolution, 1777-87” 11/4/13 and (“Class and the French Revolution” 11/27/2013).  

       At the same time, the principles of the bourgeois democratic revolution were appropriated by the Third World project, expanding and deepening their meaning (see various posts on the Third World project).  However, in the societies of the North, we have a limited understanding of the Third World project.  We often fail to make a distinction between the accommodationist Third World politicians, allied with neocolonial interests; and revolutionary Third World political leaders, who were committed to a project of national sovereignty and social transformation.  If we take the accommodationist project as representative of the Third World project of national liberation, we cannot see the unfolding revolutionary project in an alternative form, and it appears that the democratic revolutions of the Third World, like the democratic revolutions of the West, failed to attain their proclaimed goals.

       If we are aware of the undemocratic character of Western political institutions, if we combine this with a superficial understanding that does not distinguish consistently between accommodationist and revolutionary Third World political leaders, and if we do not distinguish between Leninism and Stalinism, we tend to believe that revolutions promise a just and democratic world but ultimately fail to deliver on this promise.   This belief undermines the potential viability of the Leninist concept of a vanguard political party that leads the masses toward emancipation.

     (3) The bureaucratization of society.  For the bourgeoisie, the expansion of bureaucracy is a mechanism for the recruitment of the petty bourgeoisie and the upper levels of the proletariat and the peasantry to the side of the bourgeoisie; and it is a mechanism for the prevention of a revolution from below, channeling the revolution in the direction of reform.  The petty bourgeoisie has an interest in reform and in the expansion of public and private bureaucracy, as it seeks to consolidate its position in the bourgeois order and the developing capitalist system.   Thus the expansion of bureaucracy is intertwined with reform, and this expansion serves both bourgeois and petty bourgeois interests.

     From the point of view of the development of productive capacity, the expansion of bureaucracy has both advantages and disadvantages.  On the one hand, it is inefficient, in that the bureaucracy becomes bloated with parasites, as it seeks to expand without limit, in accordance with the interest of the petty bourgeoisie, the members of which occupy the higher and lower positions of the bureaucracy.  On the other hand, bureaucracy aids efficiency, in that it is a system of labor organization and hierarchical control from above, and in this respect it serves the interests of the bourgeoisie.  In times of economic growth and expansion, the bourgeoisie will tolerate the inefficient aspects of bureaucracy, as a concession to the petty bourgeoisie.  But in times of crisis, the bourgeoisie will attack the parasitic bureaucracy, and it will act to reduce the size of public and private bureaucracies.   

      The popular sectors of the societies of the North experience bureaucracy as a centralized structure, controlled from above, that constrains creativity, innovativeness and personal initiative.  This experience leads to a rejection of authority in all its forms, including the legitimate distribution of authority, necessary for all social organizations if they are to attain their goals (see “Authoritarianism vs. legitimate power” 5/16/2016).  Such an unrealistic rebellious attitude undercuts the credibility of the Leninist notion of a centralized and disciplined political party, necessary for challenging the centralized rule of the bourgeoisie.

     (4)  The counterrevolutionary and bureaucratic university.  British political economy had emerged during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to formulate a systematic analysis of modern capitalism, thus applying the modern scientific principle of knowledge based on empirical observation to economic and social dynamics.  But British political economy was limited by its ahistorical character, and by the fact that it looked at reality from a bourgeois horizon.  Marx, by synthesizing British political economy with German philosophy, and by analyzing from a proletarian point of view, moved the science of political economy to a more advanced stage.  Marx’s work demonstrated that knowledge of social dynamics emerges from a comprehensive response to philosophical, historical, economic, and social questions; and that advances in knowledge are integrally tied to the movements of the exploited and the dominated.  From the vantage point of the evolving capitalist world-economy, the form of knowledge developed by Marx was a serious threat, for it implied a knowledge that would be integral to social reconstruction in accordance with the needs and rights of the exploited classes.  

     Western universities functioned to contain the Marxist threat, developing an approach to knowledge of social dynamics that prevented the implications of Marx’s analysis from emerging.  There were four elements to the containment of Marxism in the universities. First, fragmentation, separating philosophy and theology from analysis of social dynamics, and dividing the latter into separate disciplines of history, economics, political science, sociology, Eastern studies, and anthropology.  Secondly, “society” became the unit of analysis, assuming that the world is composed of autonomous societies with overlapping political and cultural boundaries.  Thirdly, scientific objectivity was understood as the bracketing of values, as the leaving aside of ethical, moral, philosophical, and religious questions.   Fourthly, the university became bureaucratized, with professors organized into separate departments, each with narrow questions of investigation and with limited scope (McKelvey 1991:3-21; Wallerstein 1974:4-7, 1996, 2004, 1999, 2011:219-73).  

     The fragmentation of knowledge, the restriction of investigation to narrow questions, the epistemological assumption of society as the unit of analysis, and the concept of objectivity as value neutrality, organized in a bureaucratic structure controlled from above and allied with political and economic elites, meant that the university had become a legitimating servant of dominant particular interests.  With the pursuit of knowledge eclipsed in the universities, the development of knowledge would emerge in the social movements formed by the dominated, a knowledge formulated in the fashion of Marx.  The Third World movements of national and social liberation would become not only political agents of social change but also the depositories of an accumulating wisdom with respect to social dynamics.  Charismatic leaders with exceptional gifts would study the received intellectual and moral tradition and would creatively apply it to a new historical and social context, thus developing it further.  

      The development of the university as a counterrevolutionary ideological structure and bureaucratized social system undermined the possibility for the popular appreciation of the role of Lenin and other revolutionary leaders in the formulation of a knowledge of social dynamics necessary for human emancipation.  To the extent that the peoples of the North were disconnected from the Third World movement of national and social liberation, it was difficult for them to see the profoundly counterrevolutionary character of the structures and epistemological assumptions of the Western university.

       Fidel has said that revolution in our time is above all a battle of ideas, and the central idea that we of the Left must grasp and teach to our people is that we have been denied our human right to knowledge and cultural formation, as a consequence of ideological distortions and the bureaucratization of education and society.  To break with this ideological enslavement, the fundamental first step is personal encounter with the social movements of the Third World, where the spirit of Marx and Lenin is alive.

     As the universities were turning to the structural marginalization of Marx, Lenin developed Marxist knowledge further, on the basis of his observation of popular struggles.  Observing the capacity of workers and peasants to form soviets (or popular councils), he discerned that the key to the struggle of the workers against capitalists and of peasants against landlords was the taking of political power by the workers and peasants through the formation of soviets and the substitution of soviet power for parliamentary power.  And observing the resistance of the oppressed nationalities of the Russian Empire, he discerned the importance of the self-determination of peoples.  When he discerned that the revolutions in the West were not going to triumph, which he considered necessary for the survival of the Russian Revolution, he anticipated that the center for the global socialist revolution would pass from the Western proletariat to the oppressed and colonized peoples of the world (Lenin 1943, 1968, 1972, 1995).

     The prediction of Lenin came to pass.  The Bolshevik revolution fell, and the Third World revolutions of national liberation would arrive to take central stage in the world arena.  The global powers were able to channel many of these revolutions to reform, using a variety of amoral means, including alliances with the opportunist accommodationist politicians.  But there are a number of cases in which a popular revolution has taken power, and the leadership of the revolution in power has defended the people and the nation, putting into practice revolutionary values and ideals.  The charismatic leaders of the Third World revolutions that sought both national sovereignty and social transformation are most clearly exemplified by Ho Chi Minh and Fidel. Ho was attracted to Lenin from the moment when, as a young man in a meeting of the French Socialist Party in Paris, he learned that Lenin defended the rights of the colonized peoples; and he subsequently studied the works of Lenin in the Soviet Union, in an institute for revolutionary leaders from Asia (“Ho encounters French socialism” 5/5/2014; “Ho the delegate of the colonized” 5/6/2014).  Fidel studied the works of Marx, Engels and Lenin at the library of the Cuban Communist Party, reading on his own, independent of his university studies and of the party (“Fidel becomes revolutionary at the university” 9/11/2014).  Both Ho and Fidel would adapt the insights of Lenin to their particular national conditions, forging a synthesis of Marxism-Leninism with the nationalist traditions in their particular nations (“Ho reformulates Lenin” 5/7/2014; “Ho synthesizes socialism and nationalism” 5/8/2014; “Ho’s practical theoretical synthesis” 5/9/2014; “Fidel adapts Marxism-Leninism to Cuba” 9/9/2014).  With exceptional mastery of the art of politics, they would lead their peoples in the taking of power, and they would forge new nations on a basis of revolutionary values and ideals. Their revolutionary projects continue to exist to this day, defending the dignity and the sovereignty of the nation and the rights of the people, and participating with other Third World nations in an international effort to construct a more just, democratic and sustainable world-system.  These Third World projects are the true heirs of Lenin, not Stalinist Russia, even though we must be aware that the Soviet Union after Lenin, until its fall in 1990, continued to have important dimensions that were a consequence of the legacy of Lenin (Grant 1997).  And the Third World project of national and social liberation is the true heir of Marx, further developing knowledge of history and social dynamics on the basis of insights developed by social movements that seek human emancipation (see posts on the Third World project of national and social liberation).

      We of the Left must appreciate the legacy that has been Left to us by our historic leaders.  The speeches and writings of Lenin form part of the body of sacred texts that are the intellectual and moral heritage of the Left.  They also pertain to the cultural heritage of humanity, for they are part of the evolution of knowledge of social dynamics, developed by the peoples in movement and by the charismatic leaders that they have lifted up.  We should study these sacred texts, always seeking to creatively apply their insights to our social and historical context.

     Lenin taught that it is necessary to form a vanguard political party that leads the people in the taking of political power.  He maintained that a vanguard political party, characterized by democratic centralization and discipline, is necessary for protecting the masses from the centralized and amoral power of the bourgeoisie (Lenin 1920; see “The infantile disorder of the Left” 12/19/2016).  

      We have alternative values, but we cannot implement them if we eschew the necessary dynamics of human social organization.  It is idealist to hope that persons of good will in the United States could contribute to the development of a more just, democratic and sustainable world-system without forming an alternative political party that is directed by visionary and committed leaders and that is characterized by the discipline of its members.  Without such a party, good work can be done in local communities; but such efforts will not be enough, as long as the national government remains in the hands of those who are committed to the defense of the short-term interests of the financiers and the large corporations.  We have the duty to develop a political structure that ultimately will be able to take power, confident that, if it is formed in accordance with universal human values, it will fulfill its historic duty to the people, the nation, humanity, and the earth.  

     We must form an alternative political party, look for leaders with exceptional gifts and with high moral commitment, lift them up, follow their lead, accept their direction, and defend them when they come under attack by the powers-that-be, all the while calling upon others to become a part of the process, which they can do if they have the discipline to study, to learn, to teach and to organize.  We cannot refuse to do this in the name of an idealist purity, accepting the material comforts that the neocolonial world-system unavoidably confers, and leaving the weak without defense before the barbarity of the global powers.

      Lenin taught that a revolution succeeds when the people have rejected the established order and when the rulers are unable to govern in the old way, and it is stimulated by a crisis that affects all, exploiters and exploited alike (1920:65).  These are precisely the conditions in which we live today.  But Lenin also taught that a revolution requires that a “majority of workers, (or at least a majority of the conscious, thinking, politically active workers) should fully understand the necessity for a revolution, and be ready to sacrifice their lives for it” (1920:66).  The mission of an alternative political party of the Left, a popular democratic socialist party, is to establish such consciousness and sacrificial dedication among significant numbers of the people, through a commitment to popular education and to acquiring mastery of the art of politics.

     That it can be done is the fundamental and most important teaching of Fidel.

References
 
Grant, Ted.  1997.  Rusia—De la revolución a la contrarrevolución: Un análisis marxista.  Prólogo de Alan Woods.  Traducción de Jordi Martorell.  Madrid: Fundación Federico Engels.

Katznelson, Ira.  1997. “The Subtle Politics of Developing Emergency: Political Science as Liberal Guardianship” in Noam Chomsky et al., The Cold War and the University.  New York: The New Press.
 
Lenin, V. I.  1920.  Left Wing” Communism: An Infantile Disorder.  London: The Communist Party of Great Britain.
 
__________.  1943.  State and Revolution.  New York: International Publishers.
 
__________.  1955.  To the Population; On Democracy and Dictatorship; What is Soviet Power?  Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House.
 
__________.  1968.  National Liberation, Socialism, and Imperialism: Selected Writings.  New York: International Publishers.
 
__________.  1972.  Speeches at Congresses of the Communist International.  Moscow: Progress Publishers.
 
__________.  1995.  Lenin’s Final Fight: Speeches and Writings, 1922-23.  New York: Pathfinder Press.
 
Trotsky, Leon.  1972.  The Revolution Betrayed: What is the Soviet Union and where is it going?  New York: Pathfinder Press. 
 
__________.  2008.  History of the Russian Revolution.  Translated by Max Eastman.  Chicago: Haymarket Books.
 
McKelvey, Charles.  1991.  Beyond Ethnocentrism:  A Reconstruction of Marx’s Concept of Science.  New York:  Greenwood Press. 
 
Wallerstein, Immanuel.  1974.  The Modern World System, Vol. I.  New York:  Academic Press. 
 
__________.  1999.  The End of the World as We Know It:  Social Science for the Twenty-First Century.  Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press.
 
__________.  2004.  The Uncertainties of Knowledge.  Philadelphia: Temple University Press. 
 
__________. 2011.  The Modern World System IV: Centralist Liberalism Triumphant, 1789-1914.  Berkeley: University of California Press.
 
Wallerstein, Immanuel, et al.  1996.  Open the Social Sciences: Report of the Gulbenkian Commission on the Restructuring of the Social Sciences.  Stanford: Stanford University Press.

     In “The Left’s Secret Identity,” Ethan Young writes:

      Writing in April 1920, two and one-half years after the taking of power by the Bolshevik Party, Lenin wrote of the “infantile disorder” of “‘Left Wing’ Communism.”  For Lenin, the disorder is much more than “an inability to recognize setbacks,” as defined by Young.  For Lenin, the disorder involves a radical extremism not based on participation in a real revolution, in the study of the history of revolutions, or in objective analysis of existing national and world conditions; and it is an idealism that projects a future society that could not possibly develop from existing conditions (Lenin 1920).

     In Lenin’s vision of the future communist society, popular councils (soviets) formed by workers and peasants would replace parliaments, and the organization of all workers in their places of work would replace organization of workers by trades.  But it is childish to believe, Lenin maintained, that a proletarian revolution can proceed in an advanced capitalist society without participation in the parliament, without coalitions with bourgeois political parties, and without communist presence in trade unions.  Awareness of the reactionary character of these institutions does not abolish them in practice.  In the context of a reality in which these institutions continue to exist, one must master the arts of politics and compromise in order to advance the revolution (Lenin 1920).

     In the German communist movement of Lenin’s time, there emerged an extreme radicalism that was opposed to the formation of political parties and to participation in the parliament.  Invoking the slogan “down with leaders,” the extreme radicalism implied an opposition to leadership itself.  Lenin acknowledged that there were opportunistic leaders and parties that had broken away from the masses.  But Lenin viewed the extreme radicalism of the “Left wing” as childish nonsense.  He maintained that to eschew the formation of a disciplined political party is to disarm the proletariat before the centralized power of the bourgeoisie.  It would result in the demoralization and corruption of the proletariat, causing it to lapse into individualism, lack of integrity, and alternating moods of exhilaration and dejection (Lenin 1920:25-29).

     Lenin maintained that the communist parties of the various nations ought to participate in parliamentary elections, in order to have a platform for the education of the people.  Through this strategy, communists could form a parliamentary faction of committed leaders that would develop a new form of parliamentarianism, oriented to the education of the people.  The communist faction would form alliances with other parties, in order to demonstrate to the masses that it understands the art of politics and that it is sensitive to the concrete needs that are important to the masses (1920: 42, 47, 74, 77).

     Lenin criticized the German Left Communists for their opposition to participation in bourgeois parliaments, noting that such opposition previously had been criticized by the eminent leaders Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht.  He observed that by persisting in this mistake, “the ‘Left’ in Germany (and some in Holland) proved themselves thereby to be not a class party, but a circle, not a party of the masses, but a group of intellectuals, and a handful of workers who imitate the worst characteristics of the intellectuals” (1920:41; italics in original).

     Lenin also criticized the British communists for their refusal to participate in parliament.  He proposed that the four small British communist parties unite into a single communist party, and that it negotiate an electoral compromise with the British Labour Party, which was a reformist “socialist” party that had the support of the majority of workers.  The Labour-Communist compromise should include concessions to the communist party, such as proportional parliamentary representation and the right of the communist parliamentarians to freely criticize the Labour-dominated government. Such an alliance of the parties of workers would prevent a Conservative-Labour alliance against the communists, and it would ensure the removal from political power of the representatives of the bourgeoisie.  A Labour-dominated government ultimately would demonstrate its lack of commitment to the workers, who then would flock to join the communists.  If the Labour Party were to reject the offer of compromise by the communists and join with the conservatives, its lack of commitment to the working class would be exposed, to the benefit of the communists.  Lenin praised the young British communists for their understanding that the parliamentary system must eventually be replaced by popular councils, and for their appropriate disdain for the “socialist” politicians.  But, he maintained, they demonstrate a total lack of understanding of the art of politics (Lenin 1920:59-69, 74-76).   

     Infantile left-wing communism also was opposed to participation in reactionary trade unions.  It maintained that the workers should leave the craft unions and that communist workers should create separate workers’ unions.  Lenin acknowledged that trade unions have reactionary traits, such as a tendency toward non-political action, and that the leaders were reactionary and opportunistic.  But he viewed the creation of separate workers’ unions to be an unpardonable error, for it left the least politically conscious workers to the influence of reactionary leaders.  He maintained that communists must be present in all social institutions, however reactionary, where workers are found, patiently and persistently educating them.  This is difficult, because the reactionary leaders resort to all methods of attacking communists; but it is necessary to remain in the trade unions and carry out educational work inside them.  Lenin here criticized not only the German extreme leftists but also the American Industrial Workers of the World (Lenin 1920:32-39).      

     Lenin also noted that infantile left-wing communism opposed the 1918 Peace Treaty that Russia signed with the imperialist powers. Infantile left-wing communism rejects all compromises with imperialism on principle, even compromises made imperative by conditions.  Lenin maintained that a party and party leaders fulfill their duty when they maintain a distinction between compromises made necessary by conditions and treasonable compromises, which are rooted in opportunism (1920:22-23, 50-51).  

     Lenin observed that communism must struggle not only against reformist social democracy to its Right but also against the infantile disorder of unreflective extremism in its own ranks.  It must develop the art of politics, capable of making necessary compromises with imperialism and forming alliances with reformist bourgeois parties.  It must display flexibility in tactics, developing them on the basis of objective analysis of national and international conditions as well as on reflection on the experience of other revolutionary movements (Lenin 1920:22-23, 36, 46, 66-71, 80).

     Lenin believed that reformist social democracy, with its opportunistic leaders who pretended to be socialist but were not committed to the defense of workers, was a greater threat to communism than infantile left-wing communism.  Nevertheless, he believed that the childish extreme radicalism of the Left had brought “the most serious harm to communism.”  He believed that the lack of an intelligent flexibility in tactics was preventing the communist vanguard from bringing the masses over to its side (Lenin 1920:66, 72-73, 80-81). 

     In their analyses, Marx and Lenin believed that the working class, by which they generally meant the industrial working class or the factory workers, is and will be at the vanguard of the socialist revolution.  They had good reason for this interpretation.  Based on his observations of the economic development of capitalism, Marx believed that technological development would increasingly forge the industrial working class as a revolutionary class (see “Marx on automated industry” 1/13/14).  Moreover, Lenin observed that, in the Paris Commune of 1871 and in the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917, the workers created popular councils as an alternative to the bourgeois bureaucratic state (Lenin 1943:32-48).  In addition, the particular conditions of Russian industry had created a working class in Russia that was characterized by advanced political consciousness (Trotsky 2008:7-10).  Furthermore, Lenin found that middle class “socialists” in Russia and Western Europe distorted Marx and turned against the proletarian revolution (Lenin 1943:7-9, 22-3, 26-27).  

      But we live today in a different world historical context.  Materially benefitting from colonial domination and imperialist penetration of vast regions of the Third World, the United States and the nations of Western Europe were able to make significant concession to the concrete demands of industrial working-class organizations, channeling them in a reformist direction.  During this time, anti-colonial and anti-imperialist movements in the Third World emerged to the forefront of the global revolution, with the middle class playing a decisive role, as a result of its objective interest in transforming the neocolonial situation.  At the same time, the technological and commercial development of the advanced capitalist economies led to the expansion of the middle class, which played a vital role in the popular revolution of 1968, a revolution that gave issues of race and gender a more central place in political and social consciousness, and that included a historically significant anti-imperialist dimension. Beginning in the 1970s, the neocolonial world-system entered a sustained and multi-dimensional structural crisis, demonstrating its unsustainability, a phenomenon that coincided with the relative commercial decline of the neocolonial hegemonic power.  Responding to the global crisis and to the relative decline of the United States, the global elite has broken its alliances with the popular classes of the core and with the national bourgeoisie of the Third World, and it is leading the world toward chaos or a new form of fascism, creating the conditions for the possible extinction of the human species.  In the context of this dark scenario, Third World movements of national and social liberation have renewed since 1994, and they are proclaiming that a more just, democratic and sustainable world-system is possible and necessary, and they are developing an alternative world in practice.

      As a result of these conditions, all of the world’s peoples and all of the popular sectors of the core nations have an objective interest in the establishment of governments that are controlled by the people and not by the corporate class; and there is today no reason to believe that the working class will lead the popular revolutionary movements in the core.  Recognizing the common interest of all the popular sectors of the core in the taking of political power, the Left needs to focus today on all of the popular sectors, and on the need to form a coalition of the popular sectors, understanding and responding concretely to the different ways in which each sector is dominated and excluded.  Thus, when we seek to apply the insights of Lenin to our social and historical conditions, when Lenin speaks of the workers, we should immediately think not merely of workers but of the people.  

      With recognition of this appropriate adaptation from “the working class” to “the people,” Lenin leaves insights for us concerning what we should do.  We should form an alternative to the bourgeois political parties, a popular democratic socialist party.  The principle mission of the party would be to take political power, with a long-term plan of taking power in twenty or twenty-five years.  During this period, the party would give emphasis to the education of the people, generating pamphlets for the education of the people, distributed by party members in their places of work and study and in their neighborhoods.  The party should not run a candidate for president, but candidates for the Congress in favorable congressional districts, such as those with high percentages of blacks and Latinos.  The party faction in the Congress would form alliances with other parties with respect to particular legislative proposals, showing to the people its appreciation of the issues that the people define as important, and demonstrating its consistency in taking a position in defense of the people.  Thus, the Left would be participating in the established bourgeois electoral system, but it would not be doing so as individuals in the Democratic Party or the Republican Party, but through an alternative political party (or an alliance of alternative political parties), constantly giving emphasis to the education of the people, seeking to lead them toward the taking of power.  With its emphasis on education, the party would promote its Congresspersons as speakers in all of the places where the people are found, accompanied by an organizer who would recruit people to the party, seeking to develop and strengthen party chapters in a variety of social places.  Through this process, the party would be forming its Congresspersons as leaders, with the capacity to educate, exhort, and convoke the people to political action in their own defense and in defense of humanity.  The party should run a candidate for president only when it has a possibility of winning and has sufficient popular support to also capture control of the Congress.  When that triumph occurs, the construction of a popular democratic socialist political-economic-cultural system would enter a new stage, for the party would control the executive and legislative branches, but not the judicial, nor would it have control of the military nor the mass media.

     But why should we listen to Lenin?  I will address this issue in my next post.

​References
 
Lenin, V. I.  1920.  “Left Wing” Communism: An Infantile Disorder.  London: The Communist Party of Great Britain.

__________.  1943.  State and Revolution.  New York: International Publishers.
 
Trotsky, Leon.  2008.  History of the Russian Revolution.  Translated by Max Eastman.  Chicago: Haymarket Books.

     Ethan Young, a Brooklyn-based writer active in New York's Left Labor Project, has posted an essay on Portside.org, “The Left’s Secret Identity.”  It was distributed on the Radical Philosophers Association list by Mitchel Cohen, who observes that it contains food for thought.

      The article is full of insight with respect to the limitations of the Left in the United States.       It maintains that the Left is oriented to speaking truth to power, rather than speaking truth to the powerless, and organizing them in order to isolate the Right..

     The article identifies the Left’s fragmentation.  It maintains that the Left “lacks any recognizable center . . . .  It appears in and around the Democratic Party in unconnected, isolated circumstances, fragments of the population.”  

     And the article notes that the Left today is disconnected from the struggles of the past.  “Not only are the fragments disconnected from one another, they also suffer from isolation from the previous generation, which in turn had lost touch with its own predecessor.”  I would elaborate: The Left today has not sufficiently reflected on the popular movements of the 1960s, analyzing their successes and failures, discerning lessons for today.  The Left of the 1960s, however, was not disconnected from its past in the same way; rather, it defined itself as a New Left, deliberately rejecting the thinking and strategies of the generation of the Left that came of age during the Great Depression, the Second World War, and the birth of the Cold War.  I view the disconnection of the Left today from its past as a dimension of the more general problem of the lack of historical consciousness of much of today’s Left.

     Young maintains that the Left has a self-righteous attitude, giving rise to a focus on language as an indicator of membership in the club, rather than giving priority to the development of effective organizing strategies.

​This subculture, making a fetish of its marginality, creates a “secret identity” that is suicidal, inasmuch as it “reproduces its own powerlessness.”

     For Young, what is going on here is not the sectarianism that has periodically plagued the Left.  Rather, it is “a cultural phenomenon that is part of the quest for safe spaces by newly radicalized individuals with no political home to call their own.”  Although it is understandable that people will search for safe spaces, it has dysfunctional consequences when it becomes a substitute for organizing and effective political action.

      Young has a good grasp of what is wrong, and his essay reveals the pain and frustration of the Left in the aftermath of the electoral victory for Trump, which may turn out to be the triumph of a new form of fascism.  But when Young concludes the article with some indications of the task that lies ahead, I do not think that he is going in the right direction.  

     Young maintains that the Left must form a united front against capitalism.  I, however, would like to express differently what the Left must do: we must form a popular coalition in opposition to the neocolonial world-system.

      In renaming the system against which we must struggle as a “neocolonial world-system,” I am taking the vantage point of the majority of the peoples in the world, who have experienced modern capitalism as an economic system imposed by European colonial domination, and who experience domination and superexploitation through global economic, political and cultural structures that evolved during the twentieth century to a neocolonial world-system.  The neocolonized peoples of the world perceive the systemic enemy today as both capitalism and colonialism, such that Third World revolutionary movements struggle against both class exploitation and imperialism and for both socialism and true national sovereignty; they seek a world in which the people control the governments, the governments protect the social and economic rights of the people, and the international system respects the sovereign equality of all nations.  

      Why should Third World revolutionary movements matter to the popular movements of the North?  In part, it is a question of appreciating that wisdom emerges from the oppressed and that social scientific knowledge is developed on a foundation of encounter with movements from below, as Marx implicitly understood.  A global and integral social scientific knowledge, based in encounter with the movements of the neocolonized, would enable us to understand (1) how colonial structures promoted the underdevelopment of some regions of the world and the development of others; and (2) how some nations of the North, for a brief period, were able to provide a relatively high standard of living to a good part of the people, through the exploitation of the natural and human resources of other lands, supplemented by government deficit spending.  And it would enable us to understand that the conditions that made possible concessions to the popular classes of the North and to the governments of the South are no longer present, thus pushing the global elite toward a rollback of these concessions; and that the neocolonial world-system is no longer sustainable, because it has reached the geographical and ecological limits of the earth, and because the neocolonized peoples of the planet are in movement in opposition to it.  

     We in the North must develop structures of popular education in order to de-legitimate the ideological distortions of the corporate elite, their political representatives, and the Right; and we must develop such popular education on a solid foundation of integral historical social science.  Through such structures of popular education, we must seek to explain to the people that the neocolonial world-system has reached and overextended its limits, and that is why the global elite has abandoned the popular classes in the nations of the North.  If we can effectively teach our people these fundamental historical facts, they would have the foundation for taking effective political action on their own behalf, led by charismatic leaders whom they have lifted up, precisely for their clear articulation of these fundamental facts, as well as for their commitment to a more just world order.  Our people already understand that the global elite has never cared about them nor the peoples of the Third World, so when they understand the global dynamics that have led to systemic global crisis, they certainly will be able to grasp that the global elite has responded to the crisis in amoral ways that have ignored the rights and needs of the peoples of both the global North and global South, have violated the sovereignty of nations, have damaged eco-systems of the planet, and threaten the survival of the human species, all in defense of its particular interests. With such popular consciousness, the people would understand the need to mobilize for the taking of political power, so that power can be placed in the hands of delegates of the people, who are from the people and are committed to the defense of the people and the earth.

      When I say “popular coalition,” I mean to imply two things.  First, the revolution is formed by all sectors of the people, and its leadership can come from any and all sectors.  In today’s conditions, there is no reason to give emphasis to the working class, as did Marx, Lenin and Trotsky; nor to blacks, Latinos, indigenous persons or women, as does today’s identity politics.  All of us have a common interest in the establishment of a government that develops domestic and international policies that are faithful to universal human values, regardless of the sector of the people to which we belong.  If the emerging revolution is to succeed, all of the people will be invited to the party, and leaders from all sectors will be lifted up by the people, in accordance with their gifts and commitment.  

     Secondly, when I use the phrase “popular coalition,” I intend to emphasize that the people of the United States are diverse; we are many peoples who also must form one people.  So we must unite in ways that do not deny our diversity, that is to say, we form a coalition, a popular coalition.

      The people have said of the Left that we are idealistic, and they are right.  We are naïve, for example, when we propose peace without recognizing the short-term benefits of wars of aggression against recalcitrant Third World nations, given U.S. economic dependence on a permanent war economy and on the exploitation of the natural and human resources of the planet.  Often, we are hoping for peace, but we expect to maintain the material advantages that war and conquest have brought us.  And the people discern our naiveté.  The people are more connected to their concrete needs, and they want to protect what the nation has won through conquest or through its positioning itself to benefit from wars of conquest undertaken by other nations.

     We must win the confidence of the people by demonstrating that we understand how the world-system works.  We must explain to our people that the system of war and exploitation is no longer sustainable, and that we are capable of forging of world of peace and material security through cooperation with the peoples of the world, who have been organizing themselves in a revitalized form for the past twenty years, organizing not against us, but for a more just, democratic and sustainable world-system.  We must demonstrate to our people that we understand the sources of the denial of their rights, and that we know how to address them; that the elite does not know how to respond to the sustained global crisis, because it has looked at it only from the vantage point of its own short-term interests; that we know how to respond, because we have looked at the world-system from the vantage point of universal human values and the needs of the people; and that we could lead the nation toward the development of a more just and sustainable world-system, in cooperation with other nations, if we were to have the support of the people.  We must convince our people that we have an understanding that is rooted in commitment to the people and that is capable of responding to the challenges that humanity confronts.  We must ask our people for their support in an alternative project to save humanity.  And even though we are convinced that we are right, we must be patient with the people, for they have been victimized by ideological distortions, as many of us have been.  We must not shout, but patiently explain.

     Young hopes that the Left will be able to build itself as a political force.  Its form will likely be determined by “the ways social movement activists move towards serious politics working through existing institutions.”  The difficulty here is that movement activists do not do enough intellectual work, through which they could obtain insights from revolutions in history, from historic and present-day revolutions in the Third World, and from the speeches and writings of revolutionary charismatic leaders.  The Left in the United States is not only ahistorical, un-theoretical, fragmented, self-righteous, orientated to finding safe spaces of solace, and given to self-expression rather than reflection on effective political strategies, as Young maintains; it also is Eurocentric, examining mostly developments in the North, and not giving sufficient attention to what can be learned through encounter with the renewed Third World movements of national and social liberation.

      For further reflections on the meaning of socialism and on the possibilities for socialist revolution in the United States, based on observation of and encounter with Third World movements, please see previous posts: “A just, democratic & sustainable world-system” 1/12/2016; “The twelve practices of socialism” 1/14/2016; “Popular democratic socialist revolution” 1/15/2016; and “A socialist revolution in the USA” 2/1/2016.

     I continue today with the third and final post of critical reflections on the Marxist-Humanist Initiative (see “The relation between theory and practice” 9/9/2016; “Third World socialism” 9/13/2016).  

      In its Statement of Principles, the Marxist-Humanist Initiative asserts:

     Note that white middle class men of the United States are not invited to participate in the revitalized reflection and action envisioned by the Marxist-Humanist Initiative.  I maintain that this is a dysfunctional formulation, not only because white middle class men form a significant part of the population, but also because a call to action formulated in such a manner may not be well received by those middle class white women who identify more with their professions than with their gender with respect to their social and political consciousness.  What are the reasons for this politically absurd exclusion of white middle class men?

      Lenin had good reason to be distrustful of the middle class.  In the Russian Revolution and the Western European socialist revolutions, there was a strong tendency for middle class radicals to proclaim themselves socialist revolutionaries but to abandon socialism for reformism in moments of challenge and crisis.  Lenin considered middle class socialists to be pseudo-socialists (Lenin 1943). The problem was that the middle class and the working class lived and worked in different objective conditions.  The middle class revolutionaries were prepared to settle for the reforms that would improve their political and economic situation, but they were not committed to make the sacrifices that would be necessary for the fundamental transformations that the emancipation of the working class required.  So Lenin and many Marxists that followed were oriented to the concept of a proletarian vanguard, a revolution led by the industrial working class and not the middle class.

       But as socialism evolved in practice in the Third World, the leaders of socialist revolutions were most often from the middle class.  As the anti-colonial revolutions of national and social liberation unfolded, a number of middle class leaders took the reformist road, but an equal or greater number followed the revolutionary path, and in many cases made heroic sacrifices in defense of it.  This phenomenon was a consequence of objective conditions in the Third World.  The colonial and neocolonial situation restrained the economic possibilities for the middle class, thus giving the middle class an objective interest in revolutionary transformation, in which the various popular sectors take power and implement fundamental structural transformations.  At the same time, the middle class, as the more educated popular sector, is more exposed to the colonial ideological distortions, so that it also is well represented in reformist movements and/or the counterrevolution. Thus, in the colonial/neocolonial situation, the middle class is actively present in the revolution, but also in reformism and in the counterrevolution.  The middle class is divided, often playing a leading role in both the revolution and the counterrevolution.

         In the case of the Cuban Revolution, for example, many of the great revolutionaries were of the white middle class: Máximo Gómez, José Martí, Julio Antonio Mella, Ruben Martínez Villena, Antonio Guiteras, Fidel Castro, and Che Guevara. They played an important role in a revolutionary process that that sought to develop an alternative to colonial and neocolonial domination and to implement a fundamental social transformation.  It was a revolution that creatively synthesized Marxism-Leninism with the Third World perspective of national liberation, developing in practice a revolution that was led by the various sectors that formed the people, including professionals, workers, peasants, women, blacks, whites, peasants, and mulattoes.  And it formulated its revolution as such, as revolution of, by and for the people (see various posts in the category Cuban history).

     In the case of the United States, there was a strong tendency for Marxist political parties to rigidly, uncreatively and superficially assume that a socialist revolution in the United States would be led by the working class, understood as the industrial working class and manual workers, and not middle class entrepreneurs, bureaucrats and professionals.  This approach limited the capacity of the Marxist parties to seize the opportunity provided by the popular revolution of 1968, which in fact was a revolution in which white students played a role far more central than the organized industrial working class.  

      With the collapse of the US popular revolution in the 1970s, there emerged in the United States a species of identity politics, in which reformist proposals were put forward by and on behalf of particular sectors, such as blacks, women, Latinos, and gays, with environmentalists also making specific reformist proposals.  Sensing that its classic formulation of a working class vanguard has been out of touch with the post-1960s trends, the Marxist parties have moved to adjustment of their classic formulation, appealing not only to workers but also to blacks, Latinos, women and gays.

      There is in this the failure to appreciate the pivotal role that the middle class will play in the revolutionary processes of our era.  Prior to 1970, when the world-system entered a profound systemic crisis, the middle and working classes of the core nations had a short-term interest in reform as against revolution, because the world-system could afford to concede reforms to the middle and working classes of the core, on the economic base of the superexploitation of Third World labor.  But the world-system is now in crisis.  In order to maintain the system, the global elite since 1980 has been rolling back all concessions to the core popular classes, and it has waged an attack on states in a form that threatens the future of humanity. The middle and working classes in the core no longer have a short-term interest in preserving the structures of the system.  Like the middle class in the colonial-neocolonial situation from 1917 to the present, the middle and working classes of the core today have an interest in revolutionary transformation, that is, the taking of power by the people so that fundamental transformations in the interest of the people will be implemented.  

     But can they discern this interest?  Can the middle and working classes see through the ideological distortions and see their interest in revolutionary transformation?  We do not yet know.  What we can see is a battle of ideas in the core, in which the consciousness and political comportment of the middle class will be of central importance.

     So we have to set aside the historically dated conception of a working class vanguard, even as adjusted by the also inadequate identity politics of the time.  We have to call our people to historical and political reflection, so that they can understand the social sources and the social solutions to the structural crisis of the world-system.  We have to call our people to alliance and solidarity with the anti-imperialist movements of social and national liberation in the Third World, for they represent the key to the socialist transformation of the world-system. And we have to call all of our people, including white middle class men.  
​
     Think carefully before you dismiss white middle class men, for some of them are the descendants of Irish, Italian and Polish immigrants, who brought with them to American shores the teachings of the Irish nationalists and of Marx.  Let us call them to reflection and action.  They just might remember from where they came and who they are, if we remind them.  The history of revolutions teaches us that not all will respond, but surely some will, and their participation will be decisive.
​

​Reference
 
Lenin, V.I.  1943.  State and Revolution.  New York: International Publishers.
 
 
Key words: Humanist-Marxist Initiative, Marx, vanguard, working class, middle class, revolution