A Note on the Recent Protests and the Tasks of Communists in the US
Maoist Communist Group, USA, October 2020
The protracted crisis of the International Communist Movement, discussed in Anvil’s statement of purpose, has assumed a particularly catastrophic form in the US. Today the US “Communist” “left” barely scrapes by on that eclectic, thin beggar’s soup,[1] ladled out in the universities, against which Marx, Engels, and Lenin struggled to the end. Drifting along in this beggar’s soup we occasionally encounter the name “Marx,” along with scattered fragments from the history of the proletariat in the form of a revolutionary phraseology. In this situation, we must follow Engels’ instruction in the wake of the defeat of 1848: “once we have been beaten, we have nothing else to do but to begin again from the beginning.”[2]
1. The “Left” in Crisis
A survey of the “left” landscape in the US today will provide a full picture, not of the proletarian class struggle, but of how bourgeois and petty-bourgeois class interests are transformed into political signboards.
The surviving organizations today with origins in the Marxist-Leninist movement of the 1960s and ‘70s no longer uphold the principles of anti-revisionist Marxism-Leninism, not even with the unsystematic and undeveloped intensity (Hegel) with which such principles were asserted at the time of their founding.[3] In their place, they have taken to empty sectarian shibboleths (PLP, LRNA, and RCP), modern revisionist appeals to China and DPRK (FRSO), and revivals of Second International opportunism (Liberation Road). Beyond the lineage of formerly anti-Revisionist groups, we find the heirs of various anti-Marxist traditions waving the red flag with great fanfare – all the more ostentatiously, the greater their distance from the conscious proletariat – including the original modern revisionists in our country (CPUSA) and Trotskyites of innumerable strains, from the “Left” Shachtmanite academic liberals of Tempest journal to the modern revisionist followers of the late Sam Marcy (WWP, PSL), etc. etc.
In our current context, Liebknecht’s slogan “studieren, propagandieren, organisieren” (study, propagandize, organize) retains all the significance it had for Lenin in 1894 (What the ‘Friends of the People’ Are). The question of “what path we must choose,” rather than “what practical steps we must take upon the known path” is the question confronting the US “Communist” “left” today.[4]
Paul Lafargue remarked in 1900: “A class only succeeds in shaking off the yoke which oppresses it when its conscious and revolutionary minority has emancipated itself from all the ideas of the dominant class.”[5]
Our organization holds that the principal task for Communists in the US today is the acquisition, defense, and application of the principles of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism. This task will demand the labors of a large number comrades in this country who will inevitably be brought into the revolutionary camp by the growing social want that cannot be satisfied by the rotting institutions of the US imperialist bourgeoisie. It is a task that again requires that we draw firm and definite lines of demarcation in the manner of the Manifesto of the Communist Party, the founding political text of our movement, where Marx and Engels defended the class interests of the proletariat against critical-utopian socialism, conservative or bourgeois socialism, reactionary socialism and its varieties (feudal, petty-bourgeois, and German or “True”), and so on.
Thus, we begin again from the beginning. This historically-determined beginning cannot be that of a splitting, as it was, for example, in 1919 when US adherents of the Third International left the party of the Second, or in the 1940s-60s, when successive organizations divided from the CPUSA following the merely ceremonial and inconclusive internal struggle of that Party against Browderism in 1945-46.
Nor can this beginning be imagined – an even more impossible notion – as a simple fusion with the spontaneous movement of the present: this is the apolitical proposition of so-called “base building” (Marxist Center) or “getting rooted” (AngryWorkers in the UK), a fashion that is finding some momentary life with particular appeal to the specific family of ideological prejudices typical of the Anglo-American world: empiricism, positivism, pragmatism, and the like. This spontaneist trend is reinforced by the peculiar, naïve arrogance of activists who display their ignorance like a badge: “the class experiences of the past do not concern us”; “what are the proper names of Marx, Lenin, and Mao compared to our inherent and intuitive skill?”; “let us set off on our original course” … and drive ourselves into the same old ditch!
In Talk On Questions Of Philosophy (1964), Mao said, “the oppressors oppress the oppressed, while the oppressed need to fight back and seek a way out before they start looking for philosophy.”[6] However, the philosophy that the exploited and oppressed readily discover in our time to give reason to their fight is not Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, but instead this or that school of bourgeois and petty-bourgeois thought, mobilized to advance this or that variety of liberal politics.
To the extent that contemporary rebellion rises above struggles for demands, it thinks – at best – according to various branches of bourgeois-democratic ideology. This is not a shortcoming on the part of the exploited and oppressed, but rather a testament to their will to fight using whatever ideological weapons are easily available – as well as to the longevity and adaptability of the tattered garments of bourgeois democracy.
What must be condemned is the attitude among certain “Communists” of seeking something more in rebellion – of mistaking ideology and line for program. They are confusing (1) the painstaking acquisition of the revolutionary ideas needed to construct the nucleus of the Party – the result of the historic two-line struggles that took place around the revolutionary events of 1848, 1871, 1905, 1917, 1949, 1966; with (2) what rebellions can teach us about popular political thought on the necessary concrete transformations of social life given the existing correlations of force.
In the current cycle of protests against racist police terror, which began in late May 2020, with the execution of George Floyd in Minneapolis, many “Communists” are seeking this something more in the protests. In this mass rebellion, as in any rebellion, the “left” rediscovers anew its servility to spontaneity, eclectically incorporating the slogans of the spontaneous movement into their “Marxism” and imagining that the Party can be built solely out of the militancy of the masses, graced with perfunctory Marxist language. Our own assessment, which we take up below, is quite different: the protests above all reaffirm the Bolshevik line on the national question, and provide indications of what demands a concrete program on the Black national question would need to raise.
2. The Imperialist Bourgeoisie in Crisis
In the absence of a revolutionary proletariat armed with a program on the national question – and beyond this, in the absence of a vanguard of scientific socialism capable of concretely applying Marxist principles to US society, determining political tasks on that basis, and consistently and widely disseminating appropriate slogans – each rebellion can only serve the rivalry internal to the bourgeoisie, exhausted by its contributions to renewing bourgeois rule.
In the US today, the intra-bourgeois rivalry principally sets the liberal guardians of the declining post-WWII order – which includes petty-bourgeois reformists in the Sanders/AOC trend, military officials, state bureaucrats, neoconservatives, and “moderate Republicans” – against the Trumpian reactionaries. This rivalry has taken on the aspect of a sharp struggle that exceeds the “normal” competition between factions of the bourgeoisie in a bourgeois democracy. We can characterize the current situation of bourgeois rule in the US as a situation of political crisis.
The worsening political crisis has been reflected in an intensification of the terminal ideological crisis of bourgeois liberal humanism and its universal claims. The leaders of the liberal bourgeoisie, with the petty-bourgeois reformists in tow, adorn their defense of decaying liberal institutions with a narrow and illiberal identitarian tinsel, while the Trumpians embrace barely-disguised white supremacist ideology and irrational conspiratorial beliefs, including the growing “QAnon” cult, which (among other things) holds that the coronavirus is exaggerated or an outright hoax and that the liberal bourgeoisie are directed by a cabal of Jewish pedophiles.
On the issue of the recent protests, the frontier is clearly drawn, for the sake of ideological rallying: the liberal bourgeois imperialists on the side of the protesters; and the Trumpian reactionary bourgeois imperialists, representing a much narrower section of the bourgeoisie, firmly on the side of the police and far-right paramilitaries.
In the liberal camp, we might look, e.g., to the words of retired general James Mattis, the former Trump administration Secretary of Defense turned anti-Trump icon:
The words ‘Equal Justice Under Law’ are carved in the pediment of the United States Supreme Court. This is precisely what protesters are rightly demanding. It is a wholesome and unifying demand – one that all of us should be able to get behind. We must not be distracted by a small number of lawbreakers. The protests are defined by tens of thousands of people of conscience who are insisting that we live up to our values – our values as people and our values as a nation.[7]
On the other side, Trump has repeatedly denounced Black Lives Matter, the name of the protest movement and the central slogan raised within it, as he has been precisely “distracted by a small number of lawbreakers” – although lawbreakers on the other side bother him much less. In one instance, Trump defended a gunman who shot and killed two protesters in August. In another instance, Trump claimed, correctly or incorrectly, that he personally ordered the extra-judicial killing of a protester suspected of killing a far-right paramilitary figure: “We sent in the U.S. Marshals. Took 15 minutes, it was over, 15 minutes it was over, we got him. They knew who he was. They didn’t want to arrest him, and 15 minutes, that ended.”[8]
This type of polarization began during Trump’s first year in office with dueling assessments of the “Unite the Right” rally of fascists, neo-Nazis, and other far-right gangsters in Charlottesville, Virginia. Trump remarked that “both sides” (that is, the far-right as well as counter-protesters) shared responsibility for rally violence, including one protester killed at the hands of white supremacists, and “both sides” included “very fine people.” In contrast, members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff representing the Army, Marines, Navy, Air Force, and National Guard quickly issued statements condemning racism and far-right extremism.
Of course, the anti-racist “equality” and “unity” of Mattis and the military bigwigs is nothing more than a lesson in deception and hypocrisy, as this “equality” and “unity” is supposed to be achieved along a well-trodden path of delays and procrastination that began 155 years ago (!) following the end of the US Civil War. As we know from Lenin, the objective position of the bourgeoisie as a class in capitalist society inevitably gives rise to its inconsistency in the implementation of its own democratic tasks. The bourgeoisie favors slow, gradual, cautious, and indecisive reforms –the “painfully slow decomposition of the putrid parts of the national organism” (Lenin) [9] – precisely in order to secure its mastery in the class struggle.
On the one hand, Mattis & Co. “support” the protests in order to rob the masses of their revolutionary initiative, activity, and energy. Their hope is to make the political problem of national oppression into a purely social problem, lest the working class and masses use the terrain of struggle to question bourgeois rule. On the other hand, they hypocritically mobilize this perpetual promise of (a partial, threatened, and purely formal) “equality” in order to maintain the “unity” of their camp against the Trumpians – and through this and beyond this, to the “unity” of their project of inter-imperialist “great power competition” (Mattis’ words) vis-à-vis China and Russia. As the well-known saying goes: language was given to people in order to hide their thoughts.
3. The First Cycle of Protests: 2012 – 2017
It is important to note that the protest movement against racist police terror began roughly at the end of Obama’s first term (2009-2012) and the beginning of his second (2013-2016), when the liberal fraction of the bourgeoisie still held the executive branch – long before the Trumpians entered onto the scene.
The first cycle of protests ran from the February 2012 vigilante shooting of Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida through a number of subsequent extrajudicial killings of Black people by police, up to 2017. Each murder set in motion a legal process, typically ending at the stage of investigation without leading to an indictment or in an acquittal after trial, as was the case with Martin’s killer George Zimmerman. Between 2013-17, hundreds of thousands of people marched in protests around the country against both racist extrajudicial killings and the de facto immunity of the perpetrators.
Following the Sanford events, two protest organizations were formed with support from large philanthropic foundations: the Black Youth Project 100 (BYP100) and the Dream Defenders – the latter named after a line from the 1951 poem Harlem by Langston Hughes, famously quoted by Martin Luther King Jr. in his speech at the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.
After Sanford, the August 2014 police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri gave another impulse to the movement, generating slogans such as “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” and making “Black Lives Matter” the new cry of a generation, based on a 2013 social media post by activist Alicia Garza following Zimmerman’s acquittal:
The sad part is, there’s a section of America who is cheering and celebrating right now. and that makes me sick to my stomach. We GOTTA get it together y’all. stop saying we are not surprised. that’s a damn shame in itself. I continue to be surprised at how little Black lives matter. And I will continue that. stop giving up on black life. Black people. I love you. I love us. Our lives matter.[10]
With the intervention of a popular section of Black youth, the Ferguson protests became riots, which was met by the state governor with a deployment of the National Guard. The mass upsruge bolstered a decades-old local group, the Organization for Black Struggle (OBS) – whose leadership had been at the center of the Black Radical Congress (BRC) of 1998-2010.[11] In October, hundreds of supporters participated in “freedom rides” (named after the 1961 campaign against Southern segregation), leading to the formation of the Black Lives Matter Global Network (BLMGN). Two organizations that were established during the Ferguson protests, Blackbird and the Blackout Collective have, together with Black Organizing for Leadership and Dignity (established in 2012), provided ideological and tactical direction to protest organizers following Ferguson.
In April 2014, officers in Baltimore, Maryland killed Freddie Gray in another high-profile case of police terror. The protests that followed again involved property destruction, as in Ferguson provoking the mobilization of the National Guard. In July of that year, Eric Garner, a horticulturalist in the New York City Parks Department, was choked to death by officers who suspected him of selling individual, untaxed cigarettes (“loosies”). The “progressive” New York City Mayor, Bill de Blasio, refused to fire the police officers involved, urging the creation of “a culture where the police department and the communities they protect respect each other.”[12] In December 2014, some protesters met in the Oval Office with Obama, who advised them that change is “incremental.”
At the end of 2014, organizers formed a coalition that would soon be known as the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL). This coalition – which included BLMGN, BYP100, OBS and many other groupings – held a national conference of 2000 people in Cleveland, Ohio in July 2015.
The cycle of protest continued with a high degree of intensity through the summer of 2016, with protests around the extrajudicial killings of Alton Sterling, Philando Castile, and Korryn Gaines, among others. Several professional athletes, notably football quarterback Colin Kaepernick of the San Francisco 49ers, began kneeling during the national anthem in support of the movement. But in the fall of that year, the protests began to dissipate, and the cycle had effectively reached its end by early 2017.
What was the program of the first cycle of protests? In the absence of anything resembling a leading body – a reflection of the domination of the protests in both cycles by the urban petty-bourgeoisie, with its characteristic “horizontalist” and “anti-leader” ideology – it is difficult to determinine the programmatic demands of the movement with any precision. Out of the protests have emerged a chaos of statements, demands, and programs, often coming from individual “figures” and small groups responsible to no one and leading no one. They include much that is arbitrary and empty-mouthed. Nevertheless, to paraphrase Lenin, they express the fundamental interests and tendencies of broad social classes at the current moment in the class struggle with irresistible force.
The M4BL pamphlet Vision for Black Lives: Policy Demands for Black Power, Freedom and Justice, published in August 2016, represented the most systematic formulation of the programmatic views of the movement in the first cycle. At its core, the document raises the broad demand for the consistent democratization of the US state:
“We envision a remaking of the current U.S. political system in order to create a real democracy where Black people and all marginalized people can effectively exercise full political power.”[13]
This demand for democracy is accompanied by demands for “community control” and economic “reconstruction” to “ensure Black communities have collective [?] ownership.” Reflecting the class perspective of its authors, the text is marked by an absence of demands pertaining specifically to the interests of Black workers, even immediate demands at economic level, aside from “job programs,” an unclear “right to organize,” and vague “protections” in “industries that are not appropriately regulated.”
At the level of ideology, more than any other trend – including diverse and contending Black nationalist currents – the identitarian trend of professorial Black feminism has come to dominate the protests. From the very start of the protests in 2012, the petty-bourgeois radicals that dominated them spoke of “systems of oppression,” “patriarchy,” “privilege,” “intersectionality,” “allyship,” and evinced a particular, non-Marxist understanding of “capitalism” and “socialism.” The “Communist” “left” dutifully took up this phraseology and added it to their eclectic beggar’s soup.
4. The Second Cycle of Protests: May 2020 – Present
The current cycle of protests began several months into the coronavirus pandemic, in late May 2020, triggered by the execution of George Floyd, an unarmed Black civilian, by a police officer who kneeled on his neck for nearly nine minutes.
The protests have included “antifa” anarchists, BLM groups, and a growing number of democratic “socialist” radicals, along with a much larger number of protesters from outside the milieu of petty-bourgeois radicalism. In the second cycle of protests, the number of marchers has expanded dramatically into the millions, in comparison to the mere hundreds of thousands of protesters during the first cycle of 2013-17. Moreover, a significant number of recent protests since May 2020 have taken place in overwhelmingly white-majority cities and towns, and a large presence of white protesters everywhere has been universally noted. This vast “return to the streets” was conditioned by several factors:
—In early April, the standard-bearer of the petty-bourgeois reformist trend, Bernie Sanders, was defeated in his run for the presidency by the right of the liberal bourgeois faction who dominate the Democratic Party. This trend was now cast out of the political leadership of the Democrats, although they continued to win victories in Congressional elections. They have been brought into the liberal bourgeois camp through the Biden campaign, and have in this way been effectively neutralized. They played a negligible role at the Democratic National Convention in August.
—The end of May (George Floyd was murdered on May 25) saw the end of the period of lockdown in many cities, and a brief period of respite before a subsequent surge in coronavirus infections. People ventured outside in large numbers for the first time since the start of the pandemic.
—By May, the unemployment rate had reached an estimated 20%, as people struggled to make ends meet. In this situation, the spontaneous anger of the masses towards the big bourgeoisie could no longer be incorporated through the usual channels.
—The US bourgeoisie had failed to handle the pandemic with even minimal competence – the inevitable consequence of the refusal of the Trumpians to take the spread of disease seriously in the context of a federal system of government that would in any case make a uniform response difficult to implement.
In this situation of a pandemic and massive social unrest, the political crisis of the US imperialist bourgeoisie deepened. Between the Trumpians and the liberal bourgeoisie, neither have been able to hegemonize the other fraction within the framework of the liberal state. In this situation of acute struggle, each bourgeois camp turned to its respective base within the protests.
On the far right, the Trumpian reactionary bourgeoisie has has cemented its ties to fascist and libertarian armed militias centered on the rural and suburban petty-bourgeoisie. These militias have supported the police – and at times have coordinated with them – intervening against the protesters and, at the level of fantasy, against the liberal-dominated state bureaucracy (the “deep state”) that has promoted mask-wearing and lockdowns.
In the current cycle of BLM protests, the far right has appeared in far larger numbers than they did in the first cycle of protests. Meanwhile, the Trumpian politicians have formed ever-closer links with the militias. When asked to condemn white supremacy during the first presidential debate, Trump told the Proud Boys street gang to “stand back and stand by.” Recently, the Proud Boys provided “security” at a political rally that featured Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz, a prominent surrogate of Trump. Trump has made support for the police, and implicit support for the militias, a central element in his re-election campaign. The Trumpian reactionaries have above all cemented their base by appeals to racist nationalism. When asked by a reporter why Black people are continuing to be killed at the hands of police in the US, Trump replied: “And so are white people, so are white people – what a terrible question to ask. So are white people, more white people, by the way: more white people.”[14]
The increased intervention of far-right militias and their growing ties to the police and Trumpian politicians has led to sections of protesters arming themselves for self-defense, something that was rarely seen during the first cycle. The resulting street brawls setting the protesters against the police and militias have killed dozens of people since June.
The relationship between the liberal bourgeoisie and the protesters is more complex than the relationship between the Trumpians and the counter-protesters, for a simple reason: the Democrats are limited in their embrace by their class dependence on the police. In order to grasp the relationship between the liberal bourgeoisie and the protesters, we can turn to the “program” of the second cycle of protests, and its “implementation.”
Perhaps the principal demand of the second cycle of protests, very much in the background during the first cycle, has been the demand to “defund” or “abolish” the police. In order to understand the significance of this demand, we must proceed from the role that the two bourgeois parties play in relation to the state in the US national context.
In the US, the lack of any parliamentary opposition to the Democrats “from the left” allows the Democrats effectively to engage in perpetual electoral blackmail: “vote for us, or else the (now-Trumpian) Republicans will win.” One consequence of decades of such blackmail is that the popular masses in the US have few political references outside the Democratic Party. This is one reason why the petty-bourgeois reformists (Sanders, AOC, et al.) have held up FDR’s New Deal as a model on which to base their own “Green New Deal.”
In their vast majority, the police killings have been carried out in cities governed by Democrats, by police departments heavily infiltrated by Trumpian reactionaries. The protesters constitute a large part of the urban mass base of the elected governments. The police, of course, are unresponsive to the electorate and openly defy the municipal authorities. For example, in New York City – like all large US cities, a bastion of anti-Trump sentiment – the NYPD “union” endorsed Trump’s reelection. When the Atlanta officer who executed Rayshard Brooks was charged in the crime and Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms offered mild criticisms of the police, the police took an effective strike action, in which scores of them took time off work, claiming sickness. Such acts of defiance are common enough that the phenomenon bears a name: the “blue flu.”
However, the Democratic-run municipal governments have been unwilling to take on the police, or have been willing to do so only via tepid reforms, selective (and generally unsuccessful) prosecutions, and symbolic gestures, including murals and speeches denouncing racism. Democratic mayors and city councils have countered such sporadic appeals to their mass base in revolt with a fundamental defense of the police and the familiar themes of “law and order,” “respect for private property,” “peaceful protest,” etc.
Despite their domination by Trumpian reaction, the police exercise a gravitational pull on the “blue” mayors, drawing even the most “progressive” among them back to the common ground of bourgeois class interests.
It is in the context of the lack of an electoral option with which to punish the Democrats, and spurred on by that utopianism so characteristic of the petty bourgeoisie, that the protesters have raised slogans and municipal campaigns to “defund” or “abolish” the police.
Of course, like all petty-bourgeois illusions, police “abolition” has repeatedly crashed against the hard rock of social reality. In early June, the Minneapolis City Council approved a resolution “to end policing as we know it,” calling for replacing the city police deparment with a department of “community safety and violence prevention,” i.e., a police department under a new name. The sequence of events that followed is all-too predictable: the “abolition” proposal was put onto the November ballot; dozens of officers then quit or took “medical leave”; city council members backtracked; the city’s charter commission delayed the vote “for a year.”[15]
In this way, the Democrats mine the protests to rally their base, proposing to “end policing as we know it” by changing the name of the police. And once the ruse is exposed for what it is, they cite far-right militia attacks on protesters to cement the electoral blackmail: you must vote for “the Resistance” (represented by the elderly partisan Joe Biden) in order to remove the threat of fascism…. Such is the bourgeois liberal “handling” of the Black national question.
5. Reaffirming the Bolshevik Line on the National Question
On the “Communist” “left,” the protests at their height brought with them all manner of speculation that this was “our 1905,” with some musing about “base areas” by “Maoist” individuals and small groups, and even discussions about what to do if the White House was to fall. This infantile expression of excitement, which died with the end of the rioting phase of the recent protests, is only an acute symptom of that chronic disease of the petty-bourgeois “left,” the illness of spontaneism, which, it should go without saying, is not limited to the US, but is a global pandemic.
The professorial scholastic version of spontaneism vis-à-vis the protests is more sober-minded, but no less fantastic for all that. On the one hand, we find it among academics who confuse the democratic content of the spontaneous protests with the development of the socialist movement, e.g., Leith Mullings: “I argue that the Movement for Black Lives […] has a powerful potential to develop into an anti-capitalist struggle,” concluding “it is building coalitions for the structural transformation of society.”[16]
On the other hand, we find it among bourgeois academics like Cedric Johnson, who waves away the democratic content of the mass movement with one hand (“Black Lives Matter sentiment is essentially a militant expression of racial liberalism. Such expressions are not a threat but rather a bulwark to the neoliberal project”[17]) while burning incense to the spontaneous movement with the other:
The only way I think we can reverse this process, and contest the power of capital, which is enshrined in both parties, is to build working class-centered popular struggles and fight to achieve universal, concrete forms of social justice that improve the lives of the greatest number of Americans.[18]
Of course the proletariat must never submit to the spontaneous movement (= the movement without socialism), either by imagining that the spontaneous democratic struggle for equality is in reality an “anti-capitalist struggle” à la Mullings, or, in the manner of Johnson, by hoping somehow to “contest the power of capital” out of spontaneous workers’ struggles – while at the same time dismissing the democratic struggles of oppressed nations and national minorities as “a bulwark of the neoliberal project.” In the face of such professorial nonsense, we must recall Stalin’s warning in 1905:
It must not be forgotten that meanwhile the bourgeois ideologists are not asleep; they, in their own way, disguise themselves as Socialists and are tireless in their efforts to subordinate the working class to bourgeois ideology. If, under these circumstances, the Social-Democrats, too, like the ‘Economists,’ go wool-gathering and drag at the tail of the spontaneous movement (and the working-class movement is spontaneous when Social-Democracy behaves that way), then it is self-evident that the spontaneous working-class movement will proceed along that beaten path and submit to bourgeois ideology until, of course, long wanderings and sufferings compel it to break with bourgeois ideology and strive for the social revolution.[19]
The process of Party construction that constitutes the current step for US Communists cannot consist of a simple fusing with the spontaneous movement, whether the struggle for equality or the worker struggle, but must proceed along a distinct path, which assimilates the proletarian line that has developed through the two-line struggle over the revolutionary experiences of the proletariat. In this light, the principal lesson of the recent protests against racist police terror in the US lies in their reaffirmation of the Bolshevik line on the national question, which aims to counter the division of the working class that results from national oppression by upholding (1) full equality between nations within the existing state; and (2) the right to self-determination, i.e., the freedom of political separation.
Let us briefly review some of the key episodes in the development of that line:
In 1903, at the Second Congress of the RSDLP, a debate was held with respect to the Party program: is it enough to stipulate equality of citizens, full stop, or was it also necessary to stiupulate “equality of languages”? Martov correctly argued that it was “fetishism” to act out of fear of what others might say – i.e., Bundist demagogues then, identitarian demagogues today – and that we should instead defend the principle at stake. The Bund won the debate on the program, but lost regarding their federalist conception of Party organization, as centralism carried the day, and subsequently withdrew from the Congress.
Despite the outcome of the Second Congress regarding centralism, a federated Party with separate centers eventually won out in practice between 1907-11 – and worse than a federation: an unbalanced federation in which national minorities acted without the Russians, while Russians required the support of national minorities. Instead of cultivating unity, this “federation of the worst type” (Lenin) dispersed the revolutionary efforts of the proletariat.
Let, then, all serious-minded Social-Democrats raise and discuss the ‘national question’ as well. Federation or unity? Federation for the ‘nationalities,’ with separate centers and without a separate center for the Russians, or complete unity? Nominal unity with a virtual split (or secession) of the Bund’s local organizations, or real unity from top to bottom? Anyone who thinks he can get away from these questions is sorely mistaken. Anyone who counts on a simple restoration of the ‘federation of the worst type’ of 1907–11, mystifies himself and others. It is already impossible to restore that federation. That misbegotten child will never rise from the dead. The Party has moved away from it for good. Where has it moved to? Towards an ‘Austrian’ federation? Or towards a complete renunciation of federation, to actual unity? We are for the latter. We are opposed to ‘adapting socialism to nationalism.’ Federation with separate centers – i.e., nominal unity with a virtual split of local organizations? Or unity from top to bottom?[20]
In January 1912, the Bolsheviks constituted themselves as a Party, deciding to exclude the liquidators, Otzovists, and other anti-Bolsheviks. In August, a handful of elements led by Trotsky formed a bloc that claimed to be outside and above all fractions. Trotsky hawked the absurdity of conciliation with opportunism, thus serving liquidationism and Otzovism both. The August Bloc adopted a resolution on the national question that took up the thesis of “cultural-national autonomy.”
The thesis of cultural-national autonomy, which originated in the Austrian Social-Democratic Party of Austria (SPÖ), adapts socialism to nationalism, making the task of the proletariat the struggle to realize the national principle. Against the Marxist thesis that nations will disappear in stages under socialism, the supporters of cultural-national autonomy hold that the national principle can only be realized through socialism – and that within the existing framework of the state, i.e., on a cultural (non-territorial) basis. Instead of organizing the proletariat for class struggle, cultural-national autonomy therefore takes up the mission of organizing the nation. Despite its exclusive focus on the national question – or rather, precisely because of it – the thesis of cultural-national autonomy fails to resolve the national question, instead exacerbating frictions between nations, which inevitably leads to the fragmentation of both the Party and the mass movement.
In November, 1912, Bolshevik deputies in the Fourth State Duma traded on their principles, putting forward the line of cultural-national autonomy in order to form an alliance with the Mensheviks. Lenin was furious, and he proceeded to commission Stalin to write a systematic work on the national question, which he completed by February, 1913, and published as The National Question and Social-Democracy. Stalin’s work, later serialized as Marxism and the National Question, was directly aimed at the thesis of cultural-national autonomy, and in particular its main Austro-Marxist exponent, Otto Bauer.
Stalin’s work begins by defining the nation. Against the unilateral Bauerian definition of a nation via its national character alone, which “divorces the nation from its soil and converts it into an invisible, self-contained force,” Stalin argues that we must grasp national character together with the material conditions that gave rise to it. He defines the nation as the sum-total of six characteristics:
“A nation is a historically constituted, stable community of people, formed on the basis of a common language, territory, economic life, and psychological make-up manifested in a common culture.”[21]
Against those, like Trotsky and Luxemburg, who confuse the struggle for socialism with the national struggle, Stalin reaffirms the Marxist thesis that the national struggle is a bourgeois struggle. This is reflected in the historical origins of the nation: the nation develops with the development of capitalism in its commercial stage, breaking the internal partitions between individual principalities and unifying the territory through the development of industry, railways, and other means of transport and communication. In the struggle of an oppressed nation, the oppressed-nation bourgeoisie above all seeks to conquer the unified home market. A nation is formed through the development of capitalism and is characterized by the development of the national market, together with commonality of territory, language, and culture. There can be no nation without the presence of capitalism.
Due to national oppression, the rising bourgeoisie is able to rally other classes to its side, including the proletariat, by preaching the “harmony of interests.” By thus sending the proletariat into the arms of its own bourgeoisie, national oppression divides the proletariat. It is for this reason that Communists must take up the national question, and in particular, the political right to separation, which says: no one has the right to interfere by force in the life of a nation, i.e., a nation has the right to arrange its affairs in any way it wishes. The proletariat upholds the equality of nations and the democratic principle of the right of nations to self-determination precisely in order to seek the unity of all nations in the class struggle.
In the Bolshevik line on the national question, Communists have a powerful weapon to advance in both Party work and mass work.
In mass work, we must develop a program on the Black national question that upholds full equality and the right to self-determination. Of course, the right to self-determination can only be exercised in the string of Southern counties with a substantial Black population, i.e. in the historic “Black Belt,” where the characteristic of a common territory exists, as there cannot exist a de-territorialized nation. In the rest of the US, the Communist program on the Black national question must guarantee complete democratization, that is, absolute equality of national rights in all its forms. The protests against police terror have above raised this demand for full equality.
In formulating a program on the Black national question, we must oppose class reductionists who liquidate the national question (like Johnson), for it is only by taking up and resolving the national question that we can advance in the struggle for socialism.[22] Johnson and his ilk (Adolph Reed, etc.) reprise the arguments of what Lenin, opposing Rosa Luxemburg, called “imperialist economism”: just as the old Economists told the workers that capitalism is victorious, therefore politics is a waste of time, so the imperialist economists substitute the question of economic independence for the question of political self-determination.
Beyond our professorial example, we can say in general: those who hold that recognition of the right of self-determination does not belong in a Communist program because it supports the bourgeois nationalism of oppressed nations; those who – confusing a question of political democracy with a question of economics – assert that the self-determination of nations is impossible under capitalism; those who fail to grasp that Communists must organize struggles that arise on the ground of national oppression for the revolutionary socialist struggle … these are the scholastics of our time, who “deduce” the inadmissibility of the national question from alleged Marxist “principles.” They would do well to relearn the alphabet of Marxism and to open their eyes to social reality. To carry out mass work in the current US context while ignoring the national question is to condemn oneself to perpetual failure.
We must equally oppose those who call democratic national struggles “socialist” (like Mullings), a conceptual confusion that inevitably leads to a confusion of tasks and a resulting liquidation of socialism into nationalism. Although Communists must take up the national question where it is posed by social reality, we must never take it upon ourselves to make organizing the nation our ultimate goal. Where Communists lead a national movement – as e.g., the CPC did against Japan – it is never in order to realize the national principle, and always in order to advance the class struggle in the line of social revolution. The mass organizations we form and lead, first and foremost trade unions, must educate the workers in the conviction that they are fighters for a single class, united by fraternal sentiments.
In Party work, we must work to build a united Party with a Leninist organizational line. This means that we must mercilessly oppose not only separate nations/nationality-based parties, but also organizational federalism and leadership reservations (“only BIPOC leadership”[23]), both of which, by aggravating national frictions, inevitably lead to disintegration, and ultimately complete rupture. National autonomy and organizational federalism go hand in hand, and they have separatism as their inevitable destination. Only a united, multi-national Party based on democratic centralism can serve as a school of internationalism, against all attempts by identitarian demagogues to foster national narrow-mindedness and stagnation.
The very act of asserting that the protests have reaffirmed the importance of the Bolshevik line on the national question draws a line of demarcation with the majority of ideological spokesmen of the protesters. At the heart of all bourgeois and petty-bourgeois definitions of a nation is the view that the nation is eternal, as if it were a fact of nature. This is why the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois ideologists of the protests, “activists” and academics alike, explain the concept of nation through the notion of race – accompanied, of course, with the usual caveat that race is “socially constructed.” While nations developed out of clans and tribes with the dawn of capitalism on the basis of the development of social productive forces, and will disappear with the end of capitalism, physical racial characteristics evolve slowly and disappear slowly, on the basis of “natural” processes. In this way, conceiving the nation through the notion of race is itself a form of nationalism.
Today, productive forces are socialized globally, via the expansion of the productive scale and technical division of labor, the development of the social division of labor, and the rapid expansion of the international market. In such a world, the nation as such has become a reactionary phenomenon, delaying the unification of humanity that can only be achieved in a future Communist society.
[1] The “beggar’s soup” as a metaphor for eclecticism was first used by Goethe in a letter to Schiller from 1797 and incorporated into his play Faust. In the German context, it referred to a soup made by a poor person (or a religious person who took a vow of poverty) who would make a one-pot meal out of any vegetable or food offerings they received when begging for alms. It was a favorite expression of Marx and Engels, deployed in many of their writings, e.g., German Ideology (1845), Engels’ July 25, 1876 letter to Marx, and Engels’ Ludwig Feuerbach (1888). The term is taken up repeatedly by Lenin in Materialism and Empirio-criticism (1909).
[2] Engels, Revolution and Counter-revolution in Germany, 1852 <https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/germany/ch01.htm>
[3] In the 1812 preface to the first edition of his Science of Logic, Hegel writes: “There is a period in the culture of an epoch as in the culture of the individual, when the primary concern is the acquisition and assertion of the principle in its undeveloped intensity. But the higher demand is that it should become systematised knowledge.” <https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/hl/hlprefac.htm>
[4] Today in the US, we find ourselves in the position of the Russian Social-Democrats in the 1880s and 90s. Cf. Lenin, Where to Begin?, 1901: “It is not a question of what path we must choose (as was the case in the late eighties and early nineties), but of what practical steps we must take upon the known path and how they shall be taken.” <https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1901/may/04.htm>
[5] Paul Lafargue, “The Materialism of Marx and the Idealism of Kant,” in Le Socialiste, February 25, 1900.
[6] Mao, Talk on Questions of Philosophy, 1964, < https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-9/mswv9_27.htm>
[7] < https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/06/james-mattis-denounces-trump-protests-militarization/612640/>
[8] < https://theintercept.com/2020/10/15/trump-boasts-federal-task-force-killing-antifascist-wanted-murder-portland/>
[9] Lenin, Two Tactics of Social-Democracy, 1905, <https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1905/tactics/ch06.htm >.
[10] <https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/03/14/where-is-black-lives-matter-headed>
[11] The BRC was a national effort to form a “front of the Left” in the aftermath of – and as a counterpoint to – the 1995 Million Man March led by Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam. Emerging from discussions among leaders of CCDS, LRNA, and Liberation Road, and later involving the CPUSA and the New Afrikan People’s Organization of Chokwe Lumumba (later, 2013-14 mayor of Jackson, Mississippi), the BRC counted up to 3,000 people at its 1998 founding. However, the front declined in the early 2000s amid an internal struggle initiated by pro-Mugabe forces after the BRC leadership endorsed an open letter condemning state repression in Zimbabwe; it eventually dissolved in 2010. Within the 2012-present movement against police terror, the muted but definite influence of individuals from the BRC orbit, as well as that of younger leaders guided by them, is one factor that explains the hegemony of the discourse of Black feminism (as opposed to, say, Black nationalism). At the same time, this fact is also an index of the irreversible dilution of the formal Marxism once held by these groupings, as discussed in the third paragraph of this note.
[12] <https://www1.nyc.gov/office-of-the-mayor/news/379-14/transcript-mayor-de-blasio-hosts-roundtable-police-community-relations#/0>
[13] < https://m4bl.org/policy-platforms/political-power/>
[14] <https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-black-americans-killed-police-so-are-white-people/>
[15] Of course, the demand for police “abolition” has also been added to the eclectic beggar’s soup by the vast majority of the US “Communist” “left.”
[16] Leith Mullings, “Neoliberal Racism and the Movement for Black Lives,” in Black and Indigenous Resistance in the Americas: From Multiculturalism to Racist Backlash, ed., Juliet Hooker, 2020, <https://www.yumpu.com/en/document/read/63466298/mullings-neoliberal-racism-and-the-movement-for-black-lives-in-the-united-states >.
[17] Cedric Johnson, “The Triumph of Black Lives Matter and Neoliberal Redemption,” June 2020, <https://nonsite.org/the-triumph-of-black-lives-matter-and-neoliberal-redemption/>.
[18] Cedric Johnson, “Coming to Terms with Actually Existing Black Life,” April 2019, <https://newpol.org/coming-to-terms-with-actually-existing-black-life/>.
[19] Stalin, Briefly About Disagreements in the Party, 1905, <https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1905/05/x01.htm>.
[20] Lenin, The “Vexed Questions” of Our Party: The ‘Liquidationist’ and ‘National’ Questions, 1912, <https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1912/nov/00.htm >.
[21] Stalin, Marxism and the National Question, 1913, <https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1913/03a.htm#s1>.
[22] We must emphasize that our task as Communists is to take up and resolve the national question “in the struggle for socialism”: it should go without saying that the task of the conscious proletariat in the US is socialist revolution, and not “democratizing the state,” as advocates of a so-called “Third Reconstruction” contend. Today the national question is fully part of the proletarian revolution.
[23] An identitarian term of art, meaning “Black, Indigenous, and People of Color.”
