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No. 1 - September 2024 - Year I Last update November 17, 2024 |
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Despite having ‘Number 1, Year 1’ on the cover, the intention of this first number of the International Communist Party’s periodical review COMMUNISM, dated September 2024, is to be the continuation of the party review COMMUNIST LEFT, our party organ in the English language, of which there have been 52 numbers printed since 1989.
The scope of this new publication is to present to non-Italian readers complete
versions of the reports which are presented at our general meetings, studies
which are always rigorously faithful to the school of authentic Marxism, and
whose aim is to defend the integrity of the communist doctrine, to interpret new
developments in the class struggle and to ensure the correctness of the
policy which the party subscribes to and which it urges the working class to
adopt in its daily struggle against a hostile world; a world which is in its
death throes, but which is no less aggressive, spiteful and contemptible for all
that.
For more than 300 days bombing raids have lit up the sky above Gaza, blowing up houses and burying, killing and maiming innumerable men, women, and children, amongst which probably some of the hostages captured by Hamas, whose liberation is allegedly one of the objectives of the ‘Swords of Iron’ operation, although evidently a secondary one.
The bourgeois State of Israel claims that it launched its attack to defend itself; to “annihilate” Hamas. This is a lie, as well as an impossible goal to achieve.
What is for sure is that there is certainly something the Jewish proletariat needs to defend itself from: its own State. And likewise the Palestinian proletariat’s main enemy is, first and foremost, Hamas. This is because the contingent and historical interests of the Israeli bourgeoisie are not different from those of the Palestinian bourgeois factions.
The control of the disinherited masses in the Gaza Strip is only rendered possible by the permanent state of war, which impels the population to line up on one or the other of the fronts. The Israeli government is carrying out a massacre of civilians in order to push them to side with the Hamas butchers, same as the terrorist action of Hamas on October 7 served to push the less intimidated, but nevertheless repressed, population of Israel to support the war on the people of Gaza, along with the aggressions being perpetrated against Palestinians by fascistic gangs in the occupied West Bank.
The actions of the Israeli air-force, with its ongoing and indiscriminate bombardments, suits all of the bourgeoisies in the area. They are a warning to all proletarians, be they Egyptian, Syrian, Israeli Palestinians or Lebanese. The indiscriminate massacres express the raging anger of the bourgeoisie against the proletarian menace!
In this inferno, in which hospitals have become morgues, the struggle is not between the workers in the ghettos of Gaza and the West Bank, and those in the not much larger ghetto of Israel, nor between people of different religions; rather the conflict that is taking place is between gigantic international corporations of capitalists. The war in Gaza marks the commencement of preparations for a generalised war, just as, 87 years ago, what began with an ‘experimental’ bombing of Guernica ended with H bombs being dropped on Japan.
Only the Israeli bourgeoisie is implementing a plan to try and avoid the mortal crisis of global capitalism, currently affecting the USA, Europe, Russia and China, all of them needing a war of universal destruction to slake their thirst for proletarian blood.
In fact the area in which the war is being conducted is already widening and tending to draw in various States in the area, whereas the imperialists blocs, still hesitant, are continuing to define themselves.
War is inescapable for the capitalist mode of production and for all bourgeois States. Capital is now a monstrous entity which encircles the world and everywhere brings death and destruction. The bourgeoisie needs a planet in perpetual conflict.
All wars are fought against the working class, the bringer of a new and better social system. And only the working class can put a stop to war, united under the banner of the communist revolution. Led by its revolutionary party, it will put an end to this seemingly endless tragedy.
The communist party line will dispel any illusions that a ‘good’ capitalism is possible; that there can be a peaceful harmony between nations, all of which are dedicated to the perpetuation of surplus value, by exploiting ‘their’ proletarians.
In the areas most affected by war, and indeed everywhere else, communism is
going to overthrow capitalism and establish a world that really is possible,
that is, a society which is no longer divided into economic classes.
Part 1.
Primitive Communism and Manifest Destiny
in the Early United States
1. - Overview
The first of the British colonies, Virginia was founded in the period of mercantilism shortly before the British bourgeois established its ascendency. As the colonies spread, in the ensuing years a backwards semi-feudal slavocracy would consolidate itself in the South, while a protestant theocracy based on communal property relations would emerge in the North only to give way to a developing industrial capitalism after the American War of Independence.
Within the early New England colonies before the War of Independence a semi-barbaric form of communistic agriculture had developed under the British mercantile system which intentionally under developed its colonies. This would slowly give way to the advancement of private property under the emerging commercial power within the colonies.
As no feudal aristocracy ever existed in North America, settlement brought the development of a multifarious independent yeoman peasant strata on the frontier, on the peripheries of the slave plantations in the South, and rural areas outside the urban commercial centers in the North. This element existed halfway between workers and halfway between the bourgeois, while itself never congealing into a cohesive and distinct class expression, it would struggle to maintain independence from domination at the hands of financial and commercial capital, up until the rise and consolidation of industrial capital which would eventually eliminate any vestige of the independent small farmer from the historical stage.
At the conclusion of the American War of Independence an explosion of territorial aggression against the Indigenous of America and the opening of one of the first “Indian Wars” fought by the new bourgeois republic would occur.
The push West would be made possibly by enclosure of the New England commons and the flight of the now landless peasantry who sought to re-establish their old independence, seeing their hopes for the future with hopes and dreams with ascendant petit-bourgeois, leaving a path of blood soaked soil in their wake under the messianic white nationalist project of Manifest Destiny.
It is with the interests of this broad variegated petit-bourgeois strata of farmer peasants that the genocidal racist project of Manifest Destiny and the ideal of Jeffersonian Democracy would come to most closely correspond. A petit-bourgeois strata, often finding its basis in craftsmen and landless white workers fleeing the pressures of capital which constantly worked to poperize and enslave it to the shackles of wage labor in urban areas. Enclosure of the communal lands of the early New England townships would push masses of poor landless whites to find land by settling the West or face starvation or toil in the urban manufactures under the new slavery of wage labor.
Subjected as they were by these titanic, elemental economic forces into a position where their economic survival as a class strata was synonymous with advancing the project of colonial expansionism and the complete extirpation of the indigenous peoples, it was beyond any moral conviction of individuals who may have objected, to hold back the extension of capital across the globe. As such it could only justify itself to the Christian mind with the most dehumanizing form of racism or on the other hand noble virtues of the “white man’s burden” to paternalistically civilize the “savages” through the bible or the bullet.
The social project of Manifest Destiny would eventually bring these worker-farmer elements into alliance with the interests of industrial capital through the Republican Party, the Civil War and the passage of the Homestead Acts.
The invading armed hordes of Anglo-Saxon farmers would sweep across the American West. Attempting to maintain the same lifeway of the independent peasant that was established in the wake of the barbarian revolutions against the Roman slavocracy over a thousand years before; however, the conquering Germanic armies in the case of the American West were no liberators. Instead, they left behind their conquering horde a blood drenched trail of mass murder and plunder of countless indigenous tribal nations on the path of a developing commercial and mercantile capitalism into the new age of industrial capitalism. The taming of the American frontier by Germanic independent farmers and the final outcome of the emancipation of the slaves, both historically progressive, represents the final chapter in the story of the German yeoman peasant.
The ascendant Northern bourgeois’s would continue to grow its power until it was strong enough to cast aside the fetter of the old Southern slavocracy which has maintained control of the federal government since the start of the Republic
At the conclusion of the Civil War in 1865, and during the ensuing period of Reconstruction, a labor movement of newly proletarianized ex-slaves would develop in the American South. This movement of unskilled Black workers would arise just as Northern craft unions began re-emerging, uniting and consolidating their forces through the National Labor Union.
Meanwhile groups of German immigrants and followers of Marx within the International Workingmen’s Association proselytized within the unions on the need to converge the nascent proletarian elements into class unions, free of racial exclusion, and independent of the political parties of other class strata.
By the end of the 1870’s the impact of the economic crisis of 1873 would lead to escalating fears of Black labor competition within the established craft unions representing skilled labor and within the strata of independent farmers in the South. These events would decimate the nanscent forces of organized labor leading to most of the established craft unions in the North adopting racially exclusionary policies, just as a campaign of terror directed against Black workers continued to spread across the South. The result would be that Southern Black would be forced back into a state of peonage and in the North, excluded from the unions, they would be pushed into impoverished urban ghettos to fill the ranks of the lumpen proletariat and the reserve army of labor.
It is in this period that the Democratic Party, under the slogan of “white supremacy!” began to forge a new coalition of northern commercial interests & industrial capital on one hand, and on the other, elements of skilled craftsmen and farmers who feared Black labor competition. It was a coalition which Capital needed to wield in order to dismantle and disentrench the various long established federal legislative policies and bureaucracies that comprised the project of Reconstruction. To do this they needed to destroy the old labor-capital political coalition under the Radical Republicans. This coalition had emerged to advance the bourgeois revolution at a time when Capital was faced with the real threat of a Planter class restoration under President Andrew Johnson, following the assassination of Lincoln. Actually for Capital by the end of Reconstruction it had a new enemy, the domestic and the international proletariat and it could leave the unfinished business of the bourgeois revolution to be sorted out by natural occurrence of events.
The victory of the movement of the “Redeemers” to re-establish white supremacist regimes across the South, resulted in the reduction of the vast majority of Southern Black to the status of debt peonage by the end of the century. With the rise of Jim Crow and the growth of the KKK as a “respectable” mass movement in the early part of the next century, the true history of Black workers struggle in the period of Reconstruction would be subjected to an onslaught of historical obscurantism. Unsurprisingly, still to this day in most children’s school textbooks the whole period is often written off as merely a tale of misguided federal government overreach.
Despite the erasure, it is in this period that the Black proletarian masses would explode onto the historical stage in a flurry of struggle before Jim Crow shackled them back to the land. Our Party has always emphasized the importance of the black proletariat within the US workers movement because of the unique conditions of their proletarianization having led to their status as the most highly exploited. Given this reality it is no wonder that Black workers continue to be disproportionately targeted for mass incarceration, subjected to prison labor and extrajudicially killed at the hands of the ruthless police forces of the bourgeois State.
Additionally, the unfolding of occurrences and the efforts of the followers of Marx in the period of Reconstruction demonstrate the total invariance of our party’s directive of militating within the established unions, the absolute necessity of class unions open to all workers, and our complete rejection of all social chauvinism which is the all-time obstacle of the fighting proletariat in all countries, the labor aristocracy.
The period of Reconstruction will be explored more in Part 2 of this study. To understand this history in its full dialectical development we must review the classic Marxist positions regarding the class dynamics and land relations in the early United States.
2. - The Primitive Communism of the Indigenous Peoples of America
For Marxists, the term primitive communism refers to a communistic production method and land relationship that exists in human societies across the world before the development of social classes, private property and State formations. In one sense, the communism of the future is a great return of humanity to the communism of the past. Within these societies land is held in common, there existed no exploitation, no surplus value, no domination or class-relations. While there was a division of labor, no hierarchy between men and women existed.
The earliest form of family developed around the communistic household, the “gens” or clan, a communal property-owning grouping which was a form of social organization. While there was much diversity in their levels of development and social forms, many Indigenous peoples in North America such as the Iroquos were organized on this basis along with the ancient Germanic barbarians, the early ancient Greeks and others around the world. Within these gens there existed cooperative decision making, and cooperation between all based on production for use by the community.
Commenting on the communistic social practices of the Indigenous peoples of North America, Engels stated in Origin of the family, private property and the State: «All the members of an Iroquois gens were personally free, and they were bound to defend each other’s freedom; they were equal in privileges and in personal rights, the sachem and chiefs claiming no superiority; and they were a brotherhood bound together by the ties of kin. Liberty, equality, and fraternity, though never formulated, were cardinal principles of the gens. These facts are material, because the gens was the unit of a social and governmental system, the foundation upon which Indian society was organized... It serves to explain that sense of independence and personal dignity universally an attribute of Indian character. The Indians of the whole of North America at the time of its discovery were organized in gentes under mother-right. The gentes had disappeared only in some tribes, as among the Dakotas; in others, as among the Ojibwas and the Omahas, they were organized according to father-right».
In the aforementioned text, Engels also drew direct parallels between the German Mark and the social practices of the Iroquois in America, which were both considered to be organized on essentially the same level of primitive communism given their communal management of the land. Commenting on their mutual method unanimity in decision making he stated «Among the Iroquois the final decision had to be unanimous, as was also the case in regard to many decisions of the German mark communities. The tribal council was responsible especially for the handling of relations with other tribes».
To underscore the fact that for Marxists, primitive communism in many ways no means an inferior to the wretched society of capitalism but instead represents the alpha of human social evolution, in The Communist Revolution and the Emancipation of Women, we state: «Primitive Communism – This form is claimed in all Marxist literature and in fundamental pages of Marx and Engels, who did not exclude the necessity that between that ancient communism and the communism for which the modern proletariat struggles, forms have followed that arose with private property, class societies, and the tradition of their overlapping “cultures”. A frank glorification of that first form is in the pages of Capital and The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State».
Despite distortions by modern falsifiers of Marxism in bourgeois academia, Marxism has never declared a totalizing unilinear progression from one stage to the next, the world as divided into perfect and clean historical stages of development. Even in Russia, in the early twentieth century was a society composed of peoples living on the land mass in various different land and property relationships. As we point out in Property and Capital, «As Lenin described, the Russian economic landscape encompassed a blend of various economic forms: pre-mercantile (primitive communism, Asiatic lordship and theocracy, land baronetcy); mercantile (industrial, commercial, and banking capitalism, free private land ownership); and post-mercantile (early implementations of “war” communism, i.e., “social warfare”, such as free bread, housing, transportation in large cities, and similar provisions)».
In substance, primitive communism is a term denoting the land and production
relations within ancient and Indigenous societies before the rise of property
relations. As we state in Property and Capital these peoples exist within a
material abundance.
«Property is a relationship between man, the human person, and things. Jurists
call it the faculty to dispose of the thing in the most extensive and absolute
way, and classically to use and abuse it. It is known that we Marxists do not
like these eternal definitions, and we could better give a dialectical and
scientific definition of the right of property by saying that it is the power of
another person or group to “prevent” a human person from using a thing.
«The historical variability of the relationship can be seen, for example, in the
fact that for centuries and millennia the same human person was susceptible to
being himself the object of property (slavery). On the other hand, we have
proved a thousand times, by referring to the primitive communist society in
which property did not exist, since everything was acquired and used in common
by the first human groupings, that the institution of property cannot claim the
apologetic prerogative of being natural and eternal.
«In the relative primordial economy, or you could say, pre-economy, the
relationship between man and thing was as simple as possible. Because of the
limited number of human beings and the limited range of needs, which are barely
greater than the animal need for food, the things that satisfy these needs,
which the law later called goods, are made available by nature without limit and
the only productive act is to take them when they are needed. They are limited
to the fruits of wild vegetation and later to hunting and fishing and so on.
There were useful objects in abundance, there were not yet “products” that came
out of an embryonic physical, technical, manufacturing intervention of man on
the material offered by the natural environment...
«Just as the ownership of things or commodities for consumption and the
ownership of slaves does not go back to primitive humanity, the same applies to
the ownership of the soil, that is to say, the land and all that man adds to it
and builds upon it, immovable property, as it is referred to in law. Such
property, in its privately owned form, comes later than movable property and
slaves, because at the beginning everything that is not commonly owned is at
least attributed to the head of the familial grouping or tribe or city and
region.
«But even if we want to dispute that all peoples started from this first
communistic form and even if we want to talk ironically about such a “golden
age”, the analysis that interests us about the derivation of the legal
institution from the stages of technology is not affected by it, and it is
enough to refer to the great importance that Engels and Marx placed on these
studies on prehistory from the very start, pushing us to go much further.
«If we limit ourselves to the skeletal outlines and the things known to all, the
relations as to the ownership of the consumable and otherwise usable movable
object, of the slave or serf, and of the land, this will suffice to define the
fundamental outlines of successive historical types of class society».
Beyond these land relations and the absence of property relations we also outline the social relations of the society primitive communism. As we stated in Marxism of the Stammerers in 1952: «Man is for us the species, not the person: this bizarre, solitary and evidently sterile being, knows only consumer goods and not exchange, and not finding himself in the Garden of Eden and besides the disadvantage of being deprived of Eve, he procures himself useful goods through his work. Our example from the past we draw from the primitive communities: between the “Manifesto” and “Capital”, practical archaeological research has established that not only certain peoples, but every one of them, had their origins in organisations based on the work of all and the property of no-one. An organisation where one finds: “labour in common or directly associated labour… in its spontaneously developed form which we find on the threshold of the history of all civilised peoples”».
Not unlike how we conceptualize the Party prefiguring the Communist society of
the future, in commenting on primitive communism, we state in The Communist
Party and the Tradition of the Left
«Primitive communities realized a very strict centralism and an absolute
discipline of the single individual to the social group without the need for
coercion or any specific mechanisms. This was because it was founded exclusively
on an identity of interests, and the solidarity of all, in the struggle against
the adverse natural environment and other social groups. The primitive community
is an example of centralized and differentiated organization without coercion.
In the future communist society it will be the same. Indeed a fundamental
Marxist thesis holds that only when an irreconcilable conflict of interests
arose among members of a social group was it necessary to have a special
coercive structure in order to obtain the same centralization that in the
primitive community was obtained in a natural, spontaneous and organic manner.
«That the centralistic execution of functions and the existence of a
bureaucratic and coercive apparatus are definitely not the same thing is a
concept only the social-democrats, pilloried by Lenin in State and Revolution,
are incapable of understanding; they, that is, who used to maintain that the
need for a State machine was eternal, as otherwise individual interests would
cause social breakdown, whereas, on the contrary, both a principle, and a goal,
of communism is a stateless society in which there is no coercion of men; in
which centralization will be total and far more complete than in present
society, and founded on a natural and spontaneous solidarity among men».
In describing the organization of Indigenous tribes based on observations of the American anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan who had lived for an extensive period of time among the Iroquis. Engels stated: «What distinguishes an Indian tribe in America? 1. Its own territory and name. In addition to its actual place of settlement, every tribe further possessed considerable territory for hunting and lashing. Beyond that lay a broad strip of neutral land reaching to the territory of the neighboring tribe».
Both the early Anglo-Saxon settlers in New England and the Indigenous people, existed within their own racial communities while in definite different stages of development both maintained a communistic relation to the land. Despite their apparent cultural differences, both held communal land practices, maintained a form of unanimous decision. A society of common material basis led to very similar forms of political and social organizations. Despite both being misattributed by bourgeois academics as shining examples of “democracy”; their egalitarian social form was only a product of their cooperative mode of production and relation to the land.
While these two racial groups would be driven towards conflict with each other over land disputes, unable to integrate with eachother out of racial and ethnic animosities, born from the racially and ethnically homogeneity of their respective societies which formed the foundation of their unity, culture which had developed over millenia.
These disputes, are natural to early human societies at this stage; however, it would be on the titanic movements of capital and the development of the bourgeois that would propel the settlers of the British colonies towards a project of conquest and ethnic cleasing.
3. - Race and Nation in State Formation in America
Unlike the bourgeois who view race either as merely an ideological construct or as comprising essentially a hierarchy of different subspecies of humans as within social darwinism, in the Marxist literature the term “race” and “ethnicity” are used interchangeably. We understand race and ethnicity to be biological and material fact in that they are directly tied to the emergence of different means of production within primitive communities, be that tools, language and customs in different groups of humans who developed their culture within isolated and homogeneous tribal communities and bands over millennia.
If, overtime this led to the development of genetic and physical characteristics of difference within the human species just as any species of animal has evolved overtime when isolated from others of its kind for long periods of time, however, more significantly were the different cultural customs, tools and linguistic distinctions which arrose. Yet today, because of the expansion of global markets and mixing of populations which began millennia ago, such differentials have progressively evaporated to the point of almost complete irrelevance in the modern world.
However, in prehistoric times, members of these various tribal and ethnic groups hardly viewed themselves as members of the same human community and instead viewed outsiders mostly as inhuman creatures or spirits in some cases.
With the arrival of Europeans to North America, these formerly isolated two great masses of humanity came into contact. Europeans living as they did in cultures with animal husbandry brought with them a mass pestilence that decimated indigenous populations. Given that most indigenous people in North America lived within societies with land relations reflective of a primitive communism, it meant that the English colonies in their expansionist endeavors would have the perpetual task of destruction of this primitive communism and the expansion of social class relations throughout the land. This could only happen through a conquest and total extirpation of these native peoples from the land given the complete incompatibility of the two social forms.
Whereas European mercantile colonization in places such as Mexico, Peru, India, China and some parts of Africa encountered societies which had already developed into large sprawling State formations complete with, developed agricultural production, a distinct hierarchy of social classes and established property relations, most North American tribes still lived in a state of primitive communism with some exceptions particularly in the Pacific Northwest. The existence of relatively large groups of natives who lived without any State structure, compared to the early groups of English colonists, made them an extremely difficult group to conquer and assimilate.
We can compare the rapidity of Spanish colonization in Mexico after the conquest of the Aztec Empire for example, as the elements of established local ruling elites swore fealty to the crown and converted to Christianity, and the conquistadors intermarried with the indigenous establishing large ethnic groups of Mestizos in many places.
Given the absence of any centralized State formation the process of colonization in the United States would take a much longer time as this new State formation had to be created almost totally anew. Thus for the stateless indigenous peoples and nations who lived in relationship to the land, reflective of a primitive communism, and whose material ethnic and cultural practices had developed out of that relationship to the land, they would have to be forcibly extirpated, as the nascent bourgeois worked to extend their markets, property relations and their system of production through to the interior.
In Factors of Race and Nation in Marxist Theory we state: «The transition from the ethnic group or “people” to the “nation” only takes place with the appearance of the political State, whose fundamental characteristics are the delimitation of national boundaries and organization of the armed forces; this transition can thus only take place after the dissolution of primitive communism and the formation of social classes(...) «The precondition for the emergence of the State is the formation of social classes. Among all peoples, this formation is determined by the division of arable land between individuals and families, and, in parallel, by the different phases of the division of social labour and functions, which results in each of the various elements in general productive activity being accorde a particular position and the appearance of differentiated hierarchies responsible for elementary crafts, military action and religious magic (the first form of technical know-how and schooling), the latter detached from the immediate life of the gens and primitive family».
The Germanic anglo-saxon protestants who came to settle in New England re-established a very old form of communistic property and land. These townships were surrounded by hostile indigenous bands and tribes, who obviously resented the invasion of their lands. From their origins these townships and the early settlers organized themselves as a fortified armed camp, fenced in and enclosed, guarding itself against the outside world and the native racial other. A nation, complete with its social classes, political State, national boundaries and armed forces was developing which was fundamentally incompatible with the primitive communism of the native population. Thus this nation began overtime to incorporate into its identity completely antagonistic interests with that of the racial other and the native peoples of the Americas.
Noting the barbarity of the early Protestant colonies directed towards the native, Marx wrote in Capital Vol 1. «In 1703 those sober exponents of Protestantism, the Puritans of New England by decrees of their assembly set a premium of £40 on every Indian scalp and every captured redskin; in 1720, a premium of £100 was set on every scalp; in 1744, after Massachusetts Bay had proclaimed a certain tribe as rebels, the following prices were laid down: for a male scalp of 12 years and upwards, £100 in new currency, for a male prisoner £105, for women and children prisoners £50, for the scalps of women and children £50. Some decades later, the colonial system took its revenge on the descendants of the pious pilgrim fathers, who had grown seditious in the meantime. At English instigation, and for English money, they were tomahawked by the redskins. The British Parliament proclaimed bloodhounds and scalping as “means that God and Nature had given into its hand».
As it was the exploitative economic interests of the early mercantile colonial capital, which financed the early colonies, and whose interest these settlers ultimately served, the development of a deep seated national hatred against the racial other was inevitable and necessary for capitals accumulation and expansion. «The treasures captured outside Europe by undisguised looting, enslavement and murder (...) flowed back to the mother-country”. The colonial system «proclaimed the making of profit as the ultimate and sole purpose of mankind».
As the early settlements began to expand they made allianceswith tribes and war with others, they constantly played a game of intrigue between the different tribal groups and worked to extend and establish hegemony over the territories it exerted influence over. As it did so it often extended sovereignty over its former allies and their territories in a paternalistic fashion it would begin to treat the indigenous as children and wards of the State in many cases.
4. - The Revival of Ancient Germanic Farming Practices
in the New England Colonies
In Kautsky’s 1902 work, Socialist Agitation Among Farmers in America, he recognizes the unique conditions in the United States in relation to the agrarian question and praises the book, The American Farmer written by socialist Algie Martin Simons, the editor of the International Socialist Review, as “especially well done”. Despite disagreements about the prospects of winning farmers to the cause of Socialism at that time, Kautsky describes the book as a critical text in understanding the material and historical conditions of the agrarian question in America. Thus the text marks an essential source in understanding the Marxist view on the developing class dynamics within the United States which were intimately bound in the agrarian question given the existence of the frontier and the “westward pull”.
In the text he describes how the initial colonies in New England were small
townships with a communal property relation ruled by a strict Protestant
theocracy. He describes these early settlers as establishing communities based
on the same model that was in essence those of the old communal German Mark,
which had disappeared in Europe hundreds of years before.
«The first settlers of New England came from a European society that was still
in the social stage marked by common ownership of village lands. But economic
conditions in New England developed at a much earlier social stage and so we see
a reproduction of European institutions of centuries long by. So close was the
resemblance to these earlier days that one of our foremost historians can
account for it only on the ground of conscious revival or inherited custom.
«In reality the same economic conditions that in the time of Tacitus cause the
formation of isolated communistic settlements in Germany produced the same
results in New England. The first settlements in America, like those of the
early Germans, were but littler clearings in the midst of the forest surrounded
by hostile Indians with no strong central government to preserve order and
protect the settlers from their savage neighbors. Fences erected by common labor
shut the village off from the rest of the world».
The same forms of social organization, the independent German farmer, organized around the communal village of the Mark, and its eventual disappearance with the rise of the feudal lords are discussed extensively by Kautsky in The Agrarian Question. In Factors of Race and Nation in Marxist Theory our Party also observed that the Germanic peoples move from a nomad horde to be described as settled peasants, likely due to a rapid growth in population. In our text we note that it was the barbarians who overturned the roman slavocracy and broke up the plantation estates implementing a form of communist land cultivation in its stead. «Given the relatively small number of conquerors and their tradition of communist labour, the new organization of agriculture in these lands left large areas undivided – not just forests and pastures, but also arable land, with German forms of law prevailing over Roman forms, or combining with them».
Eventually this form of agriculture would give way to feudalism in Europe as strong lords began bringing the independent peasantry under their domination. Then this development would eventually give way to the birth of the modern European nation-States; however. In the United States it experienced a curious revival given the conditions and class relations within the early colonies which required strong independent farmers that could organize defense and without expensive centralized State support from the mother country.
The New England colonies had themselves attracted less slaves and indentured servants than in the South and the Virginia colony as the land was less suitable for extensive agriculture.
The influx of refugees to the New England colonies from the Homeland, fleeing the advance of the bourgeois revolution there, would continue to put population pressures on the settlers to expand and eventually thrust the Anglo-Saxons into a project of nation State formation as the regional bourgeois developed and eventually sought to break out from under British mercantilism.
We can understand that for the New England colonists who had once lived in this form of communistic land relations, the enclosure of the land, their poperization and thrust into the cities to be consumed as fodder for the developing manufactures led to a desperate push West where they dreamed of maintaining their old social status s based on their old communistic land relations. This of course came at the bloody expense of extirpating the native from his own primitive communism. The ruthless genocide of the native, the development of the Germanic, Anglo, White “American” Nation, and the colonial project of extending capital’s market West would go hand in hand.
5. - The American War of Independence and Westward Expansion
With the first English colonies being founded prior to the beginning of the English Revolutions in 1607, they remained small with only a few thousand until the advent of the revolutionary period, swelling over 400% in the decade of 1640 to approximately 30,000 then to 210,372 by 1690, as masses fled the tumultuous events in the home country. As the English Revolution commenced and completed itself, it brought new immigration waves ofwar refugees and landless farmers who found themselves landless due to enclosure.
The American War of Independence brought small bourgeois, artisans, workers, and farmers against British commercial interests and finance capital.
As such in the coming War of Independence, British mercantilism would find themselves allied with the indigenous peoples of North America who both sought to hem in the development of an independent North American bourgeois and capital.
Under the colonialism of the British Empire, the underdevelopment of their colonial territories was central to their global dominance. The production of raw materials in the peripheries of the empire meant that the areas that they conquered needed to themselves remain in the feudal or barbaric stage of development. Thus the New England colonies could themselves exist in a sort of semi-barbaric communistic stage, within the mercantile colonial system. In order to maintain their position, Britain and its manufacturers had to remain the progenitor of finished goods for export across the world. The British would intentionally prevent the development of alternative poles of commercial manufacture from developing within its Empire.
The mercantile monopoly of Britain had organized its colonies as producers of raw materials for export to England where they would be manufactured into finished goods for sale across the empire. British colonialism had imposed a monopoly on trade requiring purchase of its own exports, blocking the development of manufacture in its colonies to reduce competition with its domestic industry, and mandated itself as the sole receiver of colonial exports.
In its American colonies it imposed extensive restrictions on production, banning locals from even making hats, prohibited settlement west of Appalachia, minting of coins and local banks. With the rising power of the urban middle classes and the petit-bourgeois in the colonies these conditions increasingly became unendurable.
In the late 18th century the population boomed from just 250,888 in 1700 to 2,780,369 in 1780. This demographic explosion created increasing demand for new land among the masses of farmers. The citizen-soldier who formed the basis of the continental army was an independent peasant, and indeed more than 90% of the colonials made a living off the land at the time of the war, thus land acquisition was a primary motivation for many in the military.
Meanwhile real estate speculation grew as a major economic factor within the colonies. Following the French-Indian War the British reneged on promises to grant land West of Appalachia to those who fought, in fear of an alternative commercial hub developing that could threaten its mercantile domination. Major land speculators such as George Washington faced the potential total devaluation of 30,000 acres of land, similar facts were true of many of the other “Founding Fathers” of the soon to be American Republic. This along with the other aforementioned material drives created the conditions for the material American War of Independence.
At the conclusion of the war, the vast territory west of the Appalachian Mountains, which was ceded to the United States by Britain in the Treaty of Paris (1783), effectively doubled the size of the new nation. However, the soldiers would find much difficulty initially in gaining access to the new land grants they were promised.
In order to begin developing its own industry the urban bourgeois required the mass dispossession of the New England farmers. It needed to drive them into wage labor and into the cities where the manufactures were located. Following the end of the war masses of independent farmers found that the old commons had begun to be enclosed and sold off and they were now landless. This process beginning in part, to repay war debts led merchants to begin demanding payment in money in exchange for goods which forced masses of farmers into extreme poverty and debt. This had the intended outcome, many poor farmers were driven into parceling and selling their land, becoming cheap wage laborers for the developing manufactures. Others were forced to make the dangerous and risky trek West to attempt to eke out a living, an outcome which satisfied the wealthy land speculators who needed to increase the value of the lands they had purchased to turn a profit.
Conditions were so bad for the average farmer that it led to a developing popular unrest and protests across the country that eventually boiled over with the explosion of Shays Rebellion where 1,500 armed farmers outraged over debt collection and lack of land dispersal went into open rebellion in Massachusetts and attempted to storm an military armory. The newly developed centralized government swiftly put down the rebellion with almost all of the “Founding Fathers” exposing their new ruling class status, harshly denouncing the insurrection.
6. - The Independent Peasant
The American “farmer” was an extremely heterogeneous strata within American society, with various practices and methods employed suited to the natural environments of each area. In Simon’s The American Farmer he notes «When we speak of the American farmer then the greatest care and the widest knowledge is necessary if we are to avoid ascribing to the type what is characteristic only of a single section or class” (...) In the West the cattle rancher and cowboy would eventually come into existence, in the prairie farmers had access to fertile lands that allowed them to outsell the relatively poor New England farmer and in the South of course slave plantation labor was predominate; however, in the periphery there existed a crust of independent yeomans, and frontiersmen often living relatively isolated and rugged lives of self-sufficiency».
However, one thing united this section of the population and it was that ultimately they comprised a layer of independent, almost totally self-sufficient farmers. In Kautsky’s The Agrarian Question, he is careful to outline that a farmer is only a latter stage peasant who is no longer independent, by way of their production no longer producing for subsistence but primarily commodities for export on the market in exchange for money. Given that it was only after the Civil War that most farmers began moving from subsistence farming to cash crop commodity production we can understand that in the United States the vast majority of “farmers” were in fact members of an independent peasantry until later in history.
This layer of an independent peasantry in the United States was caught in between an identity of a worker and a petit-bourgeois. For it was always the aspiration of the farmer and the independent proprietor to accumulate enough wealth to either purchase a slave or two or hire helping hands. According to Lenin, in The Peasantry and the Working Class «The so-called “working” peasant is in fact a small proprietor, or a petty bourgeois, who nearly always either hires himself out to work for somebody else or hires workers himself. Being a small proprietor, the “working” peasant also vacillates in politics between the masters and the workers, between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat».
The confusing interplay between worker and peasant that was created by the existence of the frontier which acted as a pressure valve for pent up urban anxieties amongst the American workers, and drove the North Eastern capitalists to be forced to encourage European immigration to fill the developing manufactures, can be seen in the writing of Kautsky in Socialist Agitation Amongst American Farmers. He writes: «Workers did not feel as a proletariat».
However, the continued existence of the independent farmer strata depended upon the constantly expanding frontiers which gave access to adequate farm lands for a family to sustain itself and reproduce it’s existence which required the continual and growing availability of adequate land. Commenting on the role the frontier played in delaying the development of strong proletarian organizations Simmons and the confusion European socialist had on the situation he states: «In this country the element which in other lands was in continuous revolt against social in-justice had here simply moved on to the frontier, and that therefore it would be where that frontier was last located that social discontent would find its first strong united native expression».
7.- Manifest Destiny, the Frontier and Native Genocide
The War of Independence had been fought on two fronts one against the British and the other on the frontiers against the natives who had chosen to ally with the Crown because of the threat to their land. Eventually after the war, the lands were parceled and settlers began to flood in. The frontiersmen, the independent farmers who settled in these newly acquired lands came with muskets in hand, as it was their job to enforce the new property relations, to defend their newly parceled and fenced private property in the newly settled lands in areas where there was little to no centralized State authority. In all such newly settled areas, raids from natives who attempted to defend their lands from encroachment and to evict the new settlers, were a constant threat, so the settlers were at once farmers and also enforcers of the new order.
Following the War of Independence, the Indigenous raids escalated to the point of war. George Washington mobilized an army against the Northwest Confederacy composed of the Shawnee, Miami, Lenape & Ottawa who had formed to resist the colonization of their region. In one key battle, the tribes inflicted the worst defeat at the work of the natives against the U.S. military in history, forcing the government to sue for peace; however, a boundary line could not be decided and the war resumed with the confederations, defeated over ten years later.
The native populations had always posed a serious military threat and Indigenous warriors were highly feared by settlers, their mere sighting would often lead militia units to flee the field of battle in terror across many conflicts. Indigenous peoples in the region would again rise up during the War of 1812 uniting under the leadership of a Shanee warrior by the name of Tecumsah, who would form a confederacy of tribes that would ally with the British and play a key military role in the war as they worked to expel the U.S. from the region.
Following independence, Thomas Jefferson began popularizing a vision of a yeoman farmer democracy which would spread over the entire continent. In regards to the indigenous peoples he referred to them as the “doomed red race”, that would be “exterminated, or driven beyond the Mississippi”.. As settlement continued West it occurred through paramilitary units and vigilante groups of settlers who would work together to push native people off the land. Periodic open warfare between the United States Army and confederations of tribal warbands would occur with the occasional native raid on settlements. As a result a rapid depopulation of indigenous peoples occurred from mass murders, plagues, starvation and land evictions. As time went on the remaining natives were concentrated onto lands deemed worthless and unsuitable for self-sufficiency in what were and continue to be called “reservations”. The support for these policies among the bourgeois layers were widespread.
In Simon’s American Farmer he notes:
«It is extremely interesting, to say the least, to know that had independence
not been gained Washington would have lost about 30,000 acres of rich Western
land... The possession of land carries no benefits unless it carries with it the
power to appropriate the fruits of other men’s labor. Manifestly, if the owner
is to secure any such fruits he must somehow get men out to where his land is
located. So it was that the governing powers gave all possible encouragement to
this westward movement. The result of all these tendencies was that a mighty
army of conquest and occupation poured over the mountains and down the rivers
into the wilderness. They were the first members of that ever-fleeing yet
ever-conquering host that from that time almost to the present moment has been
fleeing from the exploitation and monopoly of the East, only to create in the
new home a new tyranny from which in turn their sons must flee.
«This army moved in irregular but fairly distinct battalions, each of which held
the field for one social stage and then gave way to the elements that were to
form a higher and more complex society. The first body to invade the wilderness
were the hunters and trappers, but close upon their heels came the pioneer
farmers, the real advanced guard of the invading army. These pioneer farmers,
who for well nigh a century were the typical Americans, had set perform them as
a task the conquest of a continent».
Thus the middle class American Dream, a modern adaption of the Jeffersonian ideal of the independent peasant farmer democracy, emerges at this historical juncture.
Secured over the corpses of untold numbers of native casualties. In Colonization and Christianity: A Popular History of the Treatment of the Natives by the Europeans in All Their Colonies (1838), which Marx studied in 1851, Writing at the time of the Trail of Tears and the massive removal of the native American tribes, Howitt concluded with the words: «Nothing will be able to prevent the final expatriation of these southern tribes: they must pass the Mississippi till the white population is swelled sufficiently to require them to cross the Missouri; there will then remain but two barriers between them and annihilation – the rocky mountains and the Pacific Ocean».
In the United States, this path of the petit-bourgeois westward to accomplish their dream of economic independence and self-sufficiency, would justify itself under the social doctrine of Manifest Destiny, a doctrine which viewed it as the inherent god given destiny of the nation to extend from coast to coast.
The rise of the Democratic Party’s slogan of “White Supremacy” then in the period following Reconstruction would work to consolidate this new national identity, as the converging forces of Capital sought to continue its hyper exploitation, while wagging the carrot of petit-bourgeois status in the face of the declassed American independent farmers, craftsman, and then proletarians.
Manifest Destiny, a doctrine which gave high ideals to a project of expansionism was at its core driven by impersonal material forces of capital accumulation that would in an unstoppable and inevitable way spread its bloody tentacles across the entirety of the globe. These conquests – historically progressive – were put forward as a social panacea.
However, the peasants will not preserve their independent status and all of American life will eventually become dominated by the forces powerfully revolutionary of industrial capital. Its progressive proletarianization of the masses continues today, despite the existence of a large but shrinking labor aristocracy.
Capital always ruins the free peasants, but at the same time deludes them in seeking their support against the working class. Even Nazism in Germany, at the other end of the bourgeois historical cycle, made the small peasants heroes in its ideology, the true representatives of the nation. They saw in them the responsibility for the German racial strain and German history. Instead, urban culture was labeled as “asphalt culture”, “Jewish”. In essence it was a petit-bourgeois dream of a renewed independent peasantry.
Capital, in its expansive fury, is anonymous and global, indifferent to race, a powerful unifier of peoples and cultures, but it becomes racist exterminator as soon as it becomes useful to its needs, of affirmation, or survival, at the beginning or end of its journey. So Hitler will write: «Here in the East a similar process will repeat itself for the second time as in the conquest of America: our Mississippi must be the Volga».
After the economic crisis of 1873 we would see the rise of the campaign of White Supremacy under the Democratic Party’s Redeemers movement in the South and its ultimate alliance under the emerging national industrial capital. A project which aimed to crush the workers organizations and the Radical Republican regimes that had been established in the South after the Civil War in the time of Reconstruction, liquidating the racial other, the proletarianized ex-slaves.
Prior to the rise of the Black Shirts in Italy and the Brown Shirts in Germany, it is in the United States that we see the first manifestation of the fascist “shirts” movement as they would later be called in Europe. The most obvious being the white supremacist Red Shirts in Mississippi and the Carolinas, and of course similar groups in the KKK and White League. These paramilitary organizations, with their connection to the Democratic Party, utilized terroristic tactics in the period of Reconstruction South.
8. - White Nationalism, the American Craftsmen and the Labor Aristocracy
Prior to the Civil War the vast majority of people in the United States were of the middle classes, either independent yeoman peasant farmers, urban craftsman or independent artisans. Small firms and workshops that used manual tools still far outnumbered factories in 1860. Likewise in 1790, nine out of ten Americans lived completely off the land. By 1860 it was still 8 out of 10. The economy of the small farmer was based on self-sufficiency: as well as tilling the soil and stock raising, and related agrarian industries, other activities such as spinning and weaving were carried out inside the family unit.
As we said in our history on the Labour Movement in the United States,
«Within the small workshops for which most of production was organized there was
the proprietor of the workshop (the master), the skilled worker (the journeyman)
and the apprentice.The artisan was equipped with a set of typical tools of his
craft, enabling him to make the finished product. The masters were proprietors
who did everything, from maintaining relations with their customers and ordering
raw materials, to keeping the accounts. In addition they planned the work,
supervised their young apprentices, and worked alongside their subordinates. For
the most part they were ex-skilled workers, expert workers formerly paid by the
day or on a piece work basis, depending on the craft. These journeymen in their
turn had been apprentices, who had started in the trade when still adolescents
and spent from three to seven years learning the secrets of the craft under the
tutelage of their master.
«The industrial revolution in North America was preceded by a period between the
1820s and 1840s in which the craft workshop underwent major changes. The first
important transformation was an increase in the number of people employed in the
workshop, rising to a few dozen or so and threatening the traditional
equilibrium between the three roles just described. The consequence was richer
proprietors, less and less hope for the journeymen of setting up on their own
(we can date the precocious death of the “American Dream” to this period, with
its subsequent existence a mere mirage for the overwhelming majority of
proletarians) and apprentices seen more and more as low cost labor rather than
as future artisans. There then followed the transformation of the mode of
working typical of the factory, whether through the introduction of machinery,
or by subdividing the working process into a number of simple phases, allowing
non-specialised, and therefore cheaper and easily replaceable labor to be taken
on, such as women and children.
«The two opposing classes meanwhile started to define themselves and clarify
their respective identities from a theoretical point of view, with the rising
bourgeoisie certainly much more prolific in this respect. Adam Smith was one of
the principal sources of American bourgeois ideology during this period, an
ideology which would eventually develop into the postulate of Free Labor, which
even now, reduced to an empty illusion, gets between our feet today. The ideal
society, supposedly, is one in which there is a minimum of political
interference in the market and in production, the dynamics of which are supposed
to naturally favor the attainment of economic independence on the part of the
farmers and the workers, if, that is, they are sufficiently diligent and
industrious. In short, it is the theory of ‘the self-made man’: everyone has the
possibility of making money (how, is irrelevant), after all, where there’s a
will there’s a way… What is more, Free Labor is considered the founding ideology
of the Republican Party, which would form as such in the mid 1850s».
Following the War of Independence the advancing commercial revolution pushed non-market systems of exchange and barter out of the way. This led to a progressive decline in the independent farmers and craftsmen and eventually a group of entrepreneurs began to emerge who were not just proprietary master craftsmen but determined to make money at all costs. As manufacturers developed, within the crafts, and its old guild system of master and journeyman, a rift began to emerge between the proprietors and non-proprietors and eventually the two began distinguishing themselves completely which gave rise to the birth of the first workers-only crafts unions.
As the manufactures grew it led to an increasing demand for more and more unskilled labor. Immigrants were often directly imported as strikebreakers at this time. Thus many of the first policies of the crafts unions were aimed at keeping out immigrants, often directed against Germans fleeing the failed German Revolution. In fact many of the policies of the early International Workingmen’s Association (IWA) were around mutual compacts between workers not to immigrate to each other’s countries and work for wages which undercut the wages of other laborers. For example, through the IWA in 1871, American and British molder societies reached an understanding where they laid down mutual rules for the entrance of immigrants from their trades into the United States.
We see here two approaches; one aimed at stopping immigration through binding themselves with bourgeois political parties and another at arriving at a mutual strategic pact with workers internationally. The first of course is a pact made on the basis of a common national chauvinist interest with ruling classes, and the second an internationalist proletarian approach which recognized a shared class interest and action based on mutual solidarity.
While these early unions would organize for collective action, their activity was often of an incoherent class character and often also partially existed to develop collective funds to start up cooperative enterprises, as it became more and more difficult for individuals to do so. The “pull of the West” ultimately acted as a pressure release valve due to the possibility of making it an independent proprietor elsewhere.
A prime example of this is in The Cooperative Commonwealth founded in 1888, to which Eugene V. Debs would briefly become president of. After the American Railway union was broken by federal troops and dissolved in 1877, its remnants joined with various colonizing groups, socialists and union locals and radical religious associations to form the Social Democracy, with Debs as chairmen. The organization aimed to colonize the Pacific Northwest, establish cooperative industry and build a new economic system that would abolish wage slavery. The leaders of the movement compared it to those of the Free Soilers in settling the State of Kansas to prevent the spread of chattel slavery; however, it was eventually realized that these projects were pulling workers out of the urban movement and so this particular project was abandoned.
Given the constant prevalence of economic crisis in this early capitalism, unemployment was a huge concern. The fear of immigration was matched by a fear of free Black slaves competing on the labor market. Thus there are many examples in the North of white and Black crafts unions viciously competing and attacking each other. As early as 1858 Black Caulkers and organized German and Irish Caulkers in Baltimore rioted against each other after the white Associations worked to push out Black labor from the trade. Meanwhile Democratic Party newspapers by the end of the war would use their racist rhetoric to incite white workers against Black as a scapegoat for economic problems & unemployment, a tactic that would continue on for a century leading to many pogroms and massacres perpetrated by white workers against Black workers throughout the country.
During the Civil War, Democratic Party newspapers incited whites to pogrom violence against Blacks, blaming them for unpopular draft measures. Meanwhile, after the war Northern capitalists increased their use of Black workers as strikebreakers, often intentionally recruiting them from the South so as to encourage the racial divides and hatred. In 1863 a strike of 3,000 longshoremen was broken because the boss used Black strikebreakers. Following the war, fears were stoked about companies being formed to ship 200,000-300,000 Black workers in the North to act as strikebreakers across New England.
Despite this, during the war more and more Black workers in the North began getting organized.
While many labor unions remained friendly and the leadership of the National Labor Union under Sylvis insisted on non-discriminator unions, many had already begun shutting out Black workers long ago, particularly in the South and in the North many were indifferent to the plight of Black workers.
The National Labor Union under Sylvis had originally organized itself as a project open to both White and Black labor; however, after his death the exclusionary attitudes and policies of White workers would force Black workers out of the union to form their own.
In the early days of the Knights of Labor it had prided itself on its racial inclusion with 60,000 Black members; however, over time many incidents of racial opportunism on the part of leadership on a local and national level and at the base of the organization began slowly to break the solidarity. After the economic crisis of 1893, the skilled labor element within the union began retrenching itself and binding itself more closely to the boss. By this time within the Knights of Labor, Black membership was almost non-existent with the organization passing resolutions calling for the deportation of Blacks to Africa the following year at its congress.
Meanwhile in 1893, the AFL would officially reverse its ban on accepting racially exclusive unions, leading to the eventual complete abandonment of its commitment to racial inclusion, and the rise of a form of Jim Crow unionism. Thus we can see that in many cases despite leadership best efforts to encourage racial unity, the deep seated racial hatred that had become a basic element of the national identity was an all too easy pole for social-chauvinist elements within the labor aristocracy to mobilize around. The predominance of the petit-bourgeois, the early development of a labor aristocracy out of the original crafts and the unskilled proletariat in the form of the ethnic and racial other, and the progressive rise of the Big Bourgeoisie delays the development of proletarian trade unions and propels the advance of a white nationalist unity set against the Black and Native races.
The White Labor Aristocracy thus begins to grow out of these material conditions
as skilled craftsmen, who most often, did not necessarily see their interests as
distinct from capital, who viewed their crafts associations, not as an organ of
class defense but purely of economic elevation, would often organize their
unions in association with the bosses in a monopolist and protectionist way to
keep out labor competition.
(continued to next issue)
– 1. – Introduction
– 2. – The Prehistory of the Kurdish Nationality
– 3. – Kurdish Rebellions from Sheikh Ubeydullah (1879) to Sheikh Said (1925)
– 4. – The New Secular Nationalism of the Republic of Agiri (1926 30) and the
Dersim Massacre (1937 38)
– 5. – The Autonomous Republic of Mahabad (1941 45) and the Kurdistan Democratic
Party
– 6. – Kurdish Nationalism in Iran after 1979
– 7. – Al Anfal Campaign (1988) and Proletarian Revolt in Southern Kurdistan
(1991)
– 8. – The PKK: From its Foundation (1978) to its Capitulation (1999)
– 9. – KRG (2005), AANES (2013) and The Kurdish Question Today
– 10. – Conclusion
– A. – Appendix 1: Communism and the Kurds
– B. – Appendix 2: The Kurdish National Movement (Comintern, 1921)
[ It is here ]
(continued to next issue)
Part 1
From Structures to Superstructures
(Exposed at the September 2022 meeting)
We return to analyzing the ideologies of the bourgeoisie, from its emergence as a class in the 13th century up to, roughly, the rise of our theory in the mid-19th century. As always, we have no novelties or great discoveries to unveil. We simply make use of dialectical materialism, which, among other things, is also a method of analyzing the structures and consequent superstructures of the various human societies.
For us, analysis is never an end in itself: theory rather than being a part of praxis is a form of it. If there should be any novelty, again as always, it will only be because we are applying our materialism to issues which we have investigated to a lesser extent in the past. The purpose of such work is twofold: on the one hand it is to get to know our enemy even better, which is always useful, and on the other hand it is to provide further confirmation of our dialectical materialism, that it is not ideas that create reality, in fact quite the contrary.
If Descartes said ’I think, therefore I am’, we say ’I am, therefore I think’, or better still ’we are, therefore we think’. In ideas we find reality reflected, in a non-mechanical and sometimes difficult to decipher way.
Of course, when we speak of reality, we do not mean some sort of Aristotelian ’raw material’, a passive, undefined and indefinable substratum of all things, be it matter as such or economy. There is neither matter as such nor economy as such. We are neither Hegelians nor economists. Matter thus conceived would only be idealism disguised as materialism. In the dispute over ’universals’ in medieval scholasticism we would be ’nominalists’ not ’realists’. The reality we are referring to is constituted by the material systems of production and of reproduction of the various human societies that have succeeded one another in history, and the resulting relationships established between the members of those societies.
But before beginning this analysis it is necessary to make some clarifications that cannot be entirely postponed until the end of the work.
Marxist Monism and the Dualisms of the Bourgeoisie
In bourgeois thought, there is always, albeit in different ways, a dichotomy between reason and faith, between rational thought and religion, along with the traditional dichotomies of body and soul, body and psyche, nature and culture, and so on, where the two terms are seen as opposites with the one irreducible to the other.
There was and still is, among the bourgeois and their historians, the idea that the modern world was born with the appearance of reason, an appearance placed by most in the Renaissance. Reason, in this case a metahistorical and metaphysical reason, is therefore supposedly a kind of underground river that appeared in Greek and Roman history, then disappeared for some 1,500 years, only to resurface in the 15th century. The men of the Renaissance, who also had held this view, had justifications for it which we certainly cannot grant to our contemporaries.
In this conception, which it has to be said is increasingly being abandoned by historians and scholars, the Middle Ages is an age of darkness, ignorance and superstition characterized by religion and faith and an absence of reason. With the emergence of the latter, by way of the Enlightenment, the darkness of ignorance and superstition to which religion had kept men chained is rent asunder, and they are now able to finally see the truth and make it their own.
This is what would come to be called ’lay’ thinking, already a term that is meaningless in itself. A meaning, however, can be ascribed to it that the ’laity’ certainly won’t like, that is: the laity in the Middle Ages were simply all those who were not clerics (i.e. priests, friars and ecclesiastics in general). They were not priests, but as members of the church (ecclesia is a Greek term meaning assembly, gathering, community) they shared the same conceptions as the clergymen as they were part of the same community. The layman was no less Christian than the priest. Today’s ’layman’, who claims to speak in the name of reason and science, actually has conceptions that are no less metaphysical than those of the various religions.
In the footsteps of Marx, but also of Ockham and the medieval ’nominalists’, we say that reason does not exist as such, but reasons do. Reason is historically determined: it is the reason of a given society, which has a given system of production and relations between its members which are determined according to the role they play in that system of production. Reason does not have those characteristics of neutrality and eternal validity for all men, as most of the Enlightenment philosophers thought, rather it is class reason. Reason is generated by the class relations and production relations of a given society, it is its ideological superstructure, like all the other ideologies, like philosophies, like religions. It is the Reason of the ruling class. it is the mask that conceals its rule from itself, and especially from those over whom their rule is exercised.
In the French revolution, when the festival of the Supreme Being was celebrated, the Goddess Reason, represented by a young dancer, was also celebrated. At that time it was a revolutionary reason, insofar as it was the reason of a revolutionary bourgeois class. We know what the men of that time could not have known: that that reason, seen and represented as a young, graceful, virginal maiden, was in reality an old con artist, and increasingly clearly an accomplice of the bourgeoisie.
We know this not because we are smarter or more cultured than the men of the
time, but because it was revealed to us by Marxism and confirmed by subsequent
history.
The Ideology of the End of Ideologies
Among the bourgeoisie, it has long been fashionable to speak of the end of ideologies, and even to boast of having no ideology at all. This end of ideologies, for others even the end of history, is only the ideological transposition of the bourgeoisie’s desire to see the end not of ideologies in general but of a very specific ideology: the revolutionary ideology, consisting of communism and guarded by the communist party which, as in the Zoroastrian religion, has the task of keeping the eternal fire burning. The custodians of the Zoroastrian temple constantly feed this fire: they too know that without their constant work, the fire, though eternal, would be extinguished.
One etymology, though not the only one, has the term “ideology” derived from “ideon” which is the aorist, a past tense conjugation of the Greek verb “orao”, which means “I saw”. Ideology therefore means ’point of view’ on reality. This meaning can be accepted by us, as long as we are clear about the meaning of ’point of view’, which is not that of one or more men more capable than others of interpreting history and thus of guiding their community to the best of their ability, nor that of ’cunning priests’ capable of devising cunning deceptions in order to predominate over their fellow men.
Ideology, the point of view (apart from ours), is never conscious: it is the point of view on the reality elaborated by a given society, with given class relations, that transports that reality into the world of ideas, elaborating a vision that, however class-based, however false or partial it may be, nevertheless responds to the survival and functioning needs of that society.
The bourgeois who boast that they have no ideologies, and thus no points of view, are therefore boasting that they see nothing and consequently understand nothing. We say to them that they are right when they say they see nothing and understand nothing, but it does not seem to us that they have anything to boast about. And included within ideology are religion, philosophy, science. Even science is not an eternal, uncreated deity which is always the same: it is a class science, bearing the stigmata of the class divisions of the society that generated it.
For us materialists, ideologies are true and false at the same time. They are true when they arise and when they respond to the needs of the society that produced them; they are false when, the relations of production and the consequent relations between the members of society having changed, within it there then begins developing an ideology that is ’truer’ than the previous one, as it better reflects the real relations between the classes. But they are also false at the very moment they are true, since they are always and in any case ideologies of the ruling class which, by material force and not through the force of ideas, impose themselves on those who are ruled. It is only in moments of revolutionary crisis, when a class rule is broken, that one slowly begins to jettison previous ideology, increasingly understood to be false.
It is only in the communist party, with the “inversion of praxis”, that consciousness precedes action, that ideology precedes reality. Ours is a class ideology as well, but, however contradictory it may seem outside the party, it is not partial, because it embraces the totality of historical and social realities and phenomena that are not easily and immediately perceived or perceptible. It is the ideology of a class that wants to destroy classes and consequently even itself, which in pursuit of its own interest aims to abolish capitalism and itself, thus pursuing what is in the interest of the human species.
The proletariat is the present and communism the future of the one reality that is the human species. We communists also say that in the party communism already exists: the present contains the future. In reality past, present and future are terms that our language, which is not perfect and always perfectible like any other human tool, uses to refer to a reality that is unique.
Heraclitus of Ephesus, the founder or one of the founders of dialectics, said at
the beginning of the 5th century B.C.: “Panta rei” (everything flows), and also:
“Truth loves to hide”. Truth loves to hide itself precisely because it is
dialectic, because it is movement, not end-in-itself à la Bernstein, nor brought
in always and forever from outside as Aristotle believed, but a movement that is
matter itself in its becoming. Movement is one of the names we give to reality.
The evolution discussed in Darwin’s theory is another name we give to movement
and hence to reality.
Bourgeois Reason and Religious Faith
We have said that the bourgeoisie traces the ’epiphany’ of reason back mostly to the Renaissance. There has also been no lack of those who have traced science back to Galileo, especially among self-styled Marxists. This idea is no less anti-Marxist and anti-dialectical than the other. No one admires Galileo more than we do, and we can also say that with him, Kepler and Newton, modern science was born, but not science without adjectives. Science arose in prehistory, when at a certain point in evolution men began to chip stones to make tools, to produce their own implements, and to produce myths and religions. Myths and religions are a primitive form of science, they are attempts to give an explanation to unknown phenomena, they are the knowledge that is possible and that is organic to those societies. The Greeks, not having the instruments of later times to explain the origin of thunder bolts, imagined they were hurled by Zeus.
Religions are not only this: they are also, and above all, an attempt to mitigate the fear of death, of pain, of life’s difficulties. Along with all this, and even before it, religions are the ideology of the societies that produce them, their transfigured image, their law and their science; they are the relations between men transported into the heavens.
Religion is therefore too important a thing to be left to priests. The same can be said of art and artists, philosophy and philosophers, science and scientists. Clearly we do not believe in the superiority of moderns over ancients, nor its opposite. To say that the product of the human species over an entire millennium, i.e. medieval Christian, Jewish and Islamic philosophy and science, is a thing of no value, to be taken out and thrown in the dustbin, is indicative of the ideological blindness of the bourgeoisie, of its reason and of its science, which in terms of its darkness, gloom and superstition are in no way inferior to the sacristies.
The Englishman John of Salisbury, a 12th century philosopher and bishop of Chartres, coined the famous metaphor that we are dwarfs on the shoulders of giants, so thanks to them we can see further than them. On this single point, the medieval philosopher was much more in touch with reality than the rationalists of later centuries.
The religious world of the Middle Ages produced ’philosophies’ of considerable importance, which inevitably influenced the conceptions of later centuries, starting with the so-called ’lay’ ones. The ’Summa theologiae’ of Thomas Aquinas, for example, is anything but a load of nonsense: it is first and foremost a mirror of the society of its time, of the slow decline of the feudal world from which the newborn bourgeoisie is arising, of the Church’s attempt, improbable but partly successful, to keep up with the changing world; neutralizing the dangerous novelty constituted by Aristotelianism by making it its own. The enemy is sometimes caught by opening doors.
We have already described Thomas’s theoretical construction as a powerful
archway of knowledge, uniting earlier and later knowledge, and constituting a
powerful development of knowledge for the society of his age. As we said,
religion is too important a thing to be left in the hands of priests, or in the
hands of those despised priests who are the so-called ’laymen’, that is to say,
the rationalist and atheist bourgeois.
Hidden Knowledge in Myths and Religions
Some examples on this theme. Among the Greek myths is that of the abduction of Europa, a Phoenician princess, by Zeus who, transformed into a bull, takes her from the coast of Asia to the island of Crete. The meaning of the myth is clear and is a historical reality: Greek civilization arrived from the East, from the Phoenicians to Crete and then from Crete to mainland Greece. The influence of the Phoenicians on Minoan and then Greek civilization is clear: it is true that we know very little about the 3rd and 2nd millennia BC, but we do know that around the 8th century BC, a script appears in Greece that is no longer a syllabic script like Linear B, which probably disappeared along with the Mycenaean world that generated it, but a phonetic script, based on the Phoenician alphabet to which some modifications were made. In fact, Herodotus in his ’Histories’ says that the Greeks called the letters of the alphabet ’phoinikeia’, Phoenician things.
Another myth present among various peoples is that of a ’golden age’ set in the distant past. This myth is nothing more than the vague memory of primitive communism, of a stage in human society in which the tribe was the primary unit, in which the concept of the individual was unknown, in which the division of that unit into social classes had not yet taken place. This division was then reflected in the concept of ’original sin’, which records the shattering of the communist spirit, the sin against a god who was nothing other than man’s original unity with a society of which he was organically a part. It is no coincidence that in Christian mythology the devil is ’the great separator’.
Communists have no nostalgia for primitive communism. Communism is arrived at by passing through the stages represented by the various class societies that appeared in history according to necessity, and not by seeking an impossible return to a past which would be just a reactionary myth. In the Bible, Lot’s wife is turned into a pillar of salt because, instead of looking forward to the future, she turns to look backwards. Primitive communism is the lost paradise of which the religions speak. In part it was, because of the absence of class divisions, and in part it was hell, because of the scarcity of resources or the means to procure them, because of the harshness of life, in which dying of hunger, cold, disease or from beasts was not unlikely. The Roman legend of babies born with birth defects being thrown off the Tarpeian cliff, and others like it, are a distant reminder of the hardships of that primary phase. In those days a man in his thirties was probably old, and certainly lucky.
We note in passing that the torments suffered back then, the hunger, the cold,
etc., have not disappeared with ’progress’, that is with class societies, the
last of which is capitalism.
In the Beginning Was the Word
In religions we sometimes find insights of great power, which the philosophy and science of the bourgeoisie, centuries and sometimes millennia later, does not achieve. This is not so strange, if we think that the oldest religions were closer to the material basis of society, while the same religions, in later stages, produced ideological constructions that transported society, with its social relations, to the high heavens. The bourgeoisie has done the same, in various ways, from Kant and Hegel up to the present day. Early Christianity was closer to the material basis than later Christianity; Judaism, being older, an expression of more archaic social relations, was closer to that basis than Christianity. The Jews, in the Bible, prayed to their god for the abundance of the harvest and for the fecundity of women and of the herds. They did not pray to him for the salvation of a soul that, we might say, had not been invented yet.
The 1st century Christians themselves did not have the conception of the soul that we know but spoke of the resurrection of bodies on the day of judgement, after the long sleep of death. It was in the 2nd century, with Justin and the Apologist Fathers, and especially in the 4th century with Augustine of Tagaste, that Christianity tried to appropriate Greek philosophy, and in particular Neo-Platonism, considering it an imperfect and partial form of ’Truth’, which only becomes full and complete in God. It is then that the Christian concept of the soul is born, a concept that changes over the centuries, and which also arises from the influence of Greek philosophy. It must be said, however, that the Souls of Plato and the Neo-Platonists, and the Anima mundi of the Stoics, were not the same as the Soul of the Christians: we do not attribute to Plato, the Stoics and Plotinus a responsibility they do not have. Neo-Platonism itself, placed by Augustine as the philosophical basis of Christianity, may have been considerably modified, but it was still a pagan philosophy.
The idea of the resurrection of bodies and the universal judgement then remained in Christianity, but was considerably watered down: what need was there for a universal judgement when there had already been so many individual judgements as individual souls arrived? These were already immediately judged and ’sorted’.
We read in the prologue of the Fourth Gospel, the Gospel according to John:
«In the beginning was the Word,
«and the Word was with God,
«and the Word was God».
The author, referring to Christ, and thus to God, uses here the Greek word ’logos’, which means word, discourse, reason, rule, cause, law. Jerome, between the 4th and 5th century, translates ’logos’ with the Latin ’verbum’, meaning word, speech, verb. In Italian it is translated as ’verbo’. Logos is a term already present in the most ancient Greek philosophy, but it is with the Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria, a contemporary of Jesus, that it is understood in the manner that the Neo-Platonists would later understand it, and which Christianity would adopt, as the middle term between god and the world, which god uses to create the world. This middle term linking god and world, which is god and world, hence god and man, lent itself well to being understood as Christ.
’Logos’ was in turn the translation of an older Hebrew term: ’Davar’. This term also meant ’word’, but a word that is indistinguishable from the fact, and at one with it. It was evidently part of the language of a society that preceded the ’original sin’ of class division.
This does not mean that we can be certain that analogous languages and myths originated in the societies of primitive communism. They may have arisen in societies with a limited class differentiation, where ideological self-representation was still very limited, so that much of the original communist vision and feeling remains. Vision and sentiment that will then increasingly shift from real life to the various ‘kingdoms of heaven’ or ‘kingdoms of the Spirit’.
The Bible tells us that in David’s time and even before, so already around 1,000 BC, the Jewish jubilee existed. Every 50 years, in the year of the jubilee, debts were written off, land alienated through debt was returned, and slaves, who had also become slaves through debt, were freed. This attempt to wipe out the failures produced by the class division of society, inevitably doomed to failure, manifested nostalgia for the undivided social stage of primitive communism.
From the term ’verbo’, the Latin translation is more apt than the Greek one. “God is the verb, God is the word”, but not just any word. It is not the immobile motor of the Greeks. The verb is action. A word that is movement, modification, creation, stretching out to the future. The best translation of the Johannine incipit is by Goethe, who makes his Faust say: “In the beginning was action”. This god, which is not static, but which is action, movement, modification, creation, stretching out to the future, is none other than matter. The characteristics listed here are the characteristics of matter. A truly powerful intuition, expressed in the language and ideological constructions of myth, religion, magic.
The most ancient thought was magical: the word did not indicate the thing, it evoked it, it was the thing. It also brought it under its power: perhaps that is why the name of god for the Jews is unpronounceable, and why among the Yazidis, those who pronounced it were put to death. The moment the name of the god is pronounced, the god is present: when the Greeks built a statue of the god, it immediately took up residence there. The god of the Jews spoke with Abraham, the Christian one also walked and ate with men. The Greeks had even closer relations with the gods, since they begat children with them.
For us, words signify things; for the most ancient communities they were things.
The distinction between signified and signifier appears in the Greek world with
Aristotle and even more so with the Stoics. In some of the most ancient ritual
dances, in the Greek world and beyond, initiates proceeded on a spiral path that
was then walked backwards. For scholars, more in the past than than today, such
a dance represented going to the realm of the dead, and then returning. For the
people of that time it was not ’representing’ something, they really did go to
the realm of the dead and come back. We have already said that this
magical-religious dimension was the distant memory of and nostalgia for
primitive communism.
Time of the Greeks, Time of the Jews, Time of the Marxists
The burning bush speaking to Moses is movement and not stasis. The words he addresses to Moses, famously known as ’I am who I am’, should actually be translated as ’I am who I will be’, or as ’I will be who I will be’. Again, stretching towards the future, in union with the present and the past.
The Greeks had a cyclical, circular conception of time, paradoxically more ’religious’ than the Jewish one, which has endured up to Vico, Hegel and Nietzsche, who used to talk specifically of an ’eternal return’. The Jewish vision of time and history was instead linear, tending towards the future, towards the ’I will be who I will be’. This linearity, however, was not perfect and without jolts: the vicissitudes of the Jewish people narrated in the Bible, its defeats that meant slavery and foreign domination, led that people to conceive a way towards God that was indeed linear, but interrupted by various painful and tragic interruptions. An altogether less ’religious’, less metaphysical conception than that of the 19th century positivists and their ’magnificent and progressive fates’.
The Marxist conception of time and history is more indebted to the Jewish one than to the Greek. In ’The Reversal of Praxis in Marxist Theory’, which takes up our text ’Party and Class’, we read:
«A completely erroneous theory is that of the descending curve of capitalism
which leads one to falsely wonder why, while capitalism declines, the revolution
does not advance. The theory of the descending curve compares the unfolding of
history to a sinusoid: each regime, like the bourgeois regime, begins an upward
phase, reaches a maximum, then begins to decline to a minimum, after which
another regime rises. Such a view is that of gradualist reformism: there are no
surges, shocks or jumps.
«The usual claim that capitalism is in the downward branch and cannot rise again
contains two errors: the fatalist and the gradualist. The first is the illusion
that once capitalism has come down, socialism will come of itself, without
agitation, struggle and armed confrontation, without party preparation. The
second, expressed by the fact that the direction of the movement bends
insensibly, amounts to admitting that elements of socialism will progressively
interpenetrate the capitalist fabric.
«The Marxist vision can be depicted (for the sake of clarity and brevity) as
many branches of ever-ascending curves up to those summits (in geometry singular
points or cusps) which are followed by an abrupt almost vertical fall; and from
below a new social regime, another historical branch of ascent...
«Marx did not envisage an ascent and then a decline of capitalism, but instead
the simultaneous and dialectical exaltation of the mass of productive forces
that capitalism controls, of their unlimited accumulation and concentration, and
at the same time of the antagonistic reaction, constituted by those dominated
forces that is the proletarian class. The general productive and economic
potential always rises until the equilibrium is broken, and there is a
revolutionary explosive phase in which, in a very short and precipitous period,
as the old forms of production break down, the forces of production fall back to
give themselves a new order and resume a more powerful ascent...
«It should just be noted that the general ascendant sense is not meant to be
linked to idealistic visions of indefinite human progress, but to the historical
fact of the continuous swelling of the material mass of the productive forces in
the succession of great historical revolutionary crises».
Magic and Greek Philosophy
We have already said that the magical vision characteristic of the earliest religious phases and an ideological residue of primitive communism, permeated the life of those epochs, philosophy included, at a stage when it was indistinguishable from science and religion. The ’Word’, the ’Davar’, can also be found in the oldest Greek philosophy. Regarding this, one example is Parmenides of Elea, a philosopher from Magna Graecia who lived between the end of the 6th and the beginning of the 5th century BC. His words are famous: “Being is and cannot not be, non-being is not and cannot be”. Idealist interpretations of these words have been much more predominant, to the point of making him a forerunner of Hegel.
We said, in our paper on The succession of modes of production in Marxist theory, published in Comunismo no. 81, that it is both legitimate and closer to reality to apply a materialist interpretation of Parmenides’ “Being”, which we can also define as “matter occupying space”. The title of his work, ’On Nature’, was the same title that earlier philosophers gave to their writings. The first philosophers, the Ionians or physicists, and likewise the later Heraclitus, Empedocles, Democritus, were certainly materialists. Thales of Miletus, considered the oldest of the philosophers, said that all things are full of gods. Certainly there has been no lack of those who saw a divine principle here, but these ’gods’ of which Thales speaks are in fact closely related to Democritus’ atoms.
No one can say with certainty if Parmenides, or indeed Plato or Aristotle, were materialists or not. It really doesn’t matter to us. What we are interested in, on the one hand, is the materialistic aspects of that philosophy and on the other its connection to the era of magic, of the Jewish Davar, of undivided unity, on the part of a society, Parmenides’ society, where class differentiation already existed.
Such a connection is not provided by his philosophical conception of ’Being’ as
unity and perfection, on which scholars have done about as much as they can, but
by the fact, preceding the various interpretations, that in his time no
distinction was made between signified and signifier. This was brought to light
by Guido Calogero in his Studies on Eleatism dating back to 1932. For
Parmenides, the word ’being’ is the being of the word: when we pronounce ’is’,
that ’is’ is the copula, the verbal form that joins the subject to the nominal
predicate. In Parmenides’ time, it was unthinkable that the words ’is’, ’being’,
did not also have their own material reality: after all, the sound of every word
is a reality. In Parmenides’ ’Being’, as in the Hebrew ’Davar’, word and thing,
signified and signifier, coincide. They coincide in the memory of and nostalgia
for a ’golden age’ of primitive communism, which even then was a distant memory.
The Supposed Superiority of the Moderns
Two other examples. We have already said that ideologies have no value in themselves, or due to any internal coherence they might have. The Enlightenment, for example, has an enormous value as the ideology of the revolutionary bourgeoisie, its instrument to destroy the old feudal world. If we then go on to examine it we find that we agree about nothing. The “law of nature”, typical of the Enlightenment and of the doctrine of natural law of the previous century, is relevant to man as such, valid therefore in all times and places. An atemporal” conception, where there is no dialectics or sense of history.
If we look at Thomas Aquinas, here too there is obviously no dialectics and no sense of history, but there is a sense of time. The temporal dimension is here closely linked to what for him is the law of nature. Time, which is the specific environment of the ‘law’, is the condition and place of human perfectibility. If ’salvation’ is a process that takes place in time, this means that human law also takes place in time: it is not timeless. On this particular point Thomas has understood more than most of the Enlightenment philosophers.
If we then look at idealism, in that philosophy only the subject exists, or in any case plays a preponderant part. The object exists only because it is known to the subject, whose creation it is. This at least in the most consequential forms of idealism. Thomas says that we know through the senses, but that known things have a reality of their own. Thomas was certainly not a materialist, but we can call him a ’realist’, and realism is still a primitive form of materialism. For him, if there are planets so distant that they cannot be seen by us and never will be, they still exist, regardless of our ability to see and experience them. On this point, with which Lenin would have agreed, Thomas was closer to reality than the idealists of the 19th and 20th centuries.
This is to reiterate once again that the only criterion for evaluating an ideology resides in whether or not it advances the knowledge of the society to which it belongs, and above all in whether or not it constitutes a weapon to destroy a social order by now exhausted.
It has not been and will not be the weapons of criticism alone that destroy a class society by now decayed, but the criticism of arms exercised by the unscientific, the dispossessed, the ’damned of the earth’. It will only be with the ending of the last class society, and with communism, that there will be recomposed what was broken, that, to adopt the Christian terminology, the Word will become Flesh.
From Comunismo No. 64, ’The Jewish Question Today’:
«Communism is a living body in which the terms of the ancient oppositions of the
human drama, man-woman, young-old, healthy-sick, sage-fool, educated-ignorant,
learner-teacher, soul-body, dead-living-unborn, are recomposed in the social
re-appropriation of the instruments of the production and reproduction of life.
All separations, which are real contradictions, not merely logical-mental ones,
says Marx in the ’Critique of the Gotha Programme’, will be addressed and
resolved. Not by decree, but insofar as favourable conditions for their
historical overcoming will have already matured in the present society (...)
«Communists are ’on the side’ of the working class, not generically ’of the
last’. The ‘last’ elements in society who some religions used to address were
the slaves of the ancient world whose human essence they revindicated. The
proletarians, the men of modern bourgeois society, come ’after the last’, they
are the product of the capitalist process of the complete destruction of their
human specificity, they do not belong to any group, race or culture, they are
not peasants or blacksmiths, they are the product of the total alienation of
man. This is the only reason why communism is possible and within reach today
(...)
«It is difficult to portray in words the disruptive explosion of energy that
will spring from the arms and brains of all men when – freed from the
constraints of need and waste, and from the necessity of interspecific warfare –
they will be able to dialogue, and operate in concert and thoughtfulness
according to a species plan that transcends generations. Communism will then be
the long-awaited expansion and approximation of man to his cosmic dimension,
until he embraces and identifies himself with the infinite happy interactions of
the material universe, which lives, loves and knows; and whose music and singing
has always fascinated and attracted him».
(continued to next issue)
Part one
Struggle for Power in the Two Revolutions
IX - 81. The Congress Recoils - 82. The June Struggles - 83. The Situation
Changes - 84. The July Battles - 85. Defeat in the Streets and Repression - 86.
Clandestine Congress - 87. Still a Balance Sheet of the Revolution - 88. Lenin’s
Political Line - 89. History of the Oscillating Power - 90. Responding to
Tactical Objections - 91. Lenin’s Conclusions - 92. Still on the 6th Congress -
93. Where the Line Was Broken
[ It is here ]
(continued to next issue)
On the same question of Arab unification, we have also translated into English and published the following texts:
- In “The Communist Party” no.58 - “The Chimera of Arab Unification Through Inter-State Understandings” (“Il Programma Comunista” no.10, 1957);
- In “The Communist Party” no.55 - “The Historical Causes of Arab Separatism” (“Il Programma Comunista” no.6, 1958).
American landing bodies, spewed from a fleet of as many as eighty warships,
invaded the small country of Lebanon. The act of force and bullying of American
imperialism comes to conclude a complicated diplomatic intrigue that the State
Department and the Foreign Office had woven, availing themselves of the ignoble
services of the gang that rules Beirut, to obtain the ascertainment of a
“foreign” intervention in the Lebanese civil war. Intervention that proved to be
absolutely hypothetical. Observers from the U.N., this permanently desecrated
temple of international legality, had traversed the Levantine country, unable to
gather evidence of the alleged intervention of weapons and gunmen from the
neighboring United Arab Republic.
The U.N. secretary himself, who had made the usual inspection tour of the Middle
East area, had concluded in his report to the Assembly in the unfavorable
direction of the Anglo-American thesis, accepted with closed eyes by the entire
Atlantic press. But the U.S. invasion was there all the same. For the moment
there is no smell of dust in the air. There is only the suffocating stench
emanating from the Atlantic bourgeois camp. The nauseating legalitarian and
democratic hypocrisy of a State, which stands instead on the camorra of the
dollar and atomic terrorism, has finally exploded. Bursting thunderously, the
sewer has engulfed with pestilential spray the entire Atlantic press, the class
press that makes a fetish of national sovereignty and independence, of the
freedom of the peoples of the homeland, and hurls the most infamous insults at
communism, which dares to contrast such idols with internationalism and the
world workers’ State.
By attacking the Arab national-democratic revolution, American imperialism has
shown that it conceives the nation-State, only as a condition of the
preservation of capitalism. The division of the world within the framework of
nation-States serves only to ensure imperialism’s monster-States economic and
military hegemony. Now, American imperialist interests benefit from the current
State arrangement of the Arab nation, i.e., the political and military
fractionalization that allows American diplomacy to maneuver at will the wimpy
and corrupt oil monarchs or the business gangs that rage in the “free
democracies”, such as the Chamoun and Sami El Solh governments. But such an
arrangement means paralysis and death for the historical evolution of the Arab
peoples, who can hope to rid themselves of archaic social structures, often
still in the state of nomadism, on the sole condition of tearing down State
divisions, inherited from the long historical course of the Arab nation and
refreshed by imperialism. Thus, in order to safeguard special economic interests
(oil profits) and its imperialist position, the U.S. reactionarily opposes, not
only the communist revolution but even the democratic-bourgeois revolution
itself for anti-feudal purposes. What does this say to all the traitors of the
working class who stand behind the U.S. power, which they make out to be
stalwart defenders of democracy, freedom, and “social progress”?
The target of the cowardly U.S. act of force is not so much the salvation of the
fractious Chamoun regime as Arab unification. It is no coincidence that the U.S.
armed intervention was decided within hours of Iraq’s anti-monarchist
revolution, which did justice to the pro-British monarchy and its bloodthirsty
servants... The dollar gangsters are primarily concerned with preventing the
formation of the great unitary State that is in the aspirations of the pan-Arabist
movement, and thus saving the military alliances that are the greatest obstacle
to the political unification of the peoples of the Middle East. By executing the
Hashemite monarchy, overthrowing the regime of the tyrannical Nuri al-Said, a
traitor to Arab unity, abrogating the provocative Jordanian-Iraqi federation,
and withdrawing from the Baghdad pact, the Iraqi nationalist revolutionaries
would vibrate a most severe blow to the interests and prestige of U.S.
imperialism. All the idiotic diplomatic inventions of Dulles and Eisenhower,
such as the “Eisenhower Doctrine” and indirect American participation in the
Baghdad Pact, were blowing up.
The Arab revolutionary movement is not anti-capitalist, it is not communist, or
even pro-communist, as the hypocritical Atlantic bourgeois press claims, It is
not even anti-imperialist, as the press of false Moscow communism claims. The
only force in the world that can seriously struggle against imperialism and
bring about its demise is the revolutionary movement that aims to undermine the
very foundations of the capitalist mode of production, from which war and
imperialism unstoppably originate. The only revolutionary force in the world
that is truly anti-imperialist is the communist revolution. This must be said
and repeated tirelessly, especially when we are induced to deal with the
problems raised by the uprising movement of the colonial and backward countries
against the imperialist States. It is clear that the anti-imperialism of the
anti-colonial movement is only a transitory weapon, destined to fall away as
capitalist elements grow in the country organized in wage-economic forms and the
process of capital accumulation is set in motion.
The Arab countries are currently in the condition in which Risorgimento Italy
was. One and the same people, speaking the same language, professing the same
customs and traditions, having an indivisible historical evolution behind it, is
broken up into a dozen States. In the Middle East alone there are six States and
a demeaning minutiae of microscopic sultanates haunting the Persian Gulf and Red
Sea, being useful only to oil companies and Anglo-American generals. The claim
to State unification, a claim that was at other times the banner of the
Garibaldis, the Kossuths, the Bolivars, the suppression of political
divisiveness and separatism, is a claim not communist, not proletarian but
national and democratic. It lies entirely within the national bourgeois
democratic revolution.
The conscious proletariat is not interested in the formation of the nation-State
per se, but in the content of social transformations that the transition
entails. It is interested in the dialectical unlocking of the “powerful economic
factors” that Lenin saw as constrained and immobilized by the anachronistic
political structures perpetuated in the semi-feudal and backward countries.
There is no doubt that the formation of a unitary Arab State by sweeping away
the reactionary obstacles to it would induce a profound social revolution. Let
us look at Iraq. The land that in the distant past had spawned the greatest
ancient civilizations, such as Ur, Nineveh, and Babylon, is now reduced to
barren desert. Centuries of invasions and foreign rule had succeeded in turning
fertile land into a sea of sand and stones. A few decades ago the profits made
from oil extraction allowed the reconstruction of irrigation works to begin,
channelling the waters of the Tigris and Euphrates, as the ancient inhabitants
of Mesopotamia had done. But nothing was done by the monarchy that devoured
hundreds of millions of pounds, lavishing much of it on the aristocratic castes
and corrupt political personnel, whose expression and safeguard it was, while
the filthy, lousy mass of the people suffered horrible misery.
The Iraqi revolution is one of those that can set in motion “powerful economic
factors”. Already Mossaddegh’s Persia had tried, by nationalizing the oil wells,
to cut the nails of the oil pirates. Will the republican revolutionary
government that took power in Baghdad succeed where the Persian revolutionaries
failed? All prospects for historical development and social transformation that
are linked to Arab unification are contingent on the ultimate victory of the
struggle waged with extraordinary courage and skill by the Iraqi
revolutionaries. If American tanks were to restore the Hashemite dynasty to the
throne and raise the sold pro-Western regime from the dust, the innovative march
of the pan-Arab movement would suffer a tremendous blow.
We compared today’s condition of the Arab nation to the Italy of the Congress of
Berlin, which sanctioned the triumph of the feudal Holy Alliance, validly
supported by liberal England. The crisis in the Middle East proves that the new
Holy Alliance has its lair in America. The United States, by attacking the
national-democratic revolution of the Arabs, putting its overpowering arms in
the service of feudal restoration, is demonstrating, while pretending to be the
champion of democratic freedom, to what degree of reactionary involution it has
reached.
All the more serious under such circumstances is the historical responsibility
of the Russians who remain the allies and accomplices of American domination in
the ultimate world war.
The years following World War II, were years of profound upheaval for all Middle
Eastern countries that saw almost all governments shaken by crises, coups, and
social uprisings. The special geographical situation of the area, which acts as
a hinge for three continents and thus increases its strategic value, and the
enormous oil wealth, constituted a weakness rather than a strength because they
aroused the attention of the world’s top powers, drew the attention of even
stronger marauders than those who had settled there after the first great
slaughter: in place of France and England, who also did everything they could to
remain there to defend their economic-strategic interests, the power of the
dollar was firmly installed, while the lesser power of the ruble forced every
available opening.
«Thanks to the combined intervention of the two greatest victors of the Second
World Carnage, the anti-colonial revolution in the Middle East – as indeed
elsewhere – recorded less revolutionary effects than would have been desirable
for general historical reasons and for the very development of the countries
concerned.
Following the thread of the events of the early 1950s, which saw numerous
workers’ strikes in Lebanon, Iraq, Jordan and even Sudan, it is in July 1952,
after several months of large popular demonstrations and major workers’ strikes
culminating in the general strike in January of that year, the abdication of
Egypt’s King Farouk forced by the uprising of the army led by the “Free
Officers” group. In June 1953 Egypt is declared a republic, Nasser’s star begins
to shine.
Also in 1952, Camille Chamoun, a character with close ties to the West and a
close friend of King Abdullah of Jordan, assassinated a year earlier by a
Palestinian Arab, comes to power in Lebanon.
But it is Nasser’s rise to power that is the important fact: the whole policy of
nationalization of the Egyptian republic takes up the banner of pan-Arabism, of
the great united Arab homeland, tries to revive the Arab league formed since
1945, between Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Transjordan, Iraq, Lebanon and Syria,
a league that had shown all its impotence, all its ineffectiveness, all the
limits of federalism in the 1948 war against Israel. The first blow to the
reborn pan-Arabism was dealt by Iraq when it allied itself in 1954 with Turkey,
which had joined NATO two years earlier, and then joined, in 1955, the Baghdad
Pact, which extended the Turkish-Iraqi pact to Iran, Pakistan and Britain, and
which found approval and support above all in the United States.
To this “Baghdad pact” Egypt responded by signing an arms-for-cotton deal with
Czechoslovakia.
In February ’54 an uprising overthrew the Shishakli dictatorship in Syria,
opening a period of political instability. In Jordan in 1955 there were broad
popular movements against joining the Baghdad pact, and elections in ’56
resulted in a pro-Nasser government.
On July 26, 1956, Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal after yet another American
refusal to give him a loan to build the Aswan Dam; on October 29 of that year
the Israeli army began its invasion of Sinai while, a few days later,
Anglo-French troops attacked the canal area with aerial bombardment and
paratroop drops.
The aggression ended after nine days, on November 6 after joint Russian-American
intervention to end the fighting.
In early 1957, the United States again stepped forward to consolidate its
influence over that increasingly important area in the inter-imperialist
contention: on January 5, President Eisenhower presented to Congress a plan for
U.S. policy in M.E. «This plan consisted of 3 points: in the decision to
intervene with massive aid in support of friendly governments in the area; in
the intention to provide, at the president’s own discretion, military support to
States or groups of States that requested it; and in keeping ready American
military forces to intervene directly alongside friendly Middle Eastern States
threatened by international communism» (Valabrega; op. cit.).
This policy would come to fruition in the following months in Jordan and
Lebanon. In Jordan, an army coup backed by the Sovereign liquidates the
pro-Nasser Nabulsi government, while the U.S. 6th Fleet, stationed in the
Mediterranean, declares itself ready to intervene to save Jordan’s integrity and
independence. Ten million dollars is the prize granted by Washington to the
Hashemite ruler in exchange for his loyalty to the West.
In Lebanon in May 1958, as a reaction to Chamoun’s dictatorial rule a general
strike broke out that turned into a full-blown insurrection that set the entire
country ablaze. When the insurgency was turning in favor of the forces of the
“left”, on July 14 a military strike swept away the Iraqi monarchy amid popular
enthusiasm. This episode convinced the United States to intervene directly: the
next day a fleet of about fifty American ships, including two aircraft carriers,
landed 10,000 soldiers in Lebanon, while strong contingents of British
paratroopers arrived in Amman, called by King Hussein of Jordan. Order was in a
few days restored.
We thus commented on these events in our newspaper:
«The target of the cowardly U.S. act of force is not so much the salvation of
the corrupt Chamoun regime as Arab unification. It is no coincidence that the
U.S. armed intervention was decided within hours of Iraq’s anti-monarchist
revolution that did justice to the pro-British monarchy and its bloodthirsty
servants. The dollar gangsters are most concerned with preventing the formation
of the great unitary State that is in the aspirations of the pan-Arabist
movement and thus saving the military alliances that are the greatest obstacle
to the political unification of the peoples of the Middle East. By executing the
Hashemite monarchy, overthrowing the regime of the tyrannical Nuri al-Said, a
traitor to Arab unity, abrogating the provocative Jordanian-Iraqi federation,
withdrawing from the Baghdad pact, the Iraqi nationalist revolutionaries are
vibrating a most severe blow to the interests and prestige of American
imperialism (...)
The prospect of Arab unification seemed at that time still feasible, and as we
have seen was believed by the party, though unlikely, to be progressive, and a
first step in that direction seemed to be the union of Egypt and Syria, by then
passed into the Russian area of influence, a unification that gave rise to the
U.A.R. on February 1, 1958, but the sluggish Arab bourgeoisies, having come too
late to the arena of history, the expression of weak economies totally dependent
on the world market, feared far more the exploited and starving masses of poor
proletarians and peasants whose upheavals had favored their coming to power,
than the old tribal classes whose place they had taken and the international
imperialism so oft condemned in words. The conclusion was that in all countries
the new bourgeois governments immediately repressed any spontaneous mass
movement and agreed either with the old ousted classes or with imperialism of
the West or East, depending on their contingent State interests.
In fact, as early as September 1958 we could write, «As we easily predicted, the
M.E. question, transferred to the plane of diplomatic negotiations, found its
denouement in the most cynical and laughable fiddle. A fiddle among the young
Arab States above all. Worried about losing buyers (which is particularly true
of commodity producers of global importance, such as Iraq, Tunisia, Morocco, and
so on) divided by conflicting interests and historical traditions, anxious not
to lose control of the unleashed and unreliable masses ready to kowtow to the
first “charitably” willing banker to provide oxygen in cash (which applies to
all), the young and greedy bourgeoisies swearing by the Koran have set aside
their mannerist “anti-colonialism” by bartering the withdrawal of “foreign
soldiers” against the triumphant entry of no less foreign money, by making their
own – they who claim to be the bearers of the revolutionary holy war – the
principles of “non-interference”, “mutual respect, integrity and national
sovereignty”, in short, the defense of a status quo that is also the expression
and product of imperialist domination, the reverse of the vaunted aspiration for
a unitary Arab State extended from West Asia to all of North Africa» (Il
Programma Comunista, 16/1958).
In these years, any possibility of a radical bourgeois revolution closed because
of the complete victory of the imperialist strategy that wants the maintenance
of the political division of the Middle East into several weak States in
perpetual conflict with each other, a solution that is certainly favored by the
weakness even in numbers of the proletariat and the exploited masses in that
region. Precisely in the wake of this defeat, in January 1964, the summit of top
Arab leaders meeting in Cairo, among the many issues and contrasts between the
various States that it brought to light without resolving them, took the
important decision to recognize the Palestinian entity, the first step toward
the creation of the Palestine Liberation Organization that would officially take
place a few months later. The timing chosen for this important decision confirms
even more decisively that it was not dictated by the will of the various Arab
governments against Israeli imperialism to solve the problem of the hundreds of
thousands of Palestinian refugees expelled from their lands, but by the fear
that all the Arab States had of the potential for social revolt that was
building up in the camps and that had already given rise since 1958, in the
camps of the Gaza Strip, to the first guerrilla nuclei, Al Fatah and its armed
wing Al-‘Asifah (The Storm).
Although the Palestinian movement was born with a moderate, pro-Nasser and pan-Arabist
agenda, it was from the beginning violently opposed by Arab States that feared
its possible radicalization given the terrible conditions of refugee existence.
The first guerrilla groups, as we have said, had been formed in the early 1950s
in the Gaza Strip since this territory, although placed since 1949 under
Egyptian administration, was never formally annexed to Egypt, and some freedom
of action was therefore possible there.
This is how the birth of Al Fatah is described in Politica Internazionale:
«It thus enjoyed a wide autonomy, within which the future elites of the
Palestinian national movement could be formed. At first Nasserism gathered a
very broad consensus among the Palestinians of Gaza, which soon resulted in the
establishment of fedayeen groups, whose activities were constantly controlled
from Cairo. The Suez crisis, as a result of which for a few months the region
fell under Israeli control, and more so the blockade that the Egyptian
authorities subsequently imposed on any guerrilla activity moving from Gaza
against Israel, made the more politically conscious Palestinian elements realize
the serious limitations involved in a strategy aimed at the liberation of
Palestine entirely based on the supposed revolutionary capacity and military
potential of “progressive” Arab regimes. It was during this period that Yasser
Arafat, like many other future Palestinian leaders operated a real reversal of
optics; while holding to the basic perspective of pan-Arabism, they nevertheless
understood that the path to Arab unity had to pass through the struggle for the
liberation of Palestine and not vice versa. The Palestinian national movement
therefore had to make a qualitative leap; it had to cease being in tow of the
various Arab countries and become itself, through its own autonomous strategy of
struggle, the real engine of Arab unity.
The tragic fact that would weigh terribly in future events was that Pan-Arabism
could in no way be resurrected, neither from below – that is, by resting on the
Arab refugees from Palestine, scattered somewhat throughout the Middle East – or
even less from above, as Nasser had tried to do.
Pan-Arabism is over, the historical appointments it had had resoundingly missed,
and Palestinian irredentism could not now resurrect it. The thousands of
Palestinian refugees crammed into camps and bidonvilles thus reflected the whole
tragedy of the Middle East, a mosaic not of nations (which exist neither in a
minor format nor, as historical facts have shown, in a single major format of a
single Arab nation) but of lousy States attached to their special interests,
each tied hand and foot to this or that power, each ranting about an economic
and political independence denied them by their real dependence on the world
market for oil or cotton or on the arms supplies of one or another world power,
each as proud and haughty as they are prone servants of the big international
entities, each ruled by greedy and sucking pseudo-bourgeoisies or even by relics
of a millenary past not even feudal but barely tribal.
The path taken by Al Fatah, which could not but lead where it has led, could not
but repeatedly sacrifice the material interests of the Palestinian plebs on the
altar of an impossible national emancipation now discarded by history. These
poor and ragged plebs had only one chance before them: that of succeeding in
fixing before their eyes the class, not “race” or “nation”, enemy, and, huddling
together in a single army of the dispossessed, equipping themselves to wipe out
local and foreign cops and masters, all equally interested in their miseries and
misfortunes.
In fact, it was precisely by virtue of the national and racial road taken that
the Arab regimes, in September 1964, recognized the PLO founded in Alexandria at
the Second Arab Summit, and placed it under their tutelage, since, despite all
the declarations of pan-Arabism from below, it was they who enabled with aid,
money and arms the life of the nascent organization, which, in their vows, was
to have in the interests of the Arab States the limit of its action, so that the
dangers of social uprisings would be neutralized by Arafat’s anti-Jewish
guerrilla framing, a guarantee that the crumbling and corrupt Arab regimes would
survive their flaccidity and weakness.
Another consideration must be made: the PLO by favoring this state of affairs
was making cast of its own pan-Arabism from below, which, taken literally,
should have overcome the existing Arab regimes, but the reason of State applied
to the PLO itself: the breaking of the umbilical cord that binds it to the
existing regimes was one of race and nation, and this breaking would have been
worth taking another path, but in that case no PLO, no Arafat!
Dollar Gangster Imperialists Assaults Arab Revolution
(From Il Programma Comunista, no.14, 1958)
These Are the Stark Facts. What Is Our Position?
The Myth of Arab Unity
(Comunismo no.12 June 1983 - Marxist Lesson of State Formation and Social Struggles in the Middle East)
«A bourgeois revolution ’all the way through,’ in the age of imperialism, is
even more unrealizable than in the past if the new powers succeeding the old
ones are not born on the wave of grandiose movements of the exploited masses and
do not rest on the armed force of the same. In Middle Eastern countries many
feudal monarchies have thus been transformed without great shock into bourgeois
monarchies and continue to rule in new guises. But even there where monarchy has
been replaced by republic the event is rather to be regarded as the result of
narrow military revolts than of mass political movements» (Il Programma
Comunista, 12/1965).
«The Arab countries are currently in the condition in which Risorgimento Italy
found itself. One and the same people speaking the same language, professing the
same customs and traditions, having behind them an indivisible historical
evolution is broken up into a dozen States (...) The claim to State unification,
reunification which was at other times the banner of the Garibaldis, Kossuths
and Bolivars, the suppression of political divisiveness and separatism, is a
claim not communist, not proletarian, but national and democratic. It lies
entirely within the national bourgeois democratic revolution.
«The conscious proletariat is not interested in the formation of the
nation-State per se, but in the content of social transformations that the
transition entails. It is interested in the dialectical unlocking of the
“powerful economic factors” that Lenin saw as constrained and immobilized by the
anachronistic political structures perpetuated in the semi-feudal and backward
countries» (Il Programma Comunista, 14/1958).
«For the Nasserians, no less than for the Ba’athists, the quest for autonomy
that was emerging among the Palestinians constituted a serious involution of a
separatist type, as if they wanted to detach themselves from the unification
process that then involved not a few Arab countries; a provincialist retreat
that not only had to be fought ideologically, but also repressed concretely.
Thus were implemented by the Arab States the first police persecutions of those
Palestinian leaders who did not intend to bend to the political directives
coming from Cairo or Damascus and who, a fortiori, contested the Palestinian
policy of Hussein of Jordan. Arafat, Abu Iyad and other Palestinian leaders thus
found themselves forced to seek refuge in the Arab countries of the Gulf and
particularly in Kuwait, where the climate of anti-Palestinian repression
dominant in other Arab States was not present. It was precisely in Kuwait that
Al Fatah was founded, the Palestinian organization that more than any other
would develop in the future, which did not fail to reiterate in the pages of its
theoretical journal Filastinuna (Our Palestine) whose first issue was published
in 1959, the concept that the struggle of the Palestinian people should follow a
completely – autonomous direction with respect to the wishes of the various Arab
regime».