Introduction

What is Western Marxism?

Curated By

Unlearning Capitalism

A curated directory of educational resources for radical political education focused on building a better world beyond capitalism.

About this Collection

About this Collection

"Western Marxism is the Marxism born from the profound crisis of 1914–18 and from the triumph of the Bolshevik Revolution, which split the socialist movement and produced a rethinking of Marxist theory by intellectuals who were detached from political practice." 

- Domenico Losurdo

Understood as a branch of Marxist thought that has developed in the wealthy nations of the imperial core, Western Marxism is defined by a focus on theoretical and abstract novelty over the concrete application of Marxist-Leninist theory. Western Marxists regard the actually existing projects of socialist construction in countries like China, Cuba, North Korea and Vietnam as unacceptable deviations from orthodox political theory and thus unworthy of support or consideration. This refusal to apply dialectical thinking to present day socialist development leads to de facto support for the 'end of history' hypothesis - that there is no viable alternative to capitalism - and thus to support for imperialism.

Read this collection online: https://unlearn.capital/collections/western-marxism

10 articles · 2 books · 3 podcasts · 3 videos

This ebook is about 127 pages long.

Table of Contents

Table of Contents

1. Explaining the Dire State of the Western Left

4 pages

https://radicaldesai.substack.com/p/explaining-the-dire-state-of-the

Dr. Radhika Desai

By Radhika Desai

The Western and European left's decline stems from seven historical parameters, including its ideological capitulation to capitalism and imperialism, marked by 'guns and butter' compromises with national capitalisms before WWI; Marxists' 'theoretical reconciliation' with neoclassical economics.

2. Western Marxism and the Myth of Capitalism's Adamantine Chains

17 pages

https://monthlyreview.org/articles/western-marxism-and-the-myth-of-capitalisms-adamantine-chains/

Monthly Review

By John Bellamy Foster

Western Marxism abandoned revolutionary praxis by accepting capitalism's 'adamantine chains' and adopting a defeatist view of history.

3. The Third Wave of Socialism

13 pages

https://thetricontinental.org/wenhua-zongheng-2023-4-third-wave-of-socialism/

Wenhua Zongheng (文化纵横)

China's socialism with Chinese characteristics represents a third wave of socialism reshaping the global order amid capitalism's crises.

4. Behind Western Marxists’ misunderstanding of imperialism lie their class interests

8 pages

https://amyyyang00.substack.com/p/behind-western-marxists-misunderstanding

Amy Yang

Argues that Western Marxists misinterpret imperialism due to their privileged class position, contrasting their views with the anti-imperialist stance of Third World nations.

5. death of the theory bro

16 pages

https://www.culture-shock.xyz/p/death-of-the-theory-bro

Return to Bandung

By Pranay Somayajula

Critiques both the obnoxious 'theory bro' archetype and the resulting anti-intellectual backlash on the left, arguing for the importance of revolutionary theory and political education.

6. The Western Left's Collaboration with the Western Bourgeoisie

7 pages

https://hoodcommunist.org/2021/09/09/the-western-lefts-collaboration-with-the-western-bourgeoisie/

Hood Communist

By Ajamu Baraka

The Western left has become complicit with imperialist powers through ideological alignment with neoliberalism and Western exceptionalism, abandoning anti-colonial principles.

7. Decolonizing Western Marxism

4 pages

https://socialistachampagne.substack.com/p/decolonizing-western-marxism

Socialista Champagne

By Isabella Aidar

The author argues that Western Marxists must reject unipolar hegemony and recognize how imperialism creates distinct revolutionary conditions for the Global South.

8. The Long Transition Toward Socialism and the End of Capitalism

13 pages

https://redantcollective.org/2025/04/15/the-long-transition-toward-socialism-and-the-end-of-capitalism-by-torkil-lauesen/

Red Anti-Imperialist Collective

This review analyzes Torkil Lauesen's book examining historical revolutions and current geopolitical shifts toward multipolarity and socialist transition.

9. China and the Purity Fetish of Western Marxism

35 pages

https://orinocotribune.com/china-and-the-purity-fetish-of-western-marxism/

Orinoco Tribune

By Carlos L. Garrido

Critiques Western Marxists' purity fetish that prevents them from recognizing China's socialist achievements and its role in the anti-imperialist struggle.

10. The Sun Does Not Rise From The West. A Review of Domenico Losurdo's Western Marxism: How it was Born, How it Died, and How it Can be Reborn

10 pages

https://redantcollective.org/2025/01/08/the-sun-does-not-rise-from-the-west-a-review-of-domenico-losurdos-western-marxism-how-it-was-born-how-it-died-and-how-it-can-be-reborn/

Red Anti-Imperialist Collective

By Brendan Duncan-Shah

This review critiques Western Marxism for neglecting anti-colonial struggles and argues for its rebirth through reconnection with global revolutionary traditions.

Other Resources

Other Resources

This collection also includes other media types such as books, videos, podcasts, and more.

Books

Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism?

https://monthlyreview.org/9781685901363/who-paid-the-pipers-of-western-marxism/

Monthly Review

By Gabriel Rockhill

This book reveals how the CIA secretly financed Western Marxist intellectuals to steer radical thought away from Soviet sympathy. It contends that Western Marxism's cultural turn was shaped by this covert funding, which flowed through front groups like the Congress for Cultural Freedom to thinkers such as Raya Dunayevskaya and the Frankfurt School.

Western Marxism

https://monthlyreview.org/9781685900649/western-marxism/

Monthly Review

By Domenico Losurdo

The book traces Western Marxism from its 1920s emergence as a critical alternative to Soviet orthodoxy, arguing that it died as a political force by becoming an academic discipline divorced from revolutionary practice, but can be reborn by reconnecting with the revolutionary movements and practical struggles that originally shaped it.

Podcasts

Resisting Western Ideological Warfare: The Politics of Anti-Imperialist Knowledge Production

https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/intlsolidarity/episodes/Resisting-Western-Ideological-Warfare-The-Politics-of-Anti-Imperialist-Knowledge-Production-w-Jeannette-Graulau--Charles-Xu-e3gndks

Journal of International Solidarity

By Jeannette Graulau and Charles Xu

Examines how knowledge production is dominated by capitalists and imperialists, and how anti-imperialists can contest this unequal terrain politically.

Western Marxism and The Imperial Theory Industry

https://revolutionaryleftradio.libsyn.com/western-marxism-and-the-imperial-theory-industry

Rev Left Radio

By Gabriel Rockhill

Discusses Gabriel Rockhill's book about how U.S. imperial power shaped Western Marxism by promoting a compatible left that rejected actually existing socialist struggles.

The Intellectual World War w/ Gabriel Rockhill

https://bb336368-b933-4b06-88b6-e51256ac6d81.libsyn.com/the-intellectual-world-war-w-gabriel-rockhill

Upstream Podcast

By Gabriel Rockhill

Gabriel Rockhill examines how imperialist forces created anticommunist Marxism to divide and neutralize the left through intellectual warfare and knowledge production.

Videos

A Critique of Western Marxism

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GuxED3ktDVQ

Red Pen

Contrasts Western Marxism with Marxism-Leninism, defending China's socialist market reforms through the lens of historical materialism.

The Political Economy of Western Marxism

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQZ4vWiNA5s

Critical Theory Workshop

By Gabriel Rockhill

Gabriel Rockhill examines the political economy underlying Western Marxist thought.

Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism? D.C. Launch

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O6oQsbIgywo

Critical Theory Workshop

By Gabriel Rockhill

Gabriel Rockhill presents his book on how the Frankfurt School served as imperialist propaganda, arguing for an anti-imperialist Marxist approach to ideology.

Explaining the Dire State of the Western Left

What is Western Marxism? — Explaining the Dire State of the Western Left

Explaining the Dire State of the Western Left

Article 1 of 10

Dr. Radhika Desai

By Radhika Desai

Originally published at https://radicaldesai.substack.com/p/explaining-the-dire-state-of-the

I recently participated in a discussion of this question and here is the full text of my remarks.

Where is the European Left Headed?

Radhika Desai

The state of the western and European left is dire. In understanding why it is so, particularly at a time when people sorely need it to be strong, I would make 7 points.

1. If, rather than benefitting from what some call ‘the systemic crisis of the liberal system combined with Western decline’, dominant left forces are in decline themselves, it is not because of any Gramscian mechanisms: Gramsci’s extrapolation of Lenin’s concept of hegemony among compatible classes to theorise the ideological relation between antagonistic classes was always problematic. Rather, we need to understand this ideological relation as a struggle.

2. It is a struggle in which the left threw in the towel a long time ago, a good century before the end of the USSR, which is the turning point for some.

a. First, there is the objective pull of imperialism which led working class parties to enter into ‘guns and butter’ compromises – reform in return for support for imperialism – with their respective national capitalisms in the decades before the First World War. This accounted for their scandalous betrayal when it broke out.

b. Connected to this, as the left in Europe split between a ‘Western’ and an ‘Eastern’ Marxism with the Bolshevik Revolution, there was a tendency to dismiss the experience of actually existing socialism as something alien to the left.

c. Both these tendencies were tied to an intellectual capitulation. It began with the arrival of neoclassical economics to displace political economy whose implications for legitimising capitalism had already become adverse with Ricardo, let alone Marx. Rather than challenging it comprehensively, Marxists pursued what Bukharin called ‘a policy of theoretical reconciliation’ with it. They criticized it only for ignoring the exploitation of workers. For the rest, their reconciling only led to a series of false accusations against Marx’s analysis of capitalism as contradictory value production: that it suffered from a ‘transformation problem’, that it did not consider paucity of demand a problem and that it was wrong about the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. The result was that Western Marxism and so-called ‘Marxist economics’ sports not a Marxist understanding of capitalism but a Schumpeterian one, bereft of contradiction, prodigiously productive and, very importantly, unconnected with imperialism. The result, as I have argued in a 2020 article, is that the New Left Review Tradition denies the necessary relation of capitalism and imperialism outright while the Monthly Review tradition examines it with an eclectic non-Marxist theoretical apparatus. Both ignore Marx’s account of what make imperialism imperative for capitalism.

The effect of this capitulation to liberalism cannot be overstated. It led Marxists to claim capitalism was superior to socialism. It led them to attribute Western prosperity to capitalism’s allegedly promethean productivity, not to imperialism. And, while it is true that Marxism did not remain the leading force of the dominant left forces in the post war period, the lack of an authentic Marxism ensured that there was no force further to the left of the dominant left forces was capable of pulling them leftwards in the wake of their repeated failures and disappointments.

3. These failures and disappointments have pulled dominant left forces only further to the right, evacuating the left of the political spectrum. Today, the historic parties of the left are parties of the corporate establishment, threatened only by insurgent forces further to their right. These are headquartered in the US with strong outposts in the English speaking countries and then the continental European countries. They represent a maverick form of capital demanding even more deregulation, as if four decades of deregulation that have already deindustrialised and financialized western economies and sent inequality skyrocketing were not enough. These forces have been coyly called populist. In reality, as I recently argued in the British Marxist Journal Theory and Struggle, they are fascist, they are what fascism must be in the twenty-first century.

4. These developments have reached a point where we now have, in the UK, a chancellor of the exchequer to whom the trust of financial markets is more important than delivering on election promises to her working class base and a prime minister who is willing to pander to the worst forms of racism as preferable to promising real material gains to that base.

5. In the absence of a serious left politics, politics dominated by the confrontation between two parties of the right, two parties of corporate capital. The intense political rivalry between them has given rise to comparisons to civil war. Indeed, I would argue, using an expression of Arno Mayer, the great historian of international politics in Europe at the end of the First World War, that it is an ‘international civil war’ fought as much within as between countries.

6. The rise of new forces championing so-called ‘woke’ issues but weak on imperialism and war was inevitable given that the historic parties of the working class themselves gave up on Marxism, with its theoretical understanding of the formative relation between capitalism and imperialism, and its original feminist and anti-racist principles. This sacrifice left these forces susceptible to the corporate sponsorship of ‘woke’ social liberalism as a substitute for genuine, inclusive anti-imperialist socialism.

7. Finally, therefore, the problems of the left as arising from a popular submission to the dominant ideology. Such submission is simply not possible in such unequal societies as ours. Instead, it is important to recognise that the historic parties of the working class have become parties of the professional middle class. As this class, which has burgeoned in the age of monopoly capital, and is particularly heavily concentrated in the West in the age of deindustrialization, has taken over the historic parties of the working class, some working people, though by no means all, have been lured by new fascist forces. However, many others continue to search for genuine left alternatives, as the surge in support for Your party when it was announced or the popularity or Zack Polanski or the election of Zohran Mamdani or the resistance in Minneapolis to the ravages of Trump’s Praetorian guard, ICE, suggest. The point is not that the leaders are less than ideal but that the spectacular support for them evinces popular hunger for a left politics. This is material foundation on which the left must build. With the weakening of imperialism, the old guns and butter contract between Western working classes and their corporate masters can only break down and that can only make this foundation broader, deeper and stronger.

You can watch the full discussion here.

Western Marxism and the Myth of Capitalism's Adamantine Chains

What is Western Marxism? — Western Marxism and the Myth of Capitalism's Adamantine Chains

Western Marxism and the Myth of Capitalism's Adamantine Chains

Article 2 of 10

Monthly Review

By John Bellamy Foster

Originally published at https://monthlyreview.org/articles/western-marxism-and-the-myth-of-capitalisms-adamantine-chains/

ЦЕПИ РВУТСЯ-ЭТО ОТЗВУК НАШЕЙ РЕВОЛЮЦИИ! "Breaking Chains—That’s an Echo of Our Revolution!" by Viktor Koretsky, 1968.

John Bellamy Foster is editor of Monthly Review and professor emeritus of sociology at the University of Oregon. His most recent book is Breaking the Bonds of Fate: Epicurus and Marx (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2025).

This article is a slightly revised version of the keynote address delivered to the inaugural conference of the Society for Peace, Internationalism, and Ecology (SPINE) on October 11, 2025 at Villanova University in Pennsylvania.

In his doctoral thesis on the ancient philosopher Epicurus, Karl Marx compared Epicurus to Prometheus, the Titan of Greek mythology, who was bound with unbreakable adamantine chains to a rock for what was intended to be eternity by Hephaestus on the orders of Zeus. Prometheus’s crime was that he had provided fire, standing for universal enlightenment (the name Prometheus means “foresight”) and creative, emancipatory powers to humanity.¹ The symbolism was important. Marx quoted Epicurus (via Lucretius) several times in his dissertation on “breaking the bonds of fate,” arguing that a materialist perspective was not necessarily rigidly deterministic or fatalistic, but rather was compatible with notions of human freedom, which would always break free or swerve away from any imposed limits.² For Marx, no adamantine fetters stood in the way of the progress of freedom. As the 20-year-old revolutionary Frederick Engels wrote in “Retrograde Signs of Our Times,” all reactionary movements “eventually disintegrate in conflict with one another and under the adamantine foot of the forward moving time,” which inevitably creates new conditions and new revolts.³ In Aeschylus’s great dramatic trilogy, Prometheus Bound was succeeded by Prometheus Unbound, and then Prometheus the Firebearer, standing for the great gift of freedom to humanity. Marx, who read Aeschylus every year in the original Greek, never lost sight of the revolutionary implications of the Greek myth.⁴

The post-Second World War Western Marxist philosophical tradition departed from the revolutionary spirit of classical historical materialism, in effect accepting the notion of adamantine chains imposed by capitalism on the working class, while abandoning the notion of “breaking the bonds of fate.” The ancient Greek Promethean myth, as presented by Aeschylus, was inverted, becoming a symbol not of enlightenment, hope, defiance, and revolution, but of the adamantine fetters imposed by modern capitalism, which could not be surmounted. For Herbert Marcuse in his Eros and Civilization, Prometheus stood for toil, order, and imprisonment. This was not the Prometheus of Aeschylus, representing defiance and revolt on behalf of humanity, but the Cold War version of the Prometheus myth armed against Marxism.⁵ Western Marxism thus surrendered to defeatism and adopted its own version of the end of history, as in the abstract negativity of Marcuse’s Great Refusal, replacing revolutionary praxis.⁶ None other than Perry Anderson wrote in Considerations on Western Marxism in 1976, “The hidden hallmark of Western Marxism as a whole is…that it is a product of defeat. The failure of the socialist revolution to spread outside Russia…is the common background to the entire theoretical tradition of this period…. This unbroken record of political defeat—for working-class struggle, for socialism—could not but have profound effects on the nature of Marxism formed in this era.”⁷ Here Anderson ignored revolutions in the periphery, such as those of China and Cuba, as of no significance in this regard, since occurring outside a developed occidental capitalism.

The Dialectic of Defeat

At the root of the retrogression of Western Marxism was a belief in the complete economic triumph of capitalism. As Marcuse wrote in One-Dimensional Man, “The enchained possibilities of advanced industrial societies are: development of the productive forces on an enlarged scale, extension of the conquest of nature, growing satisfaction of needs for a growing number of people, creation of new needs and possibilities. But these possibilities are gradually being realized through means and institutions which cancel their liberating potential, and this process affects not only the means but the ends.”⁸ The result of such a Western Marxist conception was the writing off altogether of proletarian-based revolutions, which were undermined by capitalism’s “enchained possibilities.”

The various material successes that Marx pointed to in his panegyric to the bourgeoisie in the first half of Part One of The Communist Manifesto were seen by Marcuse as freed of the contradictions that Marx introduced a few pages later: economic crises; the sorcerer’s apprentice, standing for the unforeseen rifts between society and nature; and the rise of capital’s gravedigger in the form of the modern proletariat. Capitalism was thus presented as victorious in a material sense. “On theoretical as well as empirical grounds, the dialectical concept,” Marcuse stated,

pronounces its own hopelessness. The human reality is its history, and, in it, contradictions do not explode by themselves. The conflict between streamlined, rewarding domination on the one hand, and its achievements that make for self-determination and pacification [of the struggle for human existence] on the other, may become blatant beyond any hope of denial, but it may well continue to be a manageable and even productive conflict, for with the growth in the technological conquest of nature grows the conquest of man by man.

Summing up, he wrote, “dialectical theory is not refuted, but it cannot offer the remedy. It cannot be positive.”⁹

The view that saw a Weberian “iron age” imposed by capitalism based on its economic and technological successes became the default position of the Frankfurt School and the Western Marxist philosophical tradition as a whole. Writing during the first quarter-century after the Second World War in what is today called “the golden age,” Western Marxists adopted the view that not only was the capitalist economy an overriding success, but the proletariat had been enriched and permanently “bourgeoisified,” enchained in its subservient role by the petty rewards obtained in the process of capitalism’s successful development. This was evident in the work of Theodor Adorno, who argued in 1964 that, contrary to the Marx and Engels of The Communist Manifesto, workers now had much “more to lose” than simply their chains. He referred here to their “cars and motorcycles.”¹⁰ What Adorno meant by this, from the standpoint of his negative dialectics, was that these commodities, symbolizing the embourgeoisement of the proletariat, represented new sociopsychological chains of oppression. Marx’s absolute general law of accumulation, in which he had emphasized that the relative gap between the capitalist class and the working class constantly increased, creating ever-greater class polarization, whether the workers’ wages were “high or low,” was trivialized by Adorno, in line with Cold War ideology, as a mere “theory of immiseration.”¹¹

Following in the footsteps of Engels and V. I. Lenin in this respect, Adorno insisted that Western workers were now to a considerable degree bourgeoisified. However, Adorno did not follow Engels and Lenin in analyzing such embourgeoisement in terms of the labor aristocracy theory, whereby a privileged section of workers benefited from the surplus of monopoly capitalism/imperialism.¹² Nor did he subscribe to the notion, emphasized by Engels, in relation to Britain, that the existence of a labor aristocracy and the embourgeoisement of a significant section of the proletariat was fleeting, eventually to be undermined by the waning of colonial/imperial dominance. Rather, Adorno’s Eurocentric analysis left no room for the critique of imperialism, or even a developed analysis of monopoly capitalism. As the German critic Hans Mayer, who had known Adorno since 1934, remarked: “Europe sufficed for him entirely. No India or China, no Third World, not the people’s democracies and not the workers’ movement.”¹³

What is at issue here can be clarified by saying that the main thrust of the philosophical tradition of Western Marxism is characterized by four retreats: (1) from class, (2) from materialism, (3) from the dialectics of nature, and (4) from the critique of imperialism. Behind this is not a denial of Marxist theory altogether, but rather its enclosure in a permanent bourgeois universe, which could be critically analyzed for its lack of true liberation but not transcended.¹⁴

The retreat from class was built into the notion that in its golden-age capitalism was lessening class distinctions and removing any radicalism on the part of an affluent bourgeoisified working class with their cars and motorcycles.¹⁵ The retreat from materialism was both an abandonment of genuine economic critique and, more importantly, of the materialist conception of nature, the dialectical counterpart of the materialist conception of history. The retreat from the dialectics of nature meant that the human relation to external nature could be reduced to a technological conquest of nature (what Max Horkheimer and Adorno dubbed the “dialectic of Enlightenment”).¹⁶ The retreat from critique of imperialism meant that Europe was the final destiny and the definition of modernity. As Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel had written: “the History of the World travels from East to the West, for Europe is absolutely the end of History.”¹⁷

Western Marxism was a retreat from Marx, not so much to Hegel, but rather to Max Weber, who rejected the Marxian theory of class and class struggle (in favor of the mere competition for life chances on the market); replaced historical materialism with neo-Kantian idealism, dualism, and methodological individualism; and conceived of the West as the only source of cultural phenomena of “universal significance and value” based on formal or instrumental rationality. Hence, the world was an “iron cage,” from which there was no escape.¹⁸ In its long, convoluted dialectical inversion, Western Marxism went from the left-Hegelian notion that “the rational is real” not to its opposite, the right-Hegelian notion that “the real is rational,” but rather steering toward the pseudo-critical, pseudo-Freudian position that the irrational is real, ruled by the “death instinct,” with the world permanently stripped by capitalism of any genuine materialist-revolutionary content.¹⁹ It thus increasingly converged with the anti-rationalist reaction of Friedrich Nietzsche. This is what Russell Jacoby called, in the title of his book, the Dialectic of Defeat.²⁰ The dialectic of defeat of Western Marxism was not of course the dialectic of a spiral, embodying the negation of the negation, but what Adorno termed “negative dialectics,” denying a positive moment altogether, and thus caught up in an endless circling back to bourgeois views.²¹

Where Western Marxism thrived was in its analysis of the subjective, particularly in the application of psychoanalytic categories drawn from Sigmund Freud, and the critique of reification. There were detailed analyses of the culture industry and media domination. Yet, this gave rise not to analysis of the vicissitudes of class consciousness but rather to the reified, enchained world of class unconsciousness, turning Georg Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness on its head.²² The problem, as Marcuse put it in Weberian terms, is that the “administered individuals” of modern one-dimensional society must “liberate themselves from themselves as well as from their masters.”²³ The almost exclusive focus thus became the self-destruction of the human material for change. So great was the problem as conceived in critical theory that Marcuse, as we have seen, asked whether the critical theory of society must abdicate altogether, “the dialectic having pronounced its hopelessness.” He concluded his book by highlighting the bare possibility that “the historical extremes may meet again: the most advanced consciousness of humanity and its most exploited force. It is nothing but a chance.”²⁴

The Longer and Wider View

Raymond Williams strongly warned against “long-run adjustments to short-run problems,” the tendency to see the condition of the immediate moment as determining the long-run trajectory.²⁵ Rather, as Paul A. Baran insisted, it was necessary to take “the longer view” directly into account in all of one’s immediate actions, in order to understand the contradictions, and possibilities for revolutionary praxis. Baran was a Russian Marxist economist who was a researcher at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt prior to Adolf Hitler’s rise to power, and who emigrated to the United States at the commencement of the Second World War. In the 1960s, he wrote Monopoly Capital with Paul M. Sweezy, which exhibited some aspects of the Frankfurt School analysis, but which was also a historical critique of the irrational monopolistic and imperialistic capitalism of the twentieth century. Although Baran and Sweezy, like Marcuse, ended their book with the observation that the working class was not then in revolt in the United States, unlike Marcuse they did not see this as a permanent phenomenon, but rather as something that would change with changing historical conditions. Writing in the mid-1960s, they concluded that “even if the present protest movements should suffer defeat or prove abortive, that would be no reason to write off permanently the possibility of a real revolutionary movement in the United States.”²⁶ Not only were militarism and imperialism at the center of Baran and Sweezy’s book, but Baran had published the pioneering dependency analysis, The Political Economy of Growth, less than a decade before.²⁷ Baran and Sweezy argued, based on concrete reality, that the main revolutionary struggle between workers and capital had shifted in the twentieth century to the periphery of the system in the Global South, which was the basis of the contemporary world revolution inspired by Marxist theory.

Baran had a long friendship with Marcuse going back to the early 1930s, when they were both at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt. Marcuse sent him the manuscript of One-Dimensional Man in 1963, prior to publication. Seeing the flaws in the work, Baran wrote to Sweezy:

What is at the present time at issue and indeed most urgently so is the question of whether [the] Marxian dialectic has broken down, i.e. whether it is possible for Scheisse [shit] to accumulate, to coagulate, to cover all of society (and a goodly part of the related world) without producing the dialectical counter-force which would break through it and blow it into the air. Hic Rhodus, hic salta! If the answer is affirmative then Marxism in its traditional form has become superannuated. It has predicted the misery, it has explained full well the causes of [this misery] becoming as comprehensive as it is; it was in error, however, in its central thesis that the misery generates itself the forces of its abolition.

I have just finished reading Marcuse’s new book (in MS) [One-Dimensional Man], which in a laborious kind of a way advances this very position which is called the Great Refusal or the Absolute Negation. Everything is Dreck [dirt]: monopoly capitalism and the Soviet Union, capitalism and socialism as we know it; the negative part of the Marx story has come True—its positive part remained a figment of imagination. We are back at the state of the Utopians pure and simple; a better world there should be but there ain’t no social force in sight to bring it about. Not only is Socialism no answer, but there isn’t anyone to give that answer anyway. From the Great Refusal and the Absolute Negation to the Great Withdrawal and the Absolute Betrayal is a very short step….

What is required is a cool analysis of the whole situation, the restoration of a historical perspective, a reminder of the relevant time dimensions and much more.²⁸

There is no doubt that in many cases, as Baran intimated, the Great Refusal and the Absolute Negation did turn into the Great Withdrawal and the Absolute Betrayal. The argument that the real is irrational, when divorced from a “cool [materialist] analysis of the whole situation, the restoration of a historical perspective, and a reminder of the relevant time dimensions”—not excluding the Eurocentric failure to confront imperialism—led to an absolute retreat into what Lukács called the “Grand Hotel Abyss.”²⁹ It was only a step beyond this to retrograde forms of postmodernism and posthumanism, representing purportedly radical views that undermined what was left of the radical Enlightenment. Hegel ended his final work with the question “reform or revolution?” (clearly preferring the former).³⁰ The post-Marxist left is no longer capable of doing even that, identifying with populism or republicanism, anything but genuine socialist praxis rooted in the international working class, as if it were a relic of a different age. But with this was lost any hope of transcending the existing society. “The history of [Western] Marxism,” Jacoby wrote, “is the loss of the dialectical critique of bourgeois society.”³¹

Material Crisis of Our Time and the Necessity of Freedom

In truth, there is no such thing as an objective dialectic of defeat. History is a process of continuity and change, of the negation of the negation, with no possibility of a final ending short of nuclear or environmental oblivion (real possibilities today). Western Marxism inculcated a view that history had reached a resting point, even if it continued to peer out between the bars of the iron cage—most often simply peering about within. The main focus of critical theory was understanding the persuasive power of capital and the capitulation of the working class that this brought about. Class analysis gave way in postmodernist thinkers, like Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, who took this logic to its conclusion, to the treatment of capitalist induced schizophrenia.³²

As Galileo is supposed have said (doubtless apocryphal) as he reached down to the earth, after being compelled by the Church to renounce the Copernican view of the universe: “And yet it moves.”³³ Western Marxism’s retreats from the dialectics of nature and from imperialism, along with materialism and class, left it ill-equipped to address actual economic, social, and environmental change on a global level. By rejecting both materialism and the dialectics of nature and thereby natural science, Western Marxists were unprepared to address ecological issues when they arrived. Alfred Schmidt’s Concept of Nature in Marx, a doctoral thesis written under the supervision of Horkheimer and Adorno, published in the same year as Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, partly recognized the significance of Marx’s notion of metabolism, but missed altogether his theory of metabolic rift, or ecological crisis. Arguing against Bertolt Brecht and Ernst Bloch, who, following Marx, had theorized the revolutionary reconciliation and harmonization of nature and humanity, Schmidt pointed to the inescapable rule of the conquest of nature or the so-called dialectic of the Enlightenment. Nature and natural science were seen as largely alien to any understanding of society as second nature.³⁴ The retrieval of Marx’s ecology was thus delayed, even as the world became aware of the mounting planetary ecological crisis.

A similar phenomenon happened with respect to class. More and more, Western Marxists, as Ellen Meiksins Wood explained in The Retreat from Class in 1986, dissociated politics from class, moved toward a technological determinism, substituted loosely defined “democratic forces” for the working class, and adopted mass “populist” politics that ignored class relations. In this way, Western Marxists tended to merge with liberal ideology, creating what could be called an Inverted Marxism.³⁵ Today, these arguments have morphed into the position that Marx is better seen as a republican, or as advocating a politics limited to the democratic citizen, than a militant socialist concerned with revolutionary working-class transformation aimed at substantive democracy.³⁶ Even the famous analysis of the “culture industry” of Adorno and others lacked any concrete significance when placed against the critical-realist political economy of communication and the contemporary revolt for control of the cultural apparatus.³⁷

The ultimate retreat of Western Inverted Marxism was its tendency to see the quintessential modern capitalism as representing “the rational capitalistic organization of (formally) free labour” in Weber’s terms, divorced from the theory of monopoly capitalism/imperialism and even from Marx’s theory of exploitation.³⁸ Socialist humanism and radical historical materialism were both roundly criticized by structuralist thinkers such as Louis Althusser, despite their role in all genuine revolutions erupting in the Global South. Peripheral capitalist societies were seen, according to the logic of modernity, as moving inexorably toward developed capitalism, and thus the West—insofar as they could be seen as modernizing at all. As Bill Warren argued, supposedly basing his analysis on the Marx of the early 1850s, imperialism was the “pioneer of capitalism.”³⁹ So indifferent were Western Marxists to Third World struggles, as Domenico Losurdo pointed out, that they saw 1968 in Europe and its defeat as more important than the decades of revolutionary struggle around the globe—from China to Cuba, from Kwame Nkrumah’s Ghana to Salvador Allende’s Chile—associated with what L. S. Stavrianos called The Global Rift.⁴⁰ Curiously, with revolutions against colonialism, imperialism, and dependency taking place throughout the three continents of the Global South, Western Eurocentric Marxists frequently spoke myopically of the failure of revolution, since this was supposed to take place only in mature capitalist societies in the West.

Unmoored from history and materialism in this way, the Inverted Marxism of the West, while full of penetrating ideas, can restore its fading place in Marxism as a whole only through a process of rescue and retrieval, putting it on its feet once again. This requires reconnecting with the classical historical-materialist tradition of Marx and Engels, and with the revolutionary struggles against imperialism and capitalism, both past and present, being fought throughout the Global South. Today this coincides with the great antisystemic battle to save the planet as a place of human habitation. These realities have required paradigm shifts in historical-materialist theory to incorporate the ubiquitous new dangers of capitalism’s limitless globalization and the rift that this has created in the biogeophysical flows of the planet—viewed as a place of earthly habitation for humanity and all living species.⁴¹ These crucial paradigm shifts require regrounding Marxism in its original materialist, dialectical, and revolutionary bases, with their more universal aims.

It should be acknowledged today that the development of Marxist theory and praxis, in the present historical context, is today occurring more rapidly in countries such as China, Venezuela, and Cuba than in the so-called “advanced countries” of the West. The former have delinked to some extent from the imperialist world system and are pursuing their own sovereign socialist projects in cooperation with other countries in the Global South. The main contradictions are now planetary: the Earth System crisis, the threat of thermonuclear war, the reality of hyperimperialism, and the necessity of an international labor alliance. All these struggles point to socialism as the only possible alternative.

Breaking the Adamantine Chains

Prometheus did not remain in chains for eternity, despite Zeus’s original intentions, but regained his freedom after only 30,000 years. In Aeschylus’s Prometheus Unbound, of which we have only fragments, Prometheus was freed from his unbreakable adamantine chains by Heracles/Hercules, the son of Zeus and the mortal Alcmene, who broke the unbreakable shackles, achieving the impossible. Prometheus was able to use his foresight as leverage on the tyrant Zeus, who needed the farsighted Prometheus to reveal the details of his own possible future so as to prevent his being deposed.⁴² In the final part of Aeschylus’s trilogy, Prometheus the Firebearer, Prometheus, as George Thomson surmised from the structure of the first two plays, and what little evidence can be derived of the third, comes to be worshiped by humanity as the deliverer.⁴³

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century, Enlightenment/Romantic figures like Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote of human freedom and the release from adamantine chains, breaking the bonds of fate.⁴⁴ For the young Engels, an admirer of Shelley, the “adamantine foot” of time, which kicked loose all existing material conditions and created new ones, altered the realm of human possibility and social relations, providing openings for historical change. Marx referred to both “golden chains,” when workers and their potential allies were bought off, and the “chain” of “illusion” in which mysticism, religion, and commodity fetishism constantly constrained (but did not contain) the struggle for human freedom. Nevertheless, he insisted that the fetters represented by the existing relations of production could be broken.⁴⁵

In the present day, the alienated material necessity of capitalism in the form of the concentration and centralization of immense wealth and power among a very few, the scaling up of wars of extermination, and the planetary ecological crisis can only be overcome by the revolutionary emergence of a society of substantive equality, ecological sustainability, and social freedom.

The agent of that change is best conceived today as the global environmental proletariat, the working class in its broadest, most universal materialist form—a new emergent reality of revolt. Just as ecological civilization, as it is conceived at present primarily in China, represents the highest form of the socialist struggle, so the environmental proletariat is the mature form of the material class struggle, directed at sustainable human development. If the capitalist class expropriated both humanity and the earth, the environmental proletariat is the necessary negation of the negation if the world is to free itself from capitalist perdition. The chains of humanity are self-imposed, meaning that the present can be unshackled—but only if the struggle for human freedom is progressively widened.

The Third Wave of Socialism

What is Western Marxism? — The Third Wave of Socialism

The Third Wave of Socialism

Article 3 of 10

Wenhua Zongheng (文化纵横)

Originally published at https://thetricontinental.org/wenhua-zongheng-2023-4-third-wave-of-socialism/

Yang Ping (杨平) is a leading scholar and editor in China’s contemporary ideological and cultural community. In 1993, he founded Strategy and Management (战略与管理), an important magazine which countered the influence of liberalism on Chinese ideology and culture. In 2008, he founded Wenhua Zongheng (文化纵横), a journal that focuses on the construction of Chinese society’s core value system while consistently upholding the banner of socialism. Over the past fifteen years, the journal has grown into one of China’s most important thought platforms.

‘The Third Wave of Socialism’ (社会主义的第三次浪潮) was originally published in Wenhua Zongheng (文化纵横), issue no. 3 (June 2021).

Capitalism Is Facing a Major Crisis

The 2008 financial crisis and the global COVID-19 pandemic have made clear that capitalism is facing a major crisis. The global economy has experienced prolonged stagnation and decline, widespread unemployment, profound wealth disparities, excessive debt, and asset bubbles. Most tragically, this has been accompanied by a significant loss of human life. The current crisis of global capitalism is the largest and most severe since the Great Depression (1929–1933).

Within this crisis, the limits of capitalism – market, technological, and ecological – have become increasingly apparent. First, new markets and sources of profit have grown scarce, leading to a diminishing driving force for capital accumulation. Second, although crisis-driven technological innovation has remained active, the benefits of such innovation are increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few, leaving the large majority of people marginalised within the current capitalist system. Third, the Earth’s ecosystem can no longer sustain the pressures imposed upon it by capitalist modes of production and lifestyles, as the world’s environmental capacity has been pushed to its limit.

The means traditionally used to resolve capitalist crises have failed, one by one, under the current crisis. After nearly four decades of neoliberalism, capitalist governments are facing a public spending crisis – their push for even more structural economic reforms to stimulate private capital is at odds with the need to maintain the minimum levels of social welfare. Quantitative easing policies have repeatedly created enormous asset bubbles and debt spirals, exacerbating the already severe wealth disparities.

Under this crisis, there has been a resurgence of many of the features that characterised the global capitalist landscape prior to World War I and World War II: the growth of populism, militarism, and fascism; the intensification of internal social divisions; an increase in hostility and zero-sum competition between nations; and trends toward deglobalisation and bloc politics. As international tensions rise, so too does the possibility of another global war.

Crises ignite wars and wars lead to revolutions. This has been a recurring theme in the history of the capitalist system. In the third decade of the twenty-first century, amid this major crisis, will capitalism undergo profound reforms and overcome the crisis? Or is this capitalism’s ‘Chernobyl moment’, as it heads towards its ultimate demise?

History has once again arrived at a critical juncture.

The Three Waves of Socialism

As a critique of and movement against capitalism, socialism has always coexisted alongside capitalism, serving as a powerful counterweight and constantly seeking alternative paths to overcome and replace capitalism. Since the birth of the First International (1864–1876), the global socialist movement has experienced three major waves.

The first wave occurred in nineteenth-century Europe as the European labour movement gradually transitioned from a state of being to a state of self-awareness. The main features of this period included the birth of Marxism, the establishment of international labour organisations, and the initial attempts to carry out a socialist revolution, such as the Paris Commune of 1871. The first wave of socialism propelled the political awakening and consciousness of the working class and gave rise to working-class political parties in a range of countries. However, during this wave, a socialist state form would not yet emerge.

The second wave began as World War I came to an end, with the October Revolution in 1917, and lasted until the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the communist states in Eastern Europe from 1989 to 1991. Across the world, a large number of socialist states emerged, first in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, and, after the end of World War II, in China, Cuba, Korea, Vietnam, and elsewhere. Together, these countries formed a global socialist system or camp. In addition to this state system, during the Cold War, a large section of the international socialist movement was concentrated in the national liberation movements of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, many of which identified as socialist or were significantly influenced by socialism. Thus, the two main characteristics of the second wave of socialism were the emergence of the socialist state form, with widespread public ownership and economic planning, and the national liberation movements.

After the end of the Cold War, socialism suffered significant global setbacks. However, despite this, a new wave would emerge. The third wave, which began to form after China launched its reform and opening up in the late 1970s, was able to withstand the severe shocks and tests following the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the communist states in Eastern Europe. While socialism was at a low point worldwide, China remained committed to socialism while also pursuing reform and opening up, gradually exploring a path known as socialism with Chinese characteristics. The main feature of socialism with Chinese characteristics has been the incorporation of a market economy into the socialist system, gradually forming a socialist market economy. Today, just three decades after the end of the Cold War, socialism with Chinese characteristics has undergone a rapid rise, becoming a crucial force that is reshaping the world order and humanity’s future. Although this wave of socialism is still in its early stages, it has already made a significant impact and attracted global attention, providing new options for countries that seek to pursue a path of independent development and posing a strong challenge to those who contended that capitalism marked the ‘end of history’.

Limitations of the Second Wave of Socialism

Before proceeding further in assessing the current reality and future prospects of the third wave of socialism, we must first revisit the second wave of socialism and understand the reasons for its setback.

With the October Revolution in 1917 and Chinese Revolution in 1949, socialism swept the globe, not only forming a camp of states that posed a significant threat to capitalism but also igniting a wave of national liberation movements in the vast Third World of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. In the decades after World War II, the capitalist world system was in a precarious situation. As socialism spread globally, socialist countries widely implemented Soviet-style planned economies and public ownership systems, achieving the initial stage of industrialisation and building socialist national economic systems.

However, the Soviet-style planned economy and pure public ownership model had several profound drawbacks. First, the planned economic system was unable to allocate social and economic resources in an effective and flexible manner, resulting in a rigid and distorted national economic system that could not adequately respond to indicators from the real economy. Second, the pure public ownership and egalitarian distribution system lacked sufficient incentive mechanisms for labour at the intermediate and micro levels, leading to a lack of constructive competition and pressure between enterprises and workers, and resulting in a generally low level of economic efficiency. Third, the restrictions on and elimination of private and commodity economies violated the law of value and surpassed the stage of development of social productive forces. This led to a long-term, systemic failure to meet the complex needs of economic and social life and to realise significant improvements in people’s quality of life. Finally, over time, Soviet-style planning and economic management led to the development of an increasingly inward and closed system, characterised by bureaucratism and dogmatism, and a lack of sensitivity and responsiveness to technological progress and organisational innovation.

While the significant setbacks that the second wave of socialism experienced in the 1980s and 1990s can be attributed, in part, to external factors such as the strength of the capitalist world system and the fragmentation of the socialist camp, ultimately, the inadequate economic and social operating systems and institutional mechanisms within socialist countries were the fundamental determining factors. The unsustainability of these internal systems drove the dramatic changes in the Soviet Union as well as China’s shift towards reform and opening up.

Socialism with Chinese Characteristics and the Third Wave of Socialism

With the continuous advancement of reform and opening up, socialism with Chinese characteristics has taken shape as a development path that is distinct from both traditional Soviet-style socialism and classical free-market capitalism. China’s developmental path and theories are confidently stepping onto the world stage. Although socialism with Chinese characteristics is not a static model and China’s practices undergo continuous experimentation, after more than four decades of exploration, six major features can be identified.

First, priority has been given to the development of productive forces. Socialism with Chinese characteristics dares to learn from reasonable economic forms of capitalism and allows the development of the private economy to promote the rapid development of advanced productive forces. At the same time, the development of the state-owned economy has been strategically planned in key sectors, forming a complementary relationship with the private economy and creating a mixed ownership structure.

Second, China has promoted the close integration of its socialist economic foundation and relations of production with the market economy, to gradually establish a socialist market economic system.

Third, while opening up and integrating with the global capitalist system, China has always focused on maintaining national sovereignty and ensuring the continued socialist nature of the Communist Party of China (CPC). China remains vigilant against the risk of deviating towards capitalism due to the demands of developing a market economy.

Fourth, China has sought to address issues related to social justice and inequality through development. Development can bring about a growth in wealth but, for various reasons, this wealth may also lead to increased social divisions. Only further development can produce the social wealth and material basis to resolve these social divisions and inequalities. Under socialism with Chinese characteristics, development has been the primary avenue to address social justice issues, while other methods have been secondary. This has required dynamic, proactive measures, rather than rigid and one-size-fits-all approaches.

Fifth, the state has also employed a number of other measures to balance wealth inequality within the socialist market economy. Large-scale poverty alleviation campaigns have been carried out to include marginalised groups in the market economy and help them escape poverty through targeted efforts. In addition, the practice of paired-up assistance connects developed areas, public institutions, enterprises, and other actors with poor areas to transfer resources and assistance to underdeveloped regions. Meanwhile, to address regional inequalities, transfer payments from more developed eastern regions to underdeveloped central and western areas have helped to supplement gaps in fiscal revenue and expenditure capacity. Such measures are difficult to imagine, let alone implement, in capitalist countries where private property is considered sacrosanct and where electoral processes only uphold the vested interests of the dominant class.

Sixth, the CPC is not beholden to the narrow interests of certain sectors of society. To maintain this position, the CPC must remain free from the infiltration and control of capital, as well as overcome the influences of populism and rigid egalitarianism, maintaining a dynamic balance between economic vitality and social equity.

The Relationship between Socialism and the Market Economy

History has demonstrated that it is impossible to artificially eliminate the market economy under socialism. The limitations and ultimate failure of traditional Soviet-style socialism serves as evidence.

The market economy is an ancient economic form, and its law of supply and demand spontaneously regulates human economic behaviour. It can be combined with feudalism, capitalism, and socialism. The degree of combination depends on the surplus of social products. Generally speaking, the greater the surplus, the more developed the market economy becomes. As Deng Xiaoping (邓小平) said, ‘There is no fundamental contradiction between socialism and a market economy. The question is how to develop the productive forces more effectively’.¹ Similarly, he stated, ‘A planned economy is not equivalent to socialism, because there is planning under capitalism too; a market economy is not capitalism, because there are markets under socialism too. Planning and market forces are both means of controlling economic activity’.²

In the movement of a modern market economy, capital is the main actor. Capital has a dual nature: it is the most efficient force for resource allocation in the market economy, but it can also manipulate and monopolise the market. Fernand Braudel, French historian and leading scholar of the Annales school of historiography, argued that the market economy could not be equated with capitalism. For Braudel, the market economy ‘is really only a fragment of a vast whole. For by its very nature, the market economy is reduced to playing the role of a link between production and consumption, and until the nineteenth century it was merely a layer – more or less thick and resilient, but at times very thin – between the ocean of daily life that lay stretched out beneath it and the capitalistic mechanism that more than once manipulated it from above’.³ Distinct from the market economy, Braudel wrote that ‘capitalism is the perfect term for designating economic activities that are carried on at the summit, or that are striving for the summit. As a result, large-scale capitalism rests upon the underlying double layer composed of material life and the coherent market economy; it represents the high-profit zone’.⁴ In today’s global market economy that is dominated by modern capitalism, internal forces that resist capitalism continue to emerge, giving rise to demands and movements for economic and social equality. These movements will gravitate towards and advocate for socialism to address and overcome capitalism’s inequalities. As such, socialism is also an internal force of the market economy, an organic component that naturally opposes capitalism.

In addition to capital, the government is another key actor in a modern market economy. The government is a product of the market society’s demand for order and rules. Its existence is not an external force imposed on the market but an intrinsic requirement of the market economy. Even in a market society without a government, quasi-governmental entities such as guilds and chambers of commerce will emerge. Besides regulating and managing the market economy, the government often promotes and develops the market, especially during the early stages of market economies in developing countries. In fact, the government frequently becomes the driving force behind the market economy. Therefore, it is fundamentally incorrect to place the government and the market in complete opposition to one another as dichotomised entities. Liberalism regards the government as an absolute evil, while Soviet-style socialism directly equates the market economy with capitalism – both make formalistic errors.

A socialist market economy is one in which the movement of the market economy is guided by socialist values. On the one hand, this economic system employs national strategic regulation, fully leverages the fundamental role of the market economy in organising production, exchange, guiding consumption, and distribution, and fully harnesses the leading role of capital in developing advanced productive forces. On the other hand, it utilises the powerful state-owned capital and the socialist superstructure to restrain and balance private capital, overcome the inherent tendency of the market economy towards social division, and avoid capital’s control over economic and social life.

The socialist market economy is a system that utilises the decisive role of the market economy while optimising the government’s function. It represents the combination of the modern market economy and the socialist mode of production.

Maintaining the Socialist Character of a Socialist Market Economy

Capitalism constructs a superstructure and ideology that are compatible with its mode of production according to the logic of capital’s operation. Under the conditions of a socialist market economy, this logic does not change. The spontaneous movement of the market economy and the pursuit of profit by capital entities within it will continuously erode the superstructure and ideology of socialism, and may lead to the imbalance or even disintegration of the socialist market economy, leading society towards capitalism. In the era of global capitalism, the challenges faced by socialist market economies within sovereign nations become even more apparent as capital penetrates national borders. How then has China been able to maintain the socialist character and direction of its socialist market economy?

First, the key lies in upholding the leadership of the CPC and ensuring that the socialist nature of the party remains unchanged. In the socialist market economy, the CPC has fully leveraged the role of capital in developing advanced productive forces and promoting the continuous growth of social wealth, while ensuring that the party is not infiltrated nor manipulated by capital. The party has actively controlled capital and made it serve the majority of the people. General Secretary Xi Jinping has emphasised the essential relationship between the party’s leadership and socialism, stating that, ‘The leadership of the Communist Party of China is the defining feature of socialism with Chinese characteristics and the greatest strength of the system of socialism with Chinese characteristics’.⁵

Second, the stable operation of the socialist market economy also results from the fact that China has accumulated a large amount of state-owned assets during the past seventy years of development, including state-owned enterprises, state-owned financial institutions, and state-owned land. State control of these massive strategic assets forms the foundation of the CPC’s governance and ensures the party’s independence from capital forces, allowing it to govern based on the fundamental interests of the country and the people.

Under the conditions of a socialist market economy, state-owned enterprises and state-owned capital must also operate and compete according to the laws of the market economy. The logic of the market and capital deeply penetrate the daily behaviour of not only private enterprises, but also state-owned enterprises. Therefore, it is particularly important to ensure that the managers of these massive state-owned assets do not become agents of the bourgeoisie, so as to prevent managers from transforming state-owned assets into private assets or establishing internal control that is beholden to bourgeois interests. To maintain the socialist character of the socialist market economy, the CPC must ensure both the operational efficiency and the continued state ownership of these assets.

Third, the superstructure and ideology of socialism must be firmly controlled by the party. In industries or sectors such as education, publishing, and media, the pursuit of economic benefits must be subordinate to social benefits. The logic of the market economy should not dominate these sectors, and the party’s leadership must be integrated into their daily operations. If socialism does not provide ideological and cultural leadership, capitalism inevitably will.

Fourth, under the conditions of a market economy, the CPC has led the development of civil society and non-governmental organisations. The growth of these social forces is an inevitable phenomenon in a market economy. Due to the differentiation effect of the market economy, demands from different interest groups arise to address issues such as wealth inequality, environmental degradation, the demoralisation of society, and other problems generated by private capital. Due to China’s strong historical tradition of ‘bureaucratic feudalism’, the development and construction of these social forces can help overcome excessive bureaucracy and formalism within government departments. Therefore, the party has led the development of these social forces and encouraged them to organise, to promote the stable and long-term development of the socialist market economy.

Promoting the Third Wave of Socialism

At a time when the contemporary capitalist world system is facing tremendous crises, the opportunity for a new global wave of socialism has once again emerged. Socialism with Chinese characteristics is likely to be a key factor in initiating this wave. As China continues to rise and becomes a leading global power, the Chinese path of development will attract more attention as a viable alternative mode of production and way of life, promoting the formation of a new global socialist system and value system that is increasingly accepted by people around the world.

At the same time, during this historic transition period, socialism with Chinese characteristics will also face particularly acute challenges and dangers. Since the 2008 financial crisis, and especially since the COVID-19 outbreak, the strengths of Chinese socialism have become increasingly evident on the international stage. China has turned many of these crises into opportunities, propelling the country to a higher level of development and enhancing its governance system and capacity. The stark contrast between China and Western countries in these respects has fundamentally shaken the narrative of Western capitalism; something that has a greater impact than mere military power and economic growth rates.

In response, various forces of international capitalism are mobilising against China. Attacks and smears from liberal, nationalist, and populist political forces are endless. Even some international left-wing forces harshly criticise China on issues of democracy, human rights, and environmental protection, and even question whether China is truly socialist. Since the Biden administration came to power in the United States, alliance politics have ramped up on a global scale. A US-led bourgeois ‘holy alliance’ is rapidly coalescing under the pretext of containing China.

The emerging third wave of socialism will undoubtedly face a dark night and experience even more intense turmoil and chaos within the capitalist world system. In response, Chinese socialists must be prepared.

Behind Western Marxists’ misunderstanding of imperialism lie their class interests

What is Western Marxism? — Behind Western Marxists’ misunderstanding of imperialism lie their class interests

Behind Western Marxists’ misunderstanding of imperialism lie their class interests

Article 4 of 10

Amy Yang

Originally published at https://amyyyang00.substack.com/p/behind-western-marxists-misunderstanding

“The nature of imperialism constitutes the central question of our time,” as Samir Amin said in 1977, is even more relevant today, as the imperialist West becomes increasingly aggressive in its decline. To defeat the paper tiger of imperialism completely, we need to form a united anti-imperialist front based on a united, clear, and correct understanding of imperialism. However, currently, the understanding of imperialism among anti-imperialist forces in the third world differs fundamentally from that among self-proclaimed anti-imperialist Western Marxists.

While anti-imperialist forces in the third world hold a very sound and solid anti-imperialist position along the line of “imperialist core and periphery” and show solidarity to all secular and non-secular anti-imperialist forces including Russia, the Islamic Republic of Iran, China, the Sahel states, etc, many Western Marxists have an erroneous and dogmatic understanding of imperialism and refuse to recognise the theory of unequal exchange and the crucial role of non-aligned countries in the global anti-imperialist struggles.

Western Marxists’ inability to understand imperialism is not, as many may believe, a result of ignorance. As most Western Marxists are from the bourgeois intelligentsia class, they should have enough analytical and cognitive ability to understand the nature of imperialism based on actual facts, for example:

the U.S. has more than 800 military bases around the world, especially surrounding non-aligned countries like China, Iran and Russia.

the U.S. and NATO have committed war crimes in over 30 third world countries after the World War II, including Congo, Cuba, Korea, Lebanon, Vietnam, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Iraq and most recently Iran, etc.

except few non-aligned countries, most third world countries are unable to develop their productive forces due to direct imperial military aggressions and/or indirect sanctions and structural adjustment programs by imperial financial institutions like IMF.

So, if it’s not due to a lack of knowledge, what prevents Western Marxists from acknowledging these solid facts and understanding imperialism correctly? To answer this question, we need to use the Resolution of the Founding Congress of the Communist Party of Germany (Kommunistische Partei, KP), “the imperialist world system” (Das imperialistische Weltsystem), as an example to examine the major mistakes in Western Marxists’ understanding of imperialism in detail.

Rejecting the essence of imperialism: a way for Western Marxists to cope with the bitter realities about their class

According to KP, “the productive forces do continue to develop under imperialism...The uneven development of imperialism offers young capitalist countries the opportunity to rapidly catch up with, and in some cases overtake, older ones...The bourgeoisie of weaker capitalist states also generally remains politically sovereign. Truly one-sided relationships within the imperialist world system can only be spoken of in relation to colonial oppression and occupation.”

In other words, Western Marxists like those in KP refuse to admit the continuous Western domination in “flag-independent” third-world countries through neocolonialism after the colonial era. Furthermore, by denying the reality that under both colonialism and neo-colonialism, most third world countries in the periphery do not have real national sovereignty and cannot develop their productive forces, they try to whitewash the number one crime of imperialism: de-developing the third world for the interests of the global imperialist class.

In contrast, anti-imperialists in third-world countries, who have first-hand experiences with imperialism, understand the essence of neo-colonialism and imperialism very well. As stated clearly by Amilcar Cabral,

“we therefore see that both in colonialism and in neo-colonialism the essential characteristic of imperialist domination remains the same: the negation of the historical process of the dominated people by means of violent usurpation of the freedom of development of the national productive forces.”

What prevents Western Marxists from seeing the reality that other anti-imperialists in the third world can see without any difficulty? The answer is simple: their class nature, the white labour aristocracy class.

With the colonial cultural heritage of Eurocentrism and Orientalism, Western Marxists see themselves as vanguard and more progressive than black and brown anti-imperialists in the third world, especially our Muslim brothers and sisters in the axis of resistance.

These arrogant Western Marxists believe that they have earned their imperial mode of living and the European social welfare states through their “hard and radical class struggles” in the past, which can never be achieved by un-emancipated and backward black and brown people in the third world. As stated proudly by KP, “all the social achievements under attack today were won by the labor movement. The eight-hour day is a result of the November Revolution of 1918. Continued wage payment during illness stems from the fact that in 1956/57, over 34,000 metalworkers went on strike for 114 days.”

However, if they open their eyes in front of the reality and recognise the essential characteristics of imperialism, they cannot deny that the European social welfare states are built on imperial rents and genocidal crimes, having little to do with their “class struggles” in the past. On the other hand, the real reason behind a lack of social welfare in most third world countries is neither the backwardness of the black and brown people nor a lack of “European-style” class struggle, but the weak class position of the third world countries, being in the imperialised periphery rather than in the imperialist core.

Moreover, this implies an even more bitter truth which most Western Marxists are unwilling to swallow: with the third world countries gradually breaking free from the stranglehold of imperialism and the “core-periphery” trap thanks to anti-imperialist struggles of non-aligned countries, the imperial rents the white labour aristocracy class enjoys in the past are gradually diminishing. Their ruling class will cut more and more on their social welfare in the future regardless of how hard they protest or strike peacefully.

(Unless they overthrow their ruling class through collective armed struggle, which is very unlikely to happen in the imperialist core under current conditions as class consciousness is lacking and very few (if not none) white people in the labour aristocracy class will voluntarily sacrifice their lives for the anti-imperialist and socialist cause.)

As most Western Marxists don’t have the courage to accept these bitter realities about their class nature, they simply choose to interpret imperialism in an erroneous way that suits their interests and worldview. However, through manipulating narratives, they can only deceive themselves and enjoy a few “happy” days temporarily; sooner or later, in the near future, they will have to face the truth.

Rejecting the real anti-imperialist forces: a choice of Western Marxists not to betray their own class

In this resolution, the KP denounced the support of anti-imperialists in the third world for non-aligned countries as “revisionist” and completely denied the great contributions made by non-aligned countries to the global anti-imperialist struggles.

“The revisionist equation of imperialism with the dominance of a few states often leads to the notion that there are capitalist states playing a progressive, “objectively anti-imperialist” role. For example, Russia is often ascribed such a role because of its divergence of interests with the USA. But the idea that, for instance, the resistance of the bourgeoisie in Mali, Afghanistan, or Burkina Faso against the influence of the USA or France in their countries is in the interest of the working class is also wrong. It ignores the significance of the class struggle in these countries and overlooks the fact that the shift of these bourgeoisies towards other leading states in the imperialist world system ultimately always comes at the expense of the working class.”

Instead, the KP explained their anti-imperialist strategies: “We fight against imperialism as a whole, and not against the dominance or policies of individual states perceived as particularly aggressive.”

Following the logic of Western Marxists like those in KP, the only “correct” anti-imperialist strategy is for working-class people in all countries, including in non-aligned countries like Iran, to prioritise class struggle over struggle against the imperialist West, to overthrow their national bourgeoisie and build socialist states.

However, this strategy can only work for black and brown people who live in Disneyland, where the imperialist West doesn’t exist, or for white people who live in the imperialist West and know nothing about the sabotages and aggressions of the imperialist West against any people’s revolutions (regardless of whether the revolutions are socialist or nationalist or Islamic).

For us black and brown people who live on earth and have witnessed and even directly experienced the past countless regime change attempts by the imperialist West, including the most recent attempt in January in Iran, it goes without saying that such a strategy is rather for the benefit of the imperialist West and is destined to fail from the very beginning.

How can people in the third world NOT prioritise anti-imperialist struggle against the imperialist West over class struggle against their national bourgeoisie when the number one threat to their lives is the imperialist West?

How can people in non-aligned third-world countries like Iran choose NOT to support their national bourgeoisie when the only force that protects their children from being slaughtered by the scrupulous imperialist West is the so-called (borrowing the erroneous term used by Western Marxists) “capitalist theocratic authoritarian regime”?

How can people in most third-world countries NOT choose to fight against the imperialist West when their government is a puppet placed in power and fully controlled by the imperialist West?

The most fundamental prerequisite of fighting for and building socialism in the third world is a multilateral world where no hegemonic power can slaughter people in other countries in the name of “freedom and democracy” and interfere in other countries’ internal affairs.

Throughout history, no country has developed its productive forces, let alone built socialism, without first fighting against the domination of the imperialist West and achieving real national sovereignty. All successful revolutions in the 20th century started as a national liberation struggle, aiming at defeating imperialism and colonialism, from Vietnam to China, from Iran to DPRK, from Cuba to Venezuela.

Based on this understanding, anti-imperialists in the third world prioritise struggles against the imperialist West, especially the U.S. hegemonic power, over other secondary contradictions, and stand firmly on the side of all non-aligned countries who are currently on the forefront of the struggle against the imperialist West, i.e., the axis of resistance, especially the Islamic Republic of Iran, no matter how different their philosophical foundations are.

As stated beautifully by the Communist Party Marxist Kenya,

“While our philosophical foundations differ, we also recognise that objective contradictions often unite diverse political forces against a common enemy. The international anti-imperialist movement has never been ideologically uniform. Throughout history, it has brought together workers, peasants, national liberation movements, progressive governments, and patriotic forces whose immediate unity arose from the necessity of defeating colonialism and imperial domination. In that historic struggle against imperialism, Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei occupied an important place.”

How could Western Marxists, who should be very familiar with revolutionary history and anti-imperialist theories, fail to understand that their strategy of “fighting against imperialism as a whole without targeting the imperialist West and prioritising class struggles in all third world countries” is in reality pro-imperialist strategy that can never help people in the third world to defeat imperialism but rather help the global imperialist class to defend the current genocidal system?

The answer is again very straightforward. No matter how many revolutionary theories Western Marxists have read, their hearts are still white, and their lifestyle is still bourgeois. To support non-aligned countries like Iran, China, and Russia, and to admit that top priority should be given to struggles against the imperialist West means for them to actively dismantle the very system they are still benefiting from, to betray their own class, and to abandon their white privileges.

In order to defend their class interests and not pay any real price for their radical anti-imperialist appearance, they choose to betray their brothers and sisters in the third world, and advocate for a strategy with a red “revolutionary” facade but a rotten reactionary core.

As long as they refuse to sacrifice their class interests, no matter how many times they shout “no NATO, no militarism” in demonstrations, no matter how many tears fallen from their eyes for Palestinians, no matter how many red hammer and sickle flags they carry, they still remain to be loyal firefighters of the burning empire, blaming and spreading lies about the forces who take revenge and seek for justice for children slaughtered mercilessly in west Asia, south America and Africa by pouring fuel onto the Western fortress.

Conclusion

As said by Lu Xiu (鲁迅), “An enemy is not to be feared; what is truly terrifying is the worm in one’s own camp. (敌人是不足惧的，最可怕的是自己营垒里的蛀虫。)” To safeguard our global anti-imperialist struggles, we need to draw a clear line between our real comrades and enemies. Being born into the white labour aristocracy class doesn’t necessarily negate one’s possibilities of becoming one of our comrades. However, refusing to sacrifice one’s class interests and become a class traitor to the global imperial class does make one our enemy. What distinguishes comrades from enemies is not a radical appearance that fulfils Western leftists’ liberal values, but one’s determination of allying with the non-aligned countries and people in the imperialised periphery.

death of the theory bro

What is Western Marxism? — death of the theory bro

death of the theory bro

Article 5 of 10

Return to Bandung

By Pranay Somayajula

Originally published at https://www.culture-shock.xyz/p/death-of-the-theory-bro

There’s a particular kind of person who, if you’ve been active in leftist circles for long enough, you’ve almost certainly encountered at least once—usually young, white, and male, and always incredibly and insufferably smug about the fact that they ‘read theory.’ This is the kind of person who seems more committed to proving their own intelligence than they are to actually building power for the international working class, who is constantly trying to bash you over the head with references to obscure theoretical works and chiding you for your insufficient knowledge of and fidelity to the gospel of Marx/Engels/Mao/Lenin/insert-preferred-leftist-thinker-here. For people like this, leftist politics seem to be more of a virtue-signaling aesthetic than a genuine ideological commitment—a way to prove their own intellectual bona fides, rather than to win liberation for working and oppressed people. There’s a name for this archetype; perhaps you’ve heard of it. I’m referring, of course, to the ‘theory bro.’

Everybody, understandably, hates a theory bro. But in many cases, particularly in the most online circles of the online left, the (thoroughly justified) backlash to this most obnoxious of leftist archetypes has resulted in the inadvertent embrace of an anti-intellectual ethos which not only serves to alienate us from our own revolutionary history, but which also risks adding fuel to the fire of a growing reactionary current in our society. To successfully resist this current, it’s imperative that we on the left renew our commitment to the development of a robust and disciplined revolutionary consciousness on a mass scale—a project which, whether we like it or not, can only be achieved through disciplined political education and serious engagement with the most important fundamentals of revolutionary theory.

• • • 

But what do we mean when we talk about ‘theory?’ I think it’s useful to draw a distinction between revolutionary theory—the body of theoretical literature that has emerged out of real-world revolutionary movements and struggles for liberation—and the more abstract (and often obscurantist) forms of left-wing and Marxian-influenced academic theory that began to proliferate in the latter half of the 20th cenury, exemplified by the works of thinkers such as Foucault, Derrida, Baudrillard, and others of the post-structuralist ilk. While there are certainly valuable insights to be gained from the latter, for the purposes of this essay, I’ll be focusing primarily on the former.

There are, I think, two key defining characteristics of revolutionary theory. The first is that anybody can produce it; the only qualifications needed are (1) to have been an active participant in struggle, and (2) to have developed one’s own revolutionary consciousness through committed study and political education. The second characteristic is that such theory concerns itself first and foremost with analyzing the concrete and material conditions of society, as well as the challenges and opportunities facing real-world revolutions—not just with an eye to understanding society, but with an eye to transforming it.

It’s this second characteristic that is lost in the breathless, quasi-religious reverence with which a maddeningly vocal minority on the left—particularly the online left—speak about works of theory and the thinkers who write them. Rather than seeing such works for what they are—products of particular contexts and conditions, intended to aid in the development of real-world revolutionary struggles—the archetypal ‘theory bro’ treats them as a sort of secular gospel, capable of somehow being extracted from their historical context and applied uncritically to any and all situations. Beyond being deeply obnoxious, however, this tendency also betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of what theory is, and what it is meant to do.

Case in point: last summer, as part of my own (ongoing) journey of political self-education, I took it upon myself to read Vladimir Lenin’s classic 1901 pamphlet, What Is to Be Done?—a text I’d been meaning to read for quite some time, but had never actually gotten around to. As I began reading, I found myself struck by the text’s simultaneous universality and specificity. What I mean by this is that even as each chapter practically overflowed with insights that were incredibly applicable to the present moment, the text as a whole was remarkably particular to the circumstances of its creation, replete with references to individuals and organizations and events that meant little to someone like me, reading the book more than a century after it was first published. For every sentence that I underlined with a note about its astonishing relevancy to contemporary politics, there was another that sent me scrambling to Wikipedia in a desperate attempt to figure out what the hell Lenin was actually talking about.

This experience is, I think, revealing of a crucial but often-overlooked nuance that is, unfortunately, frequently lost in the study and discussion of revolutionary theory—the extent to which works such as this one, which are all too often held up as timeless classics and invoked in dogmatic, doctrinaire terms, are in fact historically contingent and indelibly shaped by the context out of which they emerged. The fact is that Lenin did not write What Is to Be Done? as a work of abstract philosophy, nor as a how-to manual to be uncritically copied by future revolutionaries. He wrote it as a work of concrete political analysis, intended to summarize and respond to the specific conditions of turn-of-the-century Russian social-democracy. Even a work like The State and Revolution, which is much broader in its scope and less particular in its immediate subject matter than What Is to Be Done?, is still grounded in the author’s analysis of the prevailing political context around him. As such, any reading of these texts—or, for that matter, any other work of revolutionary theory, by Lenin or anyone else—which treats them as decontextualized and dehistoricized sources of eternal wisdom is doomed to failure from the outset.

In fact, when it comes to revolutionary theory, the argument could well be made that ‘theory,’ as such, doesn’t actually exist—at least, not in the sense that the term tends to evoke, of a work that was composed with the intention of postulating some timeless, universal truth. Rather, what we are really referring to when we talk about ‘theory’ are works of particularly prescient and insightful analysis, tailored to the particular conditions in which they were written, to which the status of ‘theory’ is applied in hindsight as their most salient contributions prove to have staying power beyond their immediate historical and political context. As Mao Zedong famously put it in his 1937 essay “On Practice:”

If you want knowledge, you must take part in the practice of changing reality. If you want to know the taste of a pear, you must change the pear by eating it yourself . . . If you want to know the theory and methods of revolution, you must take part in revolution.

This is an important distinction to draw, because accepting it compels us to read works of so-called ‘theory’ with a certain humility, approaching them as primary sources first and foremost—products of a particular time and place, constrained by the context in which they were written, and capable simply of offering guidance for how we in the present day might view the world. Engaging with such works in the spirit of nuanced historical analysis, taking the lessons that we can apply to our current conditions and leaving the rest behind, allows us to escape the dogmatic trap of treating a given work as gospel, simply because it was penned by one of our side’s preferred Great Men of History. Training ourselves to engage with theory in this way is certainly a daunting task—but it is also a necessary one.

• • •

It’s not entirely unsurprising that, perhaps in reaction to the rigid dogmatism and sheer insufferability of the ‘theory bro’ archetype, many on the American left seem to have turned away from engaging with revolutionary theory altogether. On social media and in organizing spaces alike, I’ve observed a particular ideological current crop up time and time again, which seems to be predicated on the assumption that the very act of invoking theory—let alone actually studying it—is inherently ‘elitist’ and ‘inaccessible’ to the masses of ordinary working people. Marginalized and oppressed people, this current holds, already have all the grounding they need for radical politics by virtue of their own ‘lived experience’—a term that has become increasingly fashionable in social-justice circles over the last decade or so. To suggest that the perspective offered by this experience might be enhanced by reading or otherwise engaging with revolutionary theory is, according to this line of thinking in its most essential form, not just an act of condescension, but an affront to the very sanctity of ‘lived experience’ itself.

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The result of all this is both clear and alarming. Rather than embracing a coherent Marxist analysis of the world, grounded in a dialectical and historical materialist understanding of politics and class struggle, many self-proclaimed leftists have instead adopted a politics rooted exclusively in moral outrage and righteous indignation at the myriad injustices of capitalist society. But while moral outrage and righteous indignation are certainly a necessary part of any left-wing politics worth its salt, they are not in and of themselves sufficient to win the world we want to build. In the absence of a genuine revolutionary consciousness to ground them, moral values alone can only ever be the basis of an idealist politics whose amorphous qualities and romantic tendencies leave us all the more susceptible to co-option—and, even more dangerously, to inaction.

It’s important to underscore that such a revolutionary consciousness isn’t something that one is born with, nor is it something that can be developed through ‘lived experience’ alone. And it certainly isn’t something that descends miraculously from the heavens to be imparted on the most principled and politically-pure among us. On the contrary, truly revolutionary consciousness can be developed only through disciplined political education and study—an ongoing, perpetually-unfinished process that strives to integrate both theory and practice in equal and co-constitutive measure. The real power of such political education—including the study of revolutionary theory and history—is not simply that it makes it us smarter or better-informed. Rather, it’s that political education allows us to refine our deeply-held values and principles into a nuanced and coherent political analysis of the world around us—the “concrete analysis of concrete conditions” that Vladimir Lenin famously called the “living soul” of Marxism.

There is, after all, a reason why so many revolutionary movements and liberation struggles throughout history have placed such a strong emphasis on political education as an integral component of revolutionary struggle. From China to Cuba to Vietnam and beyond, communist parties and guerrilla movements around the world have long required their cadres to engage in serious and disciplined study of history and revolutionary theory, rooted in the understanding that the revolutionary consciousness engendered by this political education is a necessary prerequisite for the success of any liberation struggle. This reasoning was summed up neatly by the Vietnamese revolutionary leader Ho Chi Minh in a speech that he delivered at the 1957 opening of the First Theoretical Course of the Nguyen Ai Quoc School, where he declared:

Unity of theory and practice is a fundamental principle of Marxism-Leninism. Practice without the guidance of theory is blind practice. Theory without integration with practice is mere theory . . . You are all high-ranking cadres of the Party. Your theoretical study does not aim at turning you into mere theoreticians but at enabling you to work well. It means that you must study the spirit of Marxism-Leninism, its stand, viewpoint, and method, and put them into practice in order satisfactorily to solve practical problems in our revolutionary work.

It goes without saying that the American left could stand to learn a thing or two from these insights. As it turns out, however, we don’t have to look as far afield as Vietnam for examples to learn from. Here in the United States, perhaps one of the best-known examples of a revolutionary organization integrating political education into its practice and struggle is the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. As educators Adam Sanchez and Jesse Hagopian point out in an article for the Zinn Education Project, the Panthers themselves formed out of a study group at Merritt College in Oakland, and new recruits to the Party were required to read no fewer than 10 books on topics relating to socialism and Black liberation. The Rules of the Black Panther Party, which all Party members were expected to abide by and to know by heart, declared not only that “Everyone in a leadership position must read no less than two hours per day to keep abreast of the changing political situation,” but also that “Political Education Classes are mandatory for general membership.”

In her 1974 autobiography, the legendary Black feminist and revolutionary Angela Davis offers an illuminating account of her experience with these political education sessions during her (relatively brief) involvement with the Black Panther Party. “If I still retained any of the elitism which almost inevitably insinuates itself into the minds of college students,” she declares, “I lost it all in the course of the Panther political education sessions.” Describing the experience of reading Lenin’s State and Revolution in a class alongside “sisters and brothers . . . whose public school education had not even allowed them to learn how to read,” Davis writes:

When they explained, for the benefit of the other members of the class, what they had gotten out of their reading, it was clear that they knew it all — they had understood Lenin on a far more elemental level than any professor of social science.

It’s worth pointing out that while Davis describes here how the most marginalized and least educated of her comrades were able to grasp Lenin’s core arguments “on a far more elemental level than any professor,” she does not go so far as to claim that it was therefore a waste of time for them to read State and Revolution. In this sense, Davis’ account offers a powerful and radical alternative to the oft-invoked argument that ‘lived experience’ of oppression and systemic injustice is in and of itself a sufficient substitute for engagement with revolutionary theory. On the contrary, what the anecdote that Davis offers in this passage actually tells us is that ‘lived experience’ doesn’t supplant political education—it enhances it. Just as political education serves to build upon the basic foundations of abstract moral values, sharpening and refining them into a more nuanced and conceptually rigorous revolutionary analysis, it does the same for the powerful but indeterminate sense of grievance and injustice that ‘lived experience’ tends to engender. In this sense, the power of political education lies in its ability to form a sort of ‘missing link’ between feeling and consciousness, between outrage and empowerment—and ultimately, between cynical passivity and revolutionary action.

• • •

Beyond the power it holds at the level of individual ideological development, political education can also offer the left a crucial way out of the bind created by broader societal developments as well. In recent years, many have observed a rapidly rising current of anti-intellectualism in American culture, and have rightly identified the dire threat that this current poses to the project of building a genuinely democratic society. After all, as any student of history knows, anti-intellectualism has historically been central to fascism and other far-right projects—from Nazi book-burnings to McCarthyite witch-hunts against thinkers, writers, and academics who were suspected of being ‘Communists.’

As such, it’s hardly surprising that the primary center of gravity of our contemporary anti-intellectual moment is situated squarely on the American right, thoroughly enmeshed in the culture wars and moral panics that motivate it. It’s impossible, after all, to ignore the fact that far-right crusades against ‘wokeness,’ ‘Critical Race Theory,’ ‘DEI,’ and ‘gender ideology’ almost always take the form of assaults on the very institutions that are meant to function as our society’s most crucial sites of education and knowledge production—book bans in libraries, policing and censorship of schoolteachers’ lesson plans, suppression of student dissent, public crucifixions of academics and university administrators. And all of this, of course, is taking place amid a shifting social landscape in which education itself is steadily becoming ever more neoliberalized—with the predictable result that students are treated as depersonalized vessels of human capital, the classroom is transformed into an increasingly efficient site for the reproduction of capitalist social relations, and intellectual life is rendered more and more precarious with each passing day.

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But while the scope and magnitude of the problem have certainly increased dramatically in recent years, the problem itself runs far deeper. As the liberal historian Richard Hofstadter famously observed in his Pulitzer-winning 1963 book Anti-intellectualism in American Life, skepticism of and hostility to ‘intellectuals’ has been a feature of American politics since time immemorial. “Those who have suddenly become aware of it,” he writes in the book’s introduction,

often assume that anti-intellectualism is a new force . . . But to students of Americana the anti-intellectual note so commonly struck during the 1950’s sounded not new at all, but rather familiar. Anti-intellectualism was not manifested in this country for the first time during the 1950’s. Our anti-intellectualism is, in fact, older than our national identity, and has a long historical background.

At the heart of American anti-intellectualism (and of anti-intellectualism more broadly) is the perception that the intellectual class is composed largely of pompous, out-of-touch elites. This perception is not entirely unfair. Many of the journalists and academics and media pundits who dominate this country’s contemporary intellectual life seem to harbor a perception of themselves as uniquely enlightened in relation to the masses of ‘ordinary’ people, who are all too easily pathologized and dismissed as uneducated and narrow-minded. As Adam Waters and E.J. Dionne Jr. point out in a 2019 essay for Dissent, even Hofstadter himself replicates a great deal of this same bourgeois condescension in his argument—and it is precisely this condescension that has, for so long, thrown fuel on the fire of our culture’s anti-intellectual backlash. “Impatience with intellectuals,” Waters and Dionne argue,

needs to be distinguished from outright opposition to the intellectual project . . . Attacks on free expression are fundamentally different from a healthy skepticism of intellectuals (on all sides of politics) who distance themselves from the struggles of their societies and from the insights of popular culture and popular religion. Intellectuals as a class are no more immune from criticism in a free society than any other class.

To put it in Marxist terms, bourgeois intellectualism and reactionary anti-intellectualism exist in a dialectical relationship with one another—the more desperately the intellectual class clings onto the remaining vestiges of its elite status in a world that is growing increasingly hostile to it, the greater and more vigorous the backlash against it will be. But given the intimate relationship between growing anti-intellectual sentiment and the steady creep of fascism, the left must resist at all costs the urge to respond to this dismal state of affairs by retreating into a narrow anti-intellectualism of our own. Instead, we must recognize the opportunity that this moment of crisis presents us and seize upon it to offer our own revolutionary analysis that can fill the intellectual void left by both bourgeois intellectualism and reactionary anti-intellectualism.

But what, exactly, does this mean? Simply put, it means bringing Marxism out of the classroom and into the streets. It means focusing our intellectual energies on mass political education and consciousness-raising, rather than on abstract, detached philosophizing. The revolution certainly has room enough for writers and thinkers and academics, even with all our petty conceits and idiosyncrasies. We would do well, however, to follow an example that leans less in the direction of Adorno¹ and more in the direction of Walter Rodney—the Guyanese revolutionary and ‘guerrilla intellectual’ whose critical pedagogical method of ‘grounding’ saw him bring his teaching to the masses directly in their homes and communities, approaching them not as the bearer of externally-imposed enlightenment but rather as an equal intellectual partner, ready to think and study and struggle together. As Rodney writes of the masses in the titular essay of his 1969 book, The Groundings With My Brothers: “You do not have to teach them anything. You just have to say it, and they add something to what you are saying.”

• • •

What, then, does political education actually entail? It’s an infamous cliché that leftists love a book club; we all know the stereotype of the self-proclaimed ‘Marxist’ organization whose idea of ‘organizing’ is just an endless succession of reading groups and study circles. And while close reading and careful study are certainly important parts of any project of revolutionary political education, it’s not enough to tell people to “just read theory.” Many people, especially working people, simply will not be willing or able to wrestle their way through 50 or 100 or 200 pages of dense, jargon-heavy writing. Rather, if we are serious about raising mass consciousness through political education, it’s incumbent on those of us who do have the time and energy for in-depth, firsthand engagement with theory to do so, drawing out the most salient concepts and arguments and then making those lessons widely available to the masses—always taking care to ground these theoretical insights in concrete analysis by applying them to the real-world problems facing the working class today.

This is hardly a new insight. In What Is to Be Done?, for example, Lenin argues that the “ideal” to which socialist revolutionaries must aspire should not be that of the “trade union secretary,” but rather:

the tribune of the people, who is able to react to every manifestation of tyranny and oppression . . . who is able to generalise all these manifestations and produce a single picture of police violence and capitalist exploitation; who is able to take advantage of every event, however small, in order to set forth before all his socialist convictions and his democratic demands, in order to clarify for all and everyone the world-historic significance of the struggle for the emancipation of the proletariat . . . We must ‘go among all classes of the population’ as theoreticians, as propagandists, as agitators, and as organisers.

Serving as the “tribune of the people” in this manner means meeting the people where they are at, using any and all means at our disposal to raise mass consciousness and disseminate the fundamentals of revolutionary theory as widely as possible. It means being innovative in our tactics and methods for such dissemination, embracing the accessibility and educational potential of forms of media beyond just longform academic writing—zines, podcasts, teach-ins, film screenings, even TikToks and Instagram infographics. And it means disabusing ourselves of the bourgeois, elitist notion that certain forms of disseminating revolutionary knowledge are somehow beneath us solely because they lack the intellectual imprimatur of elite institutions.

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Above all else, it also means taking seriously the idea that one can be a Marxist without ever having read Marx, and a Leninist without ever having read Lenin. One key marker of the theory bro’s influence on the left’s intellectual culture is the fetishization of texts themselves, rather than the ideas contained within them—but it is precisely this fetishization that lends itself to precisely the sort of dogmatism that we want to combat. Ultimately, what really matters is not so much whether one has read the original works of the revolutionary canon, as whether one understands the theses, concepts, and ideas that make up the intellectual core of those works.

As schoolchildren, we were all taught Newton’s laws of motion and Darwin’s theory of evolution. I’d wager a guess, however, that none of us ever had to read the Principia or On the Origin of Species as they were originally written—it was sufficient for our teachers, having a satisfactory grasp of Newton’s and Darwin’s core arguments themselves, to distill, synthesize, and present those key concepts in a way that would be more easily understandable for us as students. The same holds true for revolutionary political education—when it comes to instilling in the masses the basic principles of a Marxist political and economic analysis, the form in which those basic principles are delivered is ultimately less important than whether they are delivered in an accessible and effective manner.

For evidence of this, we need look no further than the countless Marxist revolutionaries who took part in anticolonial movements and national liberation struggles across the Third World throughout the 20th century. As researchers at Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research point out in their 2021 dossier Dawn: Marxism and National Liberation:

Many of those who became Marxists in the colonial world had never read Marx. They had read about Marx in various cheap pamphlets and had encountered Lenin in this form as well . . . They came to Marxism from the factory floor and the agriculturalist’s field, from the prisons of the colonial rulers and the nationalist organisations to which they flocked. They drew from what they learned and developed their theories both about imperialism and capitalism from that reading and from their experience. They read what they could find and drew from it what would help them to develop a theory and praxis adequate to their social reality.

These are, of course, the same revolutionaries who successfully led the struggles that liberated millions of people around the world from the shackles of colonial domination, allowing newly independent countries across the Third World to embark on ambitious projects of postcolonial nation-building and socialist construction. And while we should be careful not to romanticize such projects, many of which failed for various reasons to live up to their lofty goals, it’s still worth comparing the track records of these Third-World Marxists against the track records of self-righteous theory bros in the imperial core. Such a comparison should, I think, tell us everything we need to know.

• • •

In our current moment of deepening crisis and heightening contradictions, the project of raising mass political consciousness is, simply put, among the most important tasks facing the American left today. But ‘consciousness-raising’ is more than mere rhetoric, and it requires more than just instilling a sense of righteous outrage and opposition to injustice in the hearts of the masses—these are important prerequisites for political consciousness, but they are not substitutes for consciousness in and of itself. Rather, truly revolutionary consciousness requires principles to be sharpened and substantiated by a coherent political analysis which can only be achieved through a project of mass political education—a project which can and must take many forms, but whose crucial importance can neither be overstated nor negotiated.

Building such a project means rejecting both the drive towards holier-than-thou dogmatism and the tendency to respond to such dogmatism by disavowing revolutionary study altogether. It means responding to the rising tide of reactionary anti-intellectualism not with a repackaged anti-intellectualism of our own, but instead with new and radical forms of revolutionary political education that meet the masses where they’re at and approach them as active participants in the development of their own consciousness. And above all else, it means integrating revolutionary theory seamlessly with revolutionary practice, recognizing that one cannot exist without the other. Doing away with the theory bro, in other words, does not mean doing away with theory itself. On the contrary, the death of the theory bro is precisely the requisite condition which must be met in order for theory—and the revolutionary subject that theory is intended to empower—to truly come alive.

The Western Left's Collaboration with the Western Bourgeoisie

What is Western Marxism? — The Western Left's Collaboration with the Western Bourgeoisie

The Western Left's Collaboration with the Western Bourgeoisie

Article 6 of 10

Hood Communist

By Ajamu Baraka

Originally published at https://hoodcommunist.org/2021/09/09/the-western-lefts-collaboration-with-the-western-bourgeoisie/

As the Western left has become more aligned with their imperialist bourgeoisie in the destabilization of the Global South, the radical Black tradition provides a clear approach to “turn imperialist wars into wars against imperialism.”

Changes in historical conditions can elevate a secondary contradiction to a primary, and antagonistic contradiction, in an instant. The rightist collaboration with the Pan-European colonial/capitalist project on the part of the social-imperialist left in the United States and Europe did not occur instantly but has been evolving for decades. The contradictory nature of that relationship has sharpened as a result of the current crisis of global capitalism and the U.S. led Western imperialist project fueled by two interconnected elements: the devastating social-economic conditions that workers and the laboring classes now face as result of monopoly capital’s neoliberal turn over the last forty years in both the imperialist center and global South; and the intensifying challenge to neoliberalism from states and social movements in the global South, with the corresponding response from U.S. and European capital that has ranged from economic sanctions meant to punish whole populations to direct and indirect political subversion and military interventions, all illegal and morally indefensible.

And while political opposition to neoliberal policies have been fragmented and inconsistent in the Northern capitalist countries, the peoples and nations in the global South confronted neoliberal globalization and Western imperialism in various forms, from culturalist rejection of Westernization to sophisticated political opposition that resulted in the nominal capture of neocolonial states by left forces, in particular in Latin America.

The response from capital to those challenges was predictable. Murderous sanctions, wars of aggression and political repression. Yet, over the last two and a half decades there has been a change in how these interventions and illegal actions have been presented to the public. While U.S. and Western innocence was always a component of the propaganda to justify colonialist aggression, the ideas of humanitarian intervention and its corollary, the responsibility to protect, emerged in the 1990s as one of the most innovative ideological weapons ever produced since the end of the second imperialist war in 1945.

That framing that evokes an ideologically-embedded liberalism that infects the consciousness of most Westerners and the Western-orientated left to “instinctively” oppose something called “authoritarianism,” has created a perfect storm of counterrevolutionary ideological reaction. Its liberalism and subconscious assumptions of Western civilizational superiority has transformed large sectors of the Western left into collaborators with the white supremacist, Pan European colonial/capitalist patriarchy, from which it has also benefited materially.   

Appealing to “white saviorism,” Western interventions are now framed as “humanitarian.” Already corrupted by material privileges and infused with assumptions of white supremacist biases, elements of the Western left fell into alignment with neoliberal justifications for imperialist actions in the global South.  

This sentiment is being captured dramatically with the situation unfolding in Afghanistan. The decision on part of elements in the U.S. foreign policy community to redeploy U.S. forces from Afghanistan has sparked an ahistorical and hypocritical cry from liberals and the pro-war corporate press that the U.S. and the West are abdicating their “responsibility to protect” “oppressed” populations. This fantastic flight from reality by liberals is compounded by an equally, and even more absurd stance taken by large sectors of the radical left in the U.S. and Europe who also seem to believe, like some of their predecessors from the second international that supported Western colonialism, that the West and Western imperialism can have some beneficial results for the natives in the global South. 

While this short commentary will not attempt to delve into the complexities of how the radical left ended up as collaborators with their imperialist bourgeoisie, I will discuss the divergent approaches to the current crisis by the international bourgeoisie and the Western left, with a particular focus on the U.S. left.

Having a clear understanding of the objective interests of U.S. led imperialism and the strategies being deployed to protect and advance those interests is imperative for colonized and oppressed peoples and classes.  We do not have the luxury of confusion.  The Western bourgeoisie still under the hegemony of U.S.-based finance and corporate capital has demonstrated through practice that, notwithstanding secondary conflict of interests among them, they have a common objective interest to act as a block to counter political challenges from the global South to the Pan European colonial/capitalist white supremacist patriarchy.  

Biden and the Post-Trump reconsolidation of Global White supremacy

As a result of the incessant propaganda from neoliberal corporate press in the U.S., Biden and democrats are considered to be the nice, rational friends of people of color globally, and Trump the mean massa, the proto fascist at the head of a violent, irrational movement committed to white supremacy and capitalist hegemony.

Of course, as I have said on many occasions, the reality is much more complex, with neoliberalism actually representing a more dangerous threat to colonized and working-class peoples in the U.S. and globally. This is because within the context of the U.S., Democrats have been successful in perpetuating the myth that they represent “progressivism.” This perception usually leads to substantial demobilization and actual liberal – left alignment with neoliberalism objectively when Democrats occupy the Executive Branch.

Yet, as the late Glen Ford said on numerous occasions, the democrats are nothing more than the more effective evil, especially when it comes to advancing a white supremacist imperialist agenda.

Just a cursory examination of the rhetoric of the Biden campaign and his political objectives after assuming office reveals his quite obvious commitment to white unity and global white supremacy.

Restoring the historic alliance between the U.S. and Europe was announced by Biden as a major objective of his administration. His “America is Back” slogan was supposed to signify that the U.S. was ready to reassume its leadership of the Western alliance. Biden proudly identified himself as an “Atlanticist,” and indeed a number of the members of his foreign policy team were plunked from the “Atlantic Council.” Similar to the Council on foreign Affairs (CFA), the Atlantic Council is a neoliberal think tank that is funded by a cross-section of the ruling class but significantly by neoliberals associated with the democrat party.

The Atlantic Council was a severe critic of the Trump administration, not because of any concerns about its “racism” but because the Council opposed Trump’s unilateralist approach to foreign policy and his dangerous ideas like pulling out of NATO, a desire to draw down U.S. troops and his insufficient hostility to Russia. Plus, the Council and the neoliberal ruling class never forgave Trump for his scuttling of the Trans-Pacific Partnership because it pulled the rug out from under the Trans-Atlantic Investment Partnership that was supposed to be the next agreement after TPP and would have solidified the hegemony of U.S. capital in Europe for next few decades.

Biden and the Council believed that unity among the G-7 nations during the current global capitalist crisis was imperative. Consequently, Biden’s aggressive stance toward Russia, Venezuela, blind support for Israel and general hostility toward the progressive governments in Latin America signaled that belligerent U.S. policy would continue, but with an Obama-like smile.

What has been response from the U.S. and Western left to Bourgeois Destabilization in Global South?  

Bolivian President, Evo Morales, faced a right-wing coup and instead of unrestrained mobilization the left engaged in a debate about the Bolivian process. In Europe, the liberal-left parliamentarians in the European Union awarded their Sakharav human rights prize to the Venezuelan right-wing opposition, an opposition known for burning alive dark-skinned Venezuelans assumed to be “Chavistas.” Bernie Sanders declares Hugo Chavez a “dead communist dictator” and most respectable liberal-left elements in the U.S. would not get caught dead at a pro-Venezuela demo as long as the new “authoritarian dictator,” Nicholas Maduro, is in power. Gaddafi deserved to die, Assad is a bloodthirsty tyrant, China is capitalist, and a human rights violator, and Haiti is a S…hole country that does not merit much thought or energy, let alone mobilization for.

The anti-anti-imperialism of a Eurocentric armchair commentator like Gilbert Achcar neatly captures the inanity of this approach, dressed-up as nuanced and sophisticated analysis. Grounded in Western chauvinism and completely suspended from the contradictory structures and class forces in the specific, concrete realities of this historical moment, it condemns the left projects that don’t correspond to the imagery of Western leftists who see revolutionary change as some pristine project. These leftists do not seem to notice or don’t care that they are usually on the same side of an international issue as the international bourgeoisie.

Why? Because ideologically they don’t make a distinction from that of a David Lidington, Chair of the Royal United Services Institute and a former deputy Prime Minister of the UK, who argues the benefits of association with the West by states that are supposedly committed to something called a liberal international order. He proudly states that “What made support from the West so attractive to countries around the world was the underpinned commitment to helping countries build liberal, open democracies and a society grounded in the rule of law.”

From Achcar and the “leftists” amplifying the pro-war sentiments being pushed by liberal corporate press in response to the chaos from Afghanistan to Lidington, there is a unity of worldviews that sees stability and a safe normalcy in a world administered by Western powers.

The safe, materially comfortable, latte-left may be able to indulge in these kinds of delusional beliefs, but for the colonized still fighting for national liberation and independence against the real coterie of capitalist nation-states that conquered our lands and enslaved our peoples, it would be suicidal for us to embrace that view.  

For the colonized, the terms of the fight are between imperialism and national independence from the very same nations that “leftists” like Achcar give ideological cover to. The sophisticated Western left not only provides a “left” legitimation for alignment with reaction, but also supports the bourgeois ideological attack on the very idea of revolutionary change — a support that confuses and demobilizes activists from coming to the aid of movements and nations who find themselves in the crosshair of vicious U.S. state violence.

The African Response to What must be Done  

Lenin was crystal clear on the importance of the struggle for anti-colonial national liberation in the South. But contemporary Eurocentric Western radicals have abandoned the simple and strategically clear positions of their progenitors that the struggle for national liberation continues and that was never any “post-coloniality,” and that every victory in that struggle alters the international balance of forces against the international power of imperialism.

The peoples’ movements for national liberation from imperialism are not necessarily asking Western radicals for ideological or political support but instead are demanding that they target their national bourgeoisie in order to put a brake on their attempts to undermine anti-imperialist national projects.  We (they) say, stop giving legitimacy to the white supremacist concepts of “humanitarian intervention” and the “responsibility to protect.”

To counter the collaborationism and opportunism of the U.S. and Western left, Black revolutionaries must re-center the anti-colonial struggle that addresses the dialectics of the national and class issues produced by the colonial/capitalist system.  

This re-centering of anti-colonial struggle is not new. It has been the broad theoretical framework for African/Black radical tradition for decades — from Black socialists in Harlem like Hubert Harrison and the African Blood Brotherhood in the teens and the 1920’s to the revolutionary Pan African tradition. It was also reflected in the articulations of Lenin on the “National Question” and the assemblies of colonial peoples leading to the 1928 declaration on the right to self-determination on the part of colonized peoples and the declaration that Africans in the U.S. constituted an oppressed nation with the right to self-determination.

The radical Black tradition provides an invaluable approach for how a left should address its bourgeoisie.  We say that concretely it means that authentic Western leftists must join us to “turn imperialist wars into wars against imperialism.” Specifically for African revolutionaries in the U.S. we must build bottom-up organic black unity and an anti-colonial, pro-socialist movement anchored in the Black working class that must assert leadership of this movement and to the broader radical movement in the U.S.

Biden and the neoliberal, neo-fascists are committed to countering the movements for national liberation and socialism by any means, including destroying the planet to maintain European imperialist power.

The Western social-imperialist left that is still addicted to its material privileges and illusions of being a part of something called the “West” has a choice that it must make: either you abandon privilege and whiteness and join as class combatants against your bourgeoisie, or you will be considered part of the enemy.

Decolonizing Western Marxism

What is Western Marxism? — Decolonizing Western Marxism

Decolonizing Western Marxism

Article 7 of 10

Socialista Champagne

By Isabella Aidar

Originally published at https://socialistachampagne.substack.com/p/decolonizing-western-marxism

Yes, we need to move towards a multipolar power distributed world, even if it means multipolarity amongst other capitalist nations, monarchies, theocracies, whatever they may be. This is only shocking and controversial to hear for Western exceptionalists excusing living under single global hegemon - the most corrupt and dangerous one at that. It’s not an end goal, only a next step.

In multipolarity, countries get alternative options, deals and negotiating power so they can’t just be easily absorbed into the dominant order. We have already seen this with the Soviet Union, the first and only economic rival the West ever had until China today, and the first counterweight to Western unipolarity.

From the 1960s until the early 1990s, the Soviet Union trained thousands of cadres of MK, the armed wing of the ANC (African National Congress) to fight against the South African apartheid regime. Nelson Mandela, on his visit to Moscow in 1999 where he was awarded two honorary doctorates from the Russian Academy of Sciences, gave his thanks to the USSR for the “solidarity of the Russian people in the South African fight against apartheid and for freedom.” This is not the only time Kalashnikov rifles and Soviet trade came in handy in Africa. There’s a reason the Mozambican flag has a Soviet AK on it. Their own liberation from Portuguese colonialism, as well as that of Angola, Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde, Ethiopia, Somalia, Congo, Algeria, and Egypt - were also made possible with the Soviet Union’s military, economic, and political support. The USSR also had significant ties and early cooperation treaties that provided various forms of aid to Ghana, Guinea, Mali, Tunisia, Morocco and Benin. You get the picture.

Multipolarity helps challenge the monopoly on sanctions, the monopoly on violence, and exceptionalism before international law. Monopolies are typically something that that anarchists and leftcoms are against, yet they completely lack this analysis when it comes to imperialism. Suddenly, every other country needs to be a socialist utopia to be allowed more power (all the while excusing the hegemony of the empire of pedophiles who bombs multiple countries every single year).

The culture and tolerance of US exceptionalism and internalized imperialism is the material consequence of years of colonial dominance. Analysis on capitalism alone doesn’t get us there.

The working class of Britain and the working class of Congo, or Burkina Faso, are not the same. No two working classes are the same. Marx himself wrote about this and called it the international division of labor. Lenin called it the labor aristocracy. It’s not just “no war but class war”. Reading the works of Walter Rodney and Kwame Nkrumah informs the colonial side of the class struggle. The term ‘Global South’ refers to periphery states to an imperial core that has had their resources and labor siphoned in unequal exchange for centuries and locked into a system of perpetual inequality. While the imperial core, despite their own class struggles, still materially benefit from this unequal siphoning and exchange. The working class of Britain still benefiting from imperialism has had an effect on their culture, tolerance, and revolutionary conditions.

We can’t ignore that countries are in different stages of development and that is going to inform their revolutionary conditions. Developing countries are going to push for industrialization, decolonization and national sovereignty as they had their development ruptured and interrupted due to imperialism. The West has not had to worry about these basic things for centuries. Our conditions are not the same as theirs.
Similarly, we cannot tell the countries who are the least responsible for climate change, yet will be the most impacted by it, to not develop accordingly.

Our revolutionary conditions in the West are stunted right now. Years of individualism has impacted our culture, and that includes the most radical leftist spaces. Marxism in the west is not really about building socialism right now, it’s ideological self-masturbation; wanking over who has the best understanding of theory. It lacks the required urgency, prioritization strategizing, and collectivism needed for a revolutionary movement to take off.

In the imperial core we have become more tolerant and complacent. This is the reality of living somewhere where the bread and circus is kept just on tap. Most of the resources to make our phones and other electronics are mined in China or Africa, then they are manufactured somewhere in Asia. Yet buying an iPhone is the cheapest here in the West. Whereas in Congo they are forced to import the finished product back at a much higher price than we pay, despite being a key player who helps make the phone. They’re punished and exploited by capital for being at the bottom of the supply chain, when the whole chain is needed. This has been exponentially deepening inequality worldwide over the years.

Something as simple as buying a phone or a dishwasher or a fridge is deeply rooted in imperial exploitation. Most people don’t have to think about whether they can have a fridge or a phone.

The revolution will not be led nor started by western Marxists. Our job is to get out of the way of true revolutionary movements. This doesn’t mean assuming defeatism or nihilism, just an honest conversation about where we are at. I look around, and most people are using the deepening polycrisis as an excuse to tune further out, not in. Protect their peace.

Those of us that have had our economic and political awakening must keep going.

Thanks for reading, gang.

The Long Transition Toward Socialism and the End of Capitalism

What is Western Marxism? — The Long Transition Toward Socialism and the End of Capitalism

The Long Transition Toward Socialism and the End of Capitalism

Article 8 of 10

Red Anti-Imperialist Collective

Originally published at https://redantcollective.org/2025/04/15/the-long-transition-toward-socialism-and-the-end-of-capitalism-by-torkil-lauesen/

Reviewed by Stanley Thomson

Yanggil, yellow-tailed black cockatoo, calls high and piercing in the cooling sky. The mornings become misty—it is Waring on Wurundjeri Country, wombat season, and Sagittarius rises in the south-east after sunset. Little forest bats mark the wounded healer’s ascent to the vault of heaven.

After several brutish centuries of domination by the Global North and nearly a hundred years of United States hegemony, a multipolar world is suddenly in our midst. Neo-China arrives from the future. New Bandungs stir in the South. A bifurcation in the not-yet of our histories emerges, between peace and active development, and belligerent forever war on hothouse Earth. Old familiarities warp and distort, while new geometries of power struggle to assert themselves. Contradictions, principal and secondary, flicker like static on late night TV.

Tectonic shifts in the balance of world power and public opinion define this time of monsters. These are qualitative shifts, which have emerged from the quantitative build up of global trends and events—the fall of the Soviet Union and the westward expansion of NATO, liberalisation of China under Deng Xiaoping, the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Centers in New York, America’s wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya, the killing of a CEO by Luigi Mangione, the list goes on. In the Global North, leaders and the people alike scramble to parse the flood. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man may at last face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind. Times like these call for clarity.

Providing some sizeable measure of that clarity is Torkil Lauesen’s The Long Transition Towards Socialism and the End of Capitalism (2024), published by

Iskra Books

. Over the course of a little over four hundred pages, Lauesen charts a history of the proletarian revolutions and national liberation movements of the past two hundred years and furnishes anti-imperialists in the West with timely strategies for building a socialist world. Concise, engaging, and powerfully broad in scope, The Long Transition is a comprehensive introduction to anti-imperialist history and politics, the shape of the current principal global contradiction, and importantly to the Chinese revolution from its beginnings to the present. It is well suited for fledgling activists and seasoned comrades alike.

Lauesen, now 73, has long supported anti-imperialist movements in the Global South from his home country of Denmark. Actively involved in organising with the Kommunistisk Arbejdskreds, and later a co-founder of the Manifest-Kommunistisk Arbejdsgruppe, he was involved in a series of clandestine operations during the 1970s and 1980s aimed at providing material support to struggles for socialism, particularly to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). These operations included both legal and illegal activities, notably a series of robberies intended to fund organisations such as the PFLP. The most significant of these was the robbery of the Købmagergade Post Office in Copenhagen on November 3, 1988. In the early hours, Lauesen and his associates intercepted a postal transport van delivering cash and valuables. Disguised as police officers, they gained access to the post office’s secure area, overpowered the staff, and seized approximately 9.3 million Danish kroner (about USD$1.4 million) in cash and bearer bonds, along with other valuables. As they attempted to escape, a confrontation with the police ensued, during which a 22-year-old officer, Jesper Egtved Hansen, was fatally shot. ​

Following this incident, Lauesen was arrested on April 13, 1989, and on May 2, 1991, was sentenced to ten years in prison for his involvement in the Købmagergade robbery and related activities. He served his sentence at Vridsløselille Prison until his parole on December 13, 1995. During his incarceration, Lauesen pursued academic studies, earning a master’s degree in political science from the University of Copenhagen in June 1997. In 2000, Lauesen was employed as a district councilor in Copenhagen Municipality, a position he held for several years. Lauesen is a member of the Internationalt Forum, an anti-imperialist organization based in Denmark, and serves on the board of the Arghiri Emmanuel Association.

The struggle and suffering of millions of communists and socialists for the past two hundred years have not been in vain, but are contributions to this long process of creating a better world. To be part of this process—a tiny cogwheel in the machinery of transformation—and give it a little push in the right direction seems to be “the meaning of life.”¹

For the bulk of the text, Lauesen provides an in-depth analysis of pivotal revolutionary movements that have shaped the trajectory toward socialism over the past two centuries. He begins with the Revolutions of 1848, highlighting their role in awakening proletarian consciousness across Europe. The Paris Commune of 1871 is examined as an early, albeit short-lived, manifestation of workers’ power. Lauesen then delves into the Russian Revolution of 1917, marking the first successful establishment of a socialist state, and the Chinese Revolution of 1949, emphasising its impact on global anti-imperialist struggles. The decolonisation movements of the mid-20th century are also explored, illustrating the global challenge to colonial and capitalist systems. Finally, he discusses China’s market reforms, analysing them as strategic adaptations within the ongoing socialist project. By weaving these events into a cohesive narrative, Lauesen underscores their collective contribution to the protracted and non-linear transition from capitalism to socialism. As these histories are best appreciated in their full detail, I will leave discussion of them here. Readers will no doubt appreciate them in their fullness—for now I’d like to instead write with and alongside the text, turning towards the present events shaping our world and how we might use Lauesen’s work to analyse them and strategise as anti-imperialists in the Global North.

In The Long Transition, we see an elder of our movement exploring the “tendency to move toward grand theory,” to “assemble the puzzle, get the full picture and understand the process, trying to envision in which direction it is moving.”² Beginning with perspective, method, and concepts, Lauesen gives a succinct explanation of the differences between utopian and scientific socialism in the vein of Engels’ work, and sketches his understanding of historical and dialectical materialism. The definition he provides is one of a practice through which comrades can develop consciousness to not only better analyse the world, but to transform it. Historical and dialectical materialism “is not just a research method. It is the conscious capacity of seeing society as a process and of understanding the direction and the eventual goal of that process,” a tool to develop strategy and praxis, which “produces the theoretical insight that complements the kind of action that changes the world.”³

Building on this foundation, Lauesen details three key components of his analysis: the global perspective that charts capitalism’s bringing-together of the disparate elements of the world, the driver of this process in the contradiction between the development of the productive forces and the mode of production, and finally the principal contradiction. To take the global perspective, we must see capitalism in its historical entirety, as a “multiplicity of cultures and political systems integrated into an extensive division of labor within a single world economy.”⁴ Lauesen relies on anti-imperialist thinkers such as Samir Amin, André Gunder Frank, Giovanni Arrighi, and Walter Rodney to introduce concepts of unequal exchange, underdevelopment, and the creation of global value, arguing that “the combination of globalized value and low wages in the South is the basis for the extraction of super-surplus-value, which generates super-profits for capital and relatively low commodity prices relative to Northern wage levels. The difference between the value of labor and its price, therefore, corresponds to a transfer of value from the South to both capital and labor in the North.”⁵ Contradictions in this system have emerged steadily over the course of the past seventy or so years, a quantitative buildup of changed conditions which now produces the profound qualitative shifts we mentioned earlier.

The path of these developments is long and winding, with many zig-zags. There are periods of apparent stability, and periods of rupture and revolution which are subject to reversal and often roll back. With regards to the contradiction between the development of the forces of production and the mode of production, we see Lauesen return many times over the course of the book to this passage from Marx’s Critique of Political Economy:

No social order is ever destroyed before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient have been developed, and new superior relations of production never replace older ones before the material conditions for their existence have matured within the framework of the old society.⁶

This shapes Lauesen’s understanding of the development of colonialism, neo-colonial structures, and imperialist exploitation. Capitalism has ceaselessly sought to acquire new territory for the expansion of its markets, developing the productive forces in the process. But this process has a spatial limit – the planet has finite area and finite resources. As the contradictions within the Global North sharpened after the end of the second world war, neoliberalism was implemented as a spatial fix – a way to kick the can down the road and push out the inevitable problems of the falling rate of profit and overproduction to some undefined future date. But the spatial fix has raised problems of its own. By moving manufacturing processes to the Global South, particularly in China, the North has rapidly developed the productive forces and transferred advanced technology. China, as a chief example, has used this arrangement to modernise their economy and develop their technology, surpassing the United States in 57 of 64 critical technologies.⁷ Two decades ago, the situation was reversed, with the U.S. leading in 60 of 64.

In the North, the hollowing out of the state and the privatisation of key sectors has led to deepening instability, corruption, and austerity for the working class. The cheery mood that followed Fukuyama’s End of History has been swept away by successive financial crises, and by the unwillingness of Western states to respond constructively to the mounting crises of our time. Globalisation is no longer viewed favourably, as the effects of free trade agreements materially register in the lives of millions in the imperial core. Belief in democracy and trust in institutions is in decline, and replacing it are new nationalisms and far-right movements.⁸ This is driving deep divisions, with open class struggle re-emerging as a feature both of consciousness in the North, and as a material fact, from the Black Lives Matter uprisings to the attempted coup on January 6, 2021.

Alongside the rapid development of the productive forces and the fracturing of stability in the imperial core has come a new mood in the Global South. Sovereignty and self-determination are the watchwords of this new mood, which has seen countries long under the yoke of the U.S. and EU countries assert their right to their material resources, their political independence, and their rights to operate without coercion on the international stage. Thailand bypassed the United States to secure the release of hostages taken by Hamas, opening dialogue with Qatar and Egypt.⁹ Indonesia banned exports of raw nickel to stimulate Indonesian industries such as refining and battery manufacturing.¹⁰ Namibia’s President, Hage Geinob, recently condemned their former German colonial masters for supporting Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people, saying that “Germany cannot morally express commitment to the United Nations Convention against genocide, including atonement for the genocide in Namibia, whilst supporting the equivalent of a holocaust and genocide in Gaza.”¹¹ Increasingly, countries in the Global South, emboldened by China’s trajectory and the alternative financial and development frameworks emerging through BRICS and BRI, are standing up and saying “no” to the North.

The development of the productive forces of China and other countries in the Global South signals not only a shift in dynamics within capitalism, but also enhances the material conditions for the development of socialism. On devious roads for more than a hundred years, capitalism is finally approaching a dead end.¹²

This brings us to the third component of Lauesen’s analysis—the principal contradiction. In order to develop a comprehensive enough understanding to be able to intervene in the stream of history, we must hone our ability to identify and study the primary contradiction in any given phenomenon. Following Mao’s method as outlined in On Contradiction, “we must investigate both aspects, and struggle between them to decide which way the contradiction will move.”¹³ Lauesen discusses the shift in the global principal contradiction, from the neoliberal-era contradiction between transnational capital’s globalization project and the nation state’s attempts to regulate capitalism, to the “new emerging principal contradiction between the forces which want to uphold U.S. hegemony and the forces which seek a multipolar world order, headed by China. Transnational capital in the Global North is forced by the changing winds in the world-system to join with nationalist and conservative political forces in the North.”¹⁴

Under the second Trump presidency, the world has been given front row seats to view these uneasy new alliances forming. Four of the five richest men in the world attended Trump’s inauguration to prostrate before their new head of state.¹⁵ Corporate representatives from Walmart, Pfizer, Microsoft, Ford, Google, Goldman Sachs, Toyota, General Motors, Bank of America, and AT&T were also present. The combined total wealth in the room reached some 1.35 trillion, enough to immediately end world hunger and poverty.¹⁶ Within Trump’s cabinet, hawkish conservative realists like Elbridge Colby float “speculative, first-best” grand strategies that seek to maintain U.S. hegemony through the sabotage and denial of China, and the building of an “Asian NATO” with countries like Japan, Taiwan, Australia and South Korea.¹⁷ Trump’s Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, flies to Japan to carry them out.¹⁸

Transnational capital is in a double-bind. It requires the nation state to protect its operations, the profits from which depend on the global production chains and markets developed through the neoliberal era. But increasingly, the nation states of the North are turning to protectionist measures and forms of economic and military aggression that undermine and dismantle those same markets and chains of production. “U.S. policy is becoming self-destructive; it shatters the world market, upon which America has built its power since the end of the Second World War.”¹⁹ These contradictions will only become more pronounced as Trump pursues so-called “reciprocal” tariffs on major U.S. trading partners, in a misguided attempt to re-shore manufacturing and stimulate the U.S. domestic economy.²⁰ An escalating trade war on a global scale is one potential outcome, with China, Canada and the European Union advancing greater retaliatory measures.

The emerging tariff regime is best understood as an intensification of imperial crisis management through economic violence. Far from a strategy for national rejuvenation, the tariff program functions as a class weapon wielded by the U.S. state on behalf of monopoly capital—shifting the burden of economic stagnation onto workers and peripheral economies through inflation, disrupted supply chains, and coercive trade policy. The tariffs were not designed to restore industrial capacity or employment but to discipline economic rivals, extract tribute, and reassert imperial authority.²¹ In this sense, they are not a deviation from neoliberal globalization, but its militarised continuation under conditions of hegemony in decay.²² As supply chains fracture and dollar hegemony is challenged by dedollarisation, particularly among BRICS states, the empire turns inward, lashing out at both domestic workers and external competitors in a desperate bid to forestall systemic decline.

Yet this hyper-imperialist maneuver is dialectically generative. While cracks emerge in the North, nations in the periphery and semi-periphery look toward China and multipolarity. Recent trilateral meetings between the trade ministers of Japan, South Korea, and China signal that even stalwart allies of the United States are seeking alternative arrangements to preserve the stability of their economies.²³ As Israel’s U.S.-backed genocide of the Palestinian people continues and expands further into surrounding countries, and as the U.S. itself doubles down on internal repression and fascistic policy, the new mood in the Global South consolidates and strengthens.²⁴ Officials in the North are aware of this, but seem unable to stop it. “We have definitely lost the battle in the Global South. All the work we have done with the Global South [over Ukraine] has been lost … Forget about rules, forget about world order, they won’t ever listen to us again.”²⁵

The “end of history” is, itself, ending. In liminal times, contradictions sharpen and crises of legitimacy and material stability emerge in the capitalist system.²⁶ Significant opportunities are emerging for anti-imperialists in the North. Popular struggles for climate justice, anti-war coalitions, and the Palestinian solidarity movement attest to the resentment for the status quo and the desire for a just world simmering under the surface of our everyday activities. Lauesen suggests a form of “realistic optimism”, one that takes “into account the structural crises and instability of global capitalism, as well as the hundreds of millions of new proletarians in the Global South who have ‘nothing to lose but their chains,’ and are becoming ever more conscious of their power.”²⁷

The eternal question remains—in light of all this, what is to be done? Lauesen gives us a few cogent suggestions:

Support a multipolar world system against U.S. hegemony to promote a more peaceful and democratic world, with an empowered and reformed United Nations.

Support the Global South’s struggle for a more equal world against the West, which has ruled the world through colonialism and imperialism for the last five hundred years.

Support the countries and movements developing socialism, to end the exploitation of humans and the destruction of planet earth.²⁸

In addition to this, Lauesen compels us on the Western left to be more than “passive bystanders,” to make sure that the North is “no safe hinterland for imperialism, which means struggle against right wing national chauvinism, racism, and imperialist political and military intervention.”²⁹ We must engage in and lead anti-war movements, and promote workers’ struggles along global production chains. Anti-imperialists must be active in the climate movement, working towards the building of a class conscious, class based internationalist lens of climate justice, over the false “climate solutions” of reformist and social democratic tendencies. We must materially support socialist movements and states, not only in words, but in deeds.

Understanding and correctly analysing the conditions and contradictions of our moment and relaying this knowledge among the people is key. We must build strong, resilient, dynamic, revolutionary anti-imperialist organisations with an orientation towards taking power. This will involve building the confidence and clarity of the people, building trust and reciprocity, showing up when it matters. We must build alternative cultural spaces, and enter the cultural spaces dominated by the right and the mainstream liberal-capitalist interpretations of the world. Working towards peace and active development, in the direction of multipolarity and socialist transition, so that “our grandchildren have to go to a museum to see what a gun looked like.”³⁰

We should be mindful, however, that proletarian revolutions are not guaranteed to occur simply because capitalism is off balance. Socialist consciousness in the North is patchy and uneven, often mired in imperialism and white supremacy, and lacking in the experience of revolutionary activity. Lauesen approaches the end of The Long Transition by asking us to meditate on how best to meet these challenges, how to prepare in our organisations for how the global struggle will develop over the next two to five years: “What should our strategy be? How can I, and my organization, fit into the analysis of the objective and subjective forces of transition? What kind of support can we deliver? How can we best be a cogwheel in the big machine of transformation from world capitalism towards socialism?”

The Northern working classes are looking for answers to the problems they face, and are apparently willing to accept the cartoonish depictions offered to them by the far-right of a special type. However, despite the difficulty, socialist consciousness and the confidence to use it in the transformation of the world can be nurtured. It can grow rapidly and deeply into the cracks in the imperialist concrete. Take a walk around any city block, and you will see green shoots bursting up from the subterranean, challenging the integrity and the finality of the world capitalism has built.

It is Waring on Wurundjeri Country. The morning dew evaporates in sheets of mist. Yanggil calls high and piercing in the cooling sky, signalling the change, carrying messages on the wind. Sagittarius rises in the south-east after sunset, and little forest bats mark the wounded healer’s ascent to the vault of heaven.

Freedom is a pure idea. It occurs spontaneously and without instruction. Random acts of insurrection are occurring constantly throughout the galaxy. There are whole armies, battalions that have no idea that they’ve already enlisted in the cause. Remember that the frontier of the Rebellion is everywhere. And even the smallest act of insurrection pushes our lines forward.

And remember this: the Imperial need for control is so desperate because it is so unnatural. Tyranny requires constant effort. It breaks, it leaks. Authority is brittle. Oppression is the mask of fear. Remember that.

And know this, the day will come when all these skirmishes and battles, these moments of defiance will have flooded the banks of the Empires’ authority and then there will be one too many. One single thing will break the siege.

Remember this: Try.³¹

Reference List

Torkil Lauesen, The Long Transition Towards Socialism and the End of Capitalism (Seattle: Iskra Books, 2024), 2.

Ibid, 1.

Ibid, 15.

Ibid, 19.

Ibid, 16.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/preface.htm

https://www.aspi.org.au/opinion/critical-technology-tracker-two-decades-data-show-rewards-long-term-research-investment

https://thetricontinental.org/newsletterissue/ten-theses-on-the-far-right-of-a-special-type/

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/11/30/relief-as-thai-hostages-return-home-amid-fears-for-those-still-held-in-gaza

https://www.lowyinstitute.org/the-interpreter/glimpse-indonesia-s-nickel-policy

https://nournews.ir/en/news/161263/Namibia-president-rebukes-Germany’s-support-for-Israel-in-genocide-case

Lauesen, The Long Transition, 323.

Ibid, 323.

Ibid, 326.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/maryroeloffs/2025/01/20/billionaires-worth-a-combined-12-trillion-attended-trumps-inauguration-heres-who-was-there-from-musk-to-bezos/

https://www.wider.unu.edu/publication/new-estimates-cost-ending-poverty; https://www.oxfamamerica.org/explore/stories/how-much-money-would-it-take-to-end-world-hunger/

https://www.independent.org/publications/tir/article.asp?id=1730

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vKm4QARi16w

Lauesen, The Long Transition, 325.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/4/1/world-markets-on-edge-as-trump-prepares-for-liberation-day-tariffs

https://www.yanisvaroufakis.eu/2025/02/21/donald-trumps-economic-masterplan-unherd/

https://thetricontinental.org/studies-on-contemporary-dilemmas-4-hyper-imperialism/

https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/south-korea-china-japan-agree-promote-regional-trade-trump-tariffs-loom-2025-03-30/

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2025/03/23/immigrant-women-hell-on-earth-trump-ice-detention/82029368007/

https://www.ft.com/content/e0b43918-7eaf-4a11-baaf-d6d7fb61a8a5

https://redantcollective.org/2025/03/06/the-widening-gyre-when-the-centre-cannot-hold-the-left-must-be-bold/

Lauesen, The Long Transition, 359.

Ibid, 359.

Ibid, 359.

Ibid, 359.

Andor, Episode 12 – Rix Road, 2022

China and the Purity Fetish of Western Marxism

What is Western Marxism? — China and the Purity Fetish of Western Marxism

China and the Purity Fetish of Western Marxism

Article 9 of 10

Orinoco Tribune

By Carlos L. Garrido

Originally published at https://orinocotribune.com/china-and-the-purity-fetish-of-western-marxism/

By Carlos L. Garrido – Oct 4, 2023

The stakes of the imperialist West’s New Cold War against China are as great as they can get. This means that the Western left’s role as controlled counter-hegemony and left-wing delegitimizers of socialist states – a role ideologically grounded in their purity fetish outlook – is as dangerous as it can get. In our current geopolitical climate, all progressive forces in the West should unite against the US and NATO’s anti-China rhetoric and actions. Unfortunately, what we find from large portions of this Western left is parroting of state-department narratives on China with radical-sounding language. Leading ‘socialist’ outlets in the US often echo baseless ruling class propaganda such as the ‘Uyghur genocide,’ Zero Covid authoritarianism, Belt and Road imperialism, debt trapping, and other similar fabrications.[1] Far from a concrete-dialectical study of China, in many of these spaces the claims of the ruling class are just assumed to be true, and anyone who dares to question them – and henceforth, bring the real truth to light – is labeled a puppet of Xi Jinping and the ‘CCP’ (which, like the Western bourgeoisie, is continuously labeled by these ‘socialists’ as CCP and not CPC in order to play on CCCP fears from the last cold war).[2]

Most of these tactics center on age-old claims of communist ‘authoritarianism,’ ‘totalitarianism,’ and all other such words used to equate fascism with communism and judge ‘democracy’ according to Western liberal-bourgeois standards. These assumptions and purity fetish engagements with Chinese socialist governance blind the Western Marxist from seeing China’s de facto geopolitical role as a beacon in the anti-imperialist struggle, in the Covid struggle, in the struggle for environmental sustainability, and in the struggle to develop with the darker nations which have been kept poor by centuries of colonialist and imperialist looting, debt traps, and superexploitation.[3]

The unquestioned, purity fetish grounded, and Sinophobic assumption of Chinese ‘authoritarianism’ and ‘lack of democracy’ also prevents the Western Marxist from learning how the Chinese socialist civilization has been able to creatively embed its socialist democracy in “seven integrated structures or institutional forms (体制tizhi): electoral democracy; consultative democracy; grassroots democracy; minority nationalities policy; rule of law; human rights; and leadership of the Communist Party.”[4] It has withheld them from seeing how a comprehensive study of this whole-process people’s democracy would lead any unbiased researcher to the conclusion Roland Boer has arrived at: namely, that “China’s socialist democratic system is already quite mature and superior to any other democratic system.” This is a position echoed by John Ross (and many other scholars of China), who argues that the “real situation shows that China’s framework and delivery on human rights and democracy is far superior to the West’s.”[5]

​The purity fetish Marxists of the West love to think about democracy in the abstract, and hold up as the pure ideal a notion of democracy which is only quantitatively different from the bourgeois notion. Then, this ideal notion of bourgeois democracy is measured up against the atrocity propaganda riddled caricature of socialist states which their ruling classes paint – and they unquestioningly accept. When the caricature of reality fails to measure up to the ideal, reality – which they have yet to engage with – is condemned. What the Western Marxist forgets – thanks to the purity fetish and their social chauvinism – is that in societies divided by class antagonisms we can never talk about ‘pure democracy,’ or abstract democracy in general; we must always ask – as Lenin did – “democracy for which class?”[6] The ‘democracy’ and ‘democratic freedoms’ of capitalist to exploit and oppress will always be detrimental to working and oppressed peoples. Only an all-people’s democracy (a working and popular classes’ democratic-dictatorship) can be genuinely democratic, for it is the only time ‘power’ (kratos) is actually in the hands of ‘common people’ (dēmos).

To claim – as American capitalists, their puppet politicians and lapdog media, and their controlled counter-hegemonic ‘socialists’ do – that the US is a ‘beacon of democracy,’ and China an ‘authoritarian one-party system,’ is to hold on to a delusional topsy turvy view of reality.[7] If democracy is considered from the standpoint of the capitalist’s ability to arbitrarily exert their will on society at the expense of working people and the planet, then, of course, the US is a beacon of this form of so-called ‘democracy,’ and China an ‘authoritarian’ regime that stands in the way of this ‘freedom.’ If instead, democracy is considered from the standpoint of common people’s ability to exert their power successfully over everyday affairs – that is, if democracy is understood in the people-centered form it etymologically stands for – then it would be indisputable that China is far more democratic than the US (and any other liberal-bourgeois ‘democracy’).

However, the object of this text is not to address and ‘debunk’ all the assertions made about China (or any other socialist country) from the Western left – specifically the Trotskyites and the Democratic Socialists. That would, for one, require a much more expansive project, and two, is a task that has already been done many times before. Projects like Friends of Socialist China and Qiao Collective consistently engage in the practice of debunking the propaganda on China proliferated by the Western ruling class and the ‘left.’ The objective of this text is different; it seeks not only to point out falsities in the Western left’s positions, but to understand the worldview which consistently reproduces these. I have called this worldview the purity fetish. In it we can find the ideological roots for the Western Marxist positions on China.

In the Western Marxist’s purity fetish assessment of China, it is held that because China doesn’t measure up to the pure socialist Ideal in their heads, because China does not have, as Samir Amin notes, “the communism of the twenty-third century,” – it is not actually socialism.[8] The question of democracy and authoritarianism has already been assessed in previous chapters – it is a classic of the Western Marxist condemnation toolbox. My focus in this chapter will be on those who claim China is ‘capitalist’ because it developed private ownership and markets with the period of Reform and Opening Up in 1978. This form of the purity fetish centers on their inability to understand, in a dialectical manner, how markets and private property function within China’s socialism. China, according to these Western Marxists, took the ‘capitalist road’ in 1978. As Roland Boer has shown in his article “Not Some Other -ism”—On Some Western Marxist Misrepresentations of Chinese Socialism,” there are four major ‘sub-forms’ through which this first form of condemnation occurs: 1) capitalist socialism; 2) neoliberalism with Chinese characteristics; 3) bureaucratic capitalism; and 4) state capitalism. Often, variations of these can be found within the same critic, as none are the result of a rigorous, principled analysis.

As US and Western imperialist powers ramp up the New Cold War against China, Western Marxism’s erroneous purity fetish view of Chinese socialism requires closer examination.

The purity fetish and the capitalist road thesis
From the moment that the Communist Party of China, spearheaded by Deng Xiaoping, embarked on the process of Reform and Opening Up in 1978, the Western world – both the hegemonic forces and the ‘socialist’ critics – held that China had taken the ‘capitalist road’ and betrayed the revolution. Opening up to foreign capital to develop the productive forces and modernize was considered a betrayal of socialism and the cause of the working class and peasantry. While it is understandable how, from the perspective of an outsider, this might have seemed to be the case, this judgment  nonetheless reflects a deep ignorance of the debates shaping Reform and Opening Up, of the role that lessons from past socialist experiments played in crafting it (e.g., Lenin’s New Economic Policy, Chinese New Democracy, and Yugoslavian Socialist Market economics), and of the poverty of dialectical thinking present in their purity fetish outlook.

Reform and Opening Up did not come out of a void; Deng did not just wake up one day and voluntaristicly say, “let’s do this!” Instead, there were objective forces which made Reform and Opening Up the most viable route for the Chinese revolution to embark on. “Thirty-five years ago,” as Yi Wen writes, “China’s per capita income was only one-third of that of sub-Saharan Africa.”[9] Justin Yifu Lin, former chief economist and senior vice president of the World Bank, writes that “an estimated 30 percent of rural residents, about 250 million [people], lived below the poverty line, relying on small loans for production and state grants for food.”[10] In a 1979 speech Deng notes that

China is still one of the world’s poor countries. Our scientific and technological forces are far from adequate. Generally speaking, we are 20 to 30 years behind the advanced countries in the development of science and technology.[11]

China was, in short, still a very poor country, and one excluded from the developments of the rest of the world by the forces of imperialism. As Carlos Martinez notes, “China in 1978 remained backwards in many ways … the bulk of the population lived in a very precarious existence, many without access to modern energy and safe water … China’s per capita income was $210, [and] food production, and consequently average food consumption, was insufficient.”[12]

The importance marxism lays on the development of the productive forces
These conditions made the construction of socialism increasingly difficult, and, if allowed to continue, could have created fertile ground for national discontent in the revolutionary process. If the people’s living standards continued to drag in comparison to the rest of the world, the Chinese – as many Russians did in the late 1980s and early 1990s – could lose trust in their party and in socialist construction. It was clear that a change was needed to remove the fetters preventing the development of the forces of production. The Marxist tradition has always understood that only in the development of the forces of production can socialism flourish. In Capital Vol. I, for instance, Marx writes that:

The development of society’s productive forces… [create the]… material conditions of production which alone can form the real basis of a higher form of society, a society in which the full and free development of every individual forms the ruling principle.[13]

It is the development of “the material conditions and the social combination of the process of production” which “ripens,” in the capitalist mode of life, “both the elements for forming a new society and the forces tending towards the overthrow of the old one.”[14] As with other modes of life, Marxist have long understood that capitalist relations of production, while at one point being “forms of development [for] the productive forces,” have in time “turn[ed] into their fetters.”[15] Socialist relations of production have always been understood to have the capacity of breaking through these fetters and helping unleash the forces of production. As Marx famously writes in Capital Vol. I.,

The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of production, which has sprung up and flourished along with, and under it. Centralization of the means of production and socialization of labour at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. Thus integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated.[16]

A similar argument is made by Engels in his celebrated Socialism: Utopian and Scientific:

The expansive force of the means of production bursts asunder the bonds imposed upon them by the capitalist mode of production. Their release from these bonds is the sole prerequisite for an unbroken, ever more rapidly advancing development of the productive forces, and thus of a practically unlimited growth of production itself.[17]

In his “Critique of the Gotha Program,” while elaborating on some general characteristics and preconditions for the highest phase of communist society, Marx would say that,

In the highest phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labour, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labour, has vanished; after labour has become not only a means of life but life’s prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-round development of the individual, and all the springs of cooperative wealth flow more abundantly – only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banner: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs![18]

Capitalist relations of production in time become a barrier for human progress – both in the forces of production, i.e., the economic base of society, but also in culture, politics, arts, philosophy i.e., the superstructure of society. While more progressive than the feudal orders which preceded it in Europe, capitalism produces an enormous waste. It wastes labor, human potential, nature, and everything in between. As British socialist William Morris eloquently stated, “The truth is that our system of Society is essentially a system of waste.”[19] Not only would socialist relations of production remove the artificial fetters created by a society wherein production is aimed at profit, but also the extreme wastefulness in labor, life, and things created by such anarchic production for-profit. As Engels argues,

The social appropriation of the means of production puts an end not only to the current artificial restrictions on production [i.e., capitalist fetters], but also to the positive waste and devastation of productive forces and products… It sets free for the community at large a mass of means of production and products by putting an end to the senseless luxury and extravagance of the present ruling classes and their political representatives. [This affords] the possibility of securing for every member of society, through social production, an existence which is not only perfectly adequate materially and which becomes daily richer, but also guarantees him the completely free development and exercise of his physical and mental faculties.[20]

The emphasis on the development of the forces of production has led critics of Marxism to argue that socialism would reproduce the same ‘productivism’ as capitalist society. This depicts a fundamental poverty of dialectical thinking. Yes, socialism seeks to unleash the productive forces and create the sort of abundance wherein the human community can “leap from the kingdom of necessity into the kingdom of freedom.”[21] However, this growth is people-centered, not capital-centered. The aim of the development of the forces of production is not the accumulation of endless profit in a small group of hands. Far from this capitalist telos, which grows without regard for nature and human life, socialist growth is centered on creating conditions for the greatest amount of human flourishing – something which necessarily implies de-alienating humans from nature and overcoming the metabolic rifts capitalist production unquestionably creates.[22]

Instead of carrying out production in environmentally unsustainable ways – as capitalism does – socialist production allows for both developments in the productive forces and – because of its efficiency and momentum towards the elimination of superfluous waste – for this development to be carried out in a metabolic harmony with nature. As Marx argues in Capital Vol. III., communist production would

Govern the human metabolism with nature in a rational way, bringing it under collective control instead of being dominated by it as a blind power; accomplishing it with the least expenditure of energy and in conditions most worthy and appropriate for their human nature.[23]

This harmonious metabolism, or balance, can be seen most clearly in China’s efforts to build a socialist ecological civilization – a task it embarked on at the 17th National Congress of the Communist Party of China (CPC) in 2007. As it reads in the latest update to the CPC’s constitution, following the 20th National Congress of the CPC in 2022, the Party must “work to balance … relations between humankind and nature.”[24] “Harmony between humankind and nature,” as the constitution argues, is a fundamental component “in building a socialist ecological civilization” capable of creating “a positive path to development that ensures increased production, higher living standards, and healthy ecosystems.”[25] This dialectic of sustainable development, central to Marx and Engels’s understanding of socialism, finds its highest concrete form to date in China’s efforts to construct a socialist ecological civilization. As John Bellamy Foster, who has spearheaded the movement towards emphasizing the ecological dimensions of Marx and Engels’s thought, has argued: China’s “developments reflect the recognition of a dialectic in this area that has long been part of Marxist theory.”[26] In so doing, Foster argues, “China’s role in promoting ecological civilization as a stage in the development of socialism can be seen as its greatest gift to the world at present in terms of environmental governance.”[27]

On the Dialectics of Socialism and Western Marxism’s Purity Fetish

Deng and reform and opening up
Although the cultural revolution had come to halt in 1976, similar forms of dogmatism and book worshiping remained for some time. Hua Guofeng’s two whatevers (“We will resolutely uphold whatever policy decisions Chairman Mao made, and unswervingly follow whatever instructions Chairman Mao gave”), for instance, perpetuated the sort of book worshiping which not only sucked the living spirit out of Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought, but proved futile in dealing with the problems China faced.[28]

“The emancipation of minds,” as Deng eloquently noted, was indispensable; historical conditions had developed such that many cadres, especially many leading cadres, remained fettered by rigid thinking and book worshiping.[29] Under the justification of following Mao, they would participate in the same form of book worshiping Mao urged to overcome.[30] The needs of the time, therefore, were elaborated by Deng in the following manner:

Only if we emancipate our minds, seek truth from facts, proceed from reality in everything and integrate theory with practice, can we carry out our socialist modernization programme smoothly, and only then can our Party further develop Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought.[31]

The process of Reform and Opening Up required the liberation of thought from the dogmatism that wanted to perpetuate more of the same. To achieve the four modernizations Zhou Enlai enumerated (initially theorized as the second stage of the third five-year plan), namely, “the comprehensive modernization of agriculture, industry, national defense and science and technology before the end of the century, so that our national economy will be advancing in the front ranks of the world,” the emancipation of the mind from book worshiping and dogmatism was necessary.[32] To be able to understand the world dialectically, to seek truth from facts, the Chinese needed to emancipate the mind. With the mind emancipated, the inflexible rigidity which rejected Reform and Opening Up could be destroyed, and a new phase of development in the Chinese revolution emerge.
​
It must be noted that, regardless of the pre-’78 flaws Reform and Opening Up sought to overcome, it marked a new phase in the development of the Chinese revolution, not a ‘break’ with the pre-’78 era. There are, as Carlos Martinez notes, ‘no great walls,’

In each stage of its existence, the CPC has sought to creatively apply and develop Marxism according to the prevailing concrete circumstances; always seeking to safeguard China’s sovereignty, maintain peace, and build prosperity for the masses of the people. Through many twists and turns, this has been a constant of a hundred years of Chinese Revolution.[33]

Regardless of certain failures and excesses of the pre-’78 era (most notably found in the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution), it was successful in many areas, and without both its successes and failures, Reform and Opening Up could not have occurred. As Cheng Enfu has argued, “the historical period after reform and opening-up cannot be used to negate the historical period before reform and opening-up, and vice versa.”[34] The successes of Reform and Opening Up, as Samir Amin notes, “would not have been possible without the economic, political, and social foundations that had been built up in the preceding period.”[35] Hu Angang writes that “China succeeded in feeding one-fifth of the world’s population with only 7 percent of the world’s arable land and 6.5 percent of its water … China’s pre-1978 social and economic development cannot be underestimated.”[36] “In 1949,” for instance, “the country’s population was 80 percent illiterate,” by 1978, this was “reduced to 16.4 percent in urban areas and 34.7 percent in rural areas.”[37] In the first three decades of the People’s Republic of China, “the enrolment of school-age children increased from 20 to 90 percent; and the number of hospitals tripled.”[38]

The successes of the pre-1978 era can be lucidly seen when compared to India. As Carlos Martinez notes, “following independence from the British Empire in 1947, [India] was in a similarly parlous state, with a life expectancy of 32 … At the end of the pre-reform period in China, i.e., 1978, India’s life expectancy had increased to 55, while China’s had increased to 67.”[39] John Ross observes that “this sharply growing difference was not because India had a bad record – as an increase of 22 years in life expectancy over a 31-year period graphically shows … it is simply that China’s performance was sensational – life expectancy increased by 32 years in a 29-year chronological period – an annual average increase of 2.3%.”[40] This was a world-historical success, as Ross writes, “China’s rate of increase of life expectancy in the three decades after 1949 was the fastest ever recorded in a major country in human history.”[41] Therefore, the post-1978 successes cannot be isolated from the role the pre-1978 successes played in laying the ground for the following phase of the revolution. “The early decades of socialist construction,” as the Tricontinental Institute’s report on China’s poverty alleviation shows, “laid the foundation that was deepened during the reform and opening-up period.”[42]

For all its successes, 1978 China was still very poor and well-behind the Western powers. It was clearly observable by the late ‘70s “that China’s economy required an infusion of technology and capital, and that it needed to break its isolation from the world market.”[43] China was beginning to suffer in ways similar to the Soviet Union in its last years. As Domenico Losurdo notes,

the China that arose from the Cultural Revolution resembled the Soviet Union to an extraordinary degree in its last years of existence: the socialist principle of compensation based on the amount and quality of work delivered was substantially liquidated, and disaffection, disengagement, absenteeism and anarchy reigned in the workplace.[44]

The overreliance on “voluntarism and ‘moral incentives’ to raise production” began to “suffer from diminishing returns.”[45] Like in the USSR, reforms became necessary to not lose the people.

While there are some superficial similarities between Perestroika and Reform and Opening Up, there are fundamental differences upon which the difference of outcomes is grounded. As Carlos Martinez has written, the reforms in the USSR were top-down, rushed, delegitimizing for the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the socialist experiment’s history (i.e., embedded in denigrating the party and its history – the latter of which the Chinese have labeled ‘historical nihilism’); economically, privatization and marketization were carried out recklessly; key industries the state should have sustained under its control were privatized, and the state grew less capable of commanding the economy towards the pathways which would develop, and not enervate, the revolution.[46] As Martinez notes, “given that the project was presented as a form of ‘democratization,’ it’s ironic that it was carried out in a profoundly undemocratic manner… the leadership didn’t mobilize the existing, proven structures of society (the soviets and the Communist Party) but sought to bypass and weaken them.”[47]

On the other hand, the Chinese reforms were carried out in a pragmatic, grassroots, and incremental fashion – the party was never denigrated, historical nihilism was combated, key industries remained under the control of the CPC and the market activity which developed was commanded by the party to serve the ends of socialism. “Practice,” as Deng said, was “the sole criterion for testing truth.”[48] What succeeded in advancing the cause of socialism at the time was sustained, and what failed was abandoned. “The whole process” of Reform and Opening Up “was carried out under the tight control of the government and took place within the context of a planned economy.”[49]

As Arthur Kroeber has noted, “the government will pursue reforms that increase the role of the market in setting prices, but will avoid reforms that permit the market to transfer control of assets from the state to the private sector.”[50] To use a metaphor often brought up by Xi Jinping, the development of the invisible hand (the market) was not to the detriment of, but to the enhancement of, the visible hand (the state).[51] A similar phenomenon is observable with public and private ownership. As Cheng Enfu argues in China’s Economic Dialectic, “in order to improve the ownership structure of the whole society in which public ownership is dominant and private ownership is auxiliary, it is essential to enhance the symbiosis and complementarity of the two ownerships under market competition and state orientation.”[52] “The result was,” as Martinez writes, “a far more effective programme of economic reform than that which took place in the Soviet Union from 1985-1991 or in post-Soviet Russia from 1991 onwards.”[53]

The importance of not allowing economic liberalization in China to turn into political liberalization cannot be emphasized enough. In the USSR, as Cheng Enfu and Liu Zixu argue, there were three distinct categories of cause behind the fall of Soviet socialism: ideological, organizational, and political.

Ideological Causes: “Amid the rigid theorizing inside and outside of the CPSU, and given the lack of democratic and effective education and ideological work, Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin and the strategy of peaceful evolution followed by the West created long-term ideological chaos, which constituted the theoretical foundation and ideational precursor.”

Organizational Causes: “The large number of non-Marxist cadres that the CPSU promoted and placed in important positions led to a serious malfunctioning of systems and mechanisms that could not be put right in an effective and timely manner. The unfair and undemocratic procedures used to select members of the CPSU’s leading group gradually allowed non-Marxist cadres to take over leading positions within the CPSU… Over a few years, in the name of promoting young cadres and of reform, [they] replaced large number of party, political and military leaders with anti-CPSU and anti-socialist cadres or cadres with ambivalent positions. This practice laid the foundations, in organizational and cadre selection terms, for the political ‘shift of direction.’”

Political Causes: “The CPSU leadership betrayed Marxism and socialism, a betrayal that could not be overcome using the traditional political system and its corresponding mechanisms, which were highly centralized and imposed no restrictions… In short, the group headed by Gorbachev and Yeltsin exploited the highly centralized and insufficiently regulated political system and its mechanisms in order to betray Marxism, socialism and the fundamental interests of the vast majority of the people. Here are to be found the political roots and direct cause of the dramatic changes in the Soviet Union and the countries of Eastern Europe.” [54]

At the core of the differences in reforms between China and the USSR, and of the Soviet degeneration going back to Khrushchev, is the lack of awareness of the fundamental distinction between economic and political capital drawn out by Mao. In his 1957 speech given to the Conference of Secretaries of Provincial, Municipal and Autonomous Regions Party Committee, Mao would say that by having bought over the capitalist, the revolution has “deprived them of their political capital.”[55] Here is a very important distinction between political and economic capital. Mao would say that “we must deprive them of every bit of their political capital and continue to do so until not one jot is left to them.”[56] The development of capital, controlled under the people’s democratic dictatorship, “serves the purpose” of developing the productive forces and “of clearing a still wider path for the development of socialism.”[57] As Domenico Losurdo has eloquently noted,

It is, therefore, a matter of distinguishing between the economic expropriation and the political expropriation of the bourgeoisie. Only the latter should be carried out to the end, while the former, if not contained within clear limits, risks undermining the development of the productive forces. Unlike ‘political capital,’ the bourgeoisie’s economic capital should not be subject to total expropriation, at least as long as it serves the development of the national economy and thus, indirectly, the cause of socialism.[58]

Whereas the leadership of the CPSU betrayed “socialism, the party and the people” and put capital in the driver’s seat, the CPC used (and uses) capital to enhance and develop socialism, the party, and the people.[59] Reform and Opening Up has not undone the expropriation of political capital from the capitalists. Regardless of how developed capital has become in China, it has been restricted from political capital. In China, political capital is monopolized in the hands of the Party and the people. It is a people’s democratic dictatorship which uses capital to serve its needs, not the other way around. By sustaining the dictatorship of the proletariat (people’s democratic dictatorship), China has not only secured itself from the crumbling fate of the USSR, but has been able to develop into the global beacon of socialism leading the modern world against US/NATO unipolar hegemony.

This distinction was well understood by Deng, who argued that “if China allowed bourgeois liberalization, there would inevitably be turmoil … we would accomplish nothing, and our principles, policies, line and three-stage development strategy would all be doomed to failure.”[60] All throughout Reform and Opening Up, even in the most difficult of times (e.g., the ‘Wild 90s’) the four cardinal principles have been upheld:  1) We must keep to the socialist road; 2) We must uphold the dictatorship of the proletariat; 3) We must uphold the leadership of the Communist Party; 4) We must uphold Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought.[61]

Reform and Opening Up developed as a necessary phase in the Chinese revolutionary process, wherein an overly centralized economy, combined with imperialist-forced isolation from the world, stifled development and necessitated reforms which would allow China to develop its productive forces, absorb the developments taking place in science and technology from the West, and ultimately, protect its revolution. Far from being a ‘betrayal of socialism,’ as the Western Marxist holds, Reform and Opening Up saved socialism. Not just in China, but – as China’s current geopolitical role makes clear – in the world.

What western marxists fail to understand thanks to the purity fetish
At the height of the carnage of the first imperialist World War, Karl Kautsky, the representative of social democracy and the Second International, would sophistically blabber about how the present war was not “purely imperialist” because, in part, it contained “national” aspirations from the working masses, especially those in Serbia. By emphasizing the lack of a “pure imperialism,” and by seeing the Serbian national bourgeois struggle in a reified manner, isolated from the context of the imperialist war, Kautsky was setting the grounds for his social chauvinist and right opportunist support for the war. Lenin would magnificently reply to this by saying that,

In the present war the national element is represented only by Serbia’s war against Austria. It is only in Serbia and among the Serbs that we can find a national-liberation movement of long standing, embracing millions, ‘the masses of the people,’ a movement of which the present war of Serbia against Austria is a ‘continuation.’ If this war were an isolated one, i.e., if it were not connected with the general European war, with the selfish and predatory aims of Britain, Russia, etc., it would have been the duty of all socialists to desire the success of the Serbian bourgeoisie as this is the only correct and absolutely inevitable conclusion to be drawn from the national element in the present war.

However, Marxist dialectics, as the last word in the scientific-evolutionary method, excludes any isolated examination of an object, i.e., one that is one-sided and monstrously distorted.[62]

The absence of dialectical thinking in Kautsky is apparent in his reified assessment of the Serbian national struggle. Because this national struggle, in his eyes, desecrates the purity of the imperialist war, the ground is set for supporting imperialism under the guise of supporting national liberation. The reality, of course, is that the first imperialist war was a conflict between the great imperialist powers for the division of the world. Far from being a national liberation war, it was a war amongst empires fighting to colonize greater and greater parts of the world. The absence of dialectical thought in Kautsky, embedded within his social chauvinism and right opportunism, leads him to support the imperialist war for reasons completely contrary to what the war actually represented. Enslavement is dressed up by Kautsky’s sophistry in the garbs of emancipation.

By expecting a ‘pure’ imperialism, the ‘impurity’ Kautsky observes opens the door for supporting imperialism. But for a dialectician, to expect purity out of any phenomenon in life is to resign oneself to falsity, to misunderstanding the world. As Lenin would eloquently respond,

There are no ‘pure’ phenomena, nor can there be, either in Nature or in society—that is what Marxist dialectics teaches us, for dialectics shows that the very concept of purity indicates a certain narrowness, a one-sidedness of human cognition, which cannot embrace an object in all its totality and complexity. There is no ‘pure’ capitalism in the world, nor can there be; what we always find is admixtures either of feudalism, philistinism, or of something else.[63]

Like all phenomena in nature and human thought, every historically constituted mode of production is heterogeneous, that is, it is never purely one – the dominant – mode of production, but always contains auxiliary forms of production inherited from the past and transformed in light of the new conditions. This is a position very clear in Marx’s writings, which holds not only true for the mode of production (i.e., the economic base), but also for the juridical, philosophical, and political superstructures. As Marx writes in the Grundrisse, “in all forms of society there is one specific kind of production which predominates over the rest, whose relations thus assign rank and influence to the others.”[64] Marx also observes this at play in the difference interest bearing capital in capitalism has with usurer’s capital in pre-capitalist production:

What distinguishes interest-bearing capital – in so far as it is an essential element of the capitalist mode of production – from usurer’s capital is by no means the nature or character of this capital itself. It is merely the altered conditions under which it operates, and consequently also the totally transformed character of the borrower who confronts the money-lender.[65]

A similar activity, once it is embedded in a different, more developed social totality, functions in accordance with the new totality of social relations it is in. This is nothing new, it is simply a law of dialectics, and hence, of the movement and interconnection of all things. This law is called the negation of the negation (or sublation, and in German, aufhebung), and it describes the processes wherein the old is simultaneously canceled and preserved while being elevated into something new. Usurer’s capital, for instance, is the universal which is reconcretized in a sublated form as interest bearing capital in the particular, i.e., in the capitalist mode of production. Without a proper understanding of dialectics, in other words, without a concrete understanding of the world, the important differences created by a change in context is obscured and treated one-sidedly.

Whereas Kautsky would use the ‘impurity’ of imperialism to support it, today’s Western Marxists use the ‘impurity’ of socialism in China to condemn it. China’s economy is not purely dominated by public ownership and distribution is not purely controlled by state central planning; private ownership plays an auxiliary role and state central planning is dialectically enmeshed with the socialist market economy. These ‘impurities’ are used by the Western Marxist to condemn China for not being actually socialist, i.e., not living up to their purity fetish mediated idea of what socialism entails. In both cases, the expectation of purity is fundamental for positions which ultimately side with imperialism. In other words, in both cases the purity fetish is a fundamental ideological component for ‘Marxists’ turning their backs on emancipatory movements in the global south and siding with the imperialist core.

Holding purity as the standard in judgment, as we learn from Lenin and Marx, is fundamentally mistaken – it divorces one from truth and often, thanks to a one-sided and topsy-turvy interpretation of world affairs, leads one to side with the exploiters against the exploited. The Western Marxists, genealogically rooted in the eclecticism, right opportunism, and purity fetish thought of the Second International, make the same (and worse) mistakes in their assessments of China today. In prominent thinkers such as Slavoj Žižek, David Harvey, Maurice Meisner and many others, post-’78 China is described through a dualist paradigm which reduces its economy to being ‘capitalist’ (because of the auxiliary role of private ownership and the market) and its state to being ‘authoritarian’ (because of the failure to live up to the standard of ‘democracy’ in the liberal West). Out of this framework a plethora of terminological conjunctures, such as  capitalist socialism, bureaucratic capitalism, neoliberalism “with Chinese characteristics,” and state capitalism, have arisen to re-classify and condemn China.[66] Bureaucratic capitalism and state capitalism, of course, are not new – these have a long history of being used by Trotskyites and others in the compatible left to condemn the USSR.

What is common to all of these descriptions is a failure of dialectical thought – an inability to observe China’s construction of socialism as an ongoing process which will contain – as all things in the world do – internal contradictions which drive its development. In short, what is common in these descriptions (and others) is the purity fetish outlook with which China is examined. If their pure standard of what a socialist economy is supposed to be (absolutely everything under public ownership and central planning – something not even the Soviet Union had) is not met, and if the paradigm of liberal democracy is rejected in favor of a democratic people’s dictatorship, then reality must be condemned for the sake of the pure ideal; that is, China must not actually be socialist because it does not measure up to my Western Marxist standards and biases. Contrary to this purity fetish outlook, “a dialectical approach to modes of production,” would see that “different modes of production … can be included within a dominant mode that is far from being uniform or global.”[67]

The purity fetish ‘Marxists’ must remember what Engels said of definitions.

From a scientific standpoint all definitions are of little value. In order to gain an exhaustive knowledge of what life is, we should have to go through all the forms in which it appears, from the lowest to the highest. But for ordinary usage such definitions are very convenient and in places cannot well be dispensed with; moreover, they can do no harm, provided their inevitable deficiencies are not forgotten.[68]

In the purity fetish Marxists, Marxism, that is, scientific socialism, loses its scientific character. Things are no longer seen in their movement and interconnections, but treated abstractly and in a reified manner. Socialism becomes a rigid definition, with a series of characteristics reality must meet in order to be labeled as ‘socialist.’ Scientific socialism is killed with the purity fetish – for socialism is not, as Marx and Engels wrote, “a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself,” socialism is instead “the real movement which abolishes the present state of things.”[69] For Marx and Engels, as dialectical materialists, primacy was in the real movement of society, not in the abstract ideal (which is, nonetheless, not rejected as a goal to strive towards).

Socialist markets?
In V.I. Lenin’s ‘Conspectus to Hegel’s Science of Logic’ he states that,

It is impossible completely to understand Marx’s Capital, and especially its first chapter, without having thoroughly studied and understood the whole of Hegel’s Logic. Consequently, half a century later none of the Marxists understood Marx![70]

The central message in Lenin’s (rather audacious) statement is this: without a proper understanding of dialectics, Marxism is bound to be misunderstood. A century later and still, Western Marxists struggle to understand Marx, and hence, to understand the world through the Marxist worldview. This is lucidly seen in their treatment of China’s usage of markets, where they dogmatically accept Ludwig von Mises’ stale binary which states  – “the alternative is still either Socialism or a market economy.”[71]
​
As Roland Boer highlights, already in Capital Vol 3 (specifically chapter 36 on “Pre-Capitalist Relations”) Marx shows how markets existed in the slave economies of the ancient world, e.g., Rome and Greece, and in the feudal economies of the Middle Ages. Were the markets in each of these historical periods the same? Were they commensurable to how markets exist under capitalism? No. As Roland Boer states in his book Socialism with Chinese Characteristics, “market economies may appear to be similar, but it is both the arrangement of the parts in relation to each other and the overall purpose or function of the market economy in question that indicates significant differences between them.”[72] As Boer points out, Chinese scholars, following the analysis of Marx’s Capital Vol 3, understand that “market economies have existed throughout human history and constitute one of the significant creations by human societies.”[73] If markets, then, predate the capitalist mode of production, why would a socialist mode of production not be able to utilize them?

The essential components of a market economy must be understood in the larger socio-economic relations in which they are embedded. While the forms in which market economies show up in Greece, Rome, and the Middle Ages appear as the historical preconditions for the capitalist mode of production, these cannot be called ‘capitalist.’ In so far as these market economies existed outside of the capitalist mode of production, they can be ‘de-linked,’ from capitalism – and hence, their potential to be used in a socialist mode of production (especially one in its lowest stages) is completely possible. The problem is that the Western Marxist’s purity fetish considers, as Von Mises did, capitalism to be synonymous with ‘markets,’ and socialism to be synonymous with ‘planning.’ In reality, the institutional form of markets exists usually along with the institutional form of planning within capitalism itself – especially in its monopoly stage. To take this institutional form and reduce it to being a uniquely capitalist phenomenon is to participate in what Roland Boer and Chinese Marxists have called economics imperialism.[74]

As Leigh Phillips and Michael Rozworski argue in The People’s Republic of Wal-Mart, “Walmart is a prime example” of “centrally planned enterprises” whose scale allows them to function as “centrally planned economies.”[75] In fact, “almost all countries are mixed economies that include various combinations of markets and planning.”[76] Does this mean that Walmart is socialist? Only a fool would say yes. What it does show is that both planning and market institutional forms are conditioned by the socio-economic systems they are embedded in. Walmart’s planned economy is planned by capitalists to secure profits for the owners and shareholders of the enterprise. China’s socialist market economy is embedded within a larger socialist socio-economic system which conditions the market towards the common good, not just towards the profits of a few.

Chinese Marxism, following upon the tradition of Eastern European socialism (Lenin’s New Economic Policy, Yugoslavia’s socialist market economy, etc.), and the CPC’s tradition of mixed ownership and combined market and planning institutional forms (which can be traced back from the liberated areas in the 1920s to the late 1940s), was able to ‘de-link’ markets from capitalism and utilize them as a method (fangfa) and means (shouduan) to serve (fuwu) the ends of socialism, that is, to liberate the forces of production and guarantee collective flourishing.[77] If the last four decades – wherein China has drastically raised its population’s living standards and lifted 800 million people out of poverty – has taught us anything, it is that China’s usage of markets as a shouduan to fuwu socialism works.

Considering the plethora of advances China has been able to make for its population and the global movement for socialism, why have Western Marxist continuously insisted that China’s market reforms are a betrayal of socialism and a deviation down the ‘capitalist road’? Unlike some of the other Western misunderstandings of China, this one isn’t merely a case of yixi jiezhong, of “using Western frameworks or categories to understand China,”[78] for, if the dialectical framework and categories the Marxist tradition inherits from Hegel were properly applied, there would be no misunderstanding at all. Instead, it is precisely the absence of this dialectical framework which leads to the categorical mistakes.

In both Hegel and in the dialectical materialist tradition, universals are understood to be empty if not concretized through the particular. To separate the role the particular plays for the realization of the universal is to treat the universal abstractly – to disconnect it from the developments and interconnections which allow it to be actual. Since markets have existed throughout various modes of production, within the dialectic of universal and particular, markets stand as the universal term. There is no such thing as a ‘market in general,’ markets necessarily exist through a determinate – historically conditioned – form. The form the market takes is determined by the mode of production the market exists in. As an institutional form within the ‘moment of exchange,’ markets are determined by – and hence, reciprocally influence – the mode of production.

Markets, Boer argues, as a “specific building block or component of a larger system” are a “universal institutional form” (tizhi), which can only be brought into concrete existence via a particular socio-economic system (zhidu).[79] Since the particular zhidu through which the universal institutional form of a market comes into existence is a “basic socialist system” (shehuizhuyi jiben zhidu), the fundamental nature of how the tizhi functions will be different to how that tizhi functioned under the particular zhidu of slave, feudal, and capitalist modes of production. As Huang Nansen said, “there is no market economy institutional form that is independent of the basic economic system of society.”[80]

As was the case with the planned institutional form in the first few decades of the revolution, the market institutional form has been able to play its part in liberating the productive forces and drastically raising the living standards of the Chinese people. However, because 1) China took this creative leap of grounding the market institutional form in socialism, and because 2) Western Marxists retain an anti-dialectical purity fetish for the planned institutional form, 3) the usage of markets in China is taken as a desecration of their Western Marxist pseudo-Platonic socialist ideal. It is ultimately a categorical mistake to see the usage of markets as ‘taking the capitalist road’ or as a ‘betrayal of the revolution.’ It is, in essence, a bemusing of the universal for the particular, of the institutional form for the socio-economic system. As Boer asserts, “to confuse a market economy with a capitalist system entails a confusion between commonality and particularity.”[81]

Book Launch Presentation: The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism

The importance of supporting China
Today China stands as the main global force countering US/NATO led imperialism. Its rise signifies much more than the end of US unipolarity – it marks the end of the Columbian era of European global dominance that began in 1492. Today, the rise of China goes hand-in-hand with the rise of Africa, Latin-America, and other Asiatic civilizations. Through the Belt and Road Initiative and other programs, China’s development has mutually developed its international trading partners – especially those in the global South. Africa, a continent with a plethora of resources and potential, has been pillaged by the West for five centuries. It has been kept poor while its resources and people’s labor made the West rich. China’s rise and win-win relations with Africa has, on the contrary, helped develop African infrastructure and elevate the living standards of the African peoples.[82] While Western pundits have a frenzy over the potential of Africa taking the Chinese route, more and more African leaders are starting to see China not only as a trading partner and ally, but as a model which can help them develop and break their enslavement to Western imperialism.[83] The same is true with Latin America, the Middle-East, and the other parts of the world which European leaders see as ‘the jungle.’[84]

The World Bank reports that

Over the past 40 years, the number of people in China with incomes below US $1.90 per day—the international poverty line as defined by the World Bank to track global extreme poverty—has fallen by close to 800 million. With this, China has accounted for almost 75 percent of the global reduction in the number of people living in extreme poverty. In 2021, China declared that it has eradicated extreme poverty according to the national poverty threshold, lifting 770 million people out of poverty since 1978, and that it has built a ‘moderately prosperous society in all respects.’[85]

China is emerging in every category imaginable as the forefront civilization advancing humanity into a new historical stage. It has “the longest and most extensively used high-speed rail (HSR) network in the world;” it has developed, with maglev technology, the fastest train in the world; it has been, over the last 40 years, by far the fastest growing economy in the world – doing so at a speed never before seen in world-history (defying Western economist’s decades-long repeated predictions of slowdowns and collapses); in building its ecological civilization, it has indubitably been the vanguard in the fight against climate change; it has pushed back, over the last few years, against US led imperialist attacks on Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Syria, Russia, Iran, and others; in short, it has developed as the beacon of freedom, socialism, and progress for the new world we are entering into.[86]
​
Is it perfect? No. This is something they publicly recognize. As proficient dialecticians in governance – which they call ‘contradiction analysis’ over there – they understand that such perfection – such purity – is impossible. There are always contradictions to be resolved, and which, when overcome, give way to new contradictions. This is a basic law of the movement in all things in the world. But, it cannot be denied that while the American civilization train has been stopped in its tracks for decades, experiencing degeneration as the only form of change – the Chinese civilization train races towards the future at an unprecedented speed. It represents not only the advance of China and socialism – but of humanity at large. Any rational human being – let alone one who claims to adhere to Marxism – should see clearly why this is a project we must protect from the imperialist claws that seek to destroy it; the same claws that exploit and oppress us at home.

While the US encircles China with military bases and new imperialist alliances like AUKUS; while its Sinophobic politicians and media fabricate atrocity propaganda – from the ‘Chinavirus’ to ‘Uyghur Genocide’ and ‘Chinese Spy Balloons’ – in order to manufacture consent for a war with China which they predict taking place by 2025; it becomes the utmost duty of American socialists and communists to defend China, to expose the atrocity propaganda as just that –  propaganda – designed to, as Michael Parenti wrote, “invent another reality.”[87]

The defense of China from imperialist attacks is not a task which is disconnected from the struggles of the working class in the imperial core. On the contrary, there are a few reasons why both of these struggles should be seen as interrelated: 1) it is the tax dollars of American working people which are being used to fight wars abroad, while back at the ranch the American people’s lives keep getting worse; 2) sooner or later, it will be American workers which will be sent out to fight in wars to defend a hegemonic order that keeps them poor, and systematically sends them out to die, lose limbs, and acquire PTSD fighting against people whom they have more in common with than those who sent them to war; 3) China’s success is not just China’s, it is the success of socialism – and this success must be used to debunk the American myth that ‘socialism has always failed,’ and to show our working class what socialism can achieve, even while under the boot of imperialist hybrid warfare.

If American socialists genuinely want to bring the working masses of their nation to power, they must be fierce anti-imperialists and ardent defenders of China. Overcoming the purity fetish outlook, which functions as the ideological soil these erroneous views and positions grow out of, is an absolute precondition for this struggle.

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Notes
[1] See, for instance: David Palumbo-Liu, “The Ongoing Persecution of China’s Uyghurs,” Jacobin (June 2019): https://jacobin.com/2019/06/china-uyghur-persecution-concentration-camps ; Ryan Zickgraf, “A Mask Off Moment for the Left,” Sublation Media (May 2022): https://www.sublationmag.com/post/a-mask-off-moment-for-the-left ; Ho Fung-Hong, “The US-China Rivalry Is About Capitalist Competition,” Jacobin (July 2020): https://jacobin.com/2020/07/us-china-competition-capitalism-rivalry ; Vincent Kolo, “Biden and Xi escalate U.S.-China conflict,” Socialist Alternative (May 2022): https://www.socialistalternative.org/2021/05/08/biden-and-xi-escalate-us-china-conflict/

[2] In “John Ross: from Trotskyism to power-worship” from the Trotskyite website Workers Liberty, economist John Ross and historian Carlos Martinez are smeared as ‘power-worshippers’ and admirers of authoritarianism for their support of China: https://www.workersliberty.org/story/2021-06-15/john-ross-trotskyism-power-worship

[3] Vijay Prashad, The Darker Nations (New York: The New Press, 2008).

[4] Roland Boer, “We need to talk more about China’s socialist democracy,” Friends of Socialist China (September 2021): https://socialistchina.org/2021/09/26/roland-boer-we-need-to-talk-more-about-chinas-socialist-democracy/

[5] John Ross, “Democracy and policies in China far greater than the west,” China Daily (December 2021): https://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202112/09/WS61b169e6a310cdd39bc7a4f6.html

[6] V. I. Lenin, Collected Works Vol. 28 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1974), 249.

[7]Nectar Gan and Steve George, “China claims its authoritarian one-party system is a democracy – and one that works better than the US,” CNN (December 2021): https://www.cnn.com/2021/12/08/china/china-us-democracy-summit-mic-intl-hnk/index.html

[8] Amin, Only People Make Their Own History, 110.

[9] Yi Wen, “China’s Rapid Rise: From Backward Agrarian Society to Industrial Powerhouse in Just 35 Years,” Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis (April 11, 2016): https://www.stlouisfed.org/publications/regional-economist/april-2016/chinas-rapid-rise-from-backward-agrarian-society-to-industrial-powerhouse-in-just-35-years#authorbox

[10] Justin Lifu Yin, Demystifying the Chinese Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 6.

[11] Deng Xiaoping, “Uphold the Four Cardinal Principles (1979),” Selected Works of Deng Xiaoping: https://dengxiaopingworks.wordpress.com/2013/02/25/uphold-the-four-cardinal-principles/

[12] Carlos Martinez, No Great Wall: On the Continuities of the Chinese Revolution (Carbondale: Midwestern Marx Publishing Press), 25.

[13] Karl Marx, Capital Vol I., (London: Penguin, 1982), 739.

[14] Marx, Capital Vol I., 635.

[15] Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (New York: International Publishers, 1999), 21.

[16] Marx, Capital Vol. I., 929.

[17] Friedrich Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (Chicago: Revolutionary Classics, 1993), 109.

[18] Marx and Engels, MECW Vol. 24, 87.

[19] William Morris, “As to Bribing Excellence,” William Morris Archive: http://morrisarchive.lib.uiowa.edu/items/show/2322.

[20] Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, 109.

[21] Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, 110.

[22] Capitalism “produces conditions that provoke an irreparable rift in the interdependent process of social metabolism, a metabolism prescribed by the natural laws of life itself.” Karl Marx, Capital Vol. III (London: Penguin, 1991), 949. For more see John Bellamy Foster’s work, especially Marx’s Capital and The Return of Nature, and Ian Agnus’s work, especially Facing the Anthropocene and The War against the Commons: Dispossession and Resistance in the Making of Capitalism.

[23] Karl Marx, Capital Vol III, 958-9.

[24] “CONSTITUTION OF THE COMMUNIST PARTY OF CHINA (Revised and adopted at the 20th National Congress of the Communist Party of China on October 22, 2022),” Qiushi (October 2022): http://en.qstheory.cn/2022-10/27/c_824864.htm 8.

[25] “Constitution of the Communist Party of China,” 10.

[26] John Bellamy Foster et. al., “Why is the great project of Ecological Civilization specific to China?,” Monthly Review (October 2022): https://mronline.org/2022/10/01/why-is-the-great-project-of-ecological-civilization-specific-to-china/

[27] Foster et. al., “Why is the great project of Ecological Civilization specific to China?”

[28] “Resolution on certain questions in the history of our party since the founding of the People’s Republic of China,” Marxist Internet Archive: https://www.marxists.org/subject/china/documents/cpc/history/01.htm

[29] Deng Xiaoping, “Emancipate the Mind, Seek Truth From Facts and Unite As One In Looking to the Future (1978),” Selected Works of Deng Xiaoping: https://dengxiaopingworks.wordpress.com/2013/02/25/emancipate-the-mind-seek-truth-from-facts-and-unite-as-one-in-looking-to-the-future/

[30] Mao Tse-Tung, “Oppose Book Worship (1930),” In Selected Works of Mao Tse-Tung  Vol. 6 (India: Kranti Publications, 1990).

[31] Xiaoping, “Emancipate the Mind, Seek Truth From Facts and Unite As One In Looking to the Future.”

[32] Zhou Enlai, “Report on the Work of the Government (1975),” Zhou Enlai Internet Archive https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/zhou-enlai/1975/01/13.htm

[33] Martinez, No Great Wall, 33.

[34] Cheng Enfu and Jun Zhang, “Five Hundred Years of World Socialism and Its Prospect: Interview with Professor Enfu Cheng,” International Critical Thought 11(1) (2021): https://doi.org/10.1080/21598282.2021.1895508 , 17.

[35] Samir Amin, Beyond US Hegemony: Assessing the prospects for a Multipolar World (UK: Zed Books, 2013), 23.

[36] Hu Angang, China in 2020: A New Type of Superpower (US: Brookings Institution Press, 2012), 27.

[37] “Serve the People: The Eradication of Extreme Poverty in China,” Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research (July 2021): https://thetricontinental.org/studies-1-socialist-construction/

[38] “Serve the People: The Eradication of Extreme Poverty in China.”

[39] Martinez, No Great Wall, 32.

[40] John Ross, China’s Great Road: Lessons for Marxist Theory and Socialist Practice (New York: Praxis Press, 2021), 17.

[41] Ross, China’s Great Road, 17.

[42] “Serve the People: The Eradication of Extreme Poverty in China.”

[43] “Serve the People: The Eradication of Extreme Poverty in China.”

[44] Domenico Losurdo, “Has China Turned to Capitalism?—Reflections on the Transition from Capitalism to Socialism,” International Critical Thought 7(1) (2017), 19. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/21598282.2017.1287585

[45] Martinez, No Great Wall, 46.

[46] See Carlos Martinez’s chapter “Will China Suffer the Same Fate as the Soviet Union?” in No Great Wall.

[47] Martinez, No Great Wall, 47.

[48] Deng Xiaoping, “Excerpts From Talks Given In Wuchang, Shenzhen, Zhuhai and Shanghai (1992),” Selected Works of Deng Xiaoping: https://dengxiaopingworks.wordpress.com/2013/03/18/excerpts-from-talks-given-in-wuchang-shenzhen-zhuhai-and-shanghai/

[49] Martinez, No Great Wall, 48.

[50] Arthur R. Kroeber, China‘s Economy: What Everyone Needs to Know (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016,), 225.

[51] Xi Jinping, The Governance of China Vol. 1 (Beijing: Foreign Language Press, 2014), 128-130.

[52] Cheng Enfu, China’s Economic Dialectic: The Original Aspiration of Reform (New York: International Publishers, 2019), 46.

[53] Martinez, No Great Wall, 49.

[54] Cheng Enfu and Liu Zixu, “The Historical Contribution of the October Revolution to the Economic and Social Development of the Soviet Union—Analysis of the Soviet Economic Model and the Causes of Its Dramatic End,” International Critical Thought 7(3) (2017): http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/21598282.2017.1355143 , 304- 306. For more on Cheng Enfu’s views on the subject of the Soviet collapse see: Cheng Enfu and Jun Zhang, “Five Hundred Years of World Socialism and Its Prospect: Interview with Professor Enfu Cheng,” International Critical Thought 11(1) (2021): https://doi.org/10.1080/21598282.2021.1895508

[55] Mao Tse-Tung, “Talks at a Conference of Secretaries of Provincial, Municipal and Autonomous Regions Party Committees,” In Selected Works of Mao Tse-Tung Vol 5 (Peking: Foreign Language Press, 1977), 357.

[56] Mao, Selected Works Vol. 5, 357.

[57] Mao, Selected Works Vol. 5, 357.

[58] Losurdo, “Has China Turned to Capitalism?, 18-19.

[59] Enfu and Zixu, “The Historical Contribution of the October Revolution,” 306.

[60] Deng Xiaoping, “We Must Adhere To Socialism and Prevent Peaceful Evolution Towards Capitalism (1989),” Selected Works of Deng Xiaoping: https://dengxiaopingworks.wordpress.com/2013/03/18/we-must-adhere-to-socialism-and-prevent-peaceful-evolution-towards-capitalism/

[61] Deng Xiaoping, “Uphold Four Cardinal Principals (1979),” Selected Works of Deng Xiaoping: https://dengxiaopingworks.wordpress.com/2013/02/25/uphold-the-four-cardinal-principles/

[62] Lenin, Collected Works Vol. 21, 235.

[63] Lenin, Collected Works Vol 21., 236.

[64] Marx, Grundrisse, 106-107.

[65] Marx, Capital Vol. III, 600

[66] For a more detailed account, see Roland Boer “Not Some Other Ism.”

[67] Boer, “Not Some Other Ism,” 9.

[68] Friedrich Engels, Anti-Dühring (Peking: Foreign Language Press, 1976), 81.

[69] Marx and Engels, MECW Vol. 5, 49.

[70] Lenin, Collected Works Vol. 38, 180.

[71] Ludwig von Mises, Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962), 142.

[72] Boer, Socialism with Chinese Characteristics, 119.

[73] Boer, Socialism with Chinese Characteristics, 119. It is also important to note that this realization is common knowledge in economic anthropology since the 1944 publication of Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation, where, while holding that “there is hardly an anthropological or sociological assumption contained in the philosophy of economic liberalism that has not been refuted,” nonetheless argues markets have predated the capitalist mode of production, albeit usually existing inter, as opposed to intra, communally. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation, (New York: Beacon Press, 1957). 269-277.

[74] Boer, Socialism with Chinese Characteristics, 120.

[75] Leigh Phillips and Michael Rozworski, The People’s Republic of Wal-Mart (London: Verso Books, 2019), 16.

[76] Phillips and Rozworski, The People’s Republic of Wal-Mart, 14.

[77] Boer, Socialism with Chinese Characteristics, 118.

[78] Boer, Socialism with Chinese Characteristics, 13.

[79] Boer, Socialism with Chinese Characteristics, 122-3.

[80] Boer, Socialism with Chinese Characteristics, 124. Quoted from: Huang, Nansen. 1994. Shehuizhuyi shichang jingji lilun de zhexue jichu. Makesizhuyi yu xianshi 1994 (11): 1–6.

[81] Boer, Socialism with Chinese Characteristics, 124.

[82]  Ehizuelen Michael M.O., “China Helps Africa Realize its Potential,” China Daily  (July 2022): https://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202208/19/WS62fec07da310fd2b29e730f0.html

[83] Wade Shepard, “Why China’s Development Model Won’t Work In Africa,” Forbes (October 2019): https://www.forbes.com/sites/wadeshepard/2019/10/31/why-chinas-development-model-wont-work-in-africa/?sh=3df527057afd

[84] Josep Borrell, EU foreign policy chief, said in October 2022 that “Europe is a garden. We have built a garden. Most of the rest of the world is a jungle, and the jungle could invade the garden.” https://www.opindia.com/2022/10/eu-foreign-policy-chief-says-europe-is-a-garden-rest-all-is-a-jungle/#:~:text=On%2013th%20October%202022%2C%20European%20Union%E2%80%99s%20foreign%20policy,go%20to%20the%20jungle%20to%20protect%20the%20garden.

[85] “Four Decades of Poverty Reduction in China,” World Bank (2022) https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/bitstream/handle/10986/37727/9781464818776.pdf?sequence=4&isAllowed=y xiii

[86] Vivi, “China High-Speed Rail Network,” China Travel (March 2022): https://www.chinatravel.com/china-trains/china-high-speed-rail-network#:~:text=China%20has%20the%20longest%20and%20most%20extensively%20used,two-thirds%20of%20the%20world%27s%20total%20high-speed%20railway%20networks. ; Theo Wayt, “China unveils 373-mph ‘levitating’ train, fastest ground vehicle in the world,” NY Post (July 2021): https://nypost.com/2021/07/20/china-unveils-373-mph-levitating-train-fastest-in-the-world/ ; “Four Decades of Poverty Reduction in China,” World Bank 17 ; Carlos Martinez, “China is building an ecological civilization,” Friends of Socialist China (November 2022): https://socialistchina.org/2022/11/23/china-is-building-an-ecological-civilisation/

[87] Courtney Kube and Mosheh Gains, “Air Force general predicts war with China in 2025, tells officers to prep by firing ‘a clip’ at a target, and ‘aim for the head,’” NBC News (January 2023):  https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/us-air-force-general-predicts-war-china-2025-memo-rcna67967   Michael Parenti, Inventing Reality: The Politics Of The Mass Media (New York: St. Martens Press, 1986), 208.

(Midwestern Marx)

Carlos L. Garrido

Carlos L. Garrido is a Cuban American philosophy instructor at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. He is the director of the Midwestern Marx Institute and the author of The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism (2023), Marxism and the Dialectical Materialist Worldview (2022), and the forthcoming Hegel, Marxism, and Dialectics (2024). He has written for dozens of scholarly and popular publications around the world and runs various live-broadcast shows for the Midwestern Marx Institute YouTube. You can subscribe to his Philosophy in Crisis Substack HERE.

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The Sun Does Not Rise From The West. A Review of Domenico Losurdo's Western Marxism: How it was Born, How it Died, and How it Can be Reborn

What is Western Marxism? — The Sun Does Not Rise From The West. A Review of Domenico Losurdo's Western Marxism: How it was Born, How it Died, and How it Can be Reborn

The Sun Does Not Rise From The West. A Review of Domenico Losurdo's Western Marxism: How it was Born, How it Died, and How it Can be Reborn

Article 10 of 10

Red Anti-Imperialist Collective

By Brendan Duncan-Shah

Originally published at https://redantcollective.org/2025/01/08/the-sun-does-not-rise-from-the-west-a-review-of-domenico-losurdos-western-marxism-how-it-was-born-how-it-died-and-how-it-can-be-reborn/

The theoretical coordinates of Marxism in the “West” are changing—and they should. The publication of Domenico Losurdo’s Western Marxism in English will no doubt contribute to a process that is already underway—a process of reorientation and renewal behoved by the critical appraisal of the dominant Marxist formations within the imperialist countries, in particular: of Frankfurt School critical theory, including its two doyens, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno; of Perry Anderson’s late-pessimistic New Left; of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Deleuzo-Marxism; and of Slavoj Zizek’s borromean knot of Lacan, Hegel and Marx.

These thinkers, Losurdo argues in Western Marxism, constitute not so much a distinct tradition of Marxism, with defined disciplinary norms and boundaries, central points of philosophical reference, and a shared outlook on questions of theory and politics. Rather, they are expressions of a dynamic or tendency of Marxist thought and practice within the imperialist countries—one marked by a messianic or utopian conception of social progress; by an erasure or, at times, disavowal of the anti-colonial and anti-imperialist struggles of the great many of humanity in the Global South; by a correlate revolutionary defeatism and withdrawal from practice and organisation; and by a ‘distance from power’ through which is secured ‘the privileged and exclusive right to rediscover an “authentic” Marxism.’[1]

To reply to Losurdo’s challenge with the claim that these thinkers have something to contribute to Marxism is to miss the thrust of the argument: of course they do. Losurdo himself is quick to credit, for example, the Frankfurt School’s ‘brilliant and acute analyses of the social, political, and moral problems peculiar to capitalist society.’[2] The question is rather this: if these thinkers remain the central and indeed sole frame of reference for professed Marxists in the imperialist countries, then what state is communism, the “real movement that abolishes the present state of things,” left in? Does communism in the Global North possess a theoretical framework that can properly appreciate the revolutionary experience of the 20th century? One that can supply determinate answers to the questions what is to be done? and how can we do it? Can the constellation of Western Marxism function as ‘a guide-line for all concrete action’ in our current conjuncture, or does it function, otherwise, as a paralytic?[3]

To get a minimal sense of the stakes of these problems, we can cite the experience of the consummate Leninist Alan Shandro[4] within the milieu of the world’s foremost Western Marxist:

Around 2001–02, Slavoj Žižek invited me to a conference that he organized on Lenin. I went, and felt like a fish out of water. I remember talking with one of Žižek’s associates who supposed that the working class was nothing. Nonetheless, Žižek is supposed to be a representative of Marxism. Much later, it struck me that a number of my students understood Marxism to be the Frankfurt School. I.e., Marxism is now a recognition that the working class is not revolutionary and a matter of grappling with what to do now.[5]

Are Shandro’s students really to be blamed when one can read, in a passage cited by Losurdo, Adorno’s declaration in Negative Dialectics to the effect that ‘the transformation of the world [has] failed’?[6] Elsewhere we find the same thinker announce perhaps too forthrightly that ‘we do not live in a revolutionary situation’ and that ‘any appeal to form a left-wing socialist party is not on the agenda.’[7] These latter statements, uttered by one for whom ‘Praxis [is] delayed for the foreseeable future,’[8] were made in 1956—at the outbreak of the Cuban revolution, the early victories of the Vietnamese anti-colonial struggle, the height of the so-called Malayan Emergency, five years after the communist-led Telangana rebellion in India, two years after the conclusion of the decade long Huk Rebellion in the Philippines, and during the period in which the Communist Party of Indonesia was consolidating a base that would grow to 25 million persons in 1965, ‘the biggest communist party in the world outside of the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China.’[9] Situated in this period, at a time when nearly the whole of South-East Asia was on the cusp of going over to communism, Adorno’s claim concerning the lapse of practice can only be rendered plausible by the theoretical, and not merely practical, foreclosure of real struggle.

The question, then, is this: what move licenses this foreclosure, effected in various ways by the luminaries of Western Marxism? Losurdo provides a book length answer—but foremost among his answers is Western Marxism’s negation of the ‘principal question of the twentieth century’: the world anti-colonial struggle inaugurated by the October Revolution.[10] As Losurdo explains:

[T]he revolutionary cycle that began in October 1917 ended with two gigantic national wars, the Great Patriotic War of the Soviet Union and the War of National Resistance against Japanese imperialism fought by China. Not only was a barbaric colonialist and pro-slavery counter-revolution [i.e. the Third Reich] defeated, but the world anti-colonialist revolution was born, which marked the twentieth century and would put an end to a world system that had lasted for more than a century under the banner of the most illiberal and oppressive forces.[11]

This “red star over the third world,” as it has been called by Vijay Prashad,[12] was given expression by Ho Chi Minh in 1967, who wrote that ‘Like the shining sun, the October Revolution illuminated the five continents, and awakened millions and millions of oppressed and exploited people. In human history, there had never been a revolution with such great and profound significance.’[13] But how was this ‘movement of national liberation, which ha[d] become a surging wave’ by 1957—and which constituted the most militant expression of global class struggle in the twentieth century—represented theoretically by Western Marxism?[14] Consider again Adorno, who in 1959 wrote that ‘today the fascist wish-image unquestionably blends with the nationalism of the so-called underdeveloped countries’ such that ‘there exists a convergence of fascist and communist nationalism.’[15] Is it unfair to read barely concealed chauvinism when one sees, overleaf, the claim that nationalism is ‘the heritage of barbarically primitive tribal attitudes’?[16] Or consider Hardt and Negri’s polemic against what they disparagingly refer to as ‘national “liberation”’ in Empire, which concludes by citing approvingly the revolting proposition of Jean Genet that ‘The day when the Palestinians are institutionalised, I will no longer be at their side. The day the Palestinians become a nation like the other nations, I will no longer be there.’[17] This, as Losurdo says, ‘means that sympathy for the Vietnamese, the Palestinians, or other peoples can only be felt as long as they are oppressed and humiliated; a liberation struggle is supported only to the extent that it is unsuccessful!’[18] What clearer example can there be of the refusal of Western Marxists ‘to contaminate themselves with constituted power!’[19] But what better example can there be, also, of a failure of theory to live up to the maxim that ‘Marxism learns … from mass practice.’[20]

Contrast the passages from those Western Marxists cited above to any of Lenin’s writings on the national question, which affirmed the unrestricted right of oppressed nations to self-determination, and which gave occasion to Ho Chi Minh to exclaim in his empty room ‘as if addressing large crowds: “Dead martyrs, compatriots! This is what we need, this is the path to our liberation!”’[21] Or compare Mao’s dictum, cited by Losurdo, that ‘in the final analysis, a national struggle is a question of class struggle’—a thesis which, as Losurdo has argued elsewhere, can be found in Marx himself.[22] This is not to say anything of the work of Marxists who are not themselves leaders of great anti-colonial revolutions, but who comport their theory and practice to this “principal question” nonetheless. In the work of the Egyptian Marxist Samir Amin, for example, one finds a theory according to which ‘the struggle for social liberation from class exploitation is indissolubly linked to the national liberation struggle of the people of Asia and Africa.’[23] Compared to the formations of Marxism found in the Global South, then, the central operation of Western Marxism is to insert a theoretical distance between—not only itself and power—but also the most advanced dynamics of mass practice in general.

It is here that the upshot of Losurdo’s project can be found. It is not an exercise in digging up the dead only to bury them again. Rather, by situating Western Marxism in the context of class struggles globally, in terms of the balance and dynamics of class forces the world over, Losurdo’s project makes possible an appraisal of Western Marxism’s contribution to class struggles historically, and an evaluation of the possibilities it offers for advancing them in our current conjuncture. The strength of Losurdo’s book lies in its demonstration that Western Marxism is lacking in both of these respects. On the one hand, Western Marxism renders unintelligible the theme that dominated class struggle in the twentieth century: the communist-led movements for national liberation. On the other hand (as a consequence of the first) it is incapable, on the strength of its own resources, of mounting an analysis of our determinate historical situation today—for the relations of economic domination that obtained between the Global North and the Global South in the twentieth century obtain equally today, in transfigured form.[24] These relations, which, to use Lenin’s formulation, divide the world ‘into a large number of oppressed nations, and an insignificant number of oppressor nations’, still constitute the central structuring feature of the world capitalist system, and in fact make themselves felt in every ‘sphere of present-day social life’.[25] A communism which receives its sole orientation from Western Marxism—that is, not in addition to or supplementary to the great anti-colonial revolutionaries and thinkers of the twentieth century, but to their exclusion—is incapable of grasping this fact, and is therefore incapable of grasping the ‘total process’ of the current capitalist system.[26]

Guided solely by the Western Marxist architectonic, a ‘hermeneutics of innocence’ towards the actuality of class struggles continues to be the normal way of proceeding for some professed Marxists in the imperialist countries.[27] Consider, for example, the eminent Marxist Journal Crisis and Critique, which, in its 2023 issue devoted entirely to the concept of class, contained, in its seventeen contributions, a total of two citations to thinkers from the Global South.[28]

In this dire landscape, then, what are the prospects for the reconstruction of Western Marxism? This question constitutes the final chapter of Losurdo’s book, which begins by asking: ‘Can Marxism revive in the West, and under what conditions?’[29] But as Hegel says in the Science of Logic: although it is hard enough to build a new city in a devastated land, even greater is the difficulty ‘when the task is to give a new layout to an ancient and solidly constructed city, with established rights of ownership and domicile.’ For ‘one must also decide, among other things, to not make use of much otherwise valued stock.’[30] Minimally, however, it is clear that, as Losurdo says,

Transcending the unfortunate temporal and spatial amputation of Marxism will not be possible if the Marxists in the West do not restore their relationship with the world anticolonial revolution, which is mostly led by communist parties and which was the principal question of the twentieth century and continues to play an essential role in the century we have entered for some years now.[31]

As mentioned at the beginning of this review, this process of reconnection has already begun. Losurdo’s book, by drawing attention to the lines of demarcation between Western Marxism and those revolutionaries from the Global South, itself functions in part as an effective counterhistory of twentieth century anticolonial Marxism—especially with regard to the revolutionary leaders Ho Chi Minh and Mao Zedong, whose influence can be discerned on nearly every page of the book. But we can also look towards the Tricontinental Institute’s attempt to reconstruct a lineage of “National Liberation Marxism,” or towards Kevin Ochieng Okoth’s attempt to reclaim the tradition of “Red Africa.”[32] A reconstituted Western Marxism might—and in fact must—also take influence from the great Marxist theoreticians of the Global South: to name a few, from Peru José Carlos Mariátegui (1894-1930), from India D.D. Kosambi (1907-1966), from Guinnea-Bissau and Cape Verde Amilcar Cabral (1924-1973) from Egypt Samir Amin (1931-2018), from Brazil Ruy Mauro Marini (1931-1997) and Heleith Saffioti (1934-2010), from Lebanon Mahdi Amel (1936-1987), and from Guyana Walter Rodney (1942-1980).

It goes without saying that the communist-led national liberation movements themselves must be studied, and their lessons internalised and transformed into a Marxist culture and Marxist vernacular in the same way as the Russian Revolution has. And that, moreover, connections must be built with existing socialist formations in the Global South. It is necessary, also, to recenter those historical moments in which the working classes of the imperialist countries themselves contributed to national liberation struggles – whose victories so often provided their own conditions of emergence.[33] For contributing to this process of reorientation, and for diverting anglophone Marxism away from an ‘abstract internationalism’ and towards the actuality of class struggle in the twentieth century, the publication of Losurdo’s book is to be welcomed.[34]

Western Marxism can be purchased here.

[1]     Domenico Losurdo, Western Marxism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2024),  207.

[2]     Losurdo, Western Marxism, 111.

[3]     Georg Lukacs, Lenin: A Study on the Unity of His Thought (London: Verso, 2009), 40.

[4]     See Shandro’s excellent Lenin and the Logic of Hegemony (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2015).

[5]     https://platypus1917.org/2023/03/01/lenin-and-the-logic-of-hegemony-an-interview-with-alan-shandro/

[6]     Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1970),translated by Dennis Redmond, 13.  Cited by Losurdo at 200-1.

[7]     Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, “Towards a New Manifesto”, New Left Review 65, 2010, 61.

[8]     Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 13.

[9]     See Max Lane, Unfinished Nation: Indonesia Before and After Suharto (London: Verso, 2008), chapter 1.

[10]    Losurdo, Western Marxism, 224.

[11]    Losurdo, Western Marxism, 83.

[12]    Vijay Prashad, Red Star Over the Third World (London: Pluto Press, 2019).

[13]    Ho Chi Minh, “The Great October Revolution Opened the Road to Liberation to All Peoples,” in Ho Chi Minh: Selected Writings 1920-1969 (Hanoi: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1977), 325.

[14]    Ho Chi Minh, “The October Revolution and the Liberation of the Peoples of the East,” in Ho Chi Minh on Revolution: Selected Writings 1920-1966 (New York: Frederick A. Praegar, 1967), 300.

[15]    Theodor Adorno, “The Meaning of Working Through the Past,” in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 97. Cited in Losurdo, Western Marxism, 120-1.

[16]    Adorno, “The Meaning,” 98.

[17]    Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 109.

[18]    Losurdo, Western Marxism, 248.

[19]    Losurdo, Western Marxism, 202.

[20]    Lenin, “Guerilla Warfare,” in Collected Works vol. 11, 213–14.

[21]    Ho Chi Minh, “The Path Which Led Me To Leninism,” in Ho Chi Minh on Revolution: Selected Writings 1920-1966 (New York: Frederick A. Praegar, 1967), 24.

[22]    Mao, “Statement Supporting the American Negroes in their Just Struggle Against Racial Discrimination by U.S. Imperialism,” Selected Works of Mao Tse-Tung vol. 9, 20. Cited by Losurdo at Western Marxism, 261. For Losurdo’s argument that the struggle for national liberation can be considered a ‘species’ of the ‘genus’ class struggle even in Marx, see: Domenico Losurdo, Class Struggle: A Political and Philosophical History (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), chapter 1, but especially pages 12-15.

[23]    Samir Amin, Class and Nation: Historically and in the Current Crisis (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1980), 1-2. My emphasis.

[24]    On this point, see the explosion of literature on contemporary imperialism, for example: Sam King, Imperialism and the Development Myth (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2021); John Smith, Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2016); Utsa and Prabhat Patnaik, Capital and Imperialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2021); Intan Suwandi, Value Chains (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2019); Samir Amin, Modern Imperialism, Monopoly Finance Capital, and Marx’s Law of Value (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2018).

[25]    Lenin, Collected Works vol. 31, 240; vol. 22, 103.

[26]    Lukacs, Lenin, 41.

[27]    Losurdo, Western Marxism, 229.

[28]    Crisis and Critique 10, 1. The citations mentioned are: Kwame Nkrumah, Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism (London: Thomas Nelson & Sons, 1965); and Anjan Chakrabarti, Anup Dhar & Stephen Cullenberg, World of the Third and Global Capitalism (Delhi: Worldview, 2012).

[29]    Losurdo, Western Marxism, 212.

[30]    G.W.F. Hegel, The Science of Logic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 507.

[31]    Losurdo, Western Marxism, 224.

[32]    Tricontinental Institute, Dossier no. 37, “Dawn: Marxism and National Liberation.” https://thetricontinental.org/dossier-37-marxism-and-national-liberation/. Kevin Ochieng Okoth, Red Africa: Reclaiming Revolutionary Black Politics (London: Verso, 2023).

[33]    https://red-ant.org/2024/09/24/when-the-australian-waterfront-stood-with-indonesia/

[34]    Losurdo, Western Marxism, 69.

Citations

Citations

Western Marxism and the Myth of Capitalism's Adamantine Chains

Notes

See George Thomson, “Introduction,” in Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound, ed. and trans. George Thomson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1932), 1–47; George Thomson, “Special Introduction,” in Aeschylus, Oresteia Trilogy/Prometheus Bound, trans. George Thomson (New York: Dell, 1965), 24–26.

See John Bellamy Foster, Breaking the Bonds of Fate: Epicurus and Marx (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2025).

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works (New York: International Publishers, 1975), vol. 2, 48.

Paul Lafargue, “Reminiscences on Marx,” in Reminiscences of Marx and Engels, ed. Institute of Marxism and Leninism (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, n.d.), 74.

Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), 74–75. See John Bellamy Foster, “Eco-Marxism and Prometheus Unbound,” Monthly Review 77, no. 6 (November 2025): 2–5.

Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), 63–64, 255–57.

Perry Anderson, Considerations on Western Marxism (London: Verso, 1976), 42–43.

Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 255.

Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 253.

Theodor W. Adorno, Philosophical Elements of a Theory of Society, eds. Tobias ten Brink and Marc Phillip Nogueira, trans. Wieland Hoban (Cambridge: Polity, 2019), 38, 49–50.

Adorno, Philosophical Elements of a Theory of Society, 31, 49.

See Martin Nicolaus, “The Theory of the Labor Aristocracy,” Monthly Review 21, no. 11 (April 1970): 91–101.

Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1973), 187.

This framework was first introduced in John Bellamy Foster and Gabriel Rockhill, “Western Marxism and Imperialism: A Dialogue,” Monthly Review 76, no. 10 (March 2025): 9.

What Marx called the unity of opposites (or the identity of identity and nonidentity) characterizing capital and labor was here turned into a narrow, one-sided identity of opposites.

Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York: Continuum, 1944).

G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History (New York: Dover, 1956), 103.

Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1930), 13–17, 181; Max Weber, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, eds. Hans Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), 181.

G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of Right (New York: Oxford University Press, 1952), 10; Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989), 53, 59.

Russell Jacoby, Dialectic of Defeat: Contours of Western Marxism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).

Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics (New York: Continuum, 1973), xix.

Jacoby, Dialectic of Defeat, 120–21.

Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 250.

Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 25.

Terry Eagleton, “Resources for a Journey of Hope: The Significance of Raymond Williams,” New Left Review I/168 (March–April 1988).

Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy, Monopoly Capital (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1966), 366–67.

Paul A. Baran, The Political Economy of Growth (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1957, 1962).

Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy, The Age of Monopoly Capital, eds. Nicholas Baran and John Bellamy Foster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2017), 430.

Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel (London: Merlin Press, 1971), 22.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 270.

Jacoby, Dialectic of Defeat, 27.

Gilles Delueze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983).

Mario Livio, “Did Galileo Truly Say ‘And Yet It Moves?,'” Scientific American (blog), May 6, 2020.

Alfred Schmidt, The Concept of Nature in Marx (London: New Left Books, 1971), 11, 43, 78–79, 88, 154–62, 186–87.

Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Retreat from Class (London: Verso, 1986). On “Inverted Marxism,” see John Bellamy Foster, Comments, “Gabriel Rockhill, Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism Book Launch with Ali Kadri and John Bellamy Foster,” posted by Critical Theory Workshop, 1:40:27, December 11, 2025, youtube.com/watch?v=0SOFasECUbg.

Bruno Leipold, Citizen Marx: Republicanism and the Formation of Marx’s Social and Political Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2024); William Clare Roberts, Marx’s Inferno: The Political Theory of Capital (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018).

Theodor Adorno, The Culture Industry (London: Routledge, 1991). On the critique of the cultural apparatus, see John Bellamy Foster and Robert W. McChesney, “The Cultural Apparatus of Monopoly Capital,” Monthly Review 65, no. 3 (July–August 2013): 1–33. On the contemporary struggle over the political economy of the cultural apparatus, see John Bellamy Foster, “Robert W. McChesney (1952–2025): A Personal and Political-Intellectual Memoir,” Monthly Review 77, no. 7 (December 2025): 1–23.

Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, 21.

L. Bill Warren, Imperialism, Pioneer of Capitalism (London: Verso, 1980).

S. Stavrianos, Global Rift: The Third World Comes of Age (New York: William Morrow and Co., 1981).

See John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark, and Richard York, The Ecological Rift (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2010).

It was foretold that if Zeus had a child with a particular woman, then Zeus’s own offspring, the fruit of this union, would depose him. Only Prometheus, with his foresight, knew who that woman (Thetis) was, and used this as a means against Zeus, and used this information as a means of obtaining his release and readmission to Olympus—but only after Zeus had ended his absolute tyranny over Gods and humans.

Thomson, “Introduction,” Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound; Thomson, “Special Introduction,” Aeschylus, Oresteia Trilogy/Prometheus Bound; Carey Jobe, “Aeschylus’ Prometheus Unbound: Rebuilding a Lost Masterpiece,” Antigone (2024), antigonejournal.com.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Aids to Reflection (London: Edward Moxon, 1854); Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Women (New York: A. J. Matsell, 1833) 37; Percy Bysshe Shelley, Prometheus Unbound (Boston: D. C. Heath and Co, 1892), 68.

Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 3, 176; Karl Marx, Wage-Labour and Capital in Karl Marx, Wage-Labour and Capital/Value, Price and Profit (New York: International Publishers, 1976), 40; Karl Marx, A Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1970), 21; Erich Fromm, Beyond the Chains of Illusion (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1962).

The Third Wave of Socialism

Notes

¹Deng Xiaoping, ‘There Is No Fundamental Contradiction between Socialism and a Market Economy’, 23 October 1985, in Selected Works of Deng Xiaoping, vol. 5, 1982–1992 (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1994), 150, https://en.theorychina.org.cn/llzgyw/WorksofLeaders_984/deng-xiaoping-/.

²Deng Xiaoping, ‘Excerpts from Talks Given in Wuchang, Shenzhen, Zhuhai, and Shanghai’, 18 January–21 February 1992, in Selected Works of Deng Xiaoping, vol. 5, 1982–1992 (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1994), 361, https://en.theorychina.org.cn/llzgyw/WorksofLeaders_984/deng-xiaoping-/.

³Fernand Braudel, Afterthoughts on Material Civilisation and Capitalism, trans. Patricia N. Ranum (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), 41.

⁴Braudel, Afterthoughts on Material Civilization and Capitalism, 112–113.

⁵See ‘Full Text: Resolution of the CPC Central Committee on the Major Achievements and Historical Experience of the Party over the Past Century’, Xinhua News Agency, 16 November 2021, http://www.news.cn/english/2021-11/16/c_1310314611.htm.

Bibliography

 Braudel, Fernand. Afterthoughts on Material Civilisation and Capitalism. Translated by Patricia N. Ranum. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977.

Deng Xiaoping. ‘Excerpts from Talks Given in Wuchang, Shenzhen, Zhuhai, and Shanghai’, 18 January–21 February 1992. In Selected Works of Deng Xiaoping, vol. 5, 1982–1992, 358–370. Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1994. https://en.theorychina.org.cn/llzgyw/WorksofLeaders_984/deng-xiaoping-/.

Deng Xiaoping. ‘There Is No Fundamental Contradiction between Socialism and a Market Economy’, 23 October 1985. In Selected Works of Deng Xiaoping, vol. 5, 1982–1992, 151–153. Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1994. https://en.theorychina.org.cn/llzgyw/WorksofLeaders_984/deng-xiaoping-/.

‘Full Text: Resolution of the CPC Central Committee on the Major Achievements and Historical Experience of the Party over the Past Century’. Xinhua News Agency, 16 November 2021. http://www.news.cn/english/2021-11/16/c_1310314611.htm.