“The Case for Marxism-Leninism”: Corrections and Expansions

A fair while ago, as part of a collection of short essays trying to introduce readers to the Maoist perspective, I published a new revision of my essay “The Case for Marxism-Leninism.” I am proud of this essay. I think that, taken with the other essays in there as well as some readings in the additional important ideas derived from Gonzalo Thought, it an at least serviceable introduction to the Marxist-Leninist-Maoist philosophy (or at least to the first two stages of thought in its development, Marxism and Marxism-Leninism). But it is flawed, for nothing is without flaws. It has a fair number of mistakes, and a fair number of points that- now that I am someone better studied in Marxism(-Leninism-Maoism) than I was when I wrote it- I could elucidate better. These corrections and elucidations are the function of this document, this accompaniment of sorts.

Types and Nature of Value

“The Labour Theory of Value… is the idea that the value of objects or services, and thus the value of the properties that produce them (farms, factories, etc.- the means of production), comes from the amount of productive labour done by workers on those properties that is needed to produce those objects. We may prove that this is true, rather than the popular idea that value comes from the amount of consumer demand (demand can cause fluctuations in market/exchange price, but only as variations from the constant use value (basically, economic and material usefulness contained in an object or service) created by labour), with several exercises… Ultimately, a high market price is only a fluctuation from the constant use value of an object, which is very high in the case of diamonds. Thus, the only remaining explanation is that the high constant value of carved diamonds comes from the high amount of labour necessary for their production… As such, the right to use and govern the use value (whether in the form of goods or services, or some other form representing the value contained in goods or services) from a value producing property rightly belongs to the workers, those who fuel the production that creates that property’s value.”

None of this explanation of the Labour Theory and its implications is, per se, false. However, it is such a simple explanation of a complex and essential theory of political economy that it misses important points. This is due to the fact that, when I wrote it, I had a limited knowledge of the finer points of economics from a fairly cursory reading of Marx’s great works. Now, I have a better understanding and have undertaken a closer reading, and so I wish to present a better explanation, which is also a correction or improvement to the original.

First of all, what is the most essential concept of the value of a thing? It is its utility or its usefulness, what we term (as Marx did) its use value. The most essential value of a spoon, for instance, is its use value, its usefulness in eating. It is important to understand that use values are qualitative, not quantitative or numerically comparable. A spoon is not, for instance, more or less useful than a gallon of crude oil- the two are simply useful in fundamentally different ways. Yet it is no question that a gallon of crude oil is more valuable, in a sense of numerically quantitative value, than a spoon. This is a different kind of value, but one that exists at least in the present economic system as a sort of symbiotic partner of use values.

Some use values are naturally made available to humanity, like the use value of oxygen in the air we breathe. But many, probably most, of the use values we trade in require the productive labour-process, require a modification of those things furnished by natural forces by the hands of human labourers before they can be made use of. This is what the labour-process is- a meeting of the creative forces of nature on the one hand, human labour-power on the other (see Critique of the Gotha Programme, Marx. Of course, the relation of the two is a complex dialectic, not an unbridgeable dichotomy). And in a society, for instance in our present bourgeois capitalist society, where the objects bearing these use values are produced as commodities, they bear an additional value that is quantitative, and that is not directly material but is instead a socially understood phenomenon (indeed it is this that defines them as commodities, things bought and sold in order to accumulate this value, rather than simply things that are exchanged based on their usefulness, their use value, as may happen under even ancient pre-civilized societies). Some amount of value is furnished by nature (that borne by the use-values furnished by nature) because it furnishes use values (e.g., wood, soil, oxygen all have use values for humans furnished by nature); but only labour can produce new use values, changing the things nature has furnished into things bearing new use values, and so only labour can produce increases in economic value, new value, associated with the objects/services bearing these use values when they are treated as commodities in a commodity economy. For furthermore, these values-of-commodities are, unlike use values, directly numerically/quantitatively comparable- a gallon of crude oil is again unquestionably more valuable as a commodity than a spoon. And, as the original essay establishes reasonably well and as Marx proved quite clearly in Capital and elsewhere, there is an observable correlation between the magnitude of this value and the amount of labour it has taken to produce an object with a use value that additionally becomes a commodity, as measured in socially necessary labour-hours, or the amount of labour-time it is socially expected for a commodity to require on average to be produced, which is for instance a much higher quantity for the gallon of crude oil than for the spoon. It is observable furthermore, and this proves the Labour Theory of Value further, that the value of commodities falls right along with the amount of labour socially necessary to produce them- witness the fall in value of plastic from a rare and exciting commodity at its invention to its present state as mass-produced and nigh-worthless ready-made garbage. Indeed, Marx concludes, the value of commodities essentially is the amount of socially necessary labour-time embodied in them.

But, one can also clearly tell that there is a difference between the price of a commodity and its value. Commodities are sold at their value, but with distortions- one certainly would regard the “pet rock” fad of 1975–1976 as an example of the prices of commodities being distorted above their value. Price is an expression, in the form of exchange with the particular commodity that is money, of exchange value, the value at which things are sold, and exchange value is itself a distorted expression of the more abstract socially understood value of commodities. The action of selling, then, is affected not just by the basic law that socially necessary labour-time determines value, but further by the distortion of exchange value by fluctuations of supply and demand- as Marx acknowledged in Wage Labour and Capital, among other works. But we know, after all, that these fluctuations are only distortions, because a fluctuation must be a fluctuation from something- from the value of commodities furnished in them as the surplus value produced by labour. After all, no matter how their prices fluctuate, a gallon of crude oil remains more valuable than all but the most unusual or rare spoons.

But even so, these forces of supply and demand and this act of selling are more than ephemera. Indeed, the act of sale of commodities for the purpose of adding their value, in the form of money, to a sum of capital is the essence of how the capitalist profits, and how they exploit the workers who produce the sold commodities. Labour done by the labourers in any given productive property can be divided into two segments- the necessary labour, the labour which replenishes all that value that has been expended in the maintenance of the means of production and of the worker’s labour-power (their power or potential to do such productive labour, which it is worth understanding is an actual physical characteristic embodied in such things as stamina and muscle mass, and so thus the necessary labour produces enough value to equate to that value and those use values that have been consumed in maintaining the worker’s physical state), and the surplus labour, the additional labour that produces surplus value, the value in the produce of labour that exceeds the value that has been consumed in maintaining instruments of labour and workers’ labour-power. This surplus labour is embodied within the commodities produced by this labour, the capitalist who owns the means of production sells these commodities and receives the same value in the form of money, and thus they achieve profit- they add this value to their sum of capital, later to be invested in buying up further labour-power in order to make further profit in the same way. And herein lies the nature of capitalist profits as born in exploitation of the working class. The worker is compensated, in the form of wages, for the labour-power expended in necessary labour- compensated equivalent to the value produced in that labour, the value of enough use values to replenish their labour-power, to survive. But the surplus fruits of labour, the new value brought into society and the new use value added to the world by the sweat of the worker in the physical form of new objects- this is extracted, is snatched up by the capitalist investor for sale of these objects as commodities and conversion of their social value as commodities into capital for further investment. What is made by the working majority class is taken without accountability or compromise to be sold for the profits of a parasitic minority class, the bourgeoisie.

This is the essential contradiction in society under bourgeois rule, capitalist society, and the one we seek to resolve in socialist revolution- by which we intend to inaugurate a social order in which the whole of humanity is united into and under the red banner of a liberated working class through the democratic power of a proletarian-run state, and through the democratic organs of that state and workers’ control through that state over their labour; the economic property, resources, means of production used therein; and the totality of the surplus use values and socioeconomic value it produces. And, as this unification of humanity in the D. of the P.’s liberated proletariat and socialism moves the world closer and closer to full-stage, classless stateless and global communism, we shall see the motion of production out of the model of commodities made to be sold for the accruing of wealth and into a simpler and less contradictory model of use value being produced, for its own sake without regard for other forms of “value,” and only to meet human needs. Now, as we reach the close of what is most probably the longest section herein, I will simply say: even here I have only cursorily touched on the ins and outs and injustices of the capitalist political-economic system. If one desires a detailed, comprehensive, precise, well-proven understanding thereof then I can only advise one to read Marx’s Capital; it is long and dense, but well worth the read, and I believe its composition numbers on the very short list of the greatest achievements of human philosophical intellect.

Labour, Demand, Supply, and Value

“We may prove that [the Labour Theory of Value] is true, rather than the popular idea that value comes from the amount of consumer demand (demand can cause fluctuations in market/exchange price, but only as variations from the constant use value (basically, economic and material usefulness contained in an object or service) created by labour), with several exercises. For example, let us look to the value of finely carved diamonds: the average person demands, if ever, such diamonds only once in their life to propose with. Despite this, they carry extreme value and an extreme market price. Their extreme price can in part be explained by an artificially inflated scarcity of supply, but there is too little demand for that to fully explain their constant high value. Ultimately, a high market price is only a fluctuation from the constant use value of an object, which is very high in the case of diamonds. Thus, the only remaining explanation is that the high constant value of carved diamonds comes from the high amount of labour necessary for their production.”

Another comment on this passage is necessary, regarding the remarks on the bourgeois economists’ “law of” supply and demand. They are accurate, but over-simple. Yes, it is broadly true that the theories of bourgeois economists attribute value to the amount of demand which exists and its relation to amount of supply, the idea being the more a limited supply is demanded the more value it has- as I said in the original, again, it is true that these relationships can affect distortions of price, but these distortions must be understood as distortions from some given starting point and price itself as the distorted expression in a given monetary set of terms of a fundamental value which, as Marx shows quite convincingly in Capital et. al., ultimately derives from socially necessary labour-time for production. There is a distinction, though, which I did not mention, between amount of demand and amount demanded. With diamonds, amount of demand is very low- again, the average person thinks about diamonds maybe once in their life, and many never even remotely want to buy one or even can- but the amount demanded is very small for that demand, the demand is concentrated usually on a single small diamond piece, and this correlates to a rise in price especially together with the inflation of scarcity created by international diamond corporations (this correlation is what bourgeois economists denote with the “law of demand,” not to be confused with their central dogma of the “law of supply and demand,” which as we have discussed describes an effect on the price in which an exchange value is expressed but is not accurate to the true central source of value); we may say that the market price of carved diamonds is considerably above their real value. However, the fact remains that overall demand is very low and price and value quite high nonetheless, suggesting that however much prices have been inflated there is still some constant underlying cause as to why this particular gem is so valuable, and that cause can be nothing but the high socially necessary labour-time in its processing- after all, the diamond is the hardest and thus the most challenging to work of the gems. (We are talking here, again, mainly of finely worked diamonds; cutting diamonds for industrial purposes have a whole different process of production and a whole different use value and demand, and so are a different matter).

Defining Capital

“capital being value and resources that can be invested into properties such that it buys up even more labour-power and labour, even more value and thus power to extract unto itself and its owner (as in the stock market).”

This definition is, again, not wrong per se but perhaps not specific or detailed or precise enough. In the broadest and most strictly correct sense, the best definition of “capital” as a term, as used in Marxist (which of course today means Marxist-Leninist-Maoist) political-economic science and philosophy might be something like quantitative value, in various forms (chiefly that of money), used in buying up goods as commodities for the purpose of selling them in order to make profit, and thus grow the sum of capital. Of course, in practice the form this takes most frequently and at the largest scale is investment of capital in buying up wholly or partly large-scale properties like factories, restaurants, farms, what-have-you; in thusly buying up means of production and labour-power and thus buying up the surplus value produced by the labour-process in which those things meet, to be snatched away from the worker and sold for the sole profit of the capitalist investor. Again, the buying of stock in companies and thus the stealing away by the stockbroker and the company of profits from those who work on that company’s “owned” properties is a good typical example of how this systematized theft of surplus value works. Furthermore, when money-capital (capital as money) is invested into means of production, that property itself becomes the embodiment of this capital-value and may be referred to as functioning as capital, at least in a capitalist economic system. This can be confusing when reading Marxist texts. But what is essential in the concept of capital is the value itself, in whatever form it takes, value which- as Marx put it- is a vampiric entity derived from past labour which grows and sustains itself and its owner by parasitizing living labour in the present. It is this we must abolish, ending the functioning of the means of production as vessels or embodiments of capital and putting them instead under collective management of those who work them.

Wages and Surplus Value

“Only a fraction of a worker’s produced surplus value is left to them as wages, and only in the form of money restricted by a state that largely exists to serve capital in order to preserve the current power structure.”

Not, strictly, correct. The wage a worker is paid is not derived from the surplus value they specifically have produced- this would not make sense, for a payment to buy labour-power is often given before the labour manifesting from that labour-power has actually been done! In fact wages are pieces of the capitalist’s capital that are invested, given to the worker to buy their labour-power. Once the work has been done, and the worker has had returned to them the use values and value lost in maintaining their labour-power in the form of the wage, the surplus value in the form of produced commodities (i.e. shoes, spools of yarn, sides of beef) is snatched up entirely by the capitalist(s) to be sold for their profit such that the value in that form can be transformed into value in the money-form to add to the sum of their capital. Of course, since this mass grabbing of surplus value from exploited labour is how capital is grown, it is true in a sense that wages- being paid from the sum of capital as investments toward its growth- are derived from surplus value produced by labour, but not by the specific labour of the worker to whom they are paid (though in some cases, as described in Capital Vol. 2, the worker’s wage may be in part surplus value they produced in a previous round of labour). Indeed, as Marx discussed in Capital’s 25th chapter, wages are essentially a fraction of that stolen from the working class (the whole class) and made into capital that is given back to them by capital, often in the form of special benefits and payments provided by the capitalist employer in order to encourage the worker’s loyalty and dampen their class-consciousness- think for instance of the menial jobs that try to prevent their workers from demanding better pay by providing them, say, “meditation kiosks” (as Amazon has attempted). Of course, as Marx says immediately after acknowledging this phenomenon of a portion of stolen surplus value being returned, “…these things no more abolish the exploitation of the wage labourer… than do better clothing, food, and treatment, and a larger peculium, in the case of the slave.” The exploited wage labourer is not any less an exploited wage labourer because they are allowed a ZenBooth®, just as the slave is not any less a slave because they are allowed to sleep in their master’s house- especially given that the value expended in providing the ZenBooth® has been forcibly extracted from other exploited wage labourers.

Historical Materialism and Bourgeois Revolutions

Citing the French Revolution as an example of revolutionary explosions of class struggle to resolve societal contradictions as the primary driver of history is, I think, entirely correct. However, referring to it as a “peasant revolt” is a bit of an oversimplification- peasants and the emergent proletarian class were certainly involved and fought for the end of feudalism and rise of capitalism, but the leaders of the revolt were merchants and wealthy academics and intellectuals- the vanguard of the newly emerged bourgeois class that was beginning to usurp economic power in France from the old feudal noble class. But this, of course, is exactly what the theory of dialectical materialism applied to human society, or historical materialism, would tell us: from the dialectical struggle between ruling and ruled class in an old system emerges a resolution to their contradiction in the form of a new class, which takes power and forces its new system, with its new contradictions, onto society. Thus the bourgeoisie emerged as the resolution to the contradiction and struggle between the peasants and the lords, creating the new capitalist system and new bourgeois state and social order, and in it their own contradiction with the new working class of the proletariat. This new ruling class had been transformed out from the downtrodden majority working class of the old system, the peasantry, and the antagonistic contradiction between them and the old ruling class of their exploitation by that class- just as the new ruling class of socialism, the liberated socialist proletariat, is a transformed new form of the exploited proletariat under capitalism which shall topple the old ruling class of that system, the bourgeoisie, and so resolve the contradiction of their exploitation. This is why Marxists will sometimes refer to the revolutions of dialectical class struggle that ended feudalism in places like France as “bourgeois revolutions,” just as socialism is installed by proletarian revolutions. Of course, the difference between the two is that the emergent young bourgeoisie were only ever a minority; the rest of society was relegated to the role of the new exploited class, the proletariat, and so contradictions of class exploitation remained under the new system. Contrarily, to truly end capitalism and usher in socialism, proletarian revolution must unite the whole proletarian majority in socialist and democratic liberation. (Also, the minor error corrected here appears in the citations/footnotes, and so due to Medium formatting annoyances it cannot be seen in the uploaded version, only the original document linked at the end).

Note: for more on bourgeois revolutions and how a new ruling class emerges and conquers society by emerging as the resolution of the contradictions between classes in the preceding political-economic mode (in the case of the bourgeoisie, lords (and clergy) and peasants, specifically the upper peasants who became artisans and merchants (making their lower peers into their own opposite class, the proletariat); in the case of the proletariat transformed into its socialist liberated form, bourgeoisie and proletariat) see Friedrich Engels, On Historical Materialism, regarding the bourgeois revolutions in France and England.

A Mistaken Citation

“Culture, after all, is heavily influenced by the economic interests of the dominant economic class, which is now the capitalists- just look at how thoroughly Coca Cola has influenced the cultural image of Santa Claus. Karl Marx explained this phenomenon with his theory of Base and Superstructure…”

The only problem here is the cited source for the theory, which is Capital- this comes from a misremembering on my part. What I misremembered as a passage in Capital, the passage wherein Marx first published an elucidation of the theory of culture, ideology, and politics as based in material political-economic conditions, is actually the preface to his lesser-known and earlier A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy- this is the proper source to look to for Marx’s original draft of the theory.

The Imperialist Stage of Capitalism

“There is also the key contradiction of imperialism, of the constant wars of conquest and campaigns of international meddling waged by the wealthy capitalist powers.”

There is a very significant semantic error here. Imperialism is much, much more than just one of the contradictions of capitalism. Imperialism, as it exists under capitalism late in its lifespan, is an entire stage in the development of human history, the stage of capitalism’s development in which the bourgeoisie of the wealthiest countries, the appetite of their capital having exceeded the bounds of those countries’ capacities for production of surplus value, must go abroad and colonize other countries to continue extraction thereof (it is indeed generally thought to be inevitably the last stage of capitalist political-economic history, as the next boundary against which the appetite of capital will run is the finite capacity of the Earth itself!). In this regard, imperialism as it exists as the last stage of capitalism is an entire type of capitalism, an entire system of capitalist political economics unto itself (although “imperialism” earlier in history, including pre-capitalism, has existed as simply an isolated phenomenon- as Lenin acknowledged himself in his seminal text on the subject) with its own numerous contradictions. What I have referred to as the “contradiction of imperialism,” the contradiction between the people of (semi)colonized countries and the imperialist bourgeoisie of imperialist ones of the exploitation and oppression of the former by the latter, is certainly the most important- indeed, in their Fundamental Documents the PCP declares it the most significant contradiction in capitalist society in the present era (meaning, of course, capitalist-imperialist society). But there are others that are important, for instance those of the rivalries that exist between competing groups of imperialists (e.g. the Chinese imperialists and the American imperialists).

— — —

I will append here a further comment on the sentence:

“…World War I, the war Lenin analyzed when he first developed the modern Marxist theory of imperialism, which served no purpose but to render Ottoman and Austrohungarian property and workers open to the investment of British capital.”

In the first place, this seems to imply unique guilt of the British imperialists for the brutality of WWI, and this is not accurate; the Allied and Central imperialist powers were both competing to grow their control over colonies whose land and labour they could exploit; the Allied ones just happened to win.

Secondly, it was not simply the rival imperialist powers which the competing parties in WWI sought to pillage; the war also concerned the changing of hands of various countries held as colonies by the competing powers, such as South-West Africa (Namibia).

I should also mention that while the German and Austrohungarian Central Powers were certainly capitalist-imperialist, I personally have not done the investigation to discuss the economic system of the Ottoman Empire at that time.

States and “Dictatorship”

“the way to push history’s class struggle forward into socialism is with a practical, logical, functional political plan. Marx constructed the foundation for this with his political concept of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. This, it must be noted, is not a dictatorship in the usual sense. Rather, the dictatorship of the proletariat is a movement and series of political institutions by which the working proletarian class seizes economic and political power over its own productivity from the capitalist bourgeois class, and thus institutes a revolution and creates socialism by abolishing the extraction of surplus value for capital and commencing collective ownership and free egalitarian management by the majority of workers over workplaces.”

None of this is, factually, wrong. It does, however, lean into a certain bourgeois attitude that it should instead confront and condemn with frankness. What is all this fear of “dictatorship?” What is “dictatorship?” It is a social state of affairs in which a section (i.e. an individual, group, or class) makes decisions and they are enforced upon the rest of the society. In this sense, any society in which a state exists that functions to express the will of one class and enforce it upon others, and any such state (i.e. any state at all, as the very nature of a state is to be a repressive force in service to the interests of an economic class, as Lenin shows in The State and Revolution) is a dictatorship! The meaningful question is only “who is the dictator?” We are all, then, already living in dictatorships, albeit some of them in a partly democratic (bourgeois “democratic,” where only the bourgeoisie have the capital to run for election) form- in which the dictator is the bourgeois class or a few of its members. The goal of the communists, then, is to replace this with a different dictatorship, and we will admit this freely. But in the Democratic Dictatorship of the Proletariat, the dictator is the proletariat, the working majority class; the D. of the P. is the economic and political rule of the majority who perform productive labour over production and other aspects of society, facilitated by a state of soviets or equivalent councils of the labouring class and by a vanguard party of its most politically involved members to help organize this state. And furthermore, it seeks through revolutionary restructuring of society to bring the rest of humanity into this proletarian class, thus bringing about an evolution into a social order wherein class divisions and therefore states that serve classes no longer can exist, wherein the cohesive whole of humanity can govern itself freely and locally without repressive power. What can this “dictatorship” be called, then, but the truest and purest democracy? It is just as Luxemburg said: “socialism requires democracy and democracy requires socialism.” And it is also just as Mao said: socialism is the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, or more precisely (as the preceding is something of a polemical oversimplification- see for instance the example that in the USSR under the NEP capitalism persisted for a while in some areas even after the triumph of the D. of the P., though this example is largely irrelevant today for a few reasons†) the societal and political order of the Democratic D. of the P. is inextricably linked to and necessary for the economic system of self-management and non-exploitation for the working majority, i.e. socialism.

Dual Power and People’s War

“The first key thing Lenin noted was that, in the modern era of imperialism under capitalism, the Dictatorship of the Proletariat and socialism can never be built through the existing state… As such, the D. of the P. must instead be constructed separately, as a distinct set of social structures that shall grow and become powerful as the workers unite and learn the ways of socialism. We refer to this relation between two powers as Dual Power, which we must establish through revolution.”

This is, if not incorrect, at least too vague and impractical. Dual power, the construction of the D. of the P. (or, in a semifeudal (semi)colonized country, New Power and the Joint Dictatorship of all anti-imperialist classes as a precursor to the D. of the P. which will develop the country to the point where it can be established), “we must establish through revolution.” Okay, how? The answer, of course, is that revolution for this purpose must be carried out in every country through the strategic method of Protracted People’s War. This point should have been made clear here. Really, the inevitably necessary way in which Maoism (the third stage of Marxism’s philosophical/ideological development) is necessary to execute Marxism-Leninism (the first two), should have been clear throughout the essay. There is a problem in how I laid out the Essays; they are laid out essentially chronologically in the order of my own learning of Marxism. But Marxism is more complex than just stacking blocks atop one another, because Maoism inextricably is the continuation of Marxism-Leninism, not just a tacked-on addition. Indeed, there can be no Marxism-Leninism anymore without Maoism. Now that the third stage is synthesized, to deny it is simply dogmatic and unscientific. On this basis, I wish those essays had made clear from the beginning that dual power in the contemporary world must be established via PPW, and in general that only through Maoism (and, for that matter, through Maoism and the particular universal applications of Gonzalo Thought) can Marxism-Leninism be executed practically.

Worker Democracy, Soviet Democracy

“Worker Democracy is fairly simple, the idea Lenin espoused and that he and his colleagues set up in the USSR to manage local industry was one of local worker councils, called in that case soviets, which were assemblies of the workers in an area that shared and managed through democratic voting all the produced value and products of that industry equally amongst said workers, without an exploiting master. The workers of these socialist councils, or soviets or unions or committees or whichever name, shall own their workplaces and through the voting processes of worker-democracy shall manage their own labour and its produced value.”

For the most part, this explains quite well the basic theory of how the D. of the P. and socialism can practically exist and function. Again, I think it would be a better explanation of this theory if it explicitly acknowledged that this model of socialist governance must be constructed (initially as a state of Dual Power, before taking over as sole political order on the local level under the sole authority of the proletarian state by the time of Strategic Offensive and the revolutionary victory) through People’s War and in accordance with the Maoist concept of the United Front- but this point has already been made above. Rather, what I specifically want to amend here is the name I used for this theory, “worker democracy.” The name itself is, again, perfectly fine and perfectly descriptive of such a socialist system. But the way it is introduced seems to imply that this is the standard and agreed upon term for the theory of how the local of a D. of the P. is set up under socialism, which it really isn’t- more widely used names for this theory would include “soviet democracy,” or “soviet power,” or even (as I seem to recall Gramsci sometimes calling it) “sovietism.” At least acknowledging multiple terms would have been appropriate.

The Role of the Party, the Role of the Proletarian State

“Once the party has succeeded in creating a network of local worker-democratic unions, councils, etc. that may take over control of production, this Party must become the leader of the central democratic government (“proletarian semi-state,” in Lenin’s phrasing) of the thusly formed socialist economy and D. of the P. The leaders of this Party must work to build the democratic institutions that shall replace those of the bourgeois state in enforcing the rule of the ruling class (which, under a D. of the P., is the working majority) and must instruct all local members to encourage local worker-democratic councils to elect leaders to these national assemblies. These shall vote amongst themselves to devise laws that must be followed by all the councils and their leaders, and these democratic bodies of the party’s leaders and the workers’ councils’ elected representatives shall elect national heads and a central committee, the official leader of the party, which both enforces laws and sets the ideological line for the party to advocate in its revolutionary campaign and for the workers to follow. These democratic bodies of party and government leadership, elected from amongst the masses, shall monitor and guide the workers’ control of production to provide advice based on their electors’ experiences for how best to work economically and politically toward the common good of all workers, and how best to maintain proletarian power and socialism.”

Here we have an attempt, perhaps a doomed effort from the start, to elucidate in a paragraph one of the most complex and vital theories in Marxism-Leninism-Maoism. I think, on the broad strokes, it serves- especially supplemented with other, parallel explanations of vanguardism that also appear in the Essays. But there are a few points I would like to clarify.

“…these democratic bodies of the party’s leaders and the workers’ councils’ elected representatives shall elect national heads and a central committee, the official leader of the party, which both enforces laws and sets the ideological line for the party…”

I think I could have done a better job, here, of making clear the very important point that the proletarian semi-state and the Party itself are two different institutions, both within the framework of the sociopolitical system of the Democratic Dictatorship of the Proletariat. In fact, the Party is one of the several institutions upon which the foundations of a workers’ state are built. As Maoism dictates, the D. of the P. and the movement to build it are effectively constructed according to the theory of Three Instruments: Army, Party, United Front. The Party is the leadership of the process, setting through democratic processes and the work of each country’s great leadership the ideological line and constitutional guidelines upon which the state and the D. of the P. in general shall be built and function. The Army, under the direction of and integrated with a militarized party, must enforce this programme to build and defend the new state. And the U.F., organizing the workers of the country into mass organizations and local institutions of soviet power, must organize the masses of the proletariat behind Party leadership into the democratic electorate of the workers’ state and work to proletarianize the rest of the country to join into this united Democratic D. of the P. Out of this, then, built based upon the principles laid out by Party leadership and elected by the local organs of workers’ soviet power, are constructed the central organs of the workers’ state, i.e. a supreme soviet or national people’s congress or what have you and assorted ministries of agriculture and public health and such. The government itself and the Party are, then, we must again emphasize, distinct entities. The Party sets out the ideological line for its country’s path toward communism, on the basis of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism and the Mass Line approach to the masses’ experiences. But when it comes to administrating the day to day functions of the state and economy, there is to be a broad legislature built by Party guidance but elected from amongst the people voting for both Party members and independent leaders of the proletarian cause. This is the real government of a socialist country, while the Party is its ideological leader and reminds it of its duties to the people and to history, and of course must continue operating and leading revolutionary struggle through and under this government founded by it and its leadership, and most of all by the masses. Certainly we can expect that in any future socialist state, as in past ones, there is a heavy overlap between Party leadership and non-Party government leadership. But the two are different nonetheless, and it should be clear that the Party’s central committee is the leader of the Party, not the entire state, and is elected by the Party congress and not by country-level legislature(s).

“These democratic bodies of party and government leadership, elected from amongst the masses, shall monitor and guide the workers’ control of production to provide advice based on their electors’ experiences for how best to work economically and politically toward the common good of all workers, and how best to maintain proletarian power and socialism.”

As stated above, perhaps I could have been slightly clearer about the party/government distinction here. But more to the point, I think “advice” is much too vague a word to use here. It is true, as I said in the original essay, that the essential unit of economic and political power in the socialist democratic D. of the P. is the local soviet or equivalent, the local body of the socialist workers ruling themselves. but it would be naïve to think, at least under the conditions of a socialist country violently birthing itself onto the stage of an otherwise capitalist world, that an economy the size of a country like the US could be managed purely on the local level. What the governing bodies of the central workers’ state must do then, is more than “advise”; they must provide central plans in accordance with the masses’ will and the Party’s stalwartly Marxist and proletarian-democratic leadership for the management of the economy effectively and for the good of the working classes of the whole country and world. Presumably, this would in a hypothetical future socialist state take a similar form to that it took in the socialist USSR, i.e., broad five-year plans for development of production under worker rule, their execution subject to local soviet power. Also important to note: the central administration of the workers’ state is not less democratic than that by its local constituents. After all, the central government must be elected from amongst the soviets and people’s committees and other such local bodies, and in accordance with democratic centralism and the principles of soviet democracy as laid down in the USSR should act always in their interests and according to their will for fear of recall. Therefore central planning under socialism, or lower-stage communism-in-development, is both necessary and democratic. Of course, once we live in a communist world, this may change significantly.

Concerning Democratic Centralism

“Further, to ensure the party remained a democratic leader that reflected the will and the needs of the local workers, Lenin devised Democratic Centralism. This is a guiding principle for the democratic movement toward communism, the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, that dictates ‘diversity in thought, unity in action.’ In short, all members of the proletariat on the level of local Worker Democracy, and all leaders in the party and government on the national Vanguard level, may speak freely of their ideas for the path the the class struggle to communism should take. But whatever decision the collective democratically reaches through voting or the decisions of the elected leaders of the party semi-state, all proletarians (and most especially party members and worker council leaders, as they set a socialist example for the masses) should follow it in actions.”

Rather unsurprisingly, I think the best thing here is that which is lifted from Lenin’s work: the encapsulation of the Democratic Centralist doctrine in the slogan “diversity of thought, unity in action.” I think, however, that my own writing has not been specific enough about the applicability and function of the theory. I don’t think it’s necessarily true that the entirety of the socialist proletariat under socialism should be governed by “unity in action.” The masses can and should have the right to struggle against the Party and state when they make mistakes- as the Chinese masses did in China’s Cultural Revolution. So Democratic Centralism is not necessarily a doctrine for the entirety of the society of the D. of the P., I do not think. What its purpose is, rather, and where it is absolutely necessary, is as an organizing principle for leadership and most especially for revolutionary organizations, in particular vanguard Parties.Within a Party there must, as Mao ardently and correctly taught, be internal line struggle through non-antagonistic criticism and self-criticism to refine and build the most scientifically correct possible line for the organization and the masses whom it leads and who form it to follow. But when a correct and agreed upon line exists, there must be unity in carrying it out and leading the masses to democratically follow through on it in building socialism. There may seem to be a contradiction here, but there is not. All this means is that when a quarrel about a political line is raised within an organization or the movement it leads, it should not be covered up, nor should it lead some members of the movement to secretly or covertly act contrary to the rest. Indeed, this would constitute the first and/or second kind of dangerous liberal behavior described and criticized by Comrade Mao in the seminal pamphlet “Combat Liberalism.” No, instead disagreements must be resolved through friendly struggle and criticism in the open between Party members, so that once they are resolved revolutionary organizations can return to acting in unity toward the common goal of communism. The importance of this Democratic Centralist method of thinking and acting cannot be overstated- for how can the masses follow the leadership of a Party if that Party is not even in agreement about what it is doing? This is the vital importance of Democratic Centralism.

I think the previous confusion, as in above sections, probably originates in a flawed understanding of the distinct nature of the Party (indeed, the phrase “party semi-state” borders on conflating two institutions which, while intimately connected, are distinct).

Again on the Role of the State

“As such, the primary organ of economic management should remain the local council wherever possible, the Vanguard Party and semi-state serving only to protect and ensure unity and success of this socialist system, and to democratically provide advice on how best to advance the interests of the proletariat.”

Replace “advice” with “planning and leadership”- see above “The Role of the Party, the Role of the Proletarian State.”

Idealism and Utopianism

“Another critique of our ideas is that we are somehow idealist. This, again, belies a lack of understanding of Marxism, whether we go by the colloquial meaning of “idealist” (making big plans without practicality), or the formal philosophical one (expecting reality to act based on our abstract ideas). To the first meaning, some socialists are certainly too idealistic, namely the anarchists who believe we can achieve worker rule without the use of central power to defend socialism, but not we Marxist-Leninists. In fact, in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, a founding text of the Historical/Dialectical Materialist philosophy of history and political economy, Friedrich Engels (co-founder of the Marxist philosophy) decries pointless utopianism (idealism) as effectively useless for a political movement, and demands a logic-based scientific class analysis to guide socialism in a practical and rational way, which he then derives from Hegelian dialectics (thus coming to Dialectical and Historical Materialism).”

This is, I think, a good rebuke. But it doesn’t go into enough detail regarding the context of Socialism: Utopian and Scientific. “Utopian,” in a general sense, can mean the same thing as the informal (as compared to the formal philosophical) usage of “idealist,” but in Engels’ time it also referred to a specific movement of such “utopians”: the Utopian Socialists. These were the first “socialists” of the modern era (though one could argue they are preceded in the lineage of broadly “communist” movements by the proto-Utopian Diggers of England and by the Chinese peasant rebel Nongjia). They of course manifested as a movement out of the contradictions of capitalist society, but they did not really properly understand these contradictions, and especially did not recognize the central importance of the contradiction of class exploitation, of bourgeoisie against proletariat. Because of this, they did not recognize the need for societal revolution and its basis in class struggle; instead, they sought to establish a crude form of “socialism” through class-collaborationist planned communities, imagined to be literal utopias. Invariably, these failed, and it took the revelatory scientific analysis of Marx, Engels, and Dialectical and Historical Materialism to give us a real understanding of society and how it can actually move forward into socialism through dialectics of class struggle- as was demonstrated in the socialist periods in the USSR, Albania, and China, each of which moved us closer to final worldwide victory based upon Marxist science (also, incidentally, I would say I gave Hegel too much credit in the development of this science. He did work on a primitive form of dialectical analysis, but he was hardly the only one to do so (Heraclitus came first), and he was an idealist rather than a scientific materialist). It also worth noting that the ideological “spirit” of the Utopian Socialists, the desire to build socialism in a kind of planned community compound without any real societal class struggle, has arguably reared its head more recently, for instance in Jim Jones’s People’s Temple with their “Jonestown” and Gazi Kodzo’s BHO with their “Hammer City”- and there too, it must be stamped out by Marxism and its scientific philosophy.

Also, small things- I do not know if anarchists should be called socialists, or “socialists.” And the definition given here of philosophical idealism is very rudimentary, but that isn’t really the subject of the text so I think it’s okay.

Stalin and Homophobia

“Another claim of bigotry on Stalin’s part is the oft-repeated idea he was a homophobe. This idea is less unfounded, in all fairness, as the Congress of Soviets did pass a law called Article 121, illegalizing homosexuality, while he headed the party. However, as I explored in my essay “Debunking Counterrevolutionary Notions About the Soviet Union,” this bill’s existence does not actually justify that conclusion. Firstly, party records of the time do not actually show how Stalin voted. And secondly, contemporary testimony from homosexual communists suggests that the law was used not to persecute actual homosexuals, but rather as a cover to arrest those who attempted to interrupt the socialist system of mass worker democracy.”

I think what this passage demonstrates is me, a queer and a young communist who admired (and still admires) Stalin, being a little willfully naïve. I did not want to believe that he was a homophobe, because it would be admitting to a mistake by an otherwise great individual. But this is mistaken of me, because it is a fact that he very likely was. I don’t think, though, that this is terrifically important. Stalin, the man, is not as important as Stalin, the ideological influence upon proletarian ideology or as important as the socialist society he helped build and lead. And that society, as the Whyte testimony attests, was homophobic as nearly every society of its time was but noticeably less so than its capitalist neighbours. And, as my recently posted polemic on this subject has examined, homophobia in the ICM is largely a problem of the past (though the struggle for queer liberation and a proper understanding of queer questions remains real).

Also, the essay mentioned in this passage is old and bad and I am pretty sure it is no longer posted anywhere for these reasons.

Socialism and “Socialism” in Eastern Europe

“It is also worth noting that all recent polls show a majority in many former socialist European states wish for socialism to return, as their lives were better when they owned and controlled their workplaces themselves.”

The statistics cited here are accurate, although probably there is a more credible-looking way to cite them all together than linking to a reddit post that compiles them- this smacks of the kind of terminally online reddit “communist” we all hate. But I should have made clear, had I then had the political education to understand, that many of the “socialist” countries of the so-called “Eastern Bloc” fell to Khrushchevite or other revisionism (due, of course, to their Marxism lacking the essential theories and practices of the third stage, Maoism) before they ever truly built socialism (I believe I also made this mistake in other essays in the collection). This is true of the GDR, of the so-called SFR of Yugoslavia, of the PR of Romania, etc. etc. There are even cases like Bulgaria, which had communist great leadership and a communist great leader in the form of Georgi Dimitrov, but still never truly reached a fully formed socialist system. These states instead got stuck in the transitional phase of “People’s Democracy,” an idea made essentially obsolete by Maoist New Power, before being taken by revisionism. But what these statistics can truly be said to mean, then, is that not only has socialism in countries where it was actually built (USSR, Albania, etc.) been a positive force, but even failed attempts at it have (before revisionism destroyed them) been positively recieved!

Sablin and the Storozhevoy

“…when Kruschev and his revisionist ilk began to undermine the people’s democratic vanguard, the workers rose up to restore true Marxism-Leninism in incidents like the mutiny on the Red Army ship Sentry, in which a group of sailors hijacked the ship, aiming to sail it to St. Petersburg and deliver a speech calling for an end to Khruschevite corruption and a return to Lenin’s proletarian democratic policies.”

A series of small corrections: “Sentry” is one of several translations of Storozhevoy, I think using the original Russian name is more proper and clearer. Also, this ship belonged to the revisionist-era “Soviet” Navy, not the socialist era Red Army, and anyhow even in the socialist era the Red Fleet would be the proper force to name. Also, I feel it would have been proper to name the leader of the righteous mutiny, Valery Sablin. He was a good communist, even if his revolutionary effort was ill-planned and ultimately failed immediately and utterly. It would also be interesting to mention that some sections in the revisionist “Soviet” state tried to propagate the lie that Sablin and his followers had meant to defect to the US- this being a demonstration that the phony-socialist imperialists of the revisionist-era USSR were more willing to collaborate in their fellow-imperialists’ propaganda against themselves than to admit that they were no longer a socialist state!

The Lie of the “Socialist Famines”

“There is also the frequently stated false correlation between Marxist-Leninist Worker Democratic agricultural systems and famine. This we may attribute by and large to the myth of the Holodomor, a famine that supposedly constituted a mass killing in Ukraine by the USSR’s Communist Party. This myth is built on the idea that such deadly and tragic famines were unusual in Ukraine at this time, and could not have happened naturally. In reality, such famines happened with great frequency under the Tsar- this is well known. The so-called holodomor can quite comfortably fit into a natural cycle of famines- a cycle that in fact ended with the onset of collective managed farming. And would the party government, made up of workers elected by the masses, have seen any reason to murder its own electorate? Why? Where are the documents suggesting they deliberately did such a thing? Where is the motive for any government to destroy its own productive workforce? There is none, because the famine was natural. The same can be said of China and the famine there supposedly “caused” by Marxist-Leninist reforms under the leadership of Mao Tse Tung’s party.”

All I will add here is a quotation from Amartya Sen, who although not a communist has here made a very salient point:

[India] had, in terms of morbidity, mortality and longevity, suffered an excess in mortality over China of close to 4 million a year during the same period… in one geographical area alone, more deaths resulted from this ‘failed capitalist experiment’ than can be attributed to the ‘failed communist experiment’…

I ask, what is more likely: that for some reason nobody has yet demonstrated, socialists the world over are conspiring to engineer famines? Or that famines are simply a common tragedy that strikes many countries, and blaming socialism for the ones that occur in socialist countries is as absurd as doing so with earthquakes or hurricanes? I think the answer is clear.

The Volga Germans and the Liar Robert Conquest

“[Bourgeois historian Robert] Conquest’s work is a joke. He has quite clearly painted himself as biased, and much of his work cites contemporary claims that came through the axis powers’ propaganda machine, raising doubts on their veracity. Some of his cited sources, claims made by contemporary observers loyal to Hitler, can only be called Nazi propaganda.”

Specifically, this is relevant to Conquest’s claim of a genocide by Stalin’s government against the Volga German nation, supposedly one of the USSR’s largest acts of “ethnic cleansing.” This much is true: when the German fascists invaded the USSR, the Party recommended and the Union’s legislature subsequently ordered a migration of this ethnically distinct population of Soviet Germans to Kazakhstan and Eastern Russia, where they could establish new soviets and communes safe and far away from the invaders, who may have otherwise tried to absorb them into their own “pan-German” colonialist project. This happened, and one can argue perfectly reasonably that it may have been a mistake or done more harm than good; however, the majority of sources documenting supposed atrocities in this migration, cited by people like Conquest, including falsified “NKVD orders from Stalin,” originate with the Nazi occupation government in Latvia, which of course had incentive to paint the “pan-Germanic” Volga Germans as victims of atrocities that never happened. While again the call for abolition of the original Volga German local government in their home territory and their migration to new areas where they could start new ones may have been mistaken, claims of families shredded apart or of mass death in transit should be taken as the progeny of Nazi propaganda, and the application of terms like “genocide” or “ethnic cleansing” is inappropriate. Also, of course, it is strange to blame the Soviet citizens for ordering a migration to escape invasion, rather than the fascist invaders for forcing them to do so. This further smacks of absurd anti-communist bias.

Summing Up

Nothing is perfect, nothing ever can be- every real material thing will always have its contradictions, and contradicting elements will always be struggling one way or another to resolve them. And the same is true of thoughts or ideas, because these are nothing more than qualities of our material brains in response to a material universe. This is a basic expression of the Law of Contradiction and its universality, the essential rule of Dialectical Materialism. But it is true also that things are always moving from more contradictions toward less, and especially from antagonistic contradictions toward benign- Historical Materialist scientific analysis tells us that human societies have over their epochs of existence been moving steadily through dialectical class struggle toward the final resolution of class contradictions, the arrival at communism on Earth, upon which event the contradictions of human society will henceforth be much less severe. In a similar way, there were problems with the original essay, and no doubt there are still problems with it upon receiving correction and expansion. But I think the original essay was already an at least serviceable introduction, and I hope I have herein improved meaningfully upon it.

STUDY AND APPLY MARXIST-LENINIST-MAOIST THOUGHT, WITH MAOISM AS THE PRINCIPAL STAGE AND THE ALL-IMPORTANT AND SPECIALLY PRINCIPAL ADDITIONS FROM GONZALO THOUGHT!

STUDY AND PREPARE FOR THE WAGING OF REVOLUTIONARY PROTRACTED PEOPLE’S WAR AGAINST CAPITALISM AND IMPERIALISM IN EVERY COUNTRY!

SUPPORT THE EFFORTS OF ALL MAOISTS STRUGGLING TO RECONSTITUTE THE COMMUNIST PARTY IN THE USA, DESTROY REVISIONISM AND UNITE FOR REVOLUTION!

Footnotes

† in the first place the semifeudal conditions that made it necessary no longer exist in imperialist countries like what was, at the time the Soviet D. of the P. was established, the Russian Empire; in the second place where they do exist, in colonies and semicolonies, they today should be abolished through the Maoist theory of New Power as they were in China and are beginning to be everywhere People’s War is waged against imperialist capitalism.