I
Nobody can deny that American communism’s most distinguishing feature is its sheer marginality. The comfort it finds on the sidelines, in indifference, and in ‘standing alone’ are sure markers of this fact. While its partisans claim to be tirelessly working to overcome this problem of marginality, which they ascribe to external factors, they are, in fact, the strongest force keeping communism on the proverbial ‘bench.’ To understand why, we must first investigate the nature of this marginality: what constitutes it, what sustains it, and to what it relates.
Political independence has been, for years, the ‘talk of the times’ among the communists. Conceptions abound, and yet none of them seem to mean much. There are the intransigent abstentionists who locate independence in refusing to vote for either of the dominant parties. There are those who locate it in running communist candidates, and there are those who locate it predominantly outside of the realm of electoral politics, in unions, in ”mass organizations,” in “the streets.” There are those who are “too practical” to seriously consider the question, and there are those who believe the time has not yet come for such considerations. There are many more competing stances, however, the discussion here centers not on their differences, but on their general similarity—their shared origin and common outcome.
None of the existing visions have been able to produce anything resembling ‘political independence’—each new ‘party' or ‘project’ are just the playthings of a subculture at war over which ghosts get to haunt it. This internal strife, to anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear, has no bearing on the actual activity of American communism anyway: each tendency relates to American politics in the exact same way, that is, as an appendage. American communism has no independent position of its own because it takes no position of its own: it exists on the margins of other parties in order to educate them about an idea called ‘communism.’ Each approach to the problem of political independence is defined by this abstract and ‘educative’ character—and the entire discussion revolves around this or that theorist’s or party’s approach and whether it worked for them or not; the concrete historical situation we find ourselves, on the other hand, in is totally neglected.
But what is the reason for this? Why is American communism seemingly incapable of carving out an independent place in the political landscape? Perhaps because it already has a hard enough time carving out for itself an ideological independence.
The ideological ‘independence’ of communism is an empty claim that only takes the surface level into account. If one were to look more closely at the relation between liberalism and what passes for Marxism today in the United States, one would see very quickly the lack of a meaningful distinction between their approach to politics. In another article for this issue, Gandakin outlines this ideological similarity as follows:
“No matter how much Marxism in America claims to be incompatible with bourgeois thought, it, in practice, reaffirms in its worldview the most basic propositions of liberalism, viz., the centrality of the concept of rational argumentation, the essence of man as homo economicus, the unity of industrial and moral progress, etc., with more fervor and enthusiasm than liberalism itself does.”
The list here is just a start. American communism not only shares with liberalism its conception of man and reason, but also its theory of practice more generally. American communism has swallowed the bourgeois idea that ‘theory and practice’ are two separate ‘realms,’ and this is reflected as a general liability, much like Sorel’s,1to fly back and forth between the most mechanistic determinism (“the economic struggle will become political...”), and the most opportunistic voluntarism (“...as long as we intensify it”).2 Stress will lay on either side of the divide, depending on what is convenient at that moment—in exactly the same way liberals may claim that “the world has always been this way” just to, in the same breath, blame the poor for not ‘pulling themselves by their bootstraps,’ and attribute the wealth of the wealthy to their ‘hard work.’
In Marxist theory, this mechanical separation of the world of ideas and the world of material things is simply vulgar base-superstructure theory, or, more aptly put, economism. Base-superstructure theory, by privileging the economic ‘base’ over an apparently secondary ‘ideological’ superstructure, leads to a world-conception that understands the superstructure and the sum of non-economic factors as nothing more than an ‘auto-reflection’ of the economic structure. This view negates the autonomy of phenomena such as politics and culture and their ability to affect change on human activity. Because the ability of these things to affect economics and life more generally is denied (most of the time implicitly, for nobody would claim to have such a mechanistic worldview), their worldview has a hard time cognizing those moments when politics and culture, as a result of their own activity, do, in fact, change things. Ultimately, the structure, or base, acts as a “hidden god” contra-posed to the appearance of superstructure3, which is presented as impotent in the face of material conditions.
Not included in “material conditions,” however, is ideology, thought, the subjective experience, etc. In connecting the two, communists seem to have no choice but to fall back on bald-faced idealism to reconcile them. ‘Material’ seems to occupy one space, and ‘ideas’ another. The only path for development left open is through the other, from material to thought, from thought to material, and so on. Forgotten is Marx’s great innovation of “incorporating subjectivity into materialism and ‘real, sensuous activity’ into idealism,”4 and his throwing to the side of the entire question—for the first time making materialism ‘dialectical.’ In contrast, our communists live in a world before Marx, in the paradigm of Feuerbachian materialism, that is, in the paradigm of undialectical materialism. In the face of the problem this presents, communists unconsciously subscribing to this framework have no real choice (there is a reason creativity seems to be lacking among the communists!) but to try to change something ‘out there,’ in the ‘material world,’ as this would lead supposedly to a corresponding change in thought; as if thought cannot affect thought! The schema is essentially transactional: something is done in the “material world,” and, as an output in exchange, we get an alteration in the “ideological” one.
To build a communist movement, then, seems to require making our ‘material’ surroundings ‘communist.’ Though this is not the formulation our communists would use to describe their own activities, it is nonetheless what is expressed implicitly in their beliefs and actions. The faith that unions, mutual aid, reading groups, or whatever other form of activism one can think of, will give birth to a communist ideology in America is the proof of this. However, following this schema to its logical conclusion would mean that communists would have to build an entire socialist economy before being able to convince people to be socialists! Everyone will find this notion ridiculous and accuse me of building quite the straw-man, but this is the implied logic of all existing communist activity, and it is explicitly expressed in movements that fetishize co-ops and ‘economic democracy’ as a path to socialism, represented by figures such as Richard D. Wolff, organizations such as Cooperation Jackson, or the infamous ‘land-projects’ started by Fergie Chambers (one of which I was once a part of).
Regardless of how this or that organization or grouping explicitly frames their conception of societal change, they express the same base theoretical error—that of economism—and achieve the same base result: an activism indifferentiable from the hustle culture our young, budding entrepreneurs subscribe to. After all, all we need to do, according to both groups, is “put our head down and do the work!”. The only difference, however, is that some of the young entrepreneurs are actually successful in getting rich. It is an odd sight considering how nominally averse the left is to this sort of thinking, especially because they’re so vocal about it. Anyone familiar with the work of Marx can immediately tell you that this ‘hustle’ organizing culture has nothing to do with Marxism. So where does it come from? I posit that it comes directly from liberalism, that it is, once again, an expression of economism.
In the same way liberalism pretends the homeless can climb their way out of their desperate predicament with enough industrious work and a deep reserve of will, the communists posit we can climb our way out of our desperate predicament with enough elbow grease and with enough will. We have all seen it: ‘seasoned’ activists telling the young ones that “all we need to do” is “put our heads down” and “do the work.” As if communism will suddenly matter to anyone once we ‘pass the post’—a post still unable to be located in the fog of war. How inspiring it must be for the poverty-stricken man, after a conversation with his wealthy brother in which he was told that for him to conquer his predicament “all” he needed to do was “put his head down and do the work,” to then show up to a communist meeting only to be told the same exact thing! Worst of all is that his brother’s advice is actually better than the communists’—for at least he may get ahead! These activists, finding themselves lacking anything resonating to say, replace their communist responsibility to give expression to mass practice with the humble grind of ‘hard work.’
Every communist or socialist organization in the United States proclaims loudly that socialism will come about when enough people are ‘organized’ and ‘educated’ about the merits of socialism. Revolution is apparently an incremental process, for the common idea runs that ethico-political dominance in the social space, popularity, etc., “does not come about overnight.” This activist quietism is then used to justify the ideological chauvinism so common in communist spaces: supposedly, since we have the ‘correct’ ideas already, the only problem to be conquered now is applying these “correct concepts” by “putting them into action.” Once again, the arbitrary splitting of human activity into ‘thought’ and ‘material’ becomes evident.
In reality, there is no such thing as a correct political idea that is not effectively practical. A comrade recently quipped that “the best part about being a Marxist is being right all the time,” to which I responded by asking, “Why then does the American proletariat not follow us?” The reply was that though communists are “right all the time,” being right “doesn’t make our task any easier.” In all due respect, comrade, this is mental gymnastics of the highest degree. What makes one “right” outside of real human practice? As politicians, what makes us “right” outside of practical success in politics? A Marxist cannot be ‘correct’ unless his ideas are the real expression of a living social practice. Marx’s second thesis should be recalled:
The question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but is a practical question. Man must prove the truth — i.e. the reality and power [my emphasis], the this-sidedness of his thinking in practice. The dispute over the reality or non-reality of thinking that is isolated from practice is a purely scholastic question.
Let us take note of that last sentence. There is no truth outside of practice—as a Marxist, to assert that one is correct and to further argue that the problem is that we haven't ‘brought’ the truth to enough people is to fall right back into pre-Marxist vulgar materialism, as well as reaffirm the idea that human activity is structured by reason and argumentation (odd for self-proclaimed ‘materialists,’ is it not?).
In terms of the practical consequences of this thinking, it leads to activism-as-politics, in which the point is to ‘educate’ people about a ‘correct’ rational schema with twenty-five-person protests, fun facts about dead and gone socialist countries, a couple union drives nobody seems to care about, picking up trash, handing out food and toilet paper, and cosplaying as social-democrats without mentioning communism once, etc.—all in lieu of politics, that is, articulation and expression of real sentiment, real experience, and real desires. Instead, activism conceives the proletariat as within an ideal model disconnected from any real social formation, in which their sentiment, experience, and desires are determined by their abstractly posited interests. Their interests are reduced to the general desire to overthrow capitalism, while practice is understood as just getting people to ‘realize their true interests.’ As a result, communists tend to circle around a handful of disparate spontaneous movements that they identify with the interests of an abstractly conceived proletariat (which would go on with or without them all the same) in order to put in a ‘good word’ about their ideas, and in the process perhaps recruit a few people to their group. The whole operation sees the ‘working class,’ ‘proletariat,’ etc., as a scholastic and abstract category, not a historically determinate group constituted through unique political experiences and whose political will is expressed in unique ways as a result.
This conception of the communist political constituency leads directly to the anarchist idea of ‘propaganda of the deed,’ an idea that has infected Marxism with notions of spreading the ‘good word’ (gospel) of socialism, which is often confused for the Leninist notion of bringing socialism “from without.” In fact, it is merely an expression of that transactional vulgar materialism in which something is done in the “material world,” and as an output, we get an alteration in the “ideological” one. At the same time, Marxism is reduced to being purely educative. Communism is presented as an ‘alternative’ that we can ‘choose,’ which the activist justifies with evidence and ‘concrete’ examples (which tend to be dead countries and maybe a labor union). Micheal Parenti’s books and talks are emblematic of this purely educative character; communism is posed as a standalone abstract object/theory, which was then ‘applied’ (or brought) to countries, and, because of that, this-or-that outcome occurred. The listener, after hearing such reasoning, should have no problem joining the movement that achieved those things! Unfortunately for the activist, people are smarter than that—maybe not ‘smarter,’ but at least more in touch with the motion of real political life. They hear these nice things, but reality still stands, and history hitherto does as well; things are happening, history is in motion, and the listener knows this. They may agree with the activist, but the duty of history calls, and once again, they will be heading to the polls to vote for the Democrats. People do not act on the basis of abstract incentives or formulas. The ‘rational’ argument for communism is not a living one. Russians did not overthrow the Tsar because they thought that the pros of socialism outweighed the cons, but because the communist movement in Russia was able to capture the political energy of the Russian people and express it in practical terms. People did not ‘choose’ socialism, they were socialists.
Communism is never posed as the outflow of living history to the American listener or reader, which it must be if it is to articulate and express the activity of its hundreds of millions of people. If it were the case that communism was not just an idea, but a real living consequence of the history playing out in front of them, then perhaps their abstract agreement would be transformed into a much more effective form of support—a living political allegiance. Communism, as it stands, is an abstract idea with no historical continuity with present activity.
Because communism fails to make itself continuous with history, all that is left to do is to educate people as to what it may be. The communists accept the bourgeois narrative of their nation, and, leaving it unchallenged, pose an ‘alternative’ (backed up with facts, of course) rather than retelling the story to make themselves the natural conclusion. The self-conception of the people at large is left intact, and communism is made into an external force rather than being an internal aspect of the people and their development. This is the key to the communist movement’s marginality, its inherent anarchism, its educative character: as it operates, it relates to the masses in the form of an external actor that is educating them. This means that communism is essentially parasitic to the dominant political parties: it depends on existing political ideology to mobilize people, and then tries to ‘educate,’ ‘debunk,’ or ‘debate’ these political actors and win them over. But this also means that its dependence on the dominant parties is structural. As an educating force, it requires a mass of people who disagree with the party to educate. But this means that it can only educate people, and never function as a political party that expresses their political practice. If we were to remove the dominant parties from existence tomorrow, American communism would not come to the fore, it would cease to exist entirely.
It is like a leech sucking blood from a massive host, except that its feed is not blood, but the fact that it can hit you with a “gotcha!” at the dinner table. All the activist can hope to do is educate, but it must be remembered the educator’s role is dependent on there being someone to educate. To educate structurally takes for granted that you are talking to the unconvinced, without which there would be no one to listen and nothing to educate about. In this relation, the marginal character of activism becomes all the more clear—and even more so when one finds themselves in a space full of communists. All anyone has to say are things everybody already agrees on—the speaker seems to be speaking to non-socialists, as if the whole room wasn't already on the same page! The speaker acts as if they must win the whole room over with new facts and moral outrages, as if they have to ‘educate’ them as to why they should be a socialist. This is because their ‘politics’ has no continuity with history, has no place in the movement of the present, and does not attempt to situate itself in the history of the social formation it is in.
This ‘living outside of context’ leads to a political outlook dominated and characterized by a pervasive voluntarism. Because communism is seen as a break with history rather than a continuation of it, the task is left to the activist organization to initiate this ‘break.’ Socialism is thought to emerge out of struggles concocted by the activist organization, since struggles already in motion are not seen as the premise for the new society. That “the masses make history” is not seriously considered or internalized. The question becomes “What's the place of (insert activist organization)?” and not “What is the living state of the proletariat and the struggle it is presently engaged in?” No answer for the former question is provided either—upon contact with just about any political news, the activist goes “This is why we need a working class party!” Perhaps a better question would be “What are people thinking and why?” “Why has a working class party failed to materialize?” But these questions require specific investigation of American political practice rather than rote appeals to revolutionary politics, and so are left aside.
The voluntarism is very apparent in the communist organization’s tendency to base their activity on a ‘campaign’ model. In these campaigns, a single 'prevalent issue' is highlighted—such as a local labor dispute, or even something like a tenants' unionization drive—and becomes the focus of weeks (and not uncommonly, years) of 'garnering enthusiasm' or 'whipping up support.' Meanwhile, the national political struggles that the working class is actually concerned with—issues like the election, etc.—are completely ignored. This voluntarist campaign model of organizing is really just rehashed great-man theory, but enough steps (individuals) removed to allow the organization to clear any suspicions they might be engaging in such a thing. Great-man theory has been turned essentially into a ‘great-group’ theory; the fact of there being a group obscures the connection. Just because there is (barely) more than one of you does not save you from the fact that your activity is just a slightly altered form of great man theory. “The people, and the people alone, are the motive force in the making of world history” is a line all too often forgotten by our so-called “historical materialists.” While parading slogans such as this around, their practice continues to portray exactly the opposite conviction: “We, the dedicated activists, are the motive force in the making of world history; the masses role is to join us, in a secondary supporting role, because it seems we need their support in achieving our goals.” The masses do not begin to make history only after attaching themselves to some intellectual grouping (let alone the most isolated one in our entire society: the communists); those political groups that do ascend to hegemony do so not because the people ‘support’ them, but because that group expresses the living practice of a real and concrete social formation.
In the same way that “[t]he internal unity of the dominant ideology derives from the fact that it ‘expresses’ the ‘Marxist’ unity of a social formation as a whole founded on a determinate mode of production,”5 the ideology of the subaltern class seeking hegemony must also express this unity but ‘in the negative’—it must express the totality of the social formation in a fashion which also signals its impending dissolution. Expressing solely the organization or the ‘interests,’ ‘consciousness,’ of an arbitrarily delimited, ‘located,’ social group will not suffice. Expressing the “unity” of the social formation negatively, as opposed to being limited to the supposed ‘interests’ of this or that group, is what links the communist viewpoint with the past, with history, and is what ties its political ideology to a concrete social formation (as opposed to a doctrine), it is what concretizes that ideology.
As of now the idea of communism in the United States is wholly abstract, and can thus only be expressed at the myopic level of the activist, who wishes to convince you to read Marx with their community service and their altruism. The ideology, lacking the ability of expressing the practice of the social formation it finds itself in, can only peek through into the threshold of existence through proximity to this activist character, hence why the communist organization cannot conceive of political action outside of communist organizational activities. In a sense, then, the myopic activism so characteristic of American communism is not even the fault of the activists but rather the fault of its intellectuals, who, rather than studying the American social formation and coming to grips with its unique political features, and crafting an outlook that negatively expresses this social formation, have, at the sight of every injustice and struggle, neglected their duty as communist intellectuals by lazily using each example as another reason why “we need a working class party,” or need to “reaffirm the centrality of class struggle,” lending theoretical support to myopic “party building.” Great work everyone! Maybe if we scream that into the void another time or two the working class will finally turn their heads and listen to us! The point is that the task of building the party is not something that can be declared, but a historical event that can only happen on a class level by studying and engaging with the existing mass of political activity that characterizes the masses.
The task of the communist intellectual is not to ‘apply’ communist theory, for this only leads to lazily reaffirming the need for a ‘working class’ this-or-that, nor is it to ‘reinterpret’ communist theory, for this only betrays a lack of confidence. The task of the communist intellectual is concretization. As P.K. Gandakin said: “this distinction is subtle and difficult to place in words but essential.”6 Communist political practice is not the simple act of transferring principles from text to reality. Communism all too commonly sees its task as ‘application,’ but all this indicates is that communists have not considered the concrete and historically determined state that we live in, but ‘the state’ in the abstract. It also shows how social classes have not been analyzed in their specificity either, but only in the abstract, as they appear in the ‘ideal-model.’ “Application” as the ‘communist task’ renders any concrete analysis of historically determinate social formations absolutely impossible—it can then only be a matter of bringing ‘it’ down from the realm of the rational.
II
So what is ‘organizing’ if it is not a matter of ‘applying’ Marxism? To answer this question, or, more accurately, to begin to get at an answer, we can start by taking a look at P.K. Gandakin’s article ‘Good for the Gander,’ where the idea of ‘concretization’ is first explored in the pages of Geese. The question cannot be asked in isolation, however—it must be coupled, at the very least, with an exploration of what the political party actually is.
Gandakin’s article, a response to a criticism by Drake Berkman, outlines some major disagreements with how communism as a practice is conceived by American Marxists. Gandakin begins by criticizing the idea that the ‘communist movement’ (the collection of people in the United States who call themselves ‘communists’) can be understood as equivalent to the actual, historical movement towards communism—the real struggle of the toiling masses—which our Marxists actually demand we move away from.7 This pervasive error is central to ‘great activism’ theory, but the formal group of communists must be treated as analytically distinct from the masses as a whole who, although they identify in a number of different political ways, are the only really effective forces in history.
This activistic approach emphasizes communists as the sole ‘active’ element, leading to the communist assumption that it is their job to ‘raise’ or ‘elevate’ the otherwise plebeian masses. Mass struggle is not conceived as historical movement, but as an abortive ‘mistake’ that needs to be replaced by the wise prescriptions of Marxists who can set the people on the right path. Gandakin’s writes:
...Geese does not believe the movement needs to be raised anywhere, because raising is not the task. The conception of the Party (or the “movement”) as a formal organizational body composed of individuals brought together by a shared ideology, etc. is an activistic and academic understanding of the Party. It conceives of the Party’s task as convincing individuals through propaganda or appeal to their rational interest, or by building ‘good will’ in communities through organizing, activism, mutual aid, etc. It pretends activists are the only meaningful element in social life; it’s a Florence Nightingale-flavored Blanquism.
Fundamental to the aforementioned “activistic and academic understanding of the party” is the illusion that there is anything to be raised in the first place. The political activity of millions of people does not need to be raised—it exists at the pinnacle to begin with; it is already making history. The relation of the activist and the ‘people’ is one-sided—there is no reciprocal relation, only a transaction: we give you food, or win you a raise, or pick up trash, and you are to ‘support’ us (whatever that means). What is there to support? A group of awkward teenagers with a penchant for activism? What would ‘support’ even mean? Agreeing? That wouldn't amount to much (especially for self-proclaimed “materialists”). The masses do not begin to make history only after choosing a political group to attach themselves to—those political groups that do ascend to power do so not because the people ‘support’ them, but because that group expresses their living practice, independent of the ‘supporters’ knowledge or “support.”
Elaborating further, he goes on to explain to our Marxists some basic aspects of their own self-professed worldview, basic historical materialism:
The activistic mindset understands political work as a sheerly technical process that is achieved through the correct actions and decision, i.e., effective organizing, pamphleteering, correct coinciding with rational interests, etc. But this treats the existing political structure as an arbitrary and essentially neutral field (—rather than as a “super-politics”!). Liberalism, e.g., is treated as popular because the people have been convinced of it through news media, or because the Democrat Party has access to so much funding, etc.
The understanding under attack here is the “Marxist” common sense notion that political power is a technical question of ‘educating’ the people to vote for you, as if before the ‘education’ they were going to vote for nobody, or worse, whoever previously had the most convincing argument. But, as Gandakin argues, politics is not a “neutral field” where the best argument or most money wins out, but a practice with its own structure and history that cannot be understood sheerly by reference to the subjective desires of individual actors. The Democratic and Republican parties do not ‘win over the people,’but alternatively express different tendencies in American social life. He continues:
Historical materialism inverts this relationship: because liberalism as a politics is able to effectively play the role of structuring and expressing the mass practice of concrete social groups that exist in a concrete historical formation, it consequently (as a logical consequence rather than a historical or temporal one) also dominates the ideological superstructure, possesses the ability to direct the distribution of social surplus, etc. The origin of the power of the governing class (i.e., the social group that directs the state) is not in the mere possession of that power per se; the state, rather, is how the totality of political practice necessarily designates which ideology and social group accesses institutional power.
I recall a conversation some of the Geese had years ago with one of our local CPUSA bureaucrats, who also happens to be a prominent ALU organizer (now part of an ultra-left putsch clique trying to overthrow Chris Smalls), who, when an argument akin to that just quoted was stated, responded in absolute indignation, scolding us with an appeal to their ‘organizing experience.’ To her, the thing keeping the Democrats and Republicans in power was not the fact that they express the concrete activities of massive social groups, but the fact that they have ‘on the ground organizers’ going door to door. This was apparently confirmed through her years of door-knocking for a ‘party’ that even those visited by her aren't aware of. These types truly and honestly think that communism—the elevation of the entire human species to a higher and more total form of civilization—is achieved by putting your head down and... knocking on doors? They believe that the people are on the “wrong” track, and that they will be the ones to put them on the “right” track, but only if we convince them by interrupting their Saturday activities to talk at them for a few minutes at the door.
The ‘people’ did not latch onto the major parties, but rather, the parties latch onto the concrete activities of the people and in doing so became the political expression of the people. Every single living political party is a concrete expression of the fact that “the masses make history.” None of them ‘cohered’ the people into their orbit, for they are merely expressions of their activity. A political party is, after all, simply the “nomenclature of a class.”8 When the Whig Party collapsed it was not because they lost their ability to ‘send out organizers,’ but because they no longer expressed the practice of their old constituency, for it was broken apart by the force of new questions. When the Republican Party replaced them, it was not because they gained the ability to ‘send out organizers,’ but because the party expressed in its very fabric the activity of the prospective settlers who were not excited at the prospect of competing with slave labor in the West. It must be noted as well that the Republicans did not express the interests of freeholders in the abstract, but as they were definitely determined in a definite historical context.
Let us say the Communist Party was constituted tomorrow (and I say “the” to indicate that it will be “the one”). It would have to be constituted on the basis of concrete social groups in the United States (not an abstract ‘proletariat’), that is, it would have to express rather than educate. This is because the communist’s job (or any politician for that matter) is not to tell the world to cease what it is doing and convince it to do something else; the communist’s job is to explain to the world what it is already actively undertaking every day, to help the world articulate its own activity to itself. Gandakin writes:
This point makes clear the importance of the displacing of emphasis from the communist movement to the proletariat as a whole. There is nothing the communist movement can do to ‘rise’ to a higher level in national politics. If we agree that the masses make history, consistently following this thesis means that the masses are already, right now, making history. Revolution cannot be conceived as the top of a ladder with multiple steps that you can sequentially climb through instrumental action—not a matter of moving from a sect, to a large sect, to a small mass party, to a big mass party, etc., but as being tied to and determined by the relation of the Party to national political life qua mass political practice.
Activism’s orientation is that of climbing the proverbial ‘ladder.’ It is thought that we can move on up by ‘educating’ the people and reaching that numerical “critical mass” needed to “do something.” It may come as a surprise to our communists, but we do not need to educate anyone about their own lives. What they need is someone who will say what they think and who will give it higher expression on the political stage. But that is to say communists even talk about the concrete lives of Americans, which they do not. They instead talk about the predicament of abstract proletarians, outside of any definite historical context. Imagine if the Free-Soil Party, or later the Republican Party, instead of talking about the concrete American problem of slavery expansion, talked about the trans-historical interests of free landholders—instead of talking about American events and developments, they talked about abstract small-holders. They would have never come to the ascent, they would have remained a marginal-educative force, while another party, able to concretely articulate the experience of the historically definite American small-holder, would have taken the place they occupied in our timeline.
This instrumental conception of political action precludes the idea of concretization since the steps it believes itself to be taking toward its goal are informed solely on the idea of sharing something with the people, on ‘teaching’ them Marxism in the abstract. There can be no talk of concretization when the only thing being discussed is as far from the concrete as it gets, that is, absolute abstraction. Imagine if the Democrats went around trying to teach everyone the theories of Voltaire and Rousseau and about the generic interests of the bourgeoisie. Marxists forget that Marxism is worthless unless it is put into concrete terms—unless it is able to articulate the activity of the social formation it wishes to change, unless it is related to the specific practice of a people. Marxism cannot be a theory to teach, but a politics to believe in.
Antonio Gramsci took note of this inability to say anything concrete in his Prison Notebooks. In the short essay named “Against Byzantinism” he attacks this aptly named tendency. He described “Byzantinism” as “[t]he regressive tendency to treat so-called theoretical questions as if they have value in themselves, independently of any specific practice.”9 I would turn the word ‘specific’ on its side if I could, in order to emphasize this point all the more: that concretization can only take place in the realm of the specific. Only in relation to the activity of a specific social formation can a theoretical assertion find its true validity:
...every truth, even if it is universal, and even if it can be expressed by an abstract formula of a mathematical kind, owes its effectiveness to its being expressed in the language appropriate to specific concrete situations. If it cannot be expressed in such specific terms, it is a byzantine and scholastic abstraction, good only for phrase mongers to toy with.”10
The world has a point when they criticize Marxists for being phrase mongers. The criticism arose out of a basic reality, not “anti-communist propaganda.” The world sees that Marxists of all nations say the same things, that their “politics” amounts to nothing more than toying with the same phrases and formulations outside of the definite context they attempt to assert themselves in. American communists must reject the idea of ‘applying’ (educating about) communist theory in favor of concretizing it if we seek to make headway in making our way out of our small circles and, in the process, make communism a ‘real thing’ in America.
This view of ‘applying’ Marxism goes hand in hand with the instrumental and voluntaristic conception of the political party so commonly held by American Marxists. In this complex of ideas, the party (or ‘org’ in American activist lingo) is seen as a purely educative organ that, through its organizational activities and initiatives, brings socialism to the people by ‘putting in a good word’ about their beliefs with good deeds and messaging that is designed to resonate with the working class. To carry this out, the activist ‘applies’ “Marxism” (or at least a vulgar idea of what communists are ‘supposed’ to do) by doing classically “Marxist” things, which means a practice characterized by the past experiences of long-gone times and places rather a fresh analysis of the present structure of politics. Concretization, on the other hand, departs from the voluntarist conception of politics by displacing the role of ‘key player’ from the organization to the people at large, by understanding that it is their activity that serves as the basis for the transformation of society, and not the activist organization’s. Though the formal organization is absolutely essential in the transformation of society, it is not the organization that ‘spawns’ revolutionary activity, but rather, it is the practice of the people that spawns the revolutionary party which, in turn, gives consciousness to that practice. The organization (party) is derivative of the social group’s political practice.
We can see this line of thinking more clearly developed in The Modern Prince, short passages of which we will take a look at to get a better idea of this relationship between party and class. “In what will the history of a political party consist?” To this question he begins by asking
Will it be a simple narrative of the internal life of a political organization? How it comes into existence, the first groups which constitute it, the ideological controversies through which its programme and its conception of the world and of life are formed?
Seeing the shortcoming in this, he elaborates it as such:
In such a case, one would merely have a history of certain intellectual groups, or even sometimes the political biography of a single personality. The study will therefore have to have a vaster and more comprehensive framework.
What is being ‘written’ today in the United States is precisely “the history of certain intellectual groups.” We can see this when, in light of any political event, attention is immediately drawn back inward to the organization, and how the organization will proceed. The organization is elevated to a higher importance than the politics it claims to espouse. Left out of consideration is the content of this “vaster and more comprehensive framework.” He then says:
The history will have to be written of a particular mass of men who have followed the leaders of the party, sustained them with their trust, loyalty, and discipline, or criticized them “realistically” by dispersing or remaining passive before certain initiatives. [My emphasis]
I want to draw attention to the last clause, which, put simply, denotes that famous maxim that “the masses make history”—it means that this “particular mass of men,” though outside of the party proper, are centrally constitutive of the parties’ character (remember that parties are but the “nomenclature” of classes). The passivity with which a party or organization is greeted by the class it ‘represents’ is in fact the organization’s most defining feature—the one that imbues it with its true political ‘essence.’ When the working class remains passive or inert in face of the organization’s initiatives, it is not because the organization failed to bring its correct ideas to the people, but because the organization has the wrong idea of what it means to be ‘correct.’ The organization thinks it has already located a truth, and now the task remains to convince the people of this truth, when in fact (political) ‘truth’ is determined by mass political practice—if the people remain inert before your initiative, then it has no ‘truth’ in the political sense.
Gramsci continues this line of thinking by asking: “will this mass be made up solely of members of the party?” In his answer we see further this anti-voluntaristic line of reasoning emerge, and with it, a new understanding of what it means to ‘organize’ under this new understanding.
Clearly it will be necessary to take some account of the social group of which the party in question is the expression and the most advanced element. The history of a party, in other words, can only be the history of a particular social group. [My emphasis]
The history of the party, therefore, is not the history of this or that organization styling itself as a communist party but the history of the social group as a whole. Refuted once again is the activist’s crude great man theory styling itself as “Marxism.” Communist activists confuse the history of sects with the history of parties—when they attempt to outline the history of a party, they generally only do so in the fashion appropriate for a sect, that is, they only see the formal organizational decisions, the paper initiatives, the resolutions, and they forget the real mass basis of the party itself. This is what leads to so many comical mistakes in many communists’ analysis of the dominant parties, and it is what leads to so many comical mistakes in their attempts to constitute themselves as ‘parties.’
When we see these sects undertaking initiatives to “channel support” or “create enthusiasm” over certain topics, it is to, first of all, imply—and in some ways to admit to—the organization’s marginal character. It is to maintain that marginality consciously, in keeping the organization focused on topics that the activist organization is already aware nobody is talking about. Ultimately it betrays the sect’s purely parasitic relation to the dominant parties (and thus to actual life as well). It expresses for all to see the sect’s educative conception of politics, in which the dominant parties attained their status by sharing their own Micheal Parenti-esque videos11 or something of the like. It secondly, in the same breath, puts on display the voluntaristic conception of ‘organizing’ carried by the activist organization by thinking that they can get the people to do anything (which is comical considering they have a hard enough time getting their own members to do anything) that they aren't already doing. The activist organization “stands athwart history, yelling stop,”12 but, unlike William F. Buckley, who wished to push us back on the timeline, the activist organization proposes a whole new timeline—a cessation of history.
Rather than standing athwart history and yelling stop, like the ‘applier’ of Marxism (the activist) tends to do, the concretizer of Marxism takes history and makes it his own; he makes it the basis on which the new society will arise; he tells the story and makes the communist party its only natural outcome. Gramsci continues:
But this group is not isolated; it has friends, kindred groups, opponents, enemies. The history of any given party can only emerge from the complex portrayal of the totality of society and State. Hence it may be said that to write the history of a party means nothing less then to write the general history of a country from a monographic viewpoint, in order to highlight a particular aspect of it. A party will have had greater or less significance and weight precisely to the extent to which its particular activity has been more or less decisive in determining a country’s history. We may thus see that from the way in which the history of a party is written there emerges the author's conception of what a party is and should be. [My emphasis]
The political party, far from being a mere organization, must be nothing less than the country’s history embodied. All roads, all stories, all strands, must lead conclusively to the party, and nothing else. In recognizing such a fact, the political party, and the organization of that political party, becomes so much more than simply putting together a group of people who are educated in Marxism. It becomes an epic narrative—one in which nothing else can be deduced, and no other course considered even remotely viable, except for the creation of the communist party and the carrying out of revolution. The political party is living, walking history, and can be nothing but. Further, the party is not a mere organization dedicated to carrying out the revolution, an external cause of revolution—the party, rather, is, in a certain sense, the revolution itself; the act of organizing the Party is to carry out the revolution, for that very act is exactly what makes it the ‘Party,’ and not a ‘party.’ Now this may sound like some sort of empty point designed to sound poetic and inspiring, but it is far from that. The co-equivalence of revolution and Party is a structural feature of the vanguard Party; and more broadly, of the foundation of a new ‘force’—the new state.
III
Niccolo Machiavelli’s The Prince is commonly seen as a simple manual for rulers or princes in general. Common historiography would have it as such, and nobody thinks much more of The Prince than that. Why would they? It seems pretty straightforward, does it not? But the problem in this interpretation is that it does not take the rest of his work into account; namely his Discourses on Titus Livy. If one looks at them side by side, one can see that they are incredibly contradictory writings. One appears as nothing more than a “manual for tyrants,” and the other reads as a sort of ‘endorsement’ of republicanism. This contradiction is never really accounted for (at least in the English language—Italian thinkers, by virtue of shared heritage and his role as a national icon, tend to have a much more intimate understanding of Machiavelli), and as a result, the literature on Machiavelli always ends up either one-sidedly praising him as a ‘republican,’ or denouncing him as a ‘tyrant’—one side is always highlighted at the expense of the other. However, if we look at both works side by side, like Althusser did in his Machiavelli and Us, we will see that these works comprise a single body of thought, one not commonly appreciated in modern looks at our friend Niccolo. Althusser is keen to observe that13
“...what Machiavelli is seeking to define in the Discourses, in an ancient history focused on Rome and constantly paralleled with contemporary history, is theoretical arguments for the theses set out in The Prince.” 14
The Prince and the Discourses underscore two ‘moments’ in what Althusser calls Machiavelli’s “absolute object of reference,”15 that is, “the new state.” Machiavelli sought only the unification and solidification of Italy; The Prince ‘representing’ the moment of unification—of founding—and The Discourses ‘representing’ Italy’s solidification as a state:
“If in The Prince emphasis is put on the first moment—absolute power, absolute monarchy—that is because it is the absolute form of the beginning of the state. If in the Discourses emphasis is is put on what have been called republics, but which (as Machiavelli himself constantly reiterates) are just as much principalities […] it is because Machiavelli is predominantly studying the second moment there: the moment of the forms which permit state power to take root in the people, via the intermediary of laws, and render the state capable of both enduring and expanding, thus surmounting the test of time and space. In the aftermath of the founding moment, stress is no longer placed on absolute power, but on composite government, laws, and the people.”16
“Why does this matter to us?” you may be asking. What is the relation between Machiavelli’s thought and the organization of the Communist party? Machiavelli, far from being a mere ‘strategist,’ is a political theorist of the highest order—a theorist of beginnings. Everything one reads in The Prince is not advice for princes in general, but reserved for the new prince (for him the prospective unifier of the Italian nation). In his view, no prince in his day was capable of undertaking the task, for they were all marked by their ‘oldness,’ their feudal character. Any reading of The Prince should bear this fact in mind, for doing so will bring forth the real profundity of the work.
Machiavelli gives the advice to the prospective prince—the unifier of Italy—that he cannot rely on the graces of others for success, whether that means mercenaries, who are motivated by money, or foreigners, who are motivated by goals other than one’s own. The prince who is going to unify Italy must recruit his own forces, arm his people, and make out of them citizens. Anyone can see that there is the obvious benefit of loyalty, but the real point is missed if one looks no further. The very act of basing one’s army on the people, on civilians, on citizens, building an Italian army, is made an essential moment in the unification of the nation. The army, its “constitution, formation, and utilization” are considered from the viewpoint of politics, of the political end it seeks to attain, “anticipat[ing]” the “well-known theses of Clausewitz, Engels, and Mao Zedong.”17 By recruiting the army from the popular classes, “the men of the towns and countryside begin to become—learn to become—one and the same people.”18 Althusser notes that Gramsci was “sensitive” to this point of Machiavelli’s, as can be seen early on in The Modern Prince:
“Any formation of national-popular collective will is impossible, unless the great mass of peasant farmers burst simultaneously into political life. This was Machiavelli’s intention through the reform of the militia, and it was achieved by the Jacobins in the French Revolution. That Machiavelli understood it reveals a precocious Jacobinism that is the (more or less fertile) germ of his conception of national revolution.”19
Here is the true revolutionary content of Machiavelli’s idea of the army: no longer is the army (the Party in our case) conceived as a “neutral technical instrument, a force organized according to the rules of existing military technique and serving authority purely as a means to attainment of its ends,”20 the organization of the army itself is unification, the same way the organization of the Party is revolution; “the means will no longer be external to the end.”21
“...we discover that the forms of army recruitment and organization have the effect of making the end internal to the army itself; and that the creation of the army is already in itself an accomplishment of the goal. Not only are the means not external to the end, but the end is internal to the means.”22
Here, the instrumental, ‘step-by-step’ method is thrown to the wayside, for the activist conception sees itself as building the “neutral technical instrument” that will be the external means to the end. The activist sees themselves as building the ‘infrastructure’ necessary to one day carry out ‘the’ revolution. They do not see the act of organizing the party as revolution, they only see it as a prerequisite, and the ‘revolution’ is put off indefinitely. My dear comrades, there is no first building a party, and then carrying out revolution, for this implies a clear, delineated, step-by-step stage ‘system’ undergirding the whole project.
The revolution must be, in a certain—but very real—sense, already underway. Revolution is existential, it takes as its fundamental premise the transformation of all human activity. Man’s self-conception is fundamentally transformed, and it is in this that the revolution consists: a total self-reconceptualization of ourselves and others. This is where Gramsci’s wisdom really lays, that the history of a political party can be nothing less than the “history of a particular social group.” This is why a work such as Black Reconstruction in America is so revolutionary (especially compared to the stale, instrumental, organizing ‘manuals’ pumped out by our liberal activists who take a liking to the word “radical”). Black Reconstruction tells the history of a social group, and, in doing so, fundamentally transforms the self-conception of that group. If the revolution is going to be something continuous with history, that ‘flows out of history,’ it must be underway already in one way or another. If revolution is posited as something that occurs ‘later,’ after we manage to reach a certain ‘critical mass’ of support or organization, we end up falling into the trap of voluntaristic, instrumental ‘organizing,’ (liberal activism) in which the political field is seen as a neutral space (think of the game mode ‘hardpoint’ in Call of Duty) ready to be taken by whichever political group does the ‘best organizing.’ Derivative of and worse than this, we leave the listener with the same reservations they have always held: that revolution sounds like an “impossible task.” This conception of the party and politics retains the sense of powerlessness so fundamental to the people’s condition under the present ‘arrangement of things.’ Their self-conception stays the same—it is actually reaffirmed!—and their hopelessness is given new life.
Abstract communism, because it lacks continuity with history, and poses itself as an abstract set of doctrinal principles, cannot help but be educational in nature—it can only hope to teach and convince through ‘rational argumentation.’ Unfortunately, politics is passional, practical, but not rational. Everyone walks away from a debate satisfied with themselves. If a political view can only actualize itself in terms of ‘educating’ others, it is necessarily reduced to a marginal-parasitic feature of the dominant order, and of the dominant parties. Political autonomy—independence—remains a pipe dream, and will remain such as long as the communists fail to reconceptualize their task not as ‘application,’ but as concretization, veering away from instrumental, reformist, liberal activism, and towards the revolutionization of all concepts, the demystification of all social relations. In short, becoming the “basis for a modern laicism and for a complete laicisation of all aspects of life and of all customary relationships.”23
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1 – Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, International Publishers, p.129
2 – Nicos Poulantzas Reader, p.77-78
3 – Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, International Publishers p.138
4 – Marx's Materialism: Marxism and the Position of Contemplation, Section II
5 – Nicos Poulantzas Reader, p.131
6 – Good for the Gander, Section (?)
7 – Donald Parkinson, a leader of a prominent Marxist faction in the DSA, “Marxist Unity Group,” once replied to a post of ours saying something along the lines of “the culture war and the class war are two different ways of doing politics.” How far Marxism has fallen in America!
8 – Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, International Publishers, p.152
9 – Ibid, p.200
10 – Ibid, p.201
11 – Which the dominant parties were supposedly able to share en masse due to their extensive resources and funding. As if lack of funding was the crux of our (communist’s) problems. This has already been disproven by the case of Fergie Chambers.
12 – National Review, Our Mission Statement - Nov 19, 1955
13 – “We are not dealing with an interpretation—Gramsci’s, largely adopted from De Sanctis—but with a stance Machiavelli makes explicit.” – Louis Althusser, Machiavelli and Us, p.53
14 – Louis Althusser, Machiavelli and Us, p.56
15 – Ibid, p.64
16 – Ibid, p.65
17 – Ibid, p.82 – cf. Mao’s line struggle with Zhu De in 1929
18 – Ibid, p.87
19 – Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, International Publishers, p.132
20 – Louis Althusser, Machiavelli and Us, p.88
21 – Ibid, p.88
22 – Ibid, p.88-89
23 – Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, International Publishers, p.133