Tutorial Marxism

by Sarkozy

April 7, 2024

A tutorial tells us how to achieve one specific task but not the approach to all tasks in general. The difference between a tutorial and an approach is that a tutorial is a simple guide, while an approach would qualify as a proper education. A tutorial is acceptable for practical purposes - we do not need to know how to approach things in all cases; there are many times when just learning how to do something once will suffice. For example, a recipe for baking cookies is a tutorial. It tells you how to bake cookies but not how to approach baking in general. Practically, we do not need to study how to approach problems in baking like a cook to achieve this isolated task. However, a tutorial is hopelessly inadequate if the goal is changing society.  Within typical communist spaces, ‘tutorialization’ permeates left intellectual circles. Organizers teach the analytical methods, philosophical claims, and enduring concepts developed by Marx and Engels during their investigations into capitalist society as a series of disparate facts only loosely connected by the external fact that they all belong to the same couple of thinkers. Tutorial Marxism is the educational tendency in radical organizing that teaches a basic and objectified form of Marxism - one that treats the inquiry and conclusions of Marx and Marxists as a series of facts independent of effective organizing. Marxist ideas - the labor-value theory of capital, class struggle, historical materialism, dialectics, alienation, etc - are disconnected from each other and any actual theoretical method. Their content becomes factoids - “need-to-know” ideas for leftists and not much beyond that.  

To illustrate the central concept, how does Tutorial Marxism teach dialectics? Dialectics is when two phenomena conflict, both struggling for domination over the other. This dynamic explains their behavior and why one side of the dialectic always stifles the other during mutual development. The most relevant example of such conflict is the exploitative relationship between workers and capitalists. The worker struggles to survive and overcome alienation while the capitalist struggles to expand capital and increase profits. We are all painfully aware of this story. This basic understanding, more or less, is the final say-so on dialectics for most communist organizers. It is good enough to know just this level of sophistication since one could carry out typical praxis without any more investigation into the matter. Therein lies the issue - dialectics should inform our praxis far beyond merely restating the obvious. The worker and capitalist conflict with each other - anyone with a boss knows this well. Tutorial dialectics provides nothing more than that, and so the concept of dialectics becomes an isolated fact. Some organizers try to apply tutorial dialectics to analysis to escape this issue - the result is usually bland, redundant theory. For example, I could apply tutorial dialectics to the situation in Palestine. I could simply say that the Palestinians and Israelis are in a colonial struggle, the Israelis being the colonizer and the Palestinians being the colonized. This analysis ultimately only tells me that the two will fight against each other since they are locked in such a dynamic, a conclusion reached without the help of tutorial dialectics. 

Tutorial Marxism objectifies theory by treating Marxism as a closed system of thought. In this context, closed means that the final word on social investigation ends with the theories of Marx and Marxists. Tutorial Marxism objectifies theory and thus obscures the fact that theoretical development is an open inquiry. This open inquiry (effective social investigation) must be an ongoing process until we achieve communism to consider the dynamic nature of reality (we will elaborate on this further shortly). However, with Tutorial Marxism, theory becomes a rationalistic system of thought whose claims justify themselves based on other claims within that system. This rationalism encourages a profound lack of creativity in intellectual work. Organizers think of this closed form of Marxism as the proverbial wheel that should not be reinvented. It also fails to reflect the evolving world, as rationalism tends to do. Static concepts are left unaltered, reflecting the historical situation of when they were initially conceived. The nature of something like imperialism has evolved far beyond the context under which Lenin developed the idea. However, Tutorial Marxism takes Lenin’s imperialism at face value and thus fails to say anything accurate about its modern form.

Tutorial Marxism achieves a rupture in the classical dialectical relationship between theory and praxis, a divorce of the two. However, this is different from a typical separation in that theory does not reflect the content of everyday life. In the contemporary movement, this particular critique has been lobbed countless times against communist organizers and organizations. Divorce is an autonomizing of praxis due to the objectification of communist theory. Praxis enjoys the privilege of being the real focus of the movement. It isn’t just that praxis is the primary contradiction in its dialectic with theory, an idea that Marx advocated for. Instead, organizing expertise replaces any theory that might coincide with actual praxis. Our tutorial concepts merely provide the ethical backdrop of our actions, and those actions themselves become routine and cliche. Communists treat the collection of typical organizational tasks - internal meetings, recruitment efforts, fundraisers, phone banks, book clubs, canvassing projects, protests, rallies, campaigns, etc. - as divine action - the tried and true organizational path of any radically left formation. Our activities come from the same old playbook with the same old approach. The approach is the main issue as we participate in the merry-go-round of dead leftist political underdevelopment. Our actions are hardly tied to any theoretical framework. The approach to these actions, if they are even philosophically reflected on, is crude empiricism. With shoddy baseline standards such as popular turn-out and the loudness of rallying chants, the communist fundamentally misjudges the success of any activity.

Meanwhile, as stated earlier, tutorialized Marxist concepts wait patiently on stand-by in the activist's mind - it is there that they are reified, objectified, and even commodified. Excellent packaging! Since we have a tutorial on communist philosophy, the use of such ideas is purely propagandistic. Any philosophical engagement with non-communists (the fence-sitting potential convert, the reactionary opponent) is a surface-level battle of faith affirmations. Communists on the streets never develop their approach and only signal their ideology. Ultimately, the implicit assumption made whenever we engage in communist organizing is that the theory has already been settled and the time for contemplation has passed. Accusations of being an “armchair” or “theory-head” are usually lobbed at anyone who makes this earnest criticism. We cannot hope to correct this because no actual theoretical intervention can occur on the sterile grounds of Tutorial Marxism.

None of the activities we identified with communist practice are politically useless. Quite the contrary - I affirm their necessity. But being genuinely political implies some form of progress in the real political world. We aren’t revolutionaries, but instead, we have designated roles to play in the liberal-democratic order, a political drama that communism only participates in as a cardboard prop at best. We only hope to bring the same old ideological challenge to the liberal side of the capitalist political paradigm whenever the pivotal moment of a significant struggle comes to a head (the BLM uprisings, Stop Cop City, Standing Rock, CHAZ, etc.). We could be considered checking liberal hegemony at times if we’re being overly generous in our assessment. Nonetheless, we can’t call our actions revolutionary at this current political juncture - for they are thoroughly understood and accounted for by capitalist structures of domination - the ruling classes, the state, state-ideological apparatuses, etc.

Why would the issue of the divorce between theory and praxis be a philosophical one? Again, I must stress the autonomizing of praxis. No such reframing can occur through a different kind of praxis or by the quantitative intensification of praxis (just do more work!). This claim may strike the reader as odd - after all, wouldn’t the right kind of praxis be the praxis that reconnects theory and practice? This argument is a contentless tautological definition of the right kind of praxis. Besides, the “more work” attitude, its call for the needless diversification of types of organizing events (a pseudo-creativity), is an actual tendency in the communist movement to try and solve the issue in this specific and incorrect way. Organizers attempt this or that so-called “political” project, aiming for progressive communist action as the ultimate yet vague success criteria. There is a prevailing presupposition that as the typical body of leftist political action develops, a specific correct praxis will start to arise - a golden program will appear, wedged in stone. I am the first and foremost advocate of experimentalism in general. Still, as long as communists have no active theory that apprehends the objective external world, all sought-after varieties of praxis will spin in circles endlessly, independent of the type of action being carried out. All questions on praxis require reflection (which is also a form of praxis itself). Without developing our collective thought intelligently, communist praxis is a headless chicken, frantically running around from one stale organizational event to another.

Marx was large. Marx contained multitudes, and his writings begged, “Do I contradict myself?”. He did so in the sense that Marx's thought contained competing overarching tendencies during the development of his social analysis. Bertell Ollman outlines these contradictory tendencies in the introduction to his work Dance of the Dialectic. He identifies Marx’s thought as being 1) a science, 2) a critique, 3) a vision, and 4) a strategy for revolution. It is no wonder that these enormous mountains, in their tectonic formation, bumped up against each other so violently. And yet, attempting to mediate the contradictions between such tendencies is artificiality par excellence - we tend to forget that our heroes are mortal men - as confused and twisted in their philosophical investigations as we are in the midst of our everyday experience. It is a retrospective sleight-of-hand to treat Marx as having provided us with a coherent, consistent, complete method of social analysis. And sure, we can claim that dialectical materialism is an unfinished project, or even worse, the claim that this thinking is not of Marx but instead is just the logic and world-view of the working class and working-class movement - an often nebulous and problematic social grouping. The former claim’s sin is not in its inaccuracy but in its evasiveness. For the latter claim, it certainly had a time and place for its use when instrumentalism and ‘organizationalism’ reigned supreme during the patriarchal world leadership of the communist movement by the Soviet Union. No such guidance exists anymore, however, rendering the historicist claim only functional as subcultural identification that signals in-group continuity. Marxist theory desperately needs untethering from the solid block of concepts we tend to teach. A balloon tied to concrete lacks the freedom to float above our heads, the liberty to flaunt its flying powers. I claim that a loose, open, confused, turmoiled, untethered, plural Marx is not only actual Marx but also useful Marx, and consequently, any conception of him outside of this is useless.

Materialism is the philosophical position that the world exists independent of our experience. It is material, and the emphasis made in Marxist literature is that it is material rather than spiritual or mental. The materialism of Marx and Engels, known as dialectical materialism, also affirmed that things (matter) have a myriad of qualities, infinitely so. The world is a seemingly infinite amount of things, with their infinite qualities, interacting with other things everywhere. Such is the picture of our universe given by dialectical materialism. Another fundamental idea in Marxist thought is the relationship between theory and praxis - between intellectual and “sensuous” activity. The two thinkers viewed themselves as philosophers of communism, a world that had to be won primarily through sensuous activity and not philosophical contemplation. The role of philosophy in Marx’s thought is to transform the external world fundamentally, this transformation being towards a communist world. That is, revolutionary praxis is the manifestation of “correct” revolutionary theory, where the standard for correctness is whatever actualizes communism. This criterion is vague if taken by itself, for it gives no real guide on how concretely revolutionary theory leads to revolutionary practice. Nonetheless, it prepares the theoretical task for any future communist revolutionary - to learn and develop revolutionary theory. The world is not static if we accept dialectical materialism at face value. A static theory would work in a static world, but this is not our situation. The relationship between theory and praxis and the picture of objective reality given dialectical materialism leads to the following conclusion: a revolutionary theory is necessary for a revolutionary praxis, and such a theory must consider the dynamic nature of the external world. From this point, we can now explore the philosophical tradition of pragmatism to build a meta-theory that would inspire a dynamic theory. 

Pragmatism is a rich and varied philosophical tradition that centers around the principle that we should determine the truth/meaning of any phenomenon by its relation to our everyday practices. Charles Sanders Pierce’s famous pragmatic maxim sums it up best:

“Consider what effects that might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object.” 

In other words, we hold conceptions of things insofar as those conceptions have “practical bearings” in our experience. Practical consequences here would not only mean what we do (behavior, conduct, actions we take) but also how we are affected by the external world. It is entirely concerned with human agency. In 1907, William James discussed the philosophy of pragmatism in a series of eight lectures titled “Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking.” After introducing the central concept, he goes on to dispel problems in classical philosophy on practical lines - those of metaphysics, materialism, idealism, religion, truth, humanism, etc. Here, we see his general attitude toward the dilemmas that characterized contemporaneous philosophy: 

“It is astonishing to see how many philosophical disputes collapse into insignificance the moment you subject them to this simple test of tracing a concrete consequence. There can be no difference anywhere that doesn’t make a difference elsewhere – no difference in abstract truth that doesn’t express itself in a difference in concrete fact and in conduct consequent upon that fact, imposed on somebody, somehow, somewhere, and somewhen. The whole function of philosophy ought to be to find out what definite difference it will make to you and me, at definite instants of our life, if this world-formula or that world-formula be the true one.”

James chooses not to go into great detail about the practical consequences of particular beliefs in his lectures. Instead, he asks what practical difference the holding of one or the other opposing philosophical view would make. We will keep this in mind for our proposed approach to the problem of Tutorial Marxism. Two general trends at the heart of pragmatism are practicalism and pluralism. It is obvious how pragmatism is a philosophy where practicalism is the central concern. As emphasized earlier, the pragmatic maxim identifies “practical bearings” as constituting the content of the truth of any belief. Pragmatism isn’t an inert metaphysics that passively describes the world but an active tool incorporated into our practice. Again, we return to James to illustrate this: 

“Theories thus become instruments, not answers to enigmas, in which we can rest. We don’t lie back upon them, we move forward, and, on occasion, make nature over again by their aid. Pragmatism unstiffens all our theories, limbers them up, and sets each one at work.” 

Our theories need to be unstiffened. Our communism certainly has a tangible end goal - our theoretical approaches bend toward that end goal. We do not merely hold our principles for a better world - they always have to remain in contact with the thoughts, experiences, and actions of real-living communists. As an aside, practicalism itself is inherent in all political struggles - this is our motivation for taking on pragmatism. There is no political development without practicalism, as political actors enact practical maneuvers to survive and advance themselves and their aims. 

The second general trend, pluralism, appears in pragmatist rejection of any absolute truth or framework. James describes this attitude:

 “But, at the outset, at least, [pragmatism] stands for no particular results. It has no dogmas, and no doctrines save its method. As the young Italian pragmatist Papini has well said, it lies amid our theories, like a corridor in a hotel. Innumerable chambers open out of it. In one you may find a man writing an atheistic volume; in the next someone on his knees praying for faith and strength; in a third a chemist investigating a body’s properties.”

In the context of communism, we remain genuinely, and not just in name, anti-dogmatic if we take up an approach to communism that, instead of swearing fidelity to a single way of thinking, employs the vast army of theory afforded to us by all past and present human knowledge. Practicalism also exists within pluralism. Remaining open in our interpretations allows us to analyze and critique our present movement without regressive prejudice, utopianism, moralism, or any other reactionary trend within modern-day communism. Pluralism, within pragmatist philosophy, is my proposed solution to the dogmatism of Tutorial Marxism.

The Revaluation of All Values was the planned title of Nietzsche’s final four-volume work, what he expected to be his magnum opus. He went insane and died before he could ever complete it. The titular concept can be described as Nietzsche’s all-out war against all the virtues and values of his day - predominantly that of Christian Europe. Like Marx and even earlier philosophers like Hegel and Kant, Nietzsche held a concept of “New Man.” For Marx, the New Man was one freed from the alienation of capitalist society. For Nietzsche, it was the “Ubermensch” - the individual who, through sheer courage, will, and genius, revaluates all values and creates new ones for himself and society. The New Society, for Marx, would be communist. However, the New Society for Nietzsche would be an extreme aristocracy where the elitist culture would be the breeding ground for a new race of “Ubermenschen.” We communists share much more with Marx’s vision for New Man than with Nietzsche - this much goes without saying. However, the revaluation of all values remains essential for our purposes. The idea is the solution for the communist theoretical dilemma of today - what pluralism would mean for communist theory is a sort of revaluation of all values of communist philosophy. It would be a ruthless attack on all prevailing communist concepts and Tutorial Marxism in general. And just like Marx and Nietzsche, it is in the service of a vision we share for a New Man and New Society. Our pluralism is a project of self-creation - this is the cue we take from Nietzsche even though we reject his particular New Man. This revaluation is the spiritual first step in our pragmatic vision. 

The only way to resolve the problem of Tutorial Marxism is to treat communist philosophy as a creative endeavor. What I mean is that communists (“rookies” and “veterans” alike) must radically reapproach communist theory as something that needs to be constructed and not as something already formed and ready to apply. This constructive approach doesn’t mean abandoning the historical advances of communist theory. Still, it does mean treating any study or education as a process of discovery and creation rather than merely instruction. We need not rely on past geniuses to provide us with our ideas. We can have confidence in ourselves as organic intellectuals of the modern day. Richard Rorty, commonly described as a “neopragmatist,” uses excellent language to describe the creative aspect of this approach to communist philosophy. In his work Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, he argues that philosophers try to get at ahistorical, fixed, and eternal truths when all philosophies are expressed within historical and contingent social contexts. This contingency undermines the search for absolute truth. Instead, Rorty radically reframes philosophy and all of the sciences as literature. What new advances in the human sciences achieve are not descriptions of the world as the world is, closer and closer to an objective picture of reality, but instead newer and newer vocabularies for expressing their version of reality:

“...For it somehow became possible, toward the end of the nineteenth century, to take the activity of redescription more lightly than it had ever been taken before. It became possible to juggle several descriptions of the same event without asking which one was right - to see redescription as a tool rather than a claim to have discovered essence. It thereby became possible to see a new vocabulary not as something which was supposed to replace all other vocabularies, something which claimed to represent reality, but simply as one more vocabulary, one more human project, one person's chosen metaphoric.”

 Literature illuminates certain aspects of the human condition and promotes a sense of solidarity between humanity. It is from this solidarity that any movement can launch a political project. Constructing literature, according to Rorty, is taken up primarily not by “ironist” philosophers but by novelists like Proust. Rorty sums up the main task of the creative endeavor along with its contingent nature here: 

“...Or, to put the point in Heidegger's way, "language speaks to man," languages change in the course of history, and so human beings cannot escape their historicity. The most they can do is to manipulate the tensions within their epoch to produce the beginnings of the next epoch.” 

The above quote beautifully describes my approach to communist philosophy - so that we may bring about a communist epoch, we must manipulate the tensions within our communist struggle. Carrying out that struggle requires a redescription of the world. The communist struggle of today is historically contingent. And regarding the dynamic nature of reality put forth in dialectical materialism, this radical variability of reality makes it so that its apprehension renders communist philosophy as something that intrinsically needs constant revaluation. So, Rorty’s contingent neopragmatism only furthers our pragmatist approach. In practice, this approach would be an attitude that is the process of creation and redescription - the creation of new concepts and redescription of old ones. To be effectively pluralistic demands a comprehensive reading of the world’s intellectual literature - beyond Marxism and even the works of leftists. After all, a diversity of communist interpretations is necessary to apprehend our infinitely diverse reality, and that diversity only comes from an extensive study of human knowledge.

Tutorial Marxism transforms revolutionary theory into idealism. It deadens theory by separating it from our modern circumstances. Dialectical materialism, coupled with the communist approach to theory and praxis, leads us to a pluralistic approach to apprehend dynamic reality. We find inspiration for constructing this pluralistic theory through pragmatism, precisely Rorty’s literature philosophy. As pragmatists, we follow Marx in that his philosophy was unfinished. In his work The Philosophy of Marx, Etienne Balibar presents Marx’s thought as fundamentally pluralistic:

“[Marx’s thought is] essentially multiple, uncertain about its own options and strictly unfinishable.”

“...Marx was not led by his theoretical activity towards a unified system, but to an at least potential plurality of doctrines which has left readers and successors in something of a quandary.”

He then then articulates, in a very concise way, our core task concerning actual historical concepts when he describes Marx’s technical arguments in Capital:

“The most technical arguments in Capital are also those in which the categories of logic and ontology, the representations of the individual and the social bond, were wrested from their traditional definitions and re-thought in terms of the necessities of historical analysis.”

Our task is the emphasized last part of the quote. Balibar calls Marx the “philosopher of eternal new beginnings”—this is what we must become when we struggle against Tutorial Marxism. We must engage in theoretical work that opens new horizons for our praxis. It is cliche to tell communists to read widely from the Book of Life, but cliches are such for a reason. Marx and Engels incorporated the most advanced science of their day to apprehend the dynamics of social change. Communist philosophy, for them, was the culmination of the heights of human knowledge up to that point. Is such an incorporation of science possible in our modern world? At the time of Marx and Engels, single men knew of entire fields - mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology - what we call the core spheres of science was only as developed at that time as to allow for this all-knowing tendency to manifest in the scientific careers of certain privileged and talented men. To say anyone knows the entirety of modern economics is utterly laughable today. We have to wrestle with this difference in time - we have to situate the ideas advocated by Marx and Engels in its historico-cultural context when we engage in the problem of knowledge this way. Perhaps to be ultra-educated in the ambitious way they advocated for is impossible. But, again, the spirit of what they preached remains true - the whole body of human thought is the garden by which we may cultivate our minds as communist revolutionaries.