Why The Hell Would Anyone Be Into Communism?

A majority of Eastern Germans defend the GDR.

Up to 70% of the Tajikistan population longs for the Soviet Union era.

Residents of states formerly part of the Soviet Union are more than twice as likely to say the split from Russia harmed their countries than benefited them.

53% of Romanians want communism back.

72% of Hungarians say that most people in their country are actually worse off today economically than they were under communism.

Only half of Czech and Slovak people think that today’s system is better than the previous system.

Capitalist propaganda (tl;dr ‘Murican and Bri’ish and one that is suitable for the internet age) would have you dismiss this as nostalgia of elderly people who have been “brainwashed” at school and who only remember the good times and forget about the bad times, while younger people would trust the nostalgic narrations of their parents over the “political education” they get at school today (note the biased terms). But if you actually hear them speak (subtitles available there), this is not the impression you get at all. They defend socialism, but they also are very critical of certain things that actually went wrong.

So what is going on there? Maybe there is more to it. Maybe you have no idea what life was actually like under communism as media only ever lets those speak who were dissatisfied. So let us be open minded and curious and actually try to understand.

Scientific Socialism — Cringe Name, Dope Concept

If you are like me, the term “scientific socialism” will strike you as cringe. Too often have you heard — especially on television — that “science says X” without the person actually showing you how they arrived at their conclusion. Science is often portrayed as an ivory tower that just knows things because the people doing science have academic titles. Of course you know better. Science doesn’t work like that. Actual scientists will show you every step they have taken to arrive at a certain conclusion.

So, when socialists speak of scientific socialism — i.e. “science says socialism!” — , that’s actually unscientific, right? -WRONG. In fact, the abstract presentation of utopias with no connection to the real world was one of the main criticisms that Marx and Engels made, and this criticism was directed primarily at the thinkers of the so called “Enlightenment” who thought of themselves as great men who had brought reason into the world and had nothing but pity and rejection for everything that came before them; secondarily, it was directed at a group of people whom they labeled “Utopian Socialists” who did the same thing, except that they had a different conception of reason.

Marx and Engels had a broader approach to history. Before criticizing something, they first tried to understand the subject properly. But the type of understanding that they sought was not limited to an abstract representation of how the object of inquiry worked in a vacuum, but how it had come into being in its environment and what it will do to overcome it’s current state.

The method they developed is called “dialectical materialism”. It has two parts: “dialectic” and “materialism”. Let us try to understand each of them and develop from them a few points that might be relevant for our situation today. Stay tuned.

The Dialectic Method

The dialectic method goes back to ancient Greece. It finds one of its first expressions in Heraclit’s aphorism “panta rhei” — everything is in flow — and later in Socrates’ method of arriving at a better understanding of a matter by objecting to everything anyone puts forward, thereby forcing the other party to elaborate.

Immediately prior to Marx and Engels, Hegel had developed an entire philosophical edifice on this foundation, constantly playing with the theme known as the “Hegelian Triad” of thesis, antithesis and synthesis. Marx and Engels took this pattern and pointed out that a similar scheme is also the basis of the sciences they saw emerging: each cause had an effect which would immediately become the cause for something else.

Basically, they understood science in a similar way as functional programmers understand state.

It is a time honored tradition that Marxists exemplify this pattern of cause-effect-cause in various sciences ad nauseam to make it seem more profound than it actually is. The reason for this is that there is actually a target audience for this who don’t find it obvious at all why anyone would think that this is an appropriate basis for the new scientific understanding that Marx and Engels sought to build. Different authors have presented this in different ways as they were targeting different audiences. The remainder of this section will therefore be my own 50 cents on the matter.

If your gut reaction to cause-effect-cause is “duh”, then with overwhelming probability, you are not in the target audience and I highly recommend skipping to the section on materialism, as reading this section any further may make Marxism appear to be about general abstract nonsense which I promise you it is not.

If you are still reading, I am going to assume that you are an academic and your gut reaction is something analogous to: “Wait a sec. In s(t) = 1/2 g t², the equation describing for instance an apple falling to the ground, we do not see cause and effect.”

You are of course correct. If you look at Newton’s laws of motion and concrete solutions in simple cases like a free falling apple, we find that the equation describing it seems timeless. Time is just a free parameter that you can simply plug into the equation and find out where the apple is. There doesn’t seem to be any cause and effect. The same is true about Einstein’s and Schrödinger’s equations.

But as soon as the situation becomes somewhat more complex, it is well understood that only numerical solutions are possible. One modern method of solving a differential equation numerically is the method of finite elements: At a very high level, what one does is choosing a point of interest in time and taking a finite sample of the phenomenon in question; one then finds a way to apply over a short period of time the law of motion encoded in the differential equation to each point while taking into account all the complex interactions between the points; and consequently, one arrives at a new set of points in a future state.

This trend that more complicated situations required a more cause-effect-cause approach to be solved was already apparent in the 19th century, and there was an ongoing explosion of sciences based on this principle — notably Darwin’s theory of evolution which was one of the sources of inspiration for Marx and Engels. Another notable discovery from this time was Liouville’s theorem that states that certain integrals can’t be expressed in closed form using elementary functions.

Notable developments in the 20th century include Turing’s and Gödel’s contributions that provided practically relevant examples of problems that couldn’t be solved by any computable “formula” — and that’s within the abstract discipline of math itself. Any algorithm trying to solve the Halting Problem would fail for infinitely many inputs. The best we can therefore do if we wanted to solve it is to put out an algorithm covering as many cases as we consider practically relevant until people start writing more obnoxious software that our algorithm can’t deal with; and then we would try to discover patterns in these new algorithms and publish a patch for our Halting solver. Trial, error, better trial.

One can now point out that iterative solutions of differential equations or iterative patches to Halting solvers iterate towards something. This is true, but this something will forever be out of reach for us humans. We only require the existence of this abstract solution so our iterative procedures have something to converge against.

Another interesting angle that one could take when it comes to closed form timeless models is the process how one arrives at them. This is by no means an attempt to convince you that s(t) = 1/2 g t² itself contains the cause-effect-cause cycle (because it doesn’t), I merely want point out that the process of finding such solutions is an iterative one.

How did we arrive precisely at s(t) = 1/2 g t² to describe a falling apple? The answer is that up to Galileo’s time, motion was supposed to be described using ideal forms; for instance, the motion of the planets was described using cycles and epicycles. But even a rock thrown horizontally was thought of moving along a semicircular trajectory.

Galileo had started to question this view. He was wondering how such a motion could possibly come about. If you let an apple fall, at what pace does it fall? Is it a constant pace or an accelerated one? And if it was accelerated, how would the apple know to accelerate in exactly the way to form a semicircle?

Galileo decided to run a test to find out. He would then find out that of all the models he had considered, a pattern of constant acceleration which gave rise to a parabolic trajectory explained the data best. At the time, model selection from data still involved some amount of gut feeling. Today, we have devised scientific criteria like a likelihood ratio test for this task.

Another question one may ask is how one arrives at a specific value for the constant g in s(t) = 1/2 g t². Once again, the method used by Galileo appears somewhat reckless in hindsight. A more appropriate technique had been invented significantly later, around 1800: the method of least square errors.

In a nutshell, one tries to find the minimum in a so-called loss function that judges how well s(g,t) = 1/2 g t² works for a given g. The specific loss function considered when the method was devised was the sum of the squares of the differences between the prediction and the measurements. The reason for that was that it was a differentiable function that could be minimized by the more or less well understood methods that Newton had invented.

In the above equation, a closed form solution for the best g exists. As one has to deal with models that are nonlinear in their parameters (think: f(t) = sin(a t)), one has to use an iterative approach such as Gauss-Newton.

This iterative approach to find suitable parameters for equations that model more intricate scenarios — largely understood around 1800 — is all that you really need for neural networks. They are trained precisely in this manner. The main technological breakthrough that was missing was the computer. After that, it took about a generation until people realized that for the complex models that now became tractable, there was a general architectural pattern: chaining. Layers were born.

Here’s what this looked like in the early days of neural networks: A vector of data, i.e. a fixed-size column of numbers, was sent through a matrix, which is another fixed-size collection of numbers arranged in a rectangular pattern. “Sending through” a matrix here means to multiply each number in the column with each number in a given row of the matrix; the results are then summed up to give a single number. Doing this for each row gives us a new vector. After the numbers have successfully passed the matrix, they are processed through some non-linear differentiable function giving us another vector. The data (cause) has gone through a motion and become an effect. And it was an Eureka moment to learn that this effect was suitable to become someone else’s cause — the data to be fed to the next layer.

For the curious among you who wonder what the deal is with the matrix and the nonlinear function: the idea is to put all the parameters to be learned into the matrix. This is an organizational pattern that makes optimization easier.

The process of finding this pattern was of course greatly more convoluted. Anecdotally, I heard that when the computer science department (back then in its infancy) told mathematicians about their discovery of back propagation, the mathematicians patted them on the back for finally having understood the chain rule.

All innovations and breakthroughs after that, like convolutional neural networks, LSTMs or transformers were variations on that theme that exploited different aspects of the emerging hardware or that tried to solve a specific task within the connectionist framework. Other innovations like GANs, CycleGANs or Deep Reinforcement Learning herald the advent of an era in which neural networks are no longer trained in isolation against a static loss function, but against a dynamic loss function that couples an ecosystem of learners.

If you think this section is long enough, you have no idea how long Marxists — especially in the continental European tradition — typically ramble about this theme. Slavoj Zizek built an entire career on it. It’s fun. But one shouldn’t take it too seriously.

So many more things could be said, for instance about Bayesian Inference with its triad of prior — likelihood update — posterior and Category Theory with the triad of domain — morphism — codomain.

Some Marxists unfortunately resort to utterly unhelpful things like name-calling. If you’re still not convinced of the pervasiveness of dialectic phenomena, some more impatient and dogmatic Marxists would now call you an idealist — one of the worst insults a Marxist can throw at you, along with being petty bourgeois (which is often thrown around in a way that is utterly removed from the Marxist definition of the concept) or class traitor. Such childish sectarian habits need to be overcome, though I myself am not entirely innocent here.

In this presentation, I try to instead make this section entertaining for my tribe rather than trying to convince you of something of which I myself am not convinced: that the dialectic method is universal. As mentioned in the beginning of this section, s(t) = 1/2 g t² does not exhibit cause and effect.

My understanding of the dialectic method is, that it expresses an epistemic need in more complex settings. If you are happy with this understanding, please skip ahead to the section on materialism. The rest of this section will be written for an even narrower target audience.

If you are still reading, I am going to assume that you are a mathematician and that you subscribe to some version of Platonism. As you may have guessed from my choice of examples, I have majored in mathematics, too, and you know what? As a post Fregean and post Gödelean mathematician, I am a mathematical Platonist.

The remainder of this section will work out how the epistemic method of mathematics — while being dialectical — differs from that of life sciences, in a way that points to a platonic ontology of mathematics, and how this objection is nevertheless totally besides the point in a discourse on Marx and Engels.

Mathematics after Frege is analytical (not synthetic) knowledge a priori. It proceeds in an entirely logical manner. It also goes through a variation of the Hegelian triad, this time in the form of premise — conclusion — premise. The law of motion that mathematical statements follow are summarized in a calculus known as natural deduction. Their tradition stretches once again back to the syllogisms of Aristotle.

My main thesis in this discussion is that all mathematicians are Platonists, whether they privately believe in it or not. The reason for my claim is that it is embedded in our practice and is pretty much inescapable.

Proof. Let M be a mathematician. We now have to employ deductive reasoning to see if “M is a Platonist” necessarily follows. But…

See what I did there? In order to prove a necessary truth that applies to all mathematicians, I introduced an abstract mathematician, and I granted existence to them via “let”. This, I claim, is why mathematical practice is necessarily Platonist. It is the only way to accomplish its foremost task to learn about necessary truths.

Think of the situation before life existed. Back then, there were no mathematicians. At that time, the proposition “All mathematicians subscribe to an ontology different from Platonism” was vacuously true — there were no mathematicians. But if my claim that all mathematicians are Platonists is a necessary truth, then with the arrival of the first mathematician this statement became false. It was a truth that was contingent on the non-existence of mathematicians.

The only requirement that mathematicians pose before admitting the statement “let M be a mathematician” is that the concept of mathematicians does not contain a contradiction, because if it did, then stating “let M be a mathematician” would be — well — contradictory. Under no circumstances has any mathematician ever wondered if mathematicians physically exist when starting a derivation of necessary truths about them by “let M be a mathematician”.

Now you may object: but what about constructive mathematics? This objection doesn’t help here. Constructive mathematicians have no objection to make about “let M be a mathematician” when trying to prove a statement that necessarily applies to all mathematicians.

Practical differences only arise when constructive and classical mathematicians are tasked with proving the existence of, say, a mathematician M with certain properties. It is only under this circumstance that the constructive mathematician will actually make an effort to provide you with a mathematician with the desired properties. He will however do so from platonic first principles, starting with the empty set which is the class of all self-contradictory concepts and represents the number 0, then constructing the number 1 as the set that contains the number 0 of which we know it already exists, then the number 2 as the set containing 0 and 1 of which we know they exist — eventually bootstrapping an entire platonic universe from literal nothingness.

The classical mathematician on the other hand may start by assuming that such a mathematician does not exist, derive from this that necessarily the universe will explode, point to the fact that the universe did not explode and call it a day. This is of course a dangerous approach to mathematics. Unbeknownst to our classical colleague, upon saying “contradiction”, the universe splits into two copies, one of which is snapped out of existence, while in the other, a mathematician with the desired properties throws themselves into existence out of sheer necessity.

Every time a classical mathematician engages in this practice, they gamble that they will be in the surviving universe. They conclude that they will be, because they always have so far. Maybe they’re bad at dealing with conditional probabilities and would also conclude that Russian roulette is safe, because everyone they asked who has played it is still alive. Save universes. Do constructive mathematics.

On a technical note, the distinguishing feature of constructive mathematics that forces the constructive mathematician to actually construct the desired object is that it removes double negation elimination as a transition rule. Consequently, the constructive mathematician cannot jump from “not for all x, P(x) is not the case” to “there is an x such that P(x)”. If you are a mathematician who has never heard of natural deduction which is a method of syntactic manipulation mathematical propositions: be aware that the truth tables from which you probably learned logical reasoning are a semantic from which you were hopefully taught to deduce the syntactic transition rules (e.g. modus ponens or contraposition) that you then used in your studies. Natural deduction with double negation elimination is an approach of encoding this semantic syntactically. Natural deduction without double negation elimination captures a different semantic.

Paraconsistent mathematics (on which the wiki article fittingly is lacking citations and of which there exist various schools) doesn’t help either. Paraconsistent mathematics is a variety of schools that tries to consistently reason even when the set of beliefs you hold already contains a contradiction.

How is such a thing even possible? Don’t contradictory premises necessarily allow you to prove any arbitrary statement via ex falso quodlibet aka the principle of explosion? -No. As I just told you, natural deduction is a syntactic system that encodes some semantic. We can drop certain transition rules and explore what happens. So let us examine which transition rules we have to drop to arrive at paraconsistent logic. Let us derive the principle of explosion.

Premise 1: Trump was a great president.

Premise 2: Trump was a terrible president.

From these two premises, we will now scientifically derive that the moon is made of cheese. In this prove, we will make use of the mathematical use of the “or” which differs from the common use of the word in English. In mathematics, we say “a or b” is true if at least one of a or be is true. This is not an exclusive or as you may intuitively expect because you’re an English speaker. In mathematics, we use the inclusive or for a variety of reasons, not least of which is that in Latin, they were able to distinguish between vel (the here used inclusive or) and aut (the usual exclusive or). No, this time it is not the Germans who have a word for it.

Let us now proceed to the

Proof. From premise 1, we can deduce that Trump was a great president or that the moon is made of cheese. This is possible, because we know that Trump was a great president from premise 1, so we are allowed to “introduce” an or.

From premise 2 however, we know that Trump was a terrible president, thereby refuting the “Trump was a great president” in “Trump was a great president or the moon is made of cheese”. Consequently, we can “eliminate” the or along with the refuted part of it and conclude that the moon is made of cheese, quod erat demonstrandum.

From this proof, we can see the two logical transition rules that paraconsistent mathematicians can object to: or-introduction and or-elimination.

If you are aware that your premises may contain contradictions, introducing an or is problematic because you may by accident use a false premise and pair it with another false statement. Eliminating an or in the presence of contradictory premises is also problematic, because you may refute the only valid part of the or-clause by throwing a false statement at it.

Exploring paraconsistent logic is an interesting subject. Nonetheless, when tasked with proving a “for all X” statement, even the paraconsistent mathematician will start by “let x be an X”, thereby granting its existence.

If one were to refute this Platonist ontology of mathematics, this person would have to present a new method of proving a “for all” statement without introducing a placeholder. The only other approach I can see is forbidding “for all” statements altogether, thereby significantly limiting the scope of mathematics and basically handing it over to the physicists. Given the lack of rigor of their methods, this seems not a good idea. When Aristotle described how objects fall, his law of motion was subject to several revisions over time. When Euclid derived that there are infinitely many prime numbers, the work was done and nobody was ever able to refute it. This is a feature that no other science has.

Here’s the caveat though: this abstract mathematical method is strictly limited to finding out exactly what they claim to find out — necessary truths. Whenever science is tasked to deal with the real existing universe, math may be excessively useful as a tool (I have even pointed to some examples where mathematicians derived from Platonist first principles improved empirical methods in the above discussion), but because we have no privileged access to the laws of nature, the best we can do is to employ inductive empirical methods. Deduction can at best make predictions from assumptions that we have previously assumed inductively.

But admit it: if you are a mathematician, upon reading the words “real existing universe”, your first impulse was to leave this as a trivial exercise to the astute reader anyway.

Materialism

Having paid tribute to the good old Marxist tradition of rambling way too long over the dialectic method, we will now turn to a Marxist conception of materialism.

Content warning: Going forward, this text will contain meme-able content in the form of deliberately falsely attributed quotes. This is playing on the Hegelian theme that synthesizing ideas that contradict each other can give them an entirely new meaning. Don’t worry, I will make them stand out so you know they are falsely attributed. In this context, I wonder if the book from which I have taken that idea would today be sold with an accompanying “fact check”. Searching the correct quote on the internet is left to the astute reader as an exercise.

First, a bummer. It seems that at least Engels meant materialism in an also ontological way. When it comes to a materialist ontology without qualifications, I politely disagree for reasons stated towards the end of the rambling section. But a materialist ontology for the science under construction seems reasonable, as the phenomenon that Marx and Engels sought to understand is society and the process of its development, also known as history.

The materialism of Marx and Engels is perhaps best understood as a refutation of Hegel’s dialectic idealism. Hegel employed the triad of thesis — antithesis — synthesis mostly in a domain of ideas without pointing to the material causes why they stuck. I think it is fair to say that in analogy to mutation and recombination from evolution, ideas do indeed randomly pop up and are synthesized with existing ideas. But what was absent from Hegel’s work was a selection criterion in the environment where the ideas were thought.

It is not your consciousness that determines your being, but on the contrary, it is your social being that determines your consciousness. — Ben Shapiro

But there is of course more to it. Marx and Engels were not just interested in how certain ideas survived in a given society, they were interested in the material conditions of that society itself. They therefore had to investigate the necessary physical motions that a society had to go through in order to still be around in the future. They were interested in a society’s reproductive cycles.

The one reproductive activity they identified as the one separating humans from animals and being responsible for most phenomena we see in human societies was: labor.

It’s the economy, stupid. — Karl Marx

Obviously, labor is an activity that all societies hitherto had in common and that were necessary for their very survival. This may change in the future if new technologies enable fully automated gay space communism. Labor is also the main reason why human society advances way faster than biological evolution would otherwise permit. With our labor, we shape our environment; but additionally, the neural connections in our brains and the muscles that are useful to conduct those activities get amplified, while the not so useful ones weaken over time.

The importance of labor to explain human society is self-evident. Without it, you would not have a roof over your head (if you have one) and certainly no electronic device which you necessarily have because you are currently reading this article via it (unless some tree hating moron printed it).

Having rambled about the dialectic method at such length, it would be beyond the scope of this article to justify this any further. The astute reader is instead referred to David Harvey’s lecture series on Marx’s capital or the book itself.

Having identified the force that propels today’s society into the tomorrow, you may now wonder which nodes in the web of society exist that have any explanatory power with regards to society’s dynamics. In order to have any explanatory power, these nodes ought to be stable in some sense as we apply the law of motion to transport the nodes into the future. In other words, they should be reproduced.

To this purpose, Marx and Engels split society up into sub-societies that satisfy precisely this criterion. What name did Marx and Engels give to these constantly reproduced nodes? -Classes!

We have come very far already, we are almost done introducing all the required concepts. Now we should take one step back. When talking about “roles” that people occupy in society and that get reproduced, what specifically do I mean? For this, we have to inspect how exactly the labor transforms the cause — today’s society — into the effect — tomorrow’s society.

Labor has two aspects: the actual physical act of producing goods, and the distribution of the fruits of labor. As your specific relationship to society causes you to show up for work, you produce the fruits of labor that then get put onto a huge pile; then, you cause via your specific relationship to society that a portion of this pile is distributed back to you so you are fed and can show up for work again the next day.

If we want to meaningfully assess the reproduction of a subsection of society, we have to categorize them by the role they play in the physical act of production and in the distribution of the fruits of labor. We shall only consider distinction criteria that can be expressed in those terms. Depending on the partial phenomenon we want to understand, we may however choose a more granular discretization closer to the points of interest.

With this, the foundation of the new science is done. Any other Marxist notion like class struggle, exploitation, class rule, imperialism and so on are derived from feeding data to the above machinery and working out what happens.

Here’s a shovel, fool. Can you dig it? -Friedrich Engels

Marx and Engels did not wake up one day and thought that economics was an interesting field of study to understand society. They did not decide on a whim that in order to understand society, you need to understand class. They worked that out in excruciating detail in an attempt to uncover society’s laws of motion in complete analogy to other sciences. Marxism acknowledges that — as in other sciences — any predictions made by applying the law of motion to a given situation can only remain valid in the short run, if at all. But they also point out that — as in other sciences — the law of motion admits for certain meta-stable partial trajectories through the state space that can be understood.

When I started writing this article, I intended it to be a lot shorter than it now appears to necessarily become. People who work 40 hours a week or more and potentially have other responsibilities on top of that don’t have time to read lengthy derivations, nor do I have the time to write them. I will therefore restrict myself going forward to derive only the most basic Marxist notions that are necessary to participate in Marxist discourse at all and point to other sources for more advanced concepts. After that, I will add some new points regarding why the different critical traditions are so sectarian and how to overcome that.

Exploitation

No investigation, no right to speak! -Jordan Peterson

We shall begin our investigation with a gaze at societies that have already perished and can therefore be understood in their totality. The first such society that we will investigate is the ancient Greco-Roman society. What were the particular modes of production in this society that were constantly reproduced?

A prevalent mode of production at this time was slavery. Slaves were a group of people who were owned by another group of people, the slave owners. This was not the only mode of production that existed at the time, but it was one with high explanatory power.

The slaves were the ones who would show up every day to do the work. The fruits of their labor immediately became the property of their owners. The owners had to give some of those fruits of the labor back to the slaves so they wouldn’t starve and had the energy to show up again tomorrow.

At no point in this cycle was the slave owner under any obligation to release the slave from his status as a slave, and thus the slaves’ situation from today is fully reproduced tomorrow. The group of people we call slaves have thus been identified as a class.

What will the slave owners do with the remainder of the fruits of labor that they appropriated from the slaves? Obviously, they will have to feed themselves and command the labor of the slaves in such a direction that any tools they use get the proper maintenance so they can still use those tools tomorrow. We can now see that the slave owners also have a particular set of actions they needed to take in order to reproduce their role in society — and that they stuck around shows that they were able to successfully do so. This marks them as a class.

As we can see, in this for the sake of brevity highly oversimplified abstract ahistorical model of slavery, the slaves were the ones producing all the fruits of labor, while the slave owners were the ones in command of distributing the fruits of labor and in the act of doing so also commanding what concrete labor the slaves should even do.

It is this phenomenon that we call exploitation. Let us now see if we can find it in other societies, too.

In the middle ages, slavery was still around, but it was no longer the mode of production with the highest explanatory power. If we want to understand the society of the European middle ages, we have to understand a mode of production called Feudalism. We will once again in the interest of time give only a brief ahistorical sketch of how it worked.

In Feudalism, labor was done by serfs. These were people who were not owned by a master. They were to an extent free to organize their labor around their own subsistence. However, they were not free to work at any place they liked. They had to work on a given patch of land owned by a feudal lord, and when the work was done, they had to give a part of the fruits of their labor to that lord.

At no point in the cycle was the lord under any obligation to release the serfs from their patch of land or from the tithe the serfs had to pay in order to be allowed by the lord to use the land. Thus, whenever the fruits of labor sufficed to sustain the living and working conditions of both serfs and lords, the specific arrangement of work was reproduced at the end of the cycle and we can speak of them as classes.

In this arrangement, one class — the serfs — were once again doing the work. In this particular arrangement, they also had some freedom when it came to the distribution of the fruits of labor. The other class, the lords, were however able to extract enough labor from the serfs to maintain themselves and the specific relation they had vis-à-vis the serfs.

Let us now turn to the contemporary mode of production: capitalism. Since this is the mode of production with which the reader probably has the most personal experience (unless you are reading in the far future), we have to stress that the ahistorical abstract sketch I am going to give is only a starting point for the conversation. Since capitalism — as all societies — is a complex ecosystem and the below sketch may not correspond with your own experience, I will make some effort to paint a broader picture.

In capitalism, the mode of production with the highest explanatory power is that between employer and employee. Employees are a group of people that are not owned by masters; nor are they tied to a particular patch of land for which they have to pay a tithe in order to use it. Instead, they are free. And they are free in a double sense: free to choose for which employer they will work, and free of the money necessary to build their own business and become their own employer.

The employer on the other hand does have this kind of money and used it to purchase, rent or build for instance a factory, an office or a store.

The employee can now choose not to work, which in the absence of social security (which even in advanced social democracies is under constant siege) or charity means starvation. Or he may choose to sell whatever service he can offer directly to the customer, which in the absence of the tools to provide high quality or quantity means earning pennies. Consequently, most people in that material situation choose to work for an employer.

The arrangement between employee and employer is as follows: the employer agrees to pay to the employee a certain fixed amount of money — the wage. The employee on the other hand agrees to give all the fruits of the labor, including nowadays even intellectual property, to the employer. Once the work is done and the fruits of labor are produced, the employer then turns around and sells the fruits of labor in an institution called “market”. This is where the employees can use their wage to get access to the fruits of labor again to sustain themselves and show up again tomorrow.

From the perspective of the employee, the cycle of production and consumption is now complete. At no point in the cycle was the employer under any obligation to hand over a sizeable share of the factory, office or store that corresponds to the contribution that the worker makes over to the worker. Here, we have to pause and make some qualifications though to define “sizeable” and “corresponds to the contribution that the worker makes”.

In an ideological move to shut up the unions and undermine their Marxist critique, some stock companies these days will hand out financial assets like stock options to the employees to make them think that they co-own the company they’re working for in a meaningful way. This is not the case. 89% of all stocks traded in the US are owned by the wealthiest 10% of society. But let us elaborate further and look at the situation from the point of view of the employer.

Once the employer has acquired the fruits of labor, how much money does he need to make if he wants to stay in business? At the very least, he has to pay for the sum-total of the cost of production and his own personal sustenance.

The cost of production is whatever wages he had to pay to his employees so they could produce the fruits of labor; but it also includes whatever it cost to buy all the input materials plus to sustain the tools, machinery or office space that would make the workers show up in the first place.

What is the contribution of the employer to the fruits of labor? Many of them do in fact work, and for that, they should receive a sum of money similar to that of a wage worker. But they do not work 2420000 times harder than the average worker (I assumed a generous average wage of 50k here), especially not when they sleep.

So is it the contribution of the machinery then? -No. What happens even in today’s society if workers go on strike? -In the absence of scabs, businesses have to shut down and can no longer generate revenue. Certain machines these days may be able to work autonomously. But the complex ecosystem that is a company can not.

Even today, machines serve only as a multiplier of labor’s productive forces. We would be in a way worse place if that wasn’t the case, as the employers would no longer need us. What possible interest could they have in paying you a UBI in such a scenario, other than shutting you up? The more likely outcome if machines owned by the employers were to take over production is that the employees go the way of the Native American: at best being shut up with crumbs and propaganda that you should be thankful for the crumbs, while being slowly starved; at worst, the employers would seek means to accelerate that natural process of shrinking parts of the social organism that are no longer needed.

So, luckily, this is not where we are. The machinery still needs to be fertilized with your labor, and labor is the sole source of that which keeps society going. Of the money made from selling the fruits of labor, multiplied by machinery, they give you a wage that is just high enough so you show up tomorrow again. It is now that we finally understand that the sum-total of business expenses that keep the company going is solely due to the work collectively done in the company, and that consequently the amount of co-ownership in a world that would even make an attempt of making sense should roughly be equal.

But it is not. To reiterate the point where we have wandered off: At no point in the cycle was the employer under any obligation to hand over a sizeable share of the factory, office or store that corresponds to the contribution that the worker makes over to the worker. Thus, the arrangement of employee and employer is reproduced, these groups of people are marked as classes, and the employers exploit the employees.

In Marxist jargon, the employees are also referred to as “workers” (as I have done in this article before), “working class” or “proletarians”. The employers are also referred to as “bourgeoisie”. Don’t even attempt to remember how this is spelled, autocorrect knows the word. The smaller ones that actually have to work in their company to sustain it and themselves are called “petty bourgeoisie”. The requirement for them to work distinguishes them from the upper bourgeoisie that may choose to work or to delegate even the task of delegating tasks to an intricate hierarchy of managers.

Another term used to describe the bourgeoisie is “capitalists”. If you encounter someone who calls themselves a “capitalist” because they defend capitalism, ask them if they own enough money to reproduce a relationship of employer and employee.

As I have hinted at earlier: the capitalist mode of production does not require a company to be owned by a single individual or family. It may also be a stock company, the shares of which are traded wide and far, thereby creating a facade that looks like a democracy or at least a meritocracy. I hope I have made it clear earlier that this is not the case. It is just a different way for the bourgeoisie to reproduce itself.

There are also other classes in contemporary society. For instance, there are self-employed people without employees or at least without permanent employees. There are politicians and public employees who are a story of their own to which I will return later. And never ever forget about that remnant of feudal society that transformed itself slightly to become the contemporary landlord.

I consider myself a member of a sub-class of the working class the existence of which has recently been called into question on somewhat questionable theoretical grounds: the middle class. In a proper Marxian setting, this middle class consists of workers who in fact do have enough cash to make their way into the petty bourgeoisie. To determine if this is objectively the case, one has to assess what monetary and material savings one has gathered and compare them to what is needed to realistically start a business in a field of work for which one brings the required skill.

For me as a well-paid software developer who could start to free-lance with a laptop and electricity alone, this is certainly the case. My wife has actually made her way from being an employee to being an employer in veterinary medicine without any particular birth privilege other than living in an economy in which a loan was an affordable option. For a factory worker, it is certainly not so much possible to leave his path.

The middle class exhibits a distinguishing feature: it has access to social mobility. The trajectories this class moves along are not necessarily stable, but at best contingently stable. Consequently, its material interests do not necessarily align with the remainder of the working class.

The existence of this middle class is the material basis for the often heard claim that capitalism is a meritocracy and fundamentally a free society. Given that capital possesses the means to turn branches of the economy that used to be a petty bourgeois domain into a more monopolistic domain, the claim that capitalism is fundamentally a meritocracy can be squarely rejected.

I do not say these things in order to unnecessarily divide the working class. I explain this in order to properly describe the phenomena we are faced with. When an employee reports that they subjectively feel free to start a business, it may well be so. It all depends on the material circumstances.

We shall now discuss another crucial mode of interaction between exploited classes and exploiting classes: class struggle.

Class Struggle

In the beginning, there were flying pigs. But the wings of these pigs were too weak, so the pigs fell out of the sky and died. This is why we no longer see flying pigs. — Charles Darwin

Please do recall the content warning issued in an earlier section.

Let me begin this chapter with a personal anecdote that I don’t think I have ever shared with anyone.

Back when I was in school during a time when capitalism was in a rather terrifying downward spiral, I was — as many proper teenagers do — drinking the Kool-Aid. The situation was so dire that I feared that the future I had been educated to look forward to — getting a job, building a career and some form or another of a family and eventually retiring — was not going to happen. Things would turn out otherwise, as I was able to beat the odds and build a life for myself, but I did not know this at the time and sought refuge in the only ideology that I was constantly exposed to: the bourgeois ideology.

I don’t remember exactly when, but at some point, I had the wild idea to move to Africa and build a factory there for some commodity. Productive assets there are comparatively affordable for a white European, though very much out of reach for Africans. To this day, I do think that I could have pulled that off: My father, having worked for absolute corporate evil, had put aside a sizeable chunk of financial assets, and had I asked him, I am sure he would have given me some as start up capital — as he has later done so I could at least afford to take a loan to buy a nonproductive asset, a house, that I now live in.

I would have had to work for a considerable amount of time to work out the legalities and find a stable stock of customers. Once I would have done so, the plan was to grow the business to the point where I could hand my responsibilities over to a manager and retire to a comfortable life.

Again, I am confident that with my privileged starting place in life, I could have pulled something like that off. The reason why I never even attempted it is that I did something that only a child would do: I asked myself the naive question what was in it for the Africans.

Sure, had I been cynical, the answer could have been: any job is better than no job. But how and why would I get to retire while they do all the work?

Naively, I concluded that I did not understand how passive income streams work. My upbringing had brought me to have some level of hope that capitalism was in essence a fair system and that passive income streams — the type of income earned while you sleep — were possible by some magic that I just did not understand.

The reality was that I had perfectly understood how passive income streams work. What I did not understand were additional motions that the money the capitalists stole from the workers had to go through in order to stabilize the arrangement beyond the single day.

As the above anecdote should exemplify, people who ask critical questions about the system are not the ones that end up becoming capitalists — even if they have the material means to achieve this type of upward social mobility. There may certainly be some critical capitalists and there is — at least in my bubble — a not so insignificant reservoir of “nice” capitalists. But those are not the ones who climb the ladder even further. They stay insignificant.

By accidents that only turn into necessity through the process of natural selection, exploitative systems promote sadists, sociopaths and misanthropes.

Having never seriously considered critical questions or always having dismissed them with some knee-jerk reaction, they bring their own ideology to the market place of ideas and have ingenious answers for everything.

The medieval nobility for instance redirected a share of the fruits of labor to sustain an institution called “church”. What was the foremost task of the church? — Saying that the world was a just place and that god himself had placed the king on the throne, the nobility into their courts and the peasantry on the fields.

Do we today not have such a church?

When you and me buy a newspaper, we refer to the physical act of buying a piece of paper with words written onto them, or nowadays to the act of renting read-access to some website with words on it. When Jeff Bezos buys a news paper, he refers to buying the entire institution that is the Washington Post.

If capitalism failed to constantly amplify ideas and data points that make the system seem reasonable, it would become unstable. If it failed to employ various techniques to shut up critics, it would become unstable. Capitalists who fail to do so are not the ones that remain in power.

I am not going to elaborate on the point that the media is rigged much further. As I have already pointed you to Noam Chomsky’s manufacturing consent in the introduction to this article, suffice it to summarize the findings on the propagandists in a single paragraph.

I do not believe that they are told what to say and what not to say. On the contrary, I believe they say exactly what they believe. But they only get into the position they have because they believe what they believe. —Henry VIII. of England

Let us now examine what class societies will do if the ideological mechanisms of reproduction fail. By “failure”, I mean any sequence of events that leads to the demise of the meta-stable trajectories of classes of people, thereby changing the nature of the social arrangement in question.

For the purpose of this discourse, we will focus primarily on any actions that the exploited class could take.

We could also discuss events that are so far exogenous to the system, like a large asteroid impact that destroys civilization. Or we could discuss about other intrinsic dynamics, e.g. how capitalism undermines the ecosystem on which it depends or how it keeps causing wars that in today’s era may go nuclear.

But we, the workers, are at the moment not in charge of any institution that could address these issues. We therefore have to argue strictly from the perspective of an exploited class and the actions it can take. What you are going to do with this information is entirely under your discretion.

This is the world we live in

And these are the hands we’re given

Use them and let’s start trying

To make it a world worth living in

— Nada (They Live)

One possible course of action would be to withhold your labor. How did earlier class societies respond to such a thing? — The slave owners redistributed a share of the fruits of labor they had stolen to people with sticks to deal with this. The feudal lords did the same thing.

Do we today not have people with sticks?

Back in the — from the bourgeois perspective — good old days, they fired everyone and hired new workers from an abundant reserve army. Sometimes, the leaders of strikes were imprisoned as unions were illegal or they were even killed. In some countries, this happens to this day.

It is my understanding that such tactics were easier to employ back in the day before unions had won the right to even exist. The bourgeoisie was just shooting criminals. It would be naive though to assume that we don’t see this happening anymore in developed countries because the class nature of the system had somehow changed. Nor does it seem like workers gained much political influence. Bourgeois society was — even during the post New Deal consensus — clearly able to kill MLK and Fred Hampton, but these did not engage in strike, but a different mode of resistance. To me, all of this points to a general weakness of the working class that render politically costly measures like murder or imprisonment inadvisable to the bourgeoisie.

There are some contemporary examples of rather ruthless tactics. But a more cost effective approach is to buy the leaders of the institutions that are supposed to fight for the workers, and when they get caught, the blame falls squarely on the union leader rather than the people bribing them.

So how about we get someone elected to get rid of the union bureaucracy so we can finally use the union in order to organize our struggle? Great idea! Unfortunately, the other side employs several techniques of rigging such elections.

Elections in unions are by no means the only ones that are rigged. Political elections exhibit this feature too. That the moderately left leaning candidate didn’t push back against it and some other data points should additionally make us wonder if these people are even on our side.

What we see emerging here is a general pattern. There is a collection of institutions, both private and public, that are directed against any effort of the working class to gain even the most moderate of concessions. Capitalists redistribute a part of the fruits of the labor they have stolen through legal and illegal channels to fund these institutions. Whenever the working class starts to fight back, these motions become necessary or the system would already have been transcended. As capitalists engage in these modes of spending, they get better at it and it becomes their second nature.

The totality of this is what we call class struggle. The institutions defending the ruling class is what Marxists have conceptualized as the state, whether the institutions are officially public or not.

Class struggle is the first concept in Marx’s and Engels’ intellectual edifice that even remotely touches on anything resembling that thing called “human nature”, which is a time honored knee-jerk reaction brought up against it. Human nature reveals itself in the sum-total of the events that have transpired during class struggle. Using the dialectical method, we can uncover what wicked circumstances oppressed classes were ready to endure, what mental gymnastics they were able to perform and what sick methods ruling classes used in the event of any push back.

Another historic term for the set of institutions defending the bourgeoisie is the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. This term points to its own remedy.

The Dictatorship of the Proletariat

“Dictatorship” in Marxist discourse does not refer to the rule of a single man or a small clique of people. If you have been paying any attention to the presentation so far at all, you know that this would be an utterly Antimarxian notion. “Dictatorship” in Marxist jargon simply refers to one class having total authority.

In all class societies we have so far considered, it was a minority class that was in such a position of power. If our goal now is to get rid of exploitation and the rule of a minority class over the majority — and I think it should be our goal — then the task ahead of us is to somehow bring it about as exploited majority class to obtain total authority — and use it in order to expropriate the expropriators. A necessary condition for the abolition of classes is that there is only one way to relate to the means of production that is shared by everyone: people go to work, produce the fruits of labor together and then collectively distribute it back to themselves.

The dictatorship of the proletariat is thus only a transitional stage. It describes the period in which we have crushed the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie but are still in the process of taking back what they have stolen from us over the centuries.

The dictatorship of the bourgeoisie exhibits a tendency to push back harder as we push harder. This is unfortunate. Partially, it may also be cultural. Remember: the bourgeoisie must have taken certain actions to still be in power, if it still exists after the proletariat has tried certain revolutionary tactics. If certain tactics have never been tried in a country or they have been a long time ago, the bourgeoisie ruling that country right now might not be prepared to take the necessary actions to stay in power.

On a tactical note: in order to avoid violence as much as possible, we should follow Sun Tzu’s aphorism that the best victory is that which requires no battle. By this, he meant, that one should try to overpower the enemy to such an extent that they shit their pants and will not fight. Only if we choose our battles in this fashion, we can win 100 out of 100 battles without any bloodshed.

But all the evidence points to something truly scary: during the revolutionary era, the push back will be the hardest.

Actio est reactio. -Karl Marx

And even if we win and abolish classes, we will be faced with the next problem:

Communism Under Siege

What have neighboring feudal countries done as there was a bourgeois revolution in France? — They have come to the aid of the French aristocracy and the King.

Just a little earlier, they were perfectly happy to wage war among themselves. That is: redistribute a portion of the expropriated labor to peasants who no longer work on the fields, but instead now try to kill other peasants just so their nobility can appropriate some more fields along with the peasants living on it.

But when the peasants — unfortunately lead by the emerging bourgeois classes — decided that they were no longer having it, everyone came to the rescue of the French monarchy.

Exactly the same thing happened to the communists during the cold war.

This didn’t surprise anybody, as it had been predicted by Marxists long ago, especially after the experiences of the Paris Commune.

So, why would anybody try something so scary? Remember when I said that capitalism undermines the ecosystem on which it depends and how it keeps causing war? And how technological progress, if it leads to the complete obsolescence of labor, will turn the working class into surplus population as long as the means of production are under the capitalist’s command — a possibility which would turn the other mentioned tendencies into secondary problems? Well, that’s why.

Oops, I did it again. — Capitalism

There are other times during which capitalism reaches some level of temporary stability. In these times, there is even some space for a class compromise. A working class that has gone through a traumatic era of hardship will accept any olive branch the bourgeoisie extends. Sometimes, these olive branches can even be quite generous, especially when there is some external foe that a capitalist nation or coalition of nations has to deal with.

Such truces between the classes and sometimes even between coalitions of capitalist nations that would otherwise compete with each other will sometimes even come with a set of institutions that drives politicians in bourgeois nations inexorably to more social policies and a more pro-union approach that drives up wages. The Bretton-Woods system in its original conception was such a system, and had Keynes got his will on the Bretton-Woods conference, it would have been even more so. That capitalism is still around today is largely due to this system. But what horrors were needed in order to motivate the capitalist system to build it?

Capitalism had gone through an era of protectionism that limited international competition. Under this protectionist regime, the working class in the US was able to bully Franklin D. Roosevelt into actually doing something useful: the New Deal. This series of policies got aggregate demand going again so that the workers slowly found work again. It also brought a lot of important social improvements that pacified the working class.

The protectionism of the US at the time made sure that the additional demand from these policies would not be used to import the goods from nations in which the working class was less successful. The general level of development of the US would protect it from economic retaliation, its military strength, population size and geographic location would protect it from military retaliation.

None of these points were true for European nations, which is one of the reasons why most of them took a different path to deal with an increasingly dissatisfied working class: fascism. One should not pretend that when Nazi Germany incorporated Austria or attacked Poland, it attacked free nations. They too had gone fascist. The one notable exception on the continent was France, where the working class had gone down a similar path as the US just to be crushed by the Nazis.

The German bourgeoisie had been pathologically obsessed with the possibility of the working class winning anything. The reason for that is that they had lost World War I and had almost fallen to a communist revolution, just like Russia immediately before that. Consequently, they blamed the loss of the war on the communists and the Jews, where the latter were also somehow portrayed as responsible for both capitalism and communism. The German variety of fascism was therefore particularly aggressive, and after forcefully uniting large parts of the continent under its wicked banner and settling — for the time being — the historic beef it had with France, it set out to accomplish its foremost task: the destruction of communism, for which the only penalty in their eyes could be the eradication of the working class that had success, including peoples related to them. They had to be replaced with a working class that had proven more docile, so docile that they even allowed the system to engage in selectively breeding them.

But the communists fought back, and under heroic sacrifices, they won.

The American bourgeoisie on the other hand did not want to become the last outpost of capitalism. Thus, when the Japanese attacked them at Pearl Harbor and they entered the war against the Axis, their natural response was to hurry to free western Europe. There are only two possible conclusions how this motion happened: either the Americans are even worse at Geography than we already knew they are or they wanted as much of Europe as possible, which was far more developed than Asia at the time, to remain capitalist.

In order not to trip over their own dick, those western European nations together with the US then devised the Bretton-Woods system. It was the material manifestation of a truce that was the basis of the anti-communist coalition during the Cold War.

If you want to know more about the Bretton-Woods system or the system emerging right now under the leadership of the BRICS as the material basis for another coalition of capitalist nations in their struggle against US hegemony, please follow the link to the sources I have already given, as this excursion is once again way too long.

The point is: if capitalism is left to its own devices, there is a myriad of tendencies that will slowly eat and eventually outright crush any achievements that the working class unlocks. Periodically, the situation will become so dire that the working class views a revolution and the period of hardship that accompanies and follows it as the lesser evil.

Just How “Evil” Was It?

But just how evil is it actually, if so many people defend it as mentioned in the beginning? I hope I made myself clear insofar as the derivation of the necessity of struggle for communism and what communism should be is sound, even though the latter point needs a lot of further elaboration. But what those people in the east had, that was certainly not the communism that I am speaking of, right? After all, you know that Stalin and Mao were crazy dictators and killed a lot of people?

Maybe I have activated sufficient critical thinking skills that you have started to doubt that. Maybe this lengthy text was too boring for your ADHD and you have followed one of the ton of links I have provided and gone down the rabbit hole. Maybe you were a Marxist all along and just found my text interesting.

The reality of the matter is somewhat intricate. First of all, update your beliefs by following this link on how the death toll of communism was calculated and what death toll you would arrive at if you counted the deaths caused by capitalism with the same level of “scientific rigor”.

In a nutshell, they had to count Nazi soldiers killed in World War II by the Red Army, killed Nazi collaborators and children that weren’t born because the birth rates of the USSR went down from the level of traditional societies to the level that most industrial societies have.

I hope you can see now how completely reasonable people could reproduce an ideology that defends real existing socialism. For normal people, it was a great improvement. If you have remaining doubts, here is a video that should undermine some of them.

If you think about it, the statistics I pointed you to in the beginning of this article don’t even reflect just how popular socialism is in the countries who lived through it when compared to capitalism. At least, it doesn’t reflect how popular it is among the proletarians, as you would have to deduct the bourgeoisie who quite obviously would oppose it. Nevertheless, people in the east are not exactly organizing their struggle to get it back, are they?

This is — as far as I understand — because there were of course genuine mistakes. Some of them were contingent, i.e., the system’s reproduction did not depend on it. I could point you to sources for that, but given recent developments in German law (I live in Germany), this could get me in trouble. So, just do your own digging and try to find sources that say what the socialists said about certain events.

There were, however, also others that were due to a systemic flaw in the design of communism 1.0. And it is at this point that I have to leave Marxism behind and draw from a different critical tradition that emphasized points that can be found in the Marxist tradition, but were to my knowledge never fully theoretically grasped.

That Other Tradition

Don’t try to be a great man. Just be a man. —Lieutenant Commander Data

Content warning: looking backward from the 4th of April of 2023, I have to admit some of the below criticisms are inappropriately worded from a Marxist perspective. I have toned them down without watering them down in my more recent work.

So far, I have shown you the good sides of real existing socialism and how the “death count of communism” is ridiculous. However, notice how none of the defenders of real existing communism seems to bring up some actual systemic violence that might have existed. The theoretical points you need to properly understand that come from a different tradition.

My purpose is not to arrive at an accurate death count of communism. That would be just as childish as calling the USSR totalitarian without at the same time calling the contemporary USA totalitarian. My purpose is to provide the required intellectual tools to uncover some real existing class dynamics and what to do about them.

That other tradition that I am talking about is known as Anarchism. And here is what it is NOT:

It is NOT a criticism of central decision making. It is NOT a criticism of enforcing decisions that have been made. It is NOT a criticism of the actions that need to be taken to deal with reactionary forces. It is NOT even a criticism of some forms of delegating tasks associated with decision making, at least not without some profound qualifications that need to be made.

In its developed form, its key argument is that you should not only apply the critical method Marx and Engels devised to the system you seek to overcome, but also to the one you seek to build.

To an extent, Marxists have done so. But Anarchists insist that the Marxist notion of the state does not quite capture the dynamic aspects of the involved classes and what they might do if you lift the boot of capital from their neck.

What is the mode of reproduction of, say, a politician? — In a democracy, the politician has to be re-elected. This is how his position in society is reproduced. A share of the fruits of labor he receives, he gives to himself by legislating — his official salary.

Another share of the fruits of labor may come from bribes, which are very prevalent in capitalist systems, but they still exist (only to the extent that regular people are willing to bribe a politician) in communist systems that allow classes like politicians to exist.

Quick question: what possible commodity could the capitalists hope to buy with their bribes if not power which the politicians hold independently of the capitalists? — None! There is no other commodity, and all the capitalists are trying to accomplish with their bribes is to tame a serious contender for class rule.

A third share with some explanatory power may easily be overlooked or mistaken for something else. Similar to contemporary capitalists that no longer extract dividends from their stocks but instead use their stocks as collateral for a loan in order to appear poor in the eyes of the tax code, the politician can give himself a regular salary, take no bribes and still live abundantly simply by legislating that politicians, being the brains of society, always need the best living conditions provided to them by the collective they rule; in response to that, the collective then gives the fruits of labor to the politician directly rather than giving him money so he can buy them on the market place. This does not take the form of a bribe, but the form of fulfilling a public service where the benefits go to the politician.

The ideology covering for this type of behavior is reproduced in communist societies with politicians as follows: as Malatesta noticed in 1919, state communists would insist on the continued necessity of the dictatorship of the proletariat even beyond the point at which the former ruling class was expropriated. This had of course not yet happened in 1919, as the civil war was still ahead of the USSR, but this tendency to emphasize the necessity of dictatorial means was already so manifest that Malatesta had correctly identified it as the ideology of communism’s politicians.

The dictatorship of the proletariat after the bourgeoisie ceased to be a class was a contradiction in terms. As the bourgeoisie in the USSR had started to become an increasingly distant memory, the farce could no longer be upheld and, as ideologies of ruling classes do, resulted in an even greater farce as Khrushchevite “dictatorship of the people”.

This ideology lead regular people to actually believe a lot of ridiculously false dichotomies. For instance, you could either be for the ruling party or against communism. What an obvious scam.

Consequently, many comrades turned a blind eye when legit communists who were struck by critical thoughts that pointed beyond state communism received a similar treatment as reactionary dissidents.

Another tendency exhibited by the USSR, China, Yugoslavia and Vietnam was revisionism. If you are willing to entertain the Anarchist thesis, this tendency becomes utterly understandable. Of course, ruling classes seek to optimize the cost of their mode of reproduction and increase the benefits. This can be accomplished by steering the country back towards a more ruthless mode of production. The ruling class’ particularly effective method of shutting up critical voices in a rare mix with relative social stability made it so that there were not enough critical voices around when the eastern block fell.

Politicians in state communist systems exhibited all markers of a class, and in particular that of a minority ruling class. But they were only one faction of a greater ruling apparatus. A largely analogous analysis applies to the managerial class. My knowledge on the matter is limited, as I have only recently discovered that some of the content creators whom I admire for their reasonableness were able to build a worldview in which a defense of e.g. Stalin or North Korea is possible; only through this recent discovery which blew my Anarchist mind was I able to go down the rabbit hole a bit and write the article you find here. But as far as I understand the situation, managers in communism were often elected by the workers on the ground; in other cases, they were sent to the factory by the state. In either case, they had the ability to directly extract benefits and shutting down opposition.

Apparently, the above stated points had been a point of honest disagreement between Marx and Bakunin in the 19th century. Bakunin stated that upon election, the worker ceased being a worker, to which Marx responded: like the capitalist ceases to be a capitalist upon election?

I have no idea how an intelligent man like Marx could possibly come up with such an inappropriate comparison, let alone how people with the privilege of hindsight could still point to that as some kind of gotcha rather than updating their beliefs using data that has in the meantime become available. Let me nevertheless elaborate.

Obviously, the factory owner keeps his factory and his workers continue to produce a surplus for him. But the worker upon election no longer needs his day job, he can rely on the salary his new position brings him – plus all the public services that he can benefit from, like e.g. a media system that will praise him and a security apparatus dealing with critics.

Isn’t AOC an exact model of the type of politician that Leninists advocate? What is the force that corrupts her to do everything for her reelection except fighting for working people? To my awareness, she doesn’t take corporate bribes to this day. But she cares about the high official salary and the privileges, and there’s a proletarian media ecosystem having working people still believe that she’s on their side, even though they admit that she’s doing nothing for the people.

Do Leninists say that it was not the case that in the final binary yes/no vote in the USSR or the GDR, you could hand in an empty ballot indicating „yes“, while for „no“, you actually had to go into a cabin to fill it out, thereby making it known to the authorities that you were a „traitor to the people“ which could get you into serious trouble? And if you say that it: don’t you think there was at least a tremendous possibility for an elected political class to reproduce itself independently of the actual will of the people?

These activities were in my understanding supported by a system of party careerism based on the premise that making decisions required a special personality — totally anti-marxian great men. These great men read all the books that the party thought were necessary for someone to make the right decisions. They became specialized decision makers, while the population became a group specialized in implementing made decisions. The candidates they could elect had already gone through a selection process based on the premise that the party considered you suitable for decision making.

Those two groups of people had their own separate life trajectories and modes of receiving their share of the fruits of labor. There may have been a somewhat greater social mobility than under capitalism — for instance, political power could in many such countries not be inherited like corporations can — , but for the most part, the decision makers had all the means to protect their privilege from the wider population.

This marks decision makers and decision implementers as classes. And the decision making class will happily fire you, imprison you, torture you or even kill you — all by using their mode of exploitation, the public service, and using public media to make you think they were actually just fighting legit enemies of the people — if they find it helpful for their specific mode of reproduction. Thinking that their interests align with yours just because they had to be reelected is as profoundly stupid as thinking that the bourgeoisie’s interests align with yours just because you can only become rich by selling some useful commodity.

Even if you believe that the Kronstadt Rebellion was about suppressing reactionaries rather than more libertarian leaning Socialists, even if you believe that Makhno was just divisive or if you believe that the USSR’s intervention in Hungary was about suppressing fascists, don’t you see that there’s a possibility that these were propaganda lies fed to you by an apparatus that was not under direct proletarian control?

Listen: I am not saying that everything would play out in just this way if the Leninists were to implement socialism in a western country. I think when it comes to single party rule (which wasn’t even a thing in all of these countries, only in most of them) and some other points, western populations would simply not go along with it. But we can see a pattern here: the political class is by definition collectively in charge of public services — directing them in this or that direction is their very job description — , and they can therefore abuse it to help their reproduction against the interests of the people. Pointing to the fact that they weren’t always successful with this and that even in most socialist societies, they weren’t able to pass power on to their children, doesn’t affect the argument any more than the possibility of a 100% inheritance tax or a broad middle class during certain periods in capitalism changes the nature of that system. Patching it is not the solution. The solution is to abolish it.

It is this class dichotomy that Anarchism sought to remedy — and while Marx was at least aware of that, contemporary popular Marxists seem not to be aware of it. Nobody is arguing against central decision making and Anarchists did not argue against “authoritarianism” on a whim, but these are the typical responses one gets from Marxists. They argue for “pragmatism” when they argue for elected offices, apparently not realizing, that according to the Anarchist analysis, they compromise the goal of a classless society just like social democrats do. Anarchist class analysis may of course just be wrong, but that should be addressed in a scientific debate among our thought leaders.

Anarchists derived scientifically the class nature of the decision makers and developed alternative solutions to the problem of central decision making. They thought it was obvious that in criticizing Stalin, Mao or Lenin, they were pointing to a class dynamic. They were wrong in assuming that it was obvious. Still, they predicted the shit show before it happened. That alone should make you pay attention to their points.

How The Hell Was This Overlooked?

The reason why this in hindsight utterly obvious point was overlooked is to be sought, as always, in history.

I will begin by stating for the novice, that Anarchists and Marxists were once united in a common institution: the First International. For totally contingent reasons that Zoe Baker has shed new light on, the First International split into two groups that would later develop into Anarchists and Marxists.

Unfortunately, the communication channels between the two factions were cut off to an extent that some important theoretical points developed in one bubble never arrived in the other. The situation was so bad, that one of the inventors of the materialist dialectic method, Engels, responded to the new theoretical development in the Anarchist bubble that only reached him in butchered form in a knee-jerk fashion. The linked pamphlet is thrown at Anarchists by Marxists to this day as a gotcha.

During the October revolution, the emerging new ruling class offered anarchists token positions, thereby anticipating a practice that the bourgeois state has now copied in an effort to manufacture consent. Anarchists knew, based on their class analysis, that accepting such positions would have made no difference at best and only helped to legitimize the new society at worst. The new ruling class used such refusals to frame Anarchists as saboteurs and radicals that required harsh treatment.

Experiences like this made many Anarchists consider Marxism as the main enemy. As the Anarchist critique was the only scientific critique of state communism in existence, Anarchists received prosecution like they never had under capitalism which was more busy fighting Marxism.

This temporary alignment of interests between Anarchists and capitalism lead to a lot of unhelpful practices on the part of the Anarchists, such as parroting ahistoric anti-communist propaganda which at times contradicted even the beliefs they claimed to hold. At other occasions, Anarchists betrayed the identities of members of communist parties to the authorities.

A particularly pervasive theme among Anarchists is great man theory — the idea that all that happens can be explained in terms of the figureheads of a system — when it comes to characterizing state communist systems. Alexander Berkman is guilty of this. Noam Chomsky is guilty of this. The guy I just linked with regards to Engels’ straw man is guilty of this. I am guilty of this.

The most unfortunate tendency though was a growing imprecision in the once developed class based criticism of state communism. As Anarchism was preoccupied targeting state communism, they got more and more out of touch with any movements against capitalism; as a consequence, they had no realistic path into the drivers’ seat in either society and fell into a habit of waiting out the Cold War. In order to tranquilize themselves, they replaced their precise criticism with cheer leading for the team they considered — for personal reasons — the lesser evil.

None of this had to happen. The events leading to the split of the First International were wholly contingent. The tragedy might have even been avoided right up to 1917. After this, necessity took over.

As state communism had persisted for so long, the critical Anarchist tradition struggled to reconstitute itself in the aftermath. They slowly recovered the intellectual tools they once possessed. But they then misidentified the task ahead of them:

Over the last three decades, Anarchists were driven by the hope that they could replace Marxism as the most appealing criticism of capitalism. They did so based on the belief that state communism had utterly lost all credibility and they were the only game in town. A grave error: state communism remains a great improvement over capitalism for most people. Once working people are exposed to the data I presented above, many of them will be absorbed by the Marxist bubble.

Another important phenomenon that has to be addressed in order to fully understand the reproduction of state communist ideology and the low credibility that Anarchism enjoys in that bubble is known as “Anarkiddies”. These are people who were Anarchists for 5 minutes and then converted to Leninism like Mao.

The way this works is that some event triggers the awakening of the worker’s critical thinking skills and by accident, they join the Anarchists. They learn some basic principles there. But since they never made use of their critical thinking skills and that muscle is totally underdeveloped, they mistake the fact that they were just barely able to make their way into a critical tradition for evidence that they do have great critical thinking skills; consequently, they will greatly overestimate their own understanding.

No blame falls on them. It is something that we all do in this stage of our development. But as a result, when their incoherent understanding is shaken again and they move on to Marxism, they become a data point in the Marxist bubble and inform the Marxist judgement of the nature of Anarchism.

The Anarchists who react allergically to Engels’ text On Authority never become a data point. You, the Leninist, may know some of them and have polite conversations with them, finding them to be utterly reasonable people with whom you agree on many points. But how their ideology reproduces itself in the face of your criticisms (of which you only now know how knee-jerk they are) is, if you’re completely honest with yourself, a complete mystery which you have never probed into.

The Anarchist goes through precisely the same experience with you.

This cycle of reproduction of analytical sectarianism happens largely in the absence of any intervention of the ruling class. Why would the ruling class intervene and thereby cause an increased need for unity and synthesis when we’re already fighting among ourselves on the grounds that we think our goals differ so profoundly? The blame falls instead squarely on the veterans in our ranks who did not notice the bias in the data that informs our world view and did not care to learn about the centers of gravity of other critical traditions.

Having now fully grasped the nature of and the reasons for the divisions in proletarian ideology, the task ahead of us presents itself:

The real target that we should aim for is to reconstitute the First International and synthesize all the experiences the different spinoffs have made.

How To Heal

Note: This section is the condensation of additions I had to make after publishing the text. It can now be considered its core piece, as it speaks to some experiences I could already gather. There are further theoretical and closing remarks below this

The problem with the “revolutionary” organizations in western societies today is that they have entered a dialectical motion similar to that of tech standards: Whenever somebody gets frustrated with the sectarianism and the little progress that is being made, they split off with the intention of creating that one new shiny umbrella organization to unite them all. As none of them can justify how they actually differ from earlier organizations, nobody gets excited and all they have accomplished is a proliferation of sectarianism.

I am not interested in joining any such shit show or building a new organization at this time. Too many people with the best of intentions have been sucked into this cycle or quickly lost any revolutionary spirit as they got to experience how unremarkable the existing institutions had become.

My hope is that the new synthesis of criticisms developed in this article pushes people out of the loop that reproduces analytical sectarianism. In this article, I have pointed to contemporary sources from all kinds of places within the left. I hope that from those sources emerges a web of trickles that pour into a torrent of history.

Once the ideological divisions are healed, actually building the revolutionary organization should become a trivial exercise that I would like to leave to the astute proletarian. But let me give you some hints how to solve that exercise.

My main thesis developed above from Marxist principles is that the main mechanism how sectarian ideologies reproduce in the absence of interventions of the ruling class is that we’re dealing with ecosystems. At their heart reside the thought leaders, trusted by vast amounts of people. Getting a message to them and making them seriously consider it is like getting to the end boss, consequently, their views on other ideological bubbles are informed not so much by actual people from those other bubbles, but from views propagated up through their bubble. These thoughts are then projected back into the bubble.

If the thought leaders ever talk to thought leaders from other bubbles, they can at best fire random shots at what they think is the center of the other one’s ideology and at worst agree to disagree and never bring those points up. None of it can ever produce a synthesis of the bubbles. But if you were able to bring the main thesis from bubble A to thought leader of bubble B in a way that they understand it and have to take it seriously, they would — by my working hypothesis — be very reasonable, as this is what reproduces their position of being trusted by their bubble.

All of the above was written from the point of view of an Anarcho-Communist— and I cheer lead for their position. That I even bothered to go through a derivation of the claims that could lead people down the Leninist rabbit hole is because — from my point of view unfortunately — this is where the working class seems to be going. They look at the same data as I do, and when my prejudices and prior understanding of anarchist principles had me hope the data of the former eastern bloc or the data of the Squad betraying the working class would point to Anarchism being the obvious answer, the prejudices of the working class and lack of prior understanding of Anarchism has lead them to the conclusion that Leninism is the obvious answer.

The vast majority is in a profound state of soul searching though. People are not willing to go down either rabbit hole. The popular criticism of Anarchism as simply central-decision-abolitionism and the popular criticism of Leninism of being authoritarian have not been properly addressed, even though both sides think they have.

In its less knee-jerk form, the main division seems to revolve around this point: Anarchism insists that politicians form a class of their own that has the potential to become a ruling class in the absence of capital, Leninists seem to me to insist that they don’t. A practical consequence of huge importance is how we even approach politics (discussed in the section “The Revolutionary Organization”).

THAT is the dividing line between Marx and Richard Wolff on one side and Bakunin and Noam Chomsky on the other side (where Marx and Bakunin fought over it in the absence of data, while Wolff and Chomsky agreed to disagree during the Cold War brain melt); our different practical approaches result from it. We Anarchists have nothing against central decision making on summits where the role of the delegate isn’t reproduced afterwards. I don’t get the Leninist objection to that, but I‘m not even the right addressee for that objection: contemporary Anarchist thought leaders like Zoe Baker are.

The working class is not organized enough to make such a claim, but I believe I speak for the majority when I say that a serious debate on these questions has to take place now so everyone can make up their minds. Any attempts for such a serious debate during the Cold War had to produce a lot of nonsense and confused rambling for the material reasons developed above. We now have acquired the privilege of hindsight and can continue the argument between Marx and Bakunin.

Approach 1:

The task that lies ahead of us is to build the organization through which we democratically organize our struggle. For that of course, we first have to shatter the existing organizations that are the material basis for the reproduction of divisions.

One course of action the working class could take to accomplish that goal is to apply the dialectic of criticism and self-criticism: the critical worker who wants to achieve synthesis goes to, e.g., the Anarchists and tells them with an excited voice: “It has been done! A new theoretical foundation has emerged that can explain and therefore undermine the reproduction of the Leninist ideology!”

Having grabbed the attention of the Anarchists, the worker will then schedule a reading session. I would hope that that goes well, but then, the natural question arises what to do next. The answer is self-criticism: the Anarchist collective could go to the Leninist party in their area and tell them: “Oh my god, we were so wrong! A new theoretical foundation has emerged that can explain and therefore undermine the reproduction of the Anarchist ideology!”

Both groups will then schedule another reading session to determine if the theory derived here can serve as a serious basis to move forward in union. In the case of the Leninists, one should of course pay attention that whatever panel evaluates the ideological compatibility consists mostly of usual members without any elected party office.

Of course, one can also take the converse route.

Update:

Ok, I’ve tried going to the Leninists and I wanted to kill myself afterwards. But: Then I was able to take a step back and see that they hadn’t invalidated my analysis at all, but instead confirmed it. They still are reasonable, and I still think their thought leaders are reasonable. All that had happened on my safari tour was that I had encountered a new specimen that I hadn’t yet taken into account: the obscure Nerd.

Here’s what happened. I’ve tried to state politely and in a self-deprecating tone that I had something important to say regarding sectarianism. A few people then read this text (in a previous version… if that keeps happening, maybe I should put it on GitHub at some point so people can track its evolution), and some newbies to that bubble were impressed.

THEN came the nerd. The nerd had an ingenious answer for everything, totally missing all my points, but pointing me to obscure sources that in my bubble of course nobody has on their recommended reading list — and dunking on me, even though I constantly admitted upfront that I’m a douche bag and the full scope of my work is trying to point to a pattern how bubbles reproduce in the absence of sinister forces.

To make it abundantly clear: the debate that closes the matter of synthesizing the bubbles has to be done by the thought leaders of those two bubbles. Throwing books at some insignificant guy who brought the point up may or may not have an impact on that guy, but it will not have a significant impact on the bubbles. The debate must not be done by the greatest nerds of each bubble either, who absorbed all the confused rambling of the past, it must be done by the people who the working class in either camp trust the most, as they have proven to be able to update their beliefs with new data. Don’t trust the dogmatists.

It is upon YOU, the astute proletarian, to force the thought leaders of each bubble to have the debate in a serious way for us all to see, and TAKE NOTES how they respond to such demands and TELL YOUR FELLOW WORKERS who reacted how in your experience. That’s the only way we can — politely — bully them into doing what needs to happen now — and what I think can happen now as we have acquired the privilege of hindsight.

And to make another part abundantly clear: I’m definitely not one of these thought leaders. Hell, I don’t even want the spotlight. All I did was stumbling upon a profound pattern of data bias that reinforces each ideological bubble and I think is keeping the entire working class in a profound state of suspense as nobody can make up their mind up as some serious questions aren’t being addressed. That’s what my brain is trained for. I don’t have a political science degree, I don’t read theory as much as others do and I don’t want to. That’s what thought leaders are for! If I were to participate in such a debate with the Leninists on the Anarchist side, I’d fall apart and make an ass of myself, just reinforcing the Leninist belief that they’re right and my previous belief that they’re at their heart jerks.

We have to make sure that debate participants on both sides of the debate are in a state of mind where they’re seriously entertaining the possibility that the other is right. Given how much the Leninist bubble is growing right now (JT from Second Thought has about 1.4 Million subscribers on YouTube), don’t you think I — nay, the vast majority of the working class who are looking for coherent answers — want to know their weed dealer? Don’t you think I wish that their mental gymnastics that make them claim that the USSR under Stalin was a vibrant democracy actually works? Don’t you think I wish I found out that North Korea is not only “good” in some regards when compared to other class societies under similar external conditions, but actually a democracy — beyond some stupid tu quoque arguments? See: we live in an era where saying that North Korea is as democratic as the USA, it makes North Korea look WORSE!

OF COURSE I want it to be true that these systems are democratic! But so far, they haven’t convinced me! I’ve descended their rabbit hole as far as I could, then talked to them just to be confronted by giant nerds who pointed me to stuff that NOBODY in my bubble would take seriously. And what’s worse: when I retreated by stating “ok, I’m gonna read it — but please take serious my points on how synthesis is necessary and it can and must be done now and please direct it to the appropriate thought leaders”, there was a whole array of totally unhelpful cheer leaders for the nerd who had once again saved the day. But the absolute worst thing is: there’s a high chance that the giant nerd actually knows what’s at the center of other people’s ideology, but cares more about winning for their team — even by means of obfuscation.

I get it now: this is how bubbles reproduce, and there’s a reason why those dogmatists aren’t at the top of those bubbles, but they have to exist somewhere in that ecosystem or they couldn’t be stable at all. Now you and I need to find a way to bypass this and have the thought leaders address the questions that keep the working class from uniting behind the Anarchists, Leninists or a new synthesis of both of them.

I’m under no illusions either that just by bringing the question to the attention of a thought leader, all the necessary pieces will just fall in the appropriate place. But it’s a better chance than with the middle rank dogmatists, and if enough of us reach out and we reach out to enough different thought leaders so at least someone will start reproducing the message, then things can happen.

Update 2:

I have thrown this text at the heads of colleagues, friends and family. Virtually all of them respond positively, but only few actually have the time to read it. Among those who did read it, the Leninist obscure nerd was the only negative reaction.

The first data on influencers is in: very few take it seriously enough to even respond, as expected. The way to change this is that many people bang at their door and demand that they address the made points.

I’ve mentioned the text in a bunch of super chats on YouTube live streams, and people generally reacted positively, but few actually followed up; one channel asked me to send a link their way, which I had done before, e.g., via e-mail, where probably the spam filter or some other mechanism took care of it.

One notable slightly encouraging (i.e. positive) exception is Democracy at Work who I contacted via Patreon. The team assured me that they’d forward it to their intellectual leader, Richard Wolff, but later I got a message that Richard is too busy to read through such a long text. They also noted how much work had obviously gone into this text and that it was insightful. Therefore, I hope the comrades there will bring the idea of Anarchists and Marxist-Leninists coming together and sorting out their differences — which I firmly believe is now materially possible and necessary — to Professor Wolff’s attention repeatedly, and I hope the reader will reach out to these comrades so they hear this demand from different sides.

The next thing that came to mind was the following: given that the theory on how to make bubbles that are close to each other merge is an empirical project rooted in social sciences, maybe there’s preexisting work on that area? Hence, I reached out to a bunch of sociologists asking them that question and telling them about my project.

This was almost 2 days ago, as of the time of this writing. When I have a nerd question on natural sciences and ask a professor, I usually get an answer sooner — unless I wrote them before and made an ass of myself, in which case I assume they put me on a black list. It happens. These people need to protect themselves, especially the more prominent ones.

I don’t know if they dismissed my project as too unserious or they’re still in the process of reviewing it. Probably the former, as I am a nobody to them and my claim is pretty huge. Maybe, I can made myself heard by actually finding out where the lectures are and attending one, for which I’ll have to sacrifice vacation days.

The best method I’ve tried so far was answering random comments on the internet, in the appropriate places. People following the appropriate influencers are radically curious and tend to have the time. It’s similar content to the content that they’re already consuming, so they don’t have to change their behavioral patterns that much. Interestingly, the same is true for random people following popular science communicators.

The above is just a depiction of the actions I have taken and the experiences I have made. If you think the left needs to speak with a united voice and having Leninists and Anarchists (and later others) sort out their differences via a scientific debate for the entire working class to see is the unique imperative right thing to do, then PLEASE help me with SPREADING THE TEXT in your own way.

Update 3:

Seriously, if you were into Leninism or Anarchism before reading this text or have just become curious through this work, just take away this one message and spread it: the leading intellectuals in those spaces don’t try hard enough to understand each other and work together in this moment in history, and it’s our responsibility as workers to bully them into doing so.

Science is a collective process. Otherwise, why on Earth would the confirmation bias have survived natural selection? It’s way easier for individuals to work from a place of having made up their mind already. In a survival situation, you can’t afford indecision. Once you decided that the bear needs to be killed so you can survive, you don’t start philosophizing about it.

But in good old tribal societies that didn’t yet rig public discourse as much as class societies do, people with competing ideas on broader topics would eventually come together in a debate and be held accountable by the tribe. There weren’t enough people in a tribe for the two competitors to get largely segregated yet stable groups of followers.

So forget about spreading this text, it doesn’t look like it’s particularly appealing to many people except maybe some academics, nerds and novices. But to take home the above message. The remainder of this text is about what a successful synthesis could look like in my opinion and some concrete recommendations for this moment in history.

The Revolutionary Organization

Let me now briefly sketch — just for clarity — how Anarchists envision the revolutionary organization.

Having applied a criticism to Marxism that was always around but has to my knowledge only now clearly been incorporated into it, logic dictates some new set of requirements for the new shared revolutionary organization. Allow me to elaborate.

As we have identified decision makers — even elected ones — as an exploiting class, we can by necessity not seek to bring any member of the organization into any kind of political office. We can however throw our weight behind a party if we are under the impression that it gives us a tactical advantage. We can have a summit working out an agenda that a candidate needs to back to get our endorsement and then go to them, pointing to how many people listen to our recommendations and that they should better back our agenda or we go to another candidate. We should only refrain from ever considering that party our electoral wing. That party must be our tool, and when it doesn’t suit us anymore, we need a collective muscle with which we can democratically throw it away.

The last thing the working class needs right now is RBN vs The Vanguard banging their heads against each other which candidate to back. What we need is that the millions come together, give themselves a proper program and then ask the politicians if they can afford not to back it. The idea that we have time for such infighting — let alone another election cycle — strikes me as bizarre.

As a result of this consideration, the organization cannot itself be a party. It makes no sense that a party would endorse another party. Also, the very title “party” would give novices a wrong impression about the nature of the organization.

Another necessary consequence of the new criticism is that we cannot elect decision makers within the organization. We have to make our shared decisions on our own. As we will hopefully grow numerous, some mode of delegation will of course be needed. But those delegates should only ever attend a summit with a clear mandate given to them by the workers who sent them and a clear understanding of the position they should bring into the conversation. After the task for which the summit was summoned has been accomplished, the position of the delegate is not reproduced and the ultimate decision on the matter is handed back to the local committees.

A third requirement is that the institution should find a mode of operation that undermines its own necessity for the cause of the revolution. If the organization is still around after the revolution has been accomplished, its chief responsibility should not rise above the importance of building and maintaining museums about the revolution. After the revolution, nobody should have to pay any attention to anyone in the organization.

Such a thing can be accomplished if the organization understands its relationship to the proletariat as that of a teacher to a student. The organization should lead by example and teach the masses everything they need to know to surpass the organization. It is the task of the revolutionary masses to give themselves a set of horizontal institutions that provide for any need society has. It is also their responsibility alone to uphold the principles laid out in this derivation as society reconstitutes itself.

In the converse direction, it has been pointed out that Anarchists have so far underestimated the severity of communism under siege. They have been unable to build a proper army, instead relying on volunteers and on the hope of defectors when the soldiers on the other side see how great socialism is.

Coming out of the Anarchist tradition myself, I do not have a proper answer to this point. All I can point to is that Sun Tzu quote from earlier. In an international context, nuclear weapons may also pose a significant deterrent. Nuclear weapons in the hands of the bourgeoisie are a dangerous matter. In the hand of the revolutionary masses, they may be less so if only we find a reasonable answer to the question who gets to stand next to the red button until the world revolution is achieved.

Regarding a contemporary tendency inspired by Richard Wolff whom we all love but whose approach has been criticized as somewhat problematic, I have this to say: for the novice and for posteriority, Richard Wolff is most famous for advocating Worker Co-Ops as the specific mode of production we should seek. If I read Professor Wolff correctly, his intention is to be the friendly man standing at the entrance of the rabbit hole, smiling at you and offering you tasty cookies in Hammer and Sickle form. This is the scope of his work. As people got suddenly interested in his work and wanted to know how to build worker co-ops or unions, he happily referred them to others. This is true comradeship.

He may be less known for it, but he also criticizes the free market and points to some vague regulatory arrangements that in his vision, the working class now in charge of the means of production could give itself. Here, he points in a direction outside the scope if his work. Again, true comradeship.

An unintended consequence is that anecdotally, some do mistake his work for an advocacy of Market Socialism and consequently criticize the state ownership that existed in the USSR. There are aspects in his work that point in that direction.

To these comrades, I want to respond that one should first understand why exactly the USSR has chosen state property over other possible models. The main reason is precisely that in a free market place, production would take the form of a struggle worker against worker. It would have unintended disadvantageous consequences. They chose state property for the same reason why Richard Wolff gently points to regulatory measures. Yet others have sought to overcome all these problems in one broad stroke by abolishing money altogether and granting everyone free access to anything, employing democratic rationing systems should scarcities arise in spite of the abundant productive forces we find today.

This is one of the areas on which we should not have a finished answer, but instead provide forums where the matter can be discussed in detail. We should require the absence of a free market for the above stated reasons. The specific solution should be worked out by the people.

Now, let me discuss the question of the unity we should seek. Too often does left wing politics appear as the quest to know every single detail of the party program and to be able to recite it at any time. Let me instead introduce a language that can remedy this matter.

When it comes to the task of proletarian liberation, there are two kinds of criteria that we could discuss: necessary criteria and sufficient criteria. The necessary criteria for proletarian liberation can be condensed into a relatively brief set of beliefs. Sufficient criteria on the other hand fill bookshelves.

By necessity, we can only ever allow someone into the institution if they agree with the necessary criteria for proletarian liberation. If they don’t want to abolish the capitalist classes and the political classes, allowing them in would open Pandora’s box of endless discussions about first principles.

Sufficient conditions on the other hand can be the subject of lively debate fora, for which we should make room in the organization. The reproduced cycles of ideas in each forum can then give the necessary inspiration to the masses to meet the requirements on the ground. The experiences gathered in this process are then propagated back to the debate fora.

The question has been asked how we could democratize media without undermining the spontaneity of content creation that we see today. My solution to this problem is simple: Any member can at any point publish anything. If their publication challenges a necessary criterion for proletarian revolution, that person is out. If they want to have the badge of honor to publish under the organization’s logo, there’s a review process.

What organization members should publish in any event is information on action plans that the organization has decided on. Failure to do so may lead to a hearing in the plenum.

This concludes my general sketch of the organization we are tasked by forces external to us with constructing. Let me conclude by exemplifying these forces in today’s context and connecting them to the necessity of the organization of which I can only report that it has on a subconscious level already begun to be constructed.

What Is To Be Done?

Whoomp! There it is. -The Revolutionary Proletariat

For the first time in a long time, the working class has a program. It had to come. It did not have to come in this particular way, but had we waited a little longer, someone else would have written a similar synthesis of The New Criticism into Marxism. Maybe someone already has, unbeknownst to me.

I have not written that program. History has written it. I have merely summarized what has already been going on and put it into its proper historical context to shed light on the matter. This allows me to proclaim that this task has already been accomplished — even though the concluding scientific debate between the thought leaders hasn’t happened yet.

Anarchists and Marxists have already been talking to each other again for some while now.

Marxists, while not quite understanding the nature of The New Criticism, were in a process of rethinking their theories in more libertarian terms. But they did so abstractly, not grasping the class nature of the system they had devised, instead trying to apply patches to a political apparatus that is intrinsically broken just like social democrats try to do with capitalism.

Anarchists had started reading Marx again decades ago, as the Cold War was still a thing. More recently, they have started contemplating the profound possibility that real existing state communism was a historic instantiation of communism and that contemporary defenders of state communism that sounded otherwise reasonable were on to something.

Both parties had started riffing on the same theme. It had to become more significant as they approached each other, and at some point, the differences had to snap out of existence.

Just in case this particular derivation of The New Criticism is the one that gets credit from the masses, let me take that opportunity to contribute some more points that I consider helpful, especially for the novice.

Today, we find ourselves in one of the most dangerous periods of human history.

For historic reasons that have to do with communists defending the USSR’s intervention in Hungary, state communists have acquired the unflattering nickname “Tankies”. To me, the only “Tankies” have names. They are: Vladimir Putin, Annalena Baerbock, Olaf Scholz, Emmanuel Macron, Joe Biden and whoever is currently in charge in Downing Street No 10.

Disabuse yourself from the illusion that the war in Ukraine was just the wicked fantasy of a sick and evil genius and had no prehistory.

Whenever a radicalized class is forced to go to war or freeze through a sanctions war, they wish the downfall of their own masters. This is axiomatic.

With regards to an unsettling tendency in the western left to go beyond that and actually cheer for Russia (I will not point fingers), I have this to say:

It is of course correct that in the event that our Russian comrades achieved another communist revolution and we didn’t, this would be the second coming of the Soviet Union as a farce. It would be way smaller, be faced with a way larger enemy and be constructed in a hurry.

But this should not lead us to recommend to our Russian comrades to stand down and do nothing, or worse: ally themselves with their bourgeoisie. It should instead hammer home on the urgency for the western proletariat to accomplish its task.

The good news is that the resistance is already rolling. The bad news is that it has no idea what it is doing.

For instance, there has been much ado about a million workers striking against Emmanuel Macron’s plans to increase the retirement age. A million workers are of course fantastic! However, the energy is completely wasted if on the other side of the Rhine, there are not another million workers striking in solidarity for the lowering of the retirement age that has previously been increased based on lies on the severity of the demographic problems that Germany has.

Why is Macron trying so hard to emulate the neoliberal shit show that was the Schröder administration? — Because he has to. Within the framework of the Eurozone, the developed European Welfare State can only be sustained at the cost of increased unemployment.

The main reason why the ruling classes of European countries are seeking to cut back on the welfare state is that — duh — it costs money to maintain it. Specifically, it is a cost factor in production. Thus, the size of the welfare state gets inscribed in the price of goods.

This is a problem. Suppose, France and Germany had initially a modus vivendi where they just trade with each other peacefully. But now, one artificially lowers the production cost. Suddenly, it is more competitive — without having built any new productive capacities.

It is well understood that cutting back on payments distributed to workers — which welfare state expenditures are — lowers aggregate demand, thereby creating unemployment. But this unemployment will accumulate in the country with the more advanced welfare state.

In the presence of exchange rates, this doesn’t have to be so. If products in Deutsche Mark become cheaper and products in Franc retain their price, what could the exchange rates do? — The Deutsche Mark could simply become worth more Franc, thereby rendering both equally competitive and Germany receives a portion of the unemployment its policies caused. Destroying the welfare state under such an exchange rate regime would be a self-defeating policy. We do not have to compete with other nations around the world in this manner if there is an exchange rate.

I say “The Deutsche Mark could…”, because the mere existence of exchange rates doesn’t guarantee anything. This is one of the needs that were temporarily more or less addressed in the Bretton-Woods system.

We Europeans have to understand that the specific dictatorship of the bourgeoisie under which we live today has a European character. The episode with Greece has made this utterly clear.

I therefore shout out to my French comrades: congratulations on bringing such a great strike about! Now please tell everyone else how you did it. It is in your own interest.

Don’t forget to be a good comrade and clap, comment and share. Additionally, COPY AND PASTE IT AND STORE IT ON YOUR COMPUTER.