Examining the Russian Revolution in anticipation of its 108th Anniversary

(This piece is based on a lecture delivered by Cliff Slaughter in the 1960s)

As we prepare to celebrate the 108th Anniversary of the October Revolution, the world stands on the brink of a situation more explosive than that which led to the eruption of World War I and eventually the Revolution itself. It is necessary to draw the lessons of the October Revolution as our class confronts the breakdown of the world capitalist system in the 21st century. 

The Revolution did not fall from the sky. Eight months prior to the October Revolution, Russia had experienced another revolution, the February Revolution. Tsarism, the most despised and brutal autocracy on Earth which had ruled for 300 years, was overthrown by a massive movement of workers, peasants and soldiers. The Russian workers, who had toiled in destitution and misery under the bloody rule of the Tsar, were surrounded by a mass of peasants living in almost medieval conditions. The February Revolution led to the establishment of a "democratic" provisional government and the creation of Workers' Councils (Soviets), and in the conditions then existing in Russia this gave the impression of massive victory and produced a significant wave of euphoria.

This sentiment overcame many Russian socialists, including Bolshevik leaders in Petrograd such as Stalin and Kamanev, who demanded critical support for the new bourgeois government and nearly provoked Lenin to resign from the Party. However, after eight months of “liberal” government lack of action and compromise in the face of an escalating threat of a counterrevolutionary coup, by October, the working population had overthrown the provisional government and the ruling class standing behind it and installed their own socialist workers' government! 

In April, Lenin had shocked the crowd that gathered to welcome the famous revolutionist when he exited the "sealed train" upon his return to Russia from exile in Switzerland. After the February Revolution, he didn't celebrate the beginning of a new era; instead, he started a new struggle: "Down with the Provisional government! All Power to the Soviets!" At that time, even many of his comrades believed that the presence of workers councils were a guarantee of a truly "democratic" development. But this situation was not sustainable. Given the power of the working class and its organizations, Lenin saw this "democratic" stage as a situation of "dual power" and a priceless window of opportunity for socialist revolution. The organized power of the working class and its allies could not co-exist with the state of the reactionary Russian capitalists and landlords - the former would either smash this machine or be trampled by the counter-revolution of the latter. 

The most important lessons in the history of the global workers' movement can be found in Lenin’s bold attempt to readjust consciousness to the objective situation. The uncompromising revolutionism of Lenin and Bolshevism led workers and peasants through the necessary experiences that proved to the masses that the seizure of state power was necessary. 

The global working class came to achieve its greatest victory during the 1917 Russian October Revolution and forever altered the course of world history. It was unequivocally demonstrated that the working class could rule and begin the creation of a new society while abolishing the capitalist class. Under the leadership of the Bolsheviks, the working class had gained and held political power for the first time in history over 1/6 of the world. The course of the Russian Revolution had vindicated the strategic approach initially developed by Leon Trotsky, the theory of permanent revolution, which had foreseen the outbreak of a socialist revolution in backwards Russia as a manifestation of the international working class’ struggles to take power and overturn over-ripe capitalism on a world scale.

When Trotsky joined the Bolsheviks in the middle of 1917, Lenin remarked that "from that time there was no better Bolshevik." Together Lenin and Trotsky oversaw the alliance of workers with the masses of the peasantry and soldiers and ultimately victory in the Russian Civil War. As Lenin later said, “Could any one point out to me another man who could organize an almost model army in a year and even win the respect of military experts? We have such a man!”

The Bolshevik Party was, ultimately, not a party like other parties. It was an organization steeled in the struggle against all opportunism, and steeped in the theoretical traditions of Marxism. Following the start of World War I, the Marxist Internationalists, most significantly the Bolsheviks, fought against the Second International's betrayal of socialist internationalism and support for war. The rise of Bolshevism and the role it played in the turbulent events of 1917 were prepared by and vindicated the centrality of this fight.

The Bolshevik Party demonstrated through its struggle that socialist internationalism is the fundamental element of the real struggle for power. The fate of the Russian Revolution, which resulted from the systemic global contradictions of capitalism, was inseparably connected to the progression of the world socialist revolution.

The Bolshevik Party was different in other ways. The Bolsheviks were a Party based ultimately not on the "labor aristocracy" and the intelligentsia, but a dynamic movement connected to the young and most exploited sections of the working class. As Trotsky noted:

"Bolshevism when underground was always a party of young workers. The Mensheviks relied upon the more respectable skilled upper stratum of the working class, always prided themselves on it, and looked down upon the Bolsheviks. Subsequent events harshly showed them their mistake. At the decisive moment the youth carried with them the more mature stratum and even the old folks."

There was a meaningful and vibrant interplay of viewpoints between the various layers of the movement within and around the Bolsheviks. There were numerous disagreements within the party, befitting an organization that knew how to turn to the revolutionary masses. Lenin frequently found himself on the losing end of such disputes, which occasionally became public despite party discipline.

The essential element in the victory of the Revolution was ultimately the Marxist leadership of the most far-sighted and intransigent Bolsheviks. It is the approach of this leadership that the international working class must deepen our understanding of. However, it is not enough to imitate the Leninist "combat party" as an empty formalism. As Trotsky put it: 

"The moral qualities of every party flow, in the last analysis, from the historical interests that it represents. The moral qualities of Bolshevism - self-renunciation, disinterestedness, audacity and contempt for every kind of tinsel and falsehood - the highest qualities of human nature! - flow from revolutionary intransigence in the service of the oppressed. The Stalinist bureaucracy imitates in this domain the words and gestures of Bolshevism." [emphasis added]

Today Marxism and Internationalism must become wedded to the most militant and oppressed sections of the international working class, on the basis shown to us by Lenin and Trotsky: one that combines the utmost revolutionary intransigence against capitalism, against imperialism and against all sorts of nationalist and anti-Marxist revisionism, with the necessary degree of organizational flexibility and connection to the aspirations of the most revolutionary layers of the working class!

Study the lessons of the October Revolution! 

Forward to the world socialist revolution!

The "Sexual Revolution:" An Unwitting Instrument of Capitalist Counterrevolution's Devastating Public Health Legacy

Edits: 9/24, 9/28 fixed typos, increased clarity, etc

The so-called "sexual revolution" that began in the 1960s and 1970s, hailed by bourgeois liberals and postmodern academics as a triumph of individual liberation and progressive reform, also became bound up with deeply reactionary phenomenon. From advancing the cause of human emancipation, it became a critical component of the broader social counterrevolution orchestrated by the ruling classes to undermine the potential of the working class. This pseudo-liberation, rooted to a notable extent in the decay of capitalist society, has contributed directly to profound negative impacts on public health, including the explosive proliferation of sexually transmitted infections (STIs), mental health crises, and the commodification of human relationships under the guise of "freedom."

To understand the sexual revolution's contradictory character, one must situate it within the historical context of postwar capitalism's crisis. The post-World War II economic boom in the United States and Western Europe masked deepening contradictions: imperial decline, stagflation, and intensifying class antagonisms. The 1960s saw mass upheavals - student protests, explosions of workers unrest, civil rights struggles, and anti-war movements - that threatened to coalesce into a unified challenge to the capitalist order. In response, sections of the ruling elite learned to promote a series of ideological diversions, channeling discontent away from class-based politics toward individualistic and identity-focused "revolutions."

The sexual revolution, which was rooted "in-itself" in progressive developments in healthcare, was also epitomized by the rise of pornography as a multibillion-dollar industry and the cultural normalization of casual sex and became chief among these diversions. Figures like Hugh Hefner became the unwitting mouthpieces of this development. Far from liberating women or sexual minorities, as liberal historiography claims, these developments reinforced the subordination of personal life to the imperatives of profit.

Marxist analysis reveals much of the sexual revolution as an extension of bourgeois ideology, promoting atomized individualism over collective struggle. As Leon Trotsky noted in his writings on the family under capitalism, the bourgeois nuclear family, while oppressive, served as a stabilizing force for the working class in the absence of other relations. Trotsky wrote, in the context of the USSR, about "the great social crisis in the course of which the old family continues to dissolve far faster than the new institutions are capable of replacing it." The sexual revolution helped to dismantle even this fragile remnant of collectivism, promoting individualism over collectivism and fostering a more fluid, unstable workforce better suited to the demands of late capitalism. By "abolition of the family" Marx had envisioned the free development of human relations, unobstructed by the pressures of the capitalist market. Instead, the pressures of the capitalist market only deepen on workers, while human relationships become more and more atomized/commodified. The "free love" ethos of the hippies and counterculture - often romanticized in the Woodstock mythos - dovetailed perfectly with the emerging neoliberal order, where personal fulfillment was redefined as consumer choice in the marketplace of desires.

This reactionary element is evident in the movement's alignment with identity politics, which the ruling class has weaponized to divide the working class along lines of race, gender, and sexuality. The sexual revolution paved the way for today's obsession with "sexual identity" as a substitute for class consciousness. The result? A society where sex is commodified - through apps like Tinder, pornography platforms like Pornhub, and the "gig economy" of sex work such as OnlyFans and the blind eye of authorities towards the proliferation of the "paid rape" of prostitution, while workers are left more isolated and vulnerable than ever.

The public health consequences are staggering and undeniable. The proliferation of STIs stands as a grim indictment of the sexual revolution's promises within the capitalist system. According to data from the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, global STI rates have skyrocketed since the 1970s. Chlamydia, gonorrhea, and syphilis infections have reached epidemic levels in many countries, with the US alone reporting over 2.5 million cases annually in recent years. The HIV/AIDS crisis of the 1980s and 1990s, which claimed millions of lives, was exacerbated by the cultural shift toward promiscuity without corresponding social infrastructure - a direct outgrowth of the revolution's emphasis on individual "choice" over collective responsibility.

These health crises are not mere accidents but inevitable outcomes of capitalism's decay. The pharmaceutical industry profits immensely from treatments for STIs, with companies like Pfizer and Gilead raking in billions from antiretroviral drugs and antibiotics, while preventive measures like comprehensive sex education and universal healthcare are systematically underfunded. Mental health impacts are equally severe: studies link the hookup culture fostered by the sexual revolution to rising rates of depression, anxiety, and relational instability, particularly among youth. In a society where relationships are transient and exploitative, the human cost is borne disproportionately by the working class and oppressed layers, who lack access to quality healthcare and social stability.

The promotion of the sexual revolution also came to serve geopolitical ends. During the Cold War, the US imperialists contrasted their "free" society - with its permissive attitudes toward sex - against the supposed puritanism of the Soviet bureaucracy. This propaganda obscured the Stalinist betrayal of genuine socialism, which under Lenin and Trotsky had advanced progressive policies on women's rights, abortion, and family reform as part of the broader fight for workers' power.

Today, as capitalism hurtles toward catastrophe - marked by endless wars, economic inequality, and ecological collapse - the mythos of the sexual revolution must be shattered. True liberation cannot come from bourgeois individualism but only through the international unity of the working class in the struggle for socialism. The fight against STIs and other public health scourges requires not more bourgeois ideological filth or market-driven solutions, but the expropriation of the capitalist institutions which benefit from the suffering of the working class, the establishment of free, high quality universal healthcare, and the creation of a society where human relationships are based on equality and cooperation, not exploitation and individualism.

Workers and youth must reject these reactionary elements and turn to the program of social revolution, which will provide a basis for the expansion of human freedom promised by the "sexual revolution" free from the defects of capitalist society. The workers present their own independent standpoint against the arch-reactionaries and religious figures who denounce, eg, the availability of contraceptives or reproductive healthcare. It is left to the us to salvage the kernel of progressive development and fight reaction. Only through the building of a revolutionary leadership in every country can humanity achieve genuine progress, free from the chains of capitalist reaction.

Repost - "Meltdown"

By Daniel Lazare

12.08.24 

(Permanent Revolution: Meltdown)

More than four weeks after Donald Trump’s election victory, it is increasingly clear where America is heading: toward militarization and authoritarian rule.

Trump’s strong-man tendencies have long been evident.  Although largely forgotten, he repeatedly accused Democrats of rigging the vote during the 2016 presidential campaign, warning that he might not concede even if the official tally went against him.  Such threats grew more and more ominous in 2020 until Trump finally sent his forces crashing across Capitol Hill in early 2021 in a last-ditch attempt to block Joe Biden’s victory and force Congress to name him the winner.  If Trump had lost in 2024, there would have been every reason to expect more of the same, i.e. more violence, more phony accusations of electoral theft, and more attempts to overturn the results. 

But now that he has won, Trumpian authoritarianism is in full view.  Examples include:

--  His ultra-confrontational cabinet picks;

--  His plans to force the Senate to adjourn so he can bypass the confirmation process and appoint cabinet members on his own;

-- His vow to use the military to round up as many as 11 million illegal aliens;

-- His promise to pardon hundreds of January 6 insurgents the moment he takes office;

 

-- And his close ties to the authors of Project 2025, the rightwing Heritage Foundation’s proposal for a sweeping purge of the federal bureaucracy and a “unitary executive” that will infuse the government with Christian nationalist values.

Trump’s cabinet choices run the gamut from ultra-right to centrist.  They include Marco Rubio, one of the most rightwing members of the Senate, who is his pick for secretary of state, and Pete Hegseth, his choice for defense secretary, who is a Christian nationalist who believes that “just like the Christian crusaders who pushed back the Muslim hordes in the twelfth century, American Crusaders will need to muster the same courage against Islamists today.”  But they also include relative moderates such as Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence and the ever-cranky Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as head of health and human services, who, despite his anti-vax views, is not otherwise illiberal.  Scott Bessent, his choice for treasury secretary, is openly gay while Howard Lutnick, his pick for commerce secretary, is a former Democrat -- as, of course, is Trump.

They're an eclectic mix that only have one thing in common: each in his or her own way is an affront to the Washington establishment, whether it's the “intelligence community” up in arms over Gabbard,  the healthcare industry terrified by the accession of RFK , or homophobic sectors of the Trump coalition .  The result is a take-it-or-leave-it approach in which Trump fairly dares the old guard on Capitol Hill to just say no.

If they do, the next step is plain: a constitutional showdown.  With the help of Mike Johnson, the ultra-conservative speaker of the House, Trump is bruiting plans to force the Senate to adjourn against its will so he can use his recess powers to ram through \ appointments on his own.  The strategy, based on an obscure constitutional clause in Article II, section three, is setting off alarms throughout official Washington, with even the libertarian Cato Institute describing it as a “norm-defying abuse” that would trigger “a full-blown constitutional crisis.”

But that is what Trump wants.  With the Supreme Court likely on his side, Trump wants a crisis so he can cow Congress into submission and stretch the Constitution to the limits so as to accommodate his authoritarian designs.  If the maneuver works, the upshot result will be a giant step toward Argentine-style neo-Peronism in which the chief executive casts off constitutional restraints and rules on his own by decree.   

Using the military to round up illegal aliens would cement authoritarianism even more firmly in place.  Article I, section nine, gives the president emergency powers to suspend habeas corpus “in cases of rebellion or invasion [as] the public safety may require it.”  So it's a perfect opportunity for a president armed with unilateral powers to denounce illegal immigration as a foreign invasion and announce that he is suspending judicial review so that he can round up millions of people and place them in special detention camps.  And if Trump rounds up millions of immigrants, then it's not too difficult to imagine other roundups that might follow, e.g. leftwing activists who defend immigrants and their interests, anti-Zionists, etc.

. 

As for Project 2025, it is a 1,000-page plan whose ultimate goal is to turn the federal bureaucracy into a conservative battering ram.  Among the goals is banishing DEI, i.e. diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, and other such “woke” initiatives and prosecuting “anti-white racism” instead.  Project 2025 also calls for barring the National Institutes of Health from engaging in stem cell research, rejiggering environmental regulations so as to favor fossil fuels, and criminalizing pornography.  Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts is explicit about Project 2025's goals.  “The long march of cultural Marxism through our institutions has come to pass,” he writes in the introduction.  “The federal government is a behemoth, weaponized against American citizens and conservative values, with freedom and liberty under siege as never before.”  

“Conservatives have just two years and one shot to get this right,” he adds.  “With enemies at home and abroad, there is no margin for error.”  

Then there are Trump’s plans to enlist Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy in a Javier Milei-like assault on the federal workforce along with his refusal to cooperate with federal agencies like the General Services Administration that traditionally oversee the transition process.  The plan is to decimate a government apparatus that he views as little more than enemy territory while elevating himself high it. 

“He should not trust the politicized and weaponized intelligence and law enforcement agencies that hobbled his presidency the first time,” declares Mike Davis, the leader of another pro-Trump outfit called the Article III Project.  “It’s a hostile takeover on behalf of the American people.”

Finally, there is Special Prosecutor Jack Smith’s decision to drop charges related to the Capitol Hill insurrection and Trump’s promise to pardon hundreds of “J6’ers.”  Together, they show how the federal government has given up holding Trump to account for the most serious constitutional breach since the Civil War and how the uprising itself is well on its way to being officially vindicated.  The very idea of free elections is coming under assault.  Henceforth, the only elections Republicans regard as valid will be elections they win.

What does it all add up to -- authoritarianism, Bonapartism, or out-and-out fascism?  With ostensible Marxist organizations all over the map with regard precisely what Trumpism at this stage represents, the answer in this writer's view is the first.  One reason is structural.  Broadly speaking, authoritarianism (or hyper-presidentialism to use the academic term) operates within existing constitutional guidelines.  Both Juan Perón of Argentina and Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines submitted to regular elections, for instance, and even January 6 would have ended on a constitutional note even if Trump had succeeded in throwing the election into the House since Republicans would no doubt have followed the procedures outlined in the Twelfth Amendment to the letter.

This is not to say that those constitutional procedures are anything other than obsolete, arcane, and undemocratic.  Considering that the Twelfth Amendment dates from 1803 and has never been updated, they are all those and more.  But what's important is that America’s weak and decrepit constitutional structure would have remained formally intact.  By contrast, Napoleon III, the subject of Marx’s famous study, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, overthrew the existing constitution after launching a coup d’état in 1851 so that he could draft a new constitution from scratch, one that allowed him to serve an unlimited number of ten-year terms and gave him have total authority to declare war, sign treaties, form alliances, and initiate laws.  The result was not authoritarianism under the existing constitution but dictatorship over it.  As for fascism, it dispenses with constitutionalism entirely by positing a mystical union between führer and volk that is above the law, one characterized by “unconditional authority downwards, highest responsibility upwards.”  Goebbels thus described Hitler as “the greater German, the führer, the prophet, the fighter, that last hope of the masses, the shining symbol of the German will to freedom” – anything, that is, except a mundane politician or officeholder.

Class relations are also key.  Trotsky described fascism as an attempt to resolve the contradictions of capitalism within the confines of the bourgeois state.  Since “[t]he productive forces are in irreconcilable contradiction not only with private property but also with national state boundaries,” the result is an effort “to solve this contradiction through an extension of boundaries, seizure of new territories, and so on.  The totalitarian state, subjecting all aspects of economic, political and cultural life to finance capital, is the instrument for creating a super-nationalist state, an imperialist empire, the rule over continents, the rule over the whole world.”

But Trump is not remotely there yet.  He is not a military expansionist, for example, and indeed attacked neocon hawk Liz Cheney during the campaign for launching “forever wars” from the comfort of Washington.  His choice of middle-of-the-road Wall Streeters like Lutnik and Bessent to head up negotiations with China indicates that, for now at least, he is intent on using financial rather than military means in dealing with the “threat” posed by the PRC.  

Bonapartism is meanwhile classically associated with a high pitch of class conflict in which the would-be ruler plays off the warring elements against one another so as to maintain himself in power.  Yet the current period is marked by working-class quiescence in which strikes, despite a recent uptick, are still running at a rate 75 percent or more below that of the late 1960s and early 70s.  

None of which is to say that Trump will not “graduate” to Bonapartism in the event of an economic or foreign-policy crisis or other disruption.  In fact, with the world in growing turmoil, such crises are more likely than not, which is why Bonapartism, i.e. outright political dictatorship, is plainly on the agenda.  Fascism, similarly, cannot be ruled out either although it will take political breakdown and a massive upsurge in revolutionary class struggle before it advances to the fore.

To sum up: Trumpism has not yet reached the Bonapartist stage, much less the fascist.  Nonetheless, constitutional constraints have been cast aside so forcibly.  The reason is the political breakdown of the last 30 years or so, which has been unprecedented.  The legislative branch is paralyzed, corruption is soaring, economic polarization is out of control, while ordinary citizens have rarely been more pessimistic.  An eighteenth-century constitution that is increasingly at odds with the needs of modern society is making a mockery of anything resembling democratic self-government.  If we toss in global warming, imperial overstretch, economic instability, and an increasingly powerful drive to war, then it is evident that capitalism is entering into the greatest crisis in history, a perfect multi-dimensional storm involving everything from high finance and the environment to political structure.  With its limits and contradictions, American democracy was never more than a crude facsimile.  But even that it is collapsing under the strain of a growing capitalist breakdown.

As far as the US is concerned, this means that mass repression, cultural reaction, and crude expressions of racism, sexism, and homophobia will all follow.  Life in America is changing rapidly, and there is nothing that middle-class radicals, “progressive” journalists, or the washed-up liberals who constitute the Democratic Party’s left wing can do to return it to anything resembling normalcy.

The only force capable of combatting such tendencies is the proletariat.  But it can do so not by restoring the old pseudo-democracy but by replacing it with a real democracy in the form of a [Global] (Correction - IC'53) workers’ state.  The more repressive and unstable the Trump administration grows, the more the working class must take the lead.  Five programmatic elements are absolutely crucial:

-- No to one-man rule.

 

-- No to mass deportations.

 

-- No to war.

 

-- Yes to workers’ solidarity on both sides of the US-Mexican border.

 

-- Yes to a democratic constituent assembly elected on the basis of strict proportional representation whose task will be to reconstruct America’s broken system of government from the ground up.  

Crisis of Democracy

By Daniel Lazare

The one safe prediction we can make about the upcoming presidential election is that it can only result in a further intensification of the crisis of US democracy.

This is not Marxist boiler-plate in which bourgeois democracy is always bankrupt and capitalism is always in its death throes.   This is the real thing.  A lot of concerns are weighing on voters’ minds as Election Day nears, the economy, the climate crisis, inflation, and housing prices, to name just a few.  But among the most pressing is an across-the-board constitutional breakdown that is rapidly accelerating.  For example:

-- The Electoral College, which nearly quadruples the clout of voters in lily-white Wyoming versus those in minority-majority California, is playing an increasingly outsized role.  In the first two centuries of the American republic, the EC overturned the popular vote on only three occasions: in 1824, 1876, and 1888.  But it has already done so twice since November 2000 and may well do it a third time next month.

-- The Senate is more imbalanced than at any point since 1820.[1]  Thanks to equal state representation, it allows the 54 percent of the population that lives in just ten states to be outvoted four-to-one by the minority in the other forty.  A majority can be gleaned from senators representing just 17 percent of the country while a filibuster can be gleaned from 41 senators representing as little as eleven.

-- The House is so heavily gerrymandered that Republicans next month may enjoy as much as a 16-seat advantage according to estimates by the Brennan Center for Justice. 

-- The Supreme Court is increasingly undemocratic not just in terms of decision making but structure.  Five of the six justices who comprise the court’s six-member conservative majority were nominated by presidents who lost the popular vote (i.e. Roberts, Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barret), while four were confirmed by senators representing a minority of the population (Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, Barrett, and Thomas).  Given that Clarence Thomas, the oldest member of the court, is just 76, the rightwing judicial dictatorship will likely continue well into the mid-2030s.  If Trump wins a second term, it will continue even longer.

-- Federalism is in shambles.  Since January, Texas has seized control of a portion of the US-Mexican border in the town of Eagle Pass, 140 miles west of San Antonio.  This is outright insurrection, yet the White House is paralyzed.

-- Racial imbalances are growing.  More than 80 percent of racial minorities live in the ten biggest states that are outvoted in the Senate while states that are rural and white tend to benefit most from the Electoral College.  The multi-racial urban majority thus finds itself more and more disenfranchised.

-- What makes this even worse is that reform is essentially impossible thanks to the dysfunctional amending clause laid out in Article V, which stipulates that two-thirds of each house plus three-fourths of the states must consent before changing so much as a comma in America’s holy of holies.  Thirteen states representing as little as 4.4 percent of the nation can thus veto any effort at structural change, no matter how modest.  The US is as frozen as the Celestial Empire on the eve of the 1911 revolution.

The upshot is a perfect impasse.  All advanced capitalist states are under growing strain due to the post-2008 “long recession” and a host of problems that go along with it.  But since no country is saddled with a constitution that is as ancient, dysfunctional, and all-encompassing as the US version, no one faces a mechanical breakdown of anywhere near the same magnitude.  It is the equivalent of a car with a missing headlight, a missing wheel, and a sputtering engine.  But even if it leaves Americans stranded by the side of the road, there is nothing they can do because Article V renders them powerless.  Even a constitutional convention is a non-starter since Article V stipulates that its decisions are merely recommendations subject to the same two-thirds, three-fourths rule.  Wealthy minority interests are using the breakdown to impose an increasingly rightwing agenda.  Yet the democratic majority is powerless to respond.  

Powerless under the existing system, that is, but not under a new one of its own making.

There is a way out -- not a constitutional convention as outlined in Article V, but a constituent assembly along the lines of France in 1789 or Russia in 1917.  The difference is crucial.  Where one takes place under the Constitution, which describes how it may be called and what it can do, the other takes place over the Constitution since it is a gathering of the constituent elements – “we the people” and all that – who created it in the first place.  It is therefore free to operate on the Constitution as a whole, not according to the document’s rules, but according to its own, which is to say those of direct democracy.  If the assembly votes to ditch the Second Amendment, then out it goes.  If it votes to drop the Constitution in toto and draw up a new plan of government to take its place, then out it goes too.  

This is not a constitutional solution, since no such solution exists.  Rather, it is a revolutionary solution whose goal is either to create a new state or re-found the existing state on an entirely new basis.  Hence, it is one that only the industrial proletariat can implement.  

The US thus faces a classic choice between breakdown and revolution, between decay, authoritarianism, and a deepening social crisis on one hand and socialist democracy on the other.  The founding fathers have done us the favor of closing off all other escape routes.

As for the individual candidates running in 2024, they are an expression of the political crisis rather than in any sense an answer to it.

Kamala Harris is the candidate of the center-right status quo.  While she claims to stand for change, she has made it crystal clear that she will continue White House policies based on war, repression, economic royalism, and inaction in the face of accelerating climate change.  She represents the politics of muddling through, of doing whatever it takes to make it from day to day without regard to long-term considerations.  When vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz recently suggested that the Electoral College should go, the Harris campaign forced him to recant.  Even mentioning the structural crisis was more than Harris could bear.

Donald Trump, by contrast, is the candidate of lower-income voters who are “mad as hell and are not going to take it anymore,” to quote the 1976 movie “Network.”  They support him not despite the fact that he is a bull in a china shop, but because of it.  In their blind fury, they can think of no solution other than smashing stuff up and are therefore counting on him to do it.  His authoritarianism and destructiveness flow from a political structure that is broken, irrational, and increasingly undemocratic.  

For what it’s worth, this writer rates Trump’s chances at 41 percent and Harris’s at 39, with a 20-percent chance of January 6-style chaos instead.  But regardless of who wins, the great American breakdown will continue unabated.

[1] Frances E. Lee and Bruce L. Oppenheimer, Sizing Up the Senate: The Unequal Consequences of Equal Representation (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1999), 10-11.

Engels and The Fight for Dialectical Materialism Today

(This August 5th marked the 129th anniversary of Frederick Engels’ death, who together with Karl Marx founded the modern working class movement. For this occasion we are republishing an article originally printed in recognition of the 150th anniversary of his birth.)

BY TIM WOHLFORTH 

… So closely did Marx and Engels collaborate in this work that it is difficult and in many cases impossible to separate out their distinct contributions to Marxist thought. 

Engels in particular wrote on questions of philosophy and for this we must pay special tribute at this time. While this in part reflects his special interests in anthropology and science, it was just as much due to Marx’s preoccupation with Capital. Capital, of course, was for Marx a theoretical task of the highest order and as such a real development of Marxist philosophy. For those who look for a ‘‘textbook’’ by Marx on dialectical materialism could well start with Capital. Particularly important among his philosophical writings was Anti-Duhring with its important section Socialism; Utopian and Scientific, Dialectics of Nature, and Feuerbach. Because Engels took up such a sharp fight for materialism and insisted that dialectical logic was a reflection in the mind of the real contradictory movement of material reality, he has come under increasing fire by idealists. 

ATTACKS

Their essential argument is to contrast the early Marx who had not yet fully developed his materialist and class outlook with the later writings of Engels. These attacks on Engels’ materialism, which have become popular in current academic ‘‘Marxist’’ circles, actually have their origins in this country with the pragmatists of the 1930s. It was Professor Sydney Hook who wrote in 1936: 

“Marx himself never speaks of a NaturDialektik, although he was quite aware that gradual quantitative changes in the fundamental units of physics and chemistry result in qualitative changes. Engels, however, in his Anti-Duhring and in his posthumously published manuscript Dialektik und Natur openly extends the dialectic to natural phenomena. His definition of dialectic, however, indicates that he is unaware of the distinctive character of the dialectic as opposed to the physical concept of ‘change’ and the biological concept of ‘development.’ ‘Dialectic,’ he writes, ‘is nothing more than the science of universal laws of motion and evolution in nature, human society and thought.’” (From Hegel to Marx, Page 75.) 

This attempt to pit the later Engels against Marx is of course a blatant fraud. For instance Marx himself writes in 1873 in the preface to the Second Edition of Capital: 

“(My dialectic method is not only different from the Hegelian, but is its direct opposite. To Hegel, the life process of the human brain, i.e., the process of thinking, which, under the name of ‘The Idea,’ he even transforms into an independent subject, is the demiurge of the real world, and the real world is only the external phenomenal form of ‘The Idea.’ With me, on the contrary, the ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought.”

These attacks on Engels were continued by James Burnham, leader of the petty bourgeois opposition within the Socialist Workers Party in 1940. Burnham wrote of Engels: 

“I find about 75 percent of what Engels wrote in these latter fields (He is referring to ‘‘philosophy, logic, natural science and scientific method’’—TW) to be confused or outmoded by subsequent scientific investigation - in either case of little value. It seems to me (and as a Marxist I do not find it astonishing) that in them Engels was a true son of his generation, the generation of Herbert Spencer and Thomas Huxley, of the popularizers of Darwin who thought that by a metaphorical extension of the hypothesis of biological evolution they had discovered the ultimate key to the mysteries of the universe.”

PRAGMATISTS

Trotsky is-then accused of serving up “only a stale re-hash of Engels.” 

What these American pragmatists find so reprehensible in Engels is Engels’ insistence that the development of the real world is lawful and that our minds can accurately reflect this development if we can master dialectical thinking. Through dialectics our very forms of thought are developed so as to bring out the real struggle and change in the natural and social world. 

The idealism of Hook and Burnham was actually a reflection of a class position of the middle class intellectual, confronted with the rise of fascism and the needs of its own ruling class to prepare for imperialist war. Thus they sharply rebelled against a philosophical stand which exposed the real class nature of society and their responsibility to take a stand on class issues and fight to change the world through the construction of the party. For them the real world was not lawful and thus they could not really effect it. They could thus only accept it by adapting to the needs of those who ran it - the imperialists.

The thinking of Engels was always in sharp contradiction with American pragmatism. It was Engels who said of this country:

“...From good historical reasons the Americans are worlds behind in all theoretical things, and while they did not bring over any medieval institutions from Europe they did bring over masses of medieval traditions, religion, English common (feudal) law, superstition, spiritualism, in short every kind of imbecility which was not directly harmful to business and which is now very serviceable for making the masses stupid.’’ (Letter to Sorge in 1886.) 

American pragmatism was to be in the later period a development of such imbecility. 

To Engels the development of dialectics was precisely to make possible revolutionary activity, to prepare for and carry through the socialist revolution. Engels, in his later years, carried on an extensive correspondence to this end with American Marxists. In this way he became thoroughly acquainted with American conditions, the level of the American working class and its historical peculiarities as well as the weaknesses of the American Marxists themselves. It must be remembered that Engels had authored the articles which appeared under Marx’s name in the New York Herald on the German revolution and that he had written extensively on the American Civil War, particularly its military aspects. 

It was in this context that Engels took up the fight to turn the early Marxists in America into the actual organizations of the American working class and urged them to take up the fight for a labor party. He wrote: 

“The first great step of importance for every country newly entering in the move- ment is always the constitution of the workers as an independent political party, no matter how, so long as it is a distinct workers’ party.”

This brought him into collision with a section of the German-American movement about which he stated: 

“The Germans have not understood how to use their theory as a lever which could set the American masses in motion; they do not understand the theory themselves for the most part and treat it in a doctrinaire and dogmatic way as something that has to be learned by heart, which then will satisfy all requirements forthwith. To them it is a credo and not a guide to action.” 

THEORETICAL

The meaning of Engels’ work and struggle for us today comes out sharply in all this. First, we can see that the first real development of an understanding of the American working class, its theoretical backwardness and its great potential if and only if, the American Marxists learn to penetrate it so as to pit it politically against the capitalists - this understanding came from Engels along with Marx. Thus a perspective for the development of the American working class came out of the international experience and theoretical leadership of the proletariat - and not out of some peculiar American development. 

This perspective, this need to struggle for a labor party in the United States and through this struggle for Marxists to penetrate deep into the working class, can only be carried forward through an understanding of Engels’ theoretical work as a whole - in particular his fight for dialectics as a comrade-in-arms of Marx. American pragmatism comes into collision with Engels’ materialist dialectics and as such reinforces the American bourgeoisie making it impossible for American Marxists to penetrate the working class. 

It is precisely the pragmatism of the present-day Socialist Workers Party which leads it to adapt to middle class movements, abstain from work in the trade unions, and refuse to fight actively for the labor party as Engels urged. It is not surprising that the SWP makes no mention of the 150th birthday of Engels. To the SWP Engels is a figure but not the leader of a theoretical struggle vital to the construction of the party now. 

CP

The Communist Party organ Political Affairs publishes an editorial on Engels’ birthday which does not say a single word about his relationship to the United States and the political and theoretical struggle he waged for a class party here. This is then followed, not by an editorial, but actually a Political Committee Resolution on the 60th birthday of Gus Hall. Engels merits an editorial but Gus gets a resolution (which he no doubt voted for as a member of the Political Committee.) 

What is essential today is that we go to school with.Engels and seek to learn from him what the early Marxists in this country turned a deaf ear to, what the pragmatists of the 1930s sought to deny, and what the contemporary revisionists and opportunists treat with disdain as they go about their essentially liberal business. 

TURN

We must take a sharp turn towards dialectical materialism as we actually go out into the working class and take up the struggle to defend the working class politically against the new attacks of Nixon, Agnew and the whole imperialist ruling class behind them. The solution to the American question requires above all an international perspective and this at heart is a fight for dialectical materialism.