Maoist Communist Union (U.S.A.)

The Political Struggle of the Proletariat

By Ryan Costello, the Chair of MCU

Introduction

In the prevailing period of reaction, which seems to be coming to an end as the U.S. empire is collapsing in West Asia, there is great confusion, at least in U.S. Marxist circles, on the fundamental distinction between economic and political struggles of the proletariat. In the post-1970s reaction, as part of the U.S. bourgeoisie’s efforts to co-opt mass outrage and funnel it into individualist consumerism and dead-end liberal politics, the slogan “the personal is political” became a widely accepted truism.1 The petty-bourgeoisie, which as Lenin noted, in periods of reaction retreats into mysticism and pornography,2 is particularly amenable to this slogan, seeing in it both a message of individual liberty but also a latent Christian (even Puritanical) moralism, so ubiquitous in American society.3

And thus, in this period of reaction, the progressive mass revolts of the 1960s and 70s—which struggled against everything from the Vietnam War to the oppression of women and Black people—were transformed into their opposite, a bourgeois culture of sumptuary laws which placed the responsibility for social change on the individual’s consumer and interpersonal decisions. In this way, class politics were replaced with identity politics and social movementism, with their twin pillars of support, professional (NGO) activism and academia. With all this, confusion on the nature of politics, class politics, became typical in the U.S. left, as each and every social issue and movement struggle was treated as a “political struggle” of a special interest group despite very few U.S. movements over the past half-century presenting even a minor challenge to the continued supremacy of bourgeois rule in the U.S. This culminated in the “stakeholder” politics of DEI. 

This is the social morass in which many U.S. Marxists grew up and in which they were socialized. While some have broken with the most crass and vulgar forms of these bourgeois politics, many vestiges of this ideology remain. As a result, most struggle to grasp the essence of proletarian political struggles, and still implicitly have a bourgeois reformist (or petty bourgeois radical) understanding of the fundamental essence of political struggles. Thus, in line with the dominant state-approved “leftist” politics, they tend to label as political any social movement, protest, or struggle for a partial demand (reform) that is not immediately about wages, hours, conditions, or unionization. Unless these confusions are dispelled, it is impossible to grasp the essential nature of proletarian politics.

Class Politics

For Marxism, a political struggle is one of class against class. Rigorously speaking, class conflict—e.g. the economic struggles of the proletariat for better wages, hours, conditions, etc.—is not yet a form of class struggle, since, in it, the proletariat does not exist as a class-for-itself; regardless of the heroism it may show in a given struggle, it still remains ideologically dominated by the bourgeoisie. It is only once the proletariat is able to organizationally and ideologically wrest itself from the domination of the bourgeoisie and exert its class independence that it, properly speaking, wages political struggles.

In The Poverty of Philosophy, Marx, in 1847, explains how the working class movement in England had developed from its early economic struggles to the point of waging political struggles with rise of the Chartist movement:

The first attempt of workers to associate among themselves always takes place in the form of combinations.

Large-scale industry concentrates in one place a crowd of people unknown to one another. Competition divides their interests. But the maintenance of wages, this common interest which they have against their boss, unites them in a common thought of resistance—combination. Thus combination always has a double aim, that of stopping competition among the workers, so that they can carry on general competition with the capitalist. If the first aim of resistance was merely the maintenance of wages, combinations, at first isolated, constitute themselves into groups as the capitalists in their turn unite for the purpose of repression, and in the face of always united capital, the maintenance of the association becomes more necessary to them than that of wages. This is so true that English economists are amazed to see the workers sacrifice a good part of their wages in favor of associations, which, in the eyes of these economists, are established solely in favor of wages. In this struggle—a veritable civil war—all the elements necessary for a coming battle unite and develop. Once it has reached this point, association takes on a political character.

Economic conditions had first transformed the mass of the people of the country into workers. The combination of capital has created for this mass a common situation, common interests. This mass is thus already a class as against capital, but not yet for itself. In the struggle, of which we have noted only a few phases, this mass becomes united, and constitutes itself as a class for itself. The interests it defends become class interests. But the struggle of class against class is a political struggle.4

Thus, it is only once the proletariat organizes itself into a class-for-itself, at least to some degree, that political struggle becomes possible. These political struggles vary in degrees and intensity, from major political strikes, to the revolutionary overthrow of the class, the smashing of the capitalist state, and the total revolutionization of society which follows the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat.5

However, there are many steps between the most basic of political struggles of proletariat and the revolutionary overthrow of the bourgeoisie. And, Marx makes clear in the above quote, the economic struggles of the proletariat (and related organizations for these struggles, especially unions, the most basic organizations of the class) must develop to a certain point before the proletariat is ideologically and practically capable of waging political struggles. All of this is necessary but not a sufficient condition for the leap to be made from economic to political struggle, a leap which requires, as Lenin explains in What is to Be Done?, that the proletariat purge itself of bourgeois ideology by coming to understand the issues is society—affecting all classes, groups, and strata—from a distinctly proletarian perspective. For this, a vanguard party is needed. More on this later.

Despite the extreme clarity and precision which with Marx writes on this topic, there remains a good deal of confusion on the matter in U.S. Marxist circles. This can, in part, be attributed to the prevailing philosophical pragmatism and the related lack of familiarity with the most basic aspects of dialectics.6 The closely related tendency to take quotes out of context and treat them as abstract definitions also contributes to the widespread confusion on the basic distinction between economic and political struggles.

For example, some point to Marx’s statements about how the struggle to pass a law on the eight-hour days is a political movement and incorrectly conclude that every struggle to pass an important legal reform is therefore a political struggle. Generally those who promote this confusion draw on only a sentence or two of Marx’s 1871 letter to Friedrich Bolte. It is therefore helpful, in working to dissipate this rightist confusion, to quote the letter in full:

The political movement of the working class has as its object, of course, the conquest of political power for the working class, and for this it is naturally necessary that a previous organisation of the working class, itself arising from their economic struggles, should have been developed up to a certain point.

On the other hand, however, every movement in which the working class comes out as a class against the ruling classes and attempts to force them by pressure from without is a political movement. For instance, the attempt in a particular factory or even a particular industry to force a shorter working day out of the capitalists by strikes, etc., is a purely economic movement. On the other hand the movement to force an eight-hour day, etc., law is a political movement. And in this way, out of the separate economic movements of the workers there grows up everywhere a political movement, that is to say a movement of the class, with the object of achieving its interests in a general form, in a form possessing a general social force of compulsion. If these movements presuppose a certain degree of previous organisation, they are themselves equally a means of the development of this organisation.

Where the working class is not yet far enough advanced in its organisation to undertake a decisive campaign against the collective power, i.e., the political power of the ruling classes, it must at any rate be trained for this by continual agitation against and a hostile attitude towards the policy of the ruling classes. Otherwise it will remain a plaything in their hands, as the September revolution in France showed, and as is also proved up to a certain point by the game Messrs. Gladstone & Co. are bringing off in England even up to the present time.7

From this quote, it is evident that Marx continued, even after 1848, to define political struggle in the same way, as class against class. The point is not that any struggle for a legislative reform is a political struggle, but rather once the proletariat, as a class, has organization it to a sufficient degree that it can independently fight on the scale necessary to force the bourgeoisie to pass legislative reforms, then the proletariat is capable of political struggles. That said, given the prevailing confusions surrounding this quote and the nature of political struggles more broadly, it can be helpful to elaborate on a few fundamental points in greater detail.

First, not all struggles around legislation constitute political struggles of the class, even if workers are involved in those struggles. Marx is exceedingly clear in all of his writing that the working class must make a decisive break with the bourgeoisie ideologically, so that it does not “remain a plaything in their [the bourgeoisie’] hands,” in order to constitute itself into a class-for-itself (not a class-in-itself, and therefore for-the-bourgeoisie), hence his emphasis on the need for “continual agitation and a hostile attitude towards the policy of the ruling classes.” Therefore, when workers participate, even through the involvement of their unions, in movements led by bourgeois reformists, NGOs, and politicians—even if these movements are for some legislative reform—these are not yet political struggles of class against class. Actually, the capitalists have, since Marx’s time, developed incredibly sophisticated methods of social control to misdirect the masses opposition to bourgeois class dictatorship into one end or another.8 Hence the need for communists to continuously develop and refine their agitational work in light of the objective situation, and not be caught, as it were, flatfooted on the ever shifting sands of the media landscape of bourgeois society.

As Lenin never tired of emphasizing, it is only through all-around and topical exposures of all the outrages and injustices in society affecting all classes, groups, and strata that communists can raise the proletariat to true class consciousness. This is because the very essence of the proletariat’s class interest is to lead all these sections of society in the struggle against bourgeois society. It is only thus, in the era of capitalist-imperialism, that the existence of proletariat’s antagonism with bourgeois society—which is distinct from its being—can be developed and sustained all the way to the point of the revolutionary overthrow of the bourgeoisie and beyond.9

Therefore, it should be evident that there is a tremendous difference between the proletariat, organized as an independent class force, leading a national struggle for an eight-hour day, and the proletariat participating, even if occasionally through their unions, in a defanged Democratic Party led movement like the “Fight for $15” or the No Kings protests.

Second, to reinforce this point, it can be helpful to look at the actual history of the struggle for the shortening of the working day in Marx’s own time. This was during the heroic era of unionization, when, in most countries, the proletariat had yet to wrest from the bourgeoisie even the legal recognition of its unions. In the U.S. the strike struggles of the day were pitched battles, and often involving major violent clashes with the state forces, as the bourgeoisie had not yet developed its form of class rule in such a way so as to be able to co-opt and misdirect with relative ease (at least in periods of stability) the economic struggle of the working class.10 11

For example the Great Railroad Strike of 1877 in the U.S., which was an integral part of the fight for an eight-hour day, involved over 100,000 workers and spread rapidly across the country. At the time, workers were not organized into unions in the U.S., and while some sections of the 1st International played a role in the strike, it was largely a spontaneous affair. Despite this spontaneity, it was a properly political strike, and workers fought strikebreakers, the police, the National Guard, and eventually, after driving back the National Guard, federal troops.

In St. Louis, under the leadership of the 1st International, a commune was founded—inspired by the Paris Commune—and while it lasted only a few short days, this was the highest expression of the proletarian politics at the heart of this great strike, and the only place in the country where things developed into a proper general strike, the first of its kind in the U.S.12 It was in St. Louis that the demand for the eight-hour day was taken up most clearly, though the Railway Strike was defeated, this demand for an eight-hour day would go on to be rallying cry of the U.S. strike movement in the late-nineteenth century.

However, the bourgeoisie did not simply role over and accept defeat; rather, they reacted and adapted their society so as to prevent the future becoming-antagonistic of the form of proletarian struggle. In A People’s History of the United States, Howard Zinn describes some of these changes:

The railroads made some concessions, withdrew some wage cuts, but also strengthened their “Coal and Iron Police.” In a number of large cities, National Guard armories were built, with loopholes for guns. Robert Bruce believes the strikes taught many people of the hardships of others, and that they led to congressional railroad regulation. They may have stimulated the business unionism of the American Federation of Labor as well as the national unity of labor proposed by the Knights of Labor, and the independent labor-farmer parties of the next two decades.

And:

In the year 1877, the signals were given for the rest of the century: the blacks would be put back; the strikes of white workers would not be tolerated; the industrial and political elites of North and South would take hold of the country and organize the greatest march of economic growth in human history. They would do it with the aid of, and at the expense of, black labor, white labor, Chinese labor, European immigrant labor, female labor, rewarding them differently by race, sex, national origin, and social class, in such a way as to create separate levels of oppression—a skillful terracing to stabilize the pyramid of wealth.

Thus U.S. bourgeois society was transformed, as the old order developed new ways of resisting the new forms of proletarian organization and unity that had sprung up during the 1877 strike wave that rocked the country. This is a topic that deserved further analysis, and the reactionary developments in bourgeois society, reactions of the ruling class to popular movements, are little understood in U.S. Marxist circles. However, it is not possible to discuss these changes—or the subsequent ones which followed in the wake of the Great Depression with the New Deal—in this paper.

For the purposes of clarifying the nature of political struggles of the proletariat, these examples serve to show the intensity of the struggles around the eight-hour day and other key demands of the proletariat, and to clarify that despite the scale, scope, and militancy of these struggles, Marx and Engels thought that they would only lay the foundation for a proper workers’ party in the U.S. Thus we can see that even the massive railway strike was just the very beginnings of political struggle of the working class, actually its first properly political struggle in the history of the U.S.

From this, it should be clear that it is an utter mockery and debasement of the Marxist concept of political struggle, and of Marxism in general, to refer to some workers joining Democratic-Party led protests—or those, like the No Kings protests, which are led by their front-organizations—as a “political struggles.” It is only when the working class constitutes itself into a political force and ceases to be a political appendage of bourgeois-led movements that it can wage political struggle.

Any ability to sustain political struggles requires not only favorable objective conditions (e.g. the rapid period of industrialization in the wake of the Civil War and the Long Depression that prevailed in 1877, etc.), but also an organized proletarian party capable of taking advantage of these conditions to guide the struggles of the proletariat (both economic and political) towards the eventual overthrow of the bourgeoisie. While Marx and Engels did not live to see this development in their lifetimes, it was Lenin who not only saw this but developed it firsthand.

1905 and the Mass Political Strike Movement

The Russian workers were the first in the world to develop the strike struggle on the mass scale that we witnessed in 1905–07. Now it is the British workers who have lent a new great impetus to the strike movement with regard to economic strikes. The Russian workers owe their leading role, not to greater strength, better organisation or higher development compared with the workers in Western Europe, but to the fact that so far Europe has not gone through great national crises with the proletarian masses taking an independent part in them. —Lenin, Economic and Political Strikes

It was in Russia during the 1905 Revolution that the proletariat, for the first time in history, engaged in a mass political strike movement. In the crisis that rocked Russian society in the wake of the defeat in the Russo-Japanese War and the massacre of Bloody Sunday, the working class emerged as an independent political force on a nation-wide scale. Decades of work by Russian Marxists to educate the workers—first through study circles, then through economic agitation, and then through political agitation and propaganda—had equipped the advanced section of the Russian proletariat with a communist understanding of the major issues in Russian society. Their knowledge extended far beyond just their immediate “shop floor” issues or even the issues prevailing in their particular industry. The advanced workers in Russia understood the major issues and outrages affecting all oppressed classes, groups, and strata in Russian society. What’s more, roughly a decade of economic strikes under Marxist leadership had prepared the class for a hard and bitter struggle against the Russia Autocracy and the capitalists.

During the 1905 Revolution the Russian proletariat did not play the role of one class among the others (i.e. it did not exist as a class-in-itself) but rather played the leading role in the revolutionary struggle. The proletariat rallied all other progressive classes to its banner and guided, to the extent that it was capable of at the time, their struggle against the Russian autocracy and the ruling classes. In this sense, in the struggle of class against class, the other classes progressive classes were for-the-proletariat.

In a political strike, the working class comes forward as the advanced class of the whole people. In such cases, the proletariat plays not merely the role of one of the classes of bourgeois society, but the role of guide, vanguard, leader. The political ideas manifested in the movement involve the whole people, i.e., they concern the basic, most profound conditions of the political life of the whole country. This character of the political strike, as has been noted by all scientific investigators of the period 1905–07, brought into the movement all the classes, and particularly, of course, the widest, most numerous and most democratic sections of the population, the peasantry, and so forth.13

The Russian proletariat was only able to play this leading role because of the existence of the Bolshevik Party and the work it had done to educate the workers on the nature of Russian society as a whole. As Lenin noted in his 1897 pamphlet, Tasks of the Russian Social-Democrats, by teaching the advanced workers the nature of the problems other classes face, in particular the peasantry—and by teaching them to understand these problems from a proletarian perspective, and not the perspective of the petty proprietor—the workers were able to then spread, to some degree, Marxist ideas among the peasantry and help lead their struggles (spontaneous and disconnected as they were) into part of a unified revolutionary movement against Tsardom. While this was only partially successful in 1905, as the Revolution was eventually defeated, the Russian proletariat would experience much greater success in leading the peasantry during the October Revolution.14

From the experiences of the 1905 Revolution, it is clear that, when the proletariat wages a political struggle, it leads the other classes and oppressed groups in the society in their struggles against the ruling classes. It is not enough for a small minority of the proletariat to take a firm stand on a given issue (e.g. police brutality, abortion, ICE, etc.). Rather, as Lenin notes, the proletariat must play “not merely the role of one of the classes of bourgeois society”—which is to say it cannot be one of the many classes for-the-other that is the bourgeoisie—it must instead emerge as the political, organizational, and ideological leader of the other classes, groups, and strata in the society. Otherwise, the proletariat will exist merely as an appendage of bourgeois society, it will fail to develop into the antagonistic other of the bourgeoisie, and thus, at best, the proletarian forces will exist as opposition groups, unable to ever meaningfully challenge the class dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.

It must be recognized that ultimately, the development of revisionism in Parties is tied to their subjective weakness, their unwillingness and inability to guide the proletariat’s struggle in such a way that it can become a truly antagonistic other to bourgeois society. Lenin, in his struggles against various forms of revisionism (e.g. the economists, the Mensheviks, etc.) constantly emphasized that in order to actually be a Marxist, and thus to actually take seriously the task of developing the class consciousness of the proletariat, it was totally insufficient to focus the workers’ attention primarily on their own issues. This is because, in order to lead the revolutionary struggle of the oppressed, the proletariat must have concrete knowledge of their issues, ideas, and aspirations and be able to respond to them from a proletarian perspective and no other. Only thus can these forces be won over to support proletarian leadership in the eventual revolutionary struggle against the bourgeoisie.

Lenin explains this very clearly and precisely in What is to Be Done?:

In reality, it is possible to “raise the activity of the working masses” only when this activity is not restricted to “political agitation on an economic basis.” A basic condition for the necessary expansion of political agitation is the organisation of comprehensive political exposure. In no way except by means of such exposures can the masses be trained in political consciousness and revolutionary activity. Hence, activity of this kind is one of the most important functions of international Social-Democracy as a whole, for even political freedom does not in any way eliminate exposures; it merely shifts somewhat their sphere of direction. Thus, the German party is especially strengthening its positions and spreading its influence, thanks particularly to the untiring energy with which it is conducting its campaign of political exposure. Working-class consciousness cannot be genuine political consciousness unless the workers are trained to respond to all cases of tyranny, oppression, violence, and abuse, no matter what class is affected—unless they are trained, moreover, to respond from a Social-Democratic point of view and no other. The consciousness of the working masses cannot be genuine class-consciousness, unless the workers learn, from concrete, and above all from topical, political facts and events to observe every other social class in all the manifestations of its intellectual, ethical, and political life; unless they learn to apply in practice the materialist analysis and the materialist estimate of all aspects of the life and activity of all classes, strata, and groups of the population. Those who concentrate the attention, observation, and consciousness of the working class exclusively, or even mainly, upon itself alone are not Social-Democrats; for the self-knowledge of the working class is indissolubly bound up, not solely with a fully clear theoretical understanding—or rather, not so much with the theoretical, as with the practical, understanding—of the relationships between all the various classes of modern society, acquired through the experience of political life. For this reason the conception of the economic struggle as the most widely applicable means of drawing the masses into the political movement, which our Economists preach, is so extremely harmful and reactionary in its practical significance. In order to become a Social-Democrat, the worker must have a clear picture in his mind of the economic nature and the social and political features of the landlord and the priest, the high state official and the peasant, the student and the vagabond; he must know their strong and weak points; he must grasp the meaning of all the catchwords and sophisms by which each class and each stratum camouflages its selfish strivings and its real “inner workings;” he must understand what interests are reflected by certain institutions and certain laws and how they are reflected. But this “clear picture” cannot be obtained from any book. It can be obtained only from living examples and from exposures that follow close upon what is going on about us at a given moment; upon what is being discussed, in whispers perhaps, by each one in his own way; upon what finds expression in such and such events, in such and such statistics, in such and such court sentences, etc., etc. These comprehensive political exposures are an essential and fundamental condition for training the masses in revolutionary activity.15

In “peaceful” times, the various oppressed groups and classes in society still conceive of their struggles in dominantly bourgeois terms, or “at best” in terms of petty-bourgeois radicalism. Without proletarian leadership, and in particular, without training the advanced elements of the proletariat through means of all-around topical political exposures, it is totally and completely impossible to rally the progressive forces in society around communist politics and to break them from their ideological subordination to the bourgeoisie.16 A brief survey of recent protests movements in the U.S. helps to drive this point home.

During the George Floyd protests, the main demands included calls for defunding the police (a reform under capitalism, which the U.S. bourgeoisie were not willing to grant) or abolishing the police (an impossibility without overthrowing the bourgeoisie and then eliminating classes, thus a petty-bourgeois utopian fantasy). A common slogan around to which anti-war protestors have marched for decades is “money for jobs and education, not for war and occupation.” This slogan accurately expresses the views of many in the protests, namely that the U.S. should spend less on foreign wars and more on domestic concerns. This demand is essentially compatible with U.S. imperialism, as it simply advocates some budgetary adjustments, and does not challenge the class domination of the bourgeoisie.

Even the brave student occupations of university campuses in protest of the Israeli genocide of Palestinians raised three demands largely compatible with capitalism: “disclose, divest, and decolonize.” The first two demands are well within the scope of possibilities for universities and do not in any way challenge the basic function of higher education under capitalism. The third, depending on how it is understood and interpreted, could be a revolutionary demand (e.g. real and thoroughgoing decolonization of Palestine, etc.) but it can also be understood in a typical liberal academic manner (e.g. more funding for “post-colonial” studies on campus, “decolonize your mind,” etc.).

To be clear, the criticism of these slogans is not meant to disparage the courage the masses have shown in these struggles. Actually, despite the political and ideological limitations critiqued above, in all of these struggles the masses showed tremendous and inspiring heroism and self-sacrifice. However, insofar as their very conceptions of their struggles remained under the dominant influence of bourgeoise ideology, they were unable to exercise real political independence from the bourgeoisie. And thus we saw, for example, the mass rebellions of the George Floyd protests quickly dissipate, only to be replaced with a Biden presidency, DEI initiatives, and increased funding for various Democratic-Party-aligned NGOs.

It is only by equipping the working class with the revolutionary theory of Marxism that it is possible for there to be a revolutionary movement. This is the only Marxist understanding of Lenin’s statement that “without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement.” Workers must be trained to understand, via the creative application of Marxism, the whole society with all of its different social forces, from a distinctly proletarian perspective. They must, through the leadership of the Party and based on the mass line, gain a concrete understanding—meaning the unity of general and particular—of the society and the forces therein so as to be able to win the progressive classes, groups, and strata over to revolutionary struggle and provide proletarian leadership to their various struggles for partial demands. 

Every other interpretation lapses into narrow dogmatism (e.g. believing that its is sufficient to simply study or teach the basics of Marxist theory without a concrete application) or an intellectual elitism (e.g. that it is the intellectuals alone who must be equipped with Marxist theory so they can lead the workers) which reproduces the capitalist division of mental and manual labor. 

Conclusion

Since Marx and Lenin’s time the bourgeoisie has accumulated an immense amount of experience and knowledge about how to maintain their class dictatorship and how to co-opt social movements and even mass rebellions. The bourgeoisie has organized their society in such a way that they attempt to preemptively misdirect potential struggles and even mass rebellions into one dead end or another. They promote controlled opposition figures (e.g. Bernie and AOC, but also Tucker and Joe Kent) and work ceaselessly through their media to keep public opinion within the acceptable spectrum of the present Overton Window and to discredit or marginalize any views outside of it.

These forms of control coupled with a massive NGO-apparatus to contain popular discontent and funnel it into electoral politics have proven extremely effective in maintaining domestic stability for the U.S. empire. For each and every social issue there is a ready-made organization prepared to astro-turf a milquetoast “movement” which proposes only bourgeois solutions to the problems created by bourgeois society. This apparatus, despite losing its grip somewhat in recent years, present a major challenge to communists. In order to counter its continued ideological vice-grip on the masses of people, and the working class in particular, it is necessary, among other things, to carry out the systematic political exposures of which Lenin wrote in What is to Be Done? Only thus can the U.S. proletariat be ideologically prepared for the monumental tasks that lay before it, only thus can it become ready to lead all progressive elements in society in the revolutionary struggle against the monopoly capitalist class that runs the U.S.

The experiences of the Bolshevik Party proved the correctness of Lenin’s theses on the development of the class consciousness of the proletariat by means of systematic political exposures. The experiences of 1905 and October 1917 showed that, by means of years of training, the proletariat was ready and able to lead not just their own shop-floor struggles, but much more importantly, all the social forces in the revolutionary overthrow of Tsardom and then the Provisional Government. While we are still a long ways from a revolutionary situation in the U.S., communists here must redouble our efforts to raise the class consciousness of the proletariat so that it can meet the monumental tasks that lay before it. Otherwise, we will miss the once in a century opportunity afforded to us by the strategic decline of the U.S. empire. Otherwise, we will fail in our duty not only the people of this country, but the people of the world.

Footnotes

  1. From this motto a whole series of slogans promoting naked individualism have sprung up, the most common of which in “left” circles is “you do you.” This is but a slightly modified motto of Aleister Crowley “Do what thou wilt.” Crowley—a British spy and occultist who pioneered modern spycraft and various forms of social control—was explicitly promoted by music figures in the 1960s and 70s from the Beatles to Led Zeppelin and David Bowie. More recently, Jay-Z has made numerous direct references to Crowley’s work and promoted this slogan in particular. Crowley’s work also inspired controlled opposition “counter-culture” figure Timothy Leary (who believed himself to be the reincarnation of Crowley) in, among other things, his CIA-funded MK-Ultra LSD experiments at Harvard. Lieutenant Colonel Michael Aquino, an avowed Satanist—and an infamous pedophile—who pionereed the U.S. Army’s doctrine on psychological operations, was heavily influenced by Crowley and also worked to promote hedonistic individualism in U.S. culture.
    For a brief overview of Crowley’s role in the development of modern spycraft and how this is tied to the needs of the monopoly capitalists in running world-spanning empires, c.f. the analysis of this topic in MCU’s recent event on the Epstein Files: https://youtu.be/5sexPvmWRII ↩︎
  2. “Depression, demoralisation, splits, discord, defection, and pornography took the place of politics. There was an ever greater drift towards philosophical idealism; mysticism became the garb of counter-revolutionary sentiments.” https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/lwc/ch03.htm ↩︎
  3. Perhaps the paradigmatic novel on the topic, The Scarlet Letter, was written by Nathaniel Hawthorne in 1850. It remains as contemporary as ever. ↩︎
  4. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/poverty-philosophy/ch02e.htm ↩︎
  5. “Meanwhile the antagonism between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie is a struggle of class against class, a struggle which carried to its highest expression is a total revolution.” https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/poverty-philosophy/ch02e.htm ↩︎
  6. It must be admitted that this is a problem even in most Maoist circles, where, at best, people have read a few short philosophical articles (e.g. On Practice and On Contradiction), and a book or two (e.g. Anti-Dühring or Dialectical and Historical Materialism). With an arrogance all to typical in the American empire, some mistakenly believe that this paltry amount of reading (less than would be assigned in a college 101 course) is all that is needed to give one a solid grasp of dialectical materialism. When their basic (and often quite mechanical) understanding of dialectics fails to explain even the most simple aspects of reality (e.g. what sort of topology do we employ when we speak of internal contradictions? What does it mean for the proletariat to have internalized bourgeois ideology? etc.), they tend to retreat further into dogmatism and group think.
    In an effort to combat some of the most glaring and simplistic misunderstandings of dialectics all too common on the U.S. left, I wrote about the nature of the proletariat in What is the Proletariat? https://mcuusa.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/mcu_what-is-the-proletariat_oct2025.pdf ↩︎
  7. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1871/letters/71_11_23.htm ↩︎
  8. For just two examples of this, see Michael Aquino and Paul Valley’s (currently on the Board of TPUSA) paper From PSYOP to MindWar: The Psychology of Victory and Michael Prosser’s Memetics: A Growth Industry in US Military Operations. The infamous Lewis Powell Memo is also of particular importance to understanding how the U.S. ruling class transformed their class dictatorship in reaction to the social upheavals and mass struggles of the 1960s and 70s. ↩︎
  9. It should, of course, be noted that the proletariat, in period of crisis in the imperialist system, can wage somewhat spontaneous political struggles, particularly in situations and countries where the bourgeoisie has, at least somewhat, lost the ability to rule in the old way. However, without the leadership and guidance of a Communist Party, these political struggles are generally extremely limited in their ability to sustain themselves in open antagonism to bourgeois class domination. Either they are crushed well short of achieving meaningful concessions—let alone the revolutionary overthrow of the bourgeoisie—or they are ideologically coopted and thus the brutality of the status quo of bourgeois class dictatorship reasserts itself, often with new reactionary measures. ↩︎
  10. For example, it was only in the course of the 1848 Revolution that the French proletariat won the twelve-hour workday! ↩︎
  11. These adaptations to bourgeois society—forms of reaction aimed at confining the proletariat’s struggle within limits acceptable to bourgeois class rule—were only possible due to the development of capitalist imperialism and the ability, which the monopoly capitalists developed, to bribe a section of the working-class movement with the super-profits the bourgeoisie makes from their economic plunder of the oppressed countries. They thus warped fundamental aspects of the unions, as is evident in legislation like Taft-Hartley in the U.S., which explicitly prohibits the workers from going on political strikes. However, from these changes to the unions, some groups (especially Gonzaloists) erroneously conclude that no work in the unions is possible. This childish argument ignores the many decades of important work that have been done by communists in the unions in imperialist countries since the end of the Second World War. ↩︎
  12. Despite clarity on the fact that this strike would be crushed, in his July 25, 1877 letter to Engels, Marx expressed his optimism about what the strike signaled for the working class movement in the U.S.: “This first explosion against the associated oligarchy of capital which has occurred since the Civil War will naturally again be suppressed, but can very well form the point of origin of an earnest workers’ party.” https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1877/letters/77_07_25.htm ↩︎
  13. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1912/may/31.htm ↩︎
  14. During 1917, land seizures in the Russian countryside grew to a fever pitch. Given that they had concrete knowledge of the peasants issues, the workers were able to rally the mass of the peasantry to the side of the revolutionary overthrow of the Provisional Government. ↩︎
  15. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1901/witbd/iii.htm He uses the term “social-democrat” where, today, “communist” would be more appropriate. ↩︎
  16. As I noted in What is the Proletariat?: “When the proletariat constitutes itself as a class-for-itself, it is capable of wresting away the other classes in society from the ideological and political subordination to the bourgeoisie. Thus, it is possible to have a united front, under proletarian leadership, in which the various progressive classes and strata in the society are no longer “for-the-other” of the bourgeoisie (and thus no longer frame their progressive demands in dominantly bourgeois terms), but are rather “for-the-other” of the proletariat. This is the materialist kernel of what Hegel refers as “the unity of repulsion and attraction in general” when he discusses what he calls “the one One,” which is a new “One” that emerges within the old One and is capable of organizing the many around itself while repelling (purifying) from itself determination by the other-one. Provided we hold fast to the materialist axiom that there is no one that does not divide into two, it is easy enough to divide Hegel here as well. c.f The Science of Logic, § 358-360” ↩︎