This is the first part in a series of articles by the Editorial Board on the problem of revisionism with the goal of providing an understanding of revisionism and its historic development.
To approach a basic understanding of revisionism the question must focus on the Marxist principle of dialectical and historical materialism, with the law of contradiction, its sole fundamental law, at the center. Marxism has never existed a day in its life or reached a leap in development in the absence of fierce struggle. It is within these struggles that revisionism emerges and consolidates. The struggle against revisionism consolidates the class and the revolutionary organization, developing its theory, practice, and ideology.
Revisionism is the revision of Marxism by invoking new circumstances, which manifest in negating basic Marxist principles: Internationalism, the Party, the armed struggle, the dictatorship of the proletariat, the type of revolution and revolution’s development through stages without pause. Revisionism systematically erodes and opposes the three component and integral parts of Marxism; it creates fissures and splits. Inevitably, revisionism charts its course beginning in the revision of and opposition to Marxist philosophy. In the respect that revisionism is hidden behind a red flag, it is distinguished from bourgeois ideology by this form, but it maintains its bourgeois class character in essence. It is the main danger to the International Communist Movement.
The old classical revisionism unfolds with Bernstein and Kautsky. We can begin with Bernstein.
Eduard Bernstein is the father of classical revisionism. Bernstein does not appear from anywhere but within the circles of Marx and Engels, beginning his hacking work after the deaths of these great founders of Marxism. His problem was to pose that conditions had developed in the world since the basic principles of Marxism had been established, and presented that through criticism of the doctrine he could offer correctives which would save Marxism from its own inherent mistakes. This begins on the philosophical front: Bernstein negates Marxist philosophy, denies its existence, and treats it as the main error of Marxism.
He first denies the accumulation in leaps—which is to deny the law of contradiction as the sole fundamental law of the incessant transformation of all eternal matter—and substitutes for it a conception in which everything evolves. What was the problem with the leap? According to Bernstein, the leap is a problem because it is Hegelian, and by extension Marx and Engels did not develop a philosophy of their own but were mistaken Hegelians. Here the revisionist has brought in a negation of philosophy by negating its fundamental law; he has brought in a reformist positivism, where capitalist society can be argued to develop peacefully into socialist society. He has negated the role of class struggle in history. In philosophy, the revisionist calls for a Marxism of “pure science,” reducing it to the method; in political economy, he denies the growing accumulation of poverty among the proletariat; and in scientific socialism, he calls for pacifism.
The great Lenin put the problem of Bernstein’s revision like this:
“Denied was the possibility of putting socialism on a scientific basis and of demonstrating its necessity and inevitability from the point of view of the materialist conception of history. Denied was the fact of growing impoverishment, the process of proletarisation, and the intensification of capitalist contradictions; the very concept, ‘ultimate aim’, was declared to be unsound, and the idea of the dictatorship of the proletariat was completely rejected. Denied was the antithesis in principle between liberalism and socialism. Denied was the theory of the class struggle, on the alleged grounds that it could not be applied to a strictly democratic society governed according to the will of the majority, etc.”
While Bernstein is only an important figure today by the way of negative example, his theory and so much of its conclusion is well alive among all different groups of modern revisionists. Let’s examine some of Bernstein’s positions directly.
Bernstein begins with supposing a philosophical dualism, a separation between theory and practice: “A systematic extraction of the pure science of Marxist socialism from its applied part has not so far been attempted….” In order to get to this “pure science” he would have to proffer a neo-Kantian bisection and criticize Marxism, beginning to rid it of doctrine (reducing it to method) and challenging its so-called “dogmas” to oppose its orthodoxy.
“Any investigation into the correctness of Marxism must… start with the question of whether, or how far this theory [of historical materialism] is valid.” His attacks on the Marxist conception of history, precisely its dialectical motion, come in the form of denying the determining role of the mode of production on human society. Like almost all the revisionists that would follow, Bernstein seeks to diminish this role to an extreme degree:
“[H]owever ‘ultimate causes’ implies attendant causes of another kind, causes of the second and third degree etc., and it is clear that the longer a series of such causes, the more limited, both qualitatively and quantitatively, is the determining force of the ultimate causes.” By suggesting that these other factors of religion, ideas etc. could override or undermine production’s determining role, the revisionist is setting the stage for the elimination of the need for armed struggle. All revisionists come to this one way or another, and he has to seek a justification for this negation of the Marxist concept of history by way of citing letters from Engels: “Friedrich Engels limited the determining force of conditions of production even further.”1
Bernstein goes on to indicate a rupture in the works of Marx and Engels; he claims that they restricted the influence of “non-economic factors” in their early writings and relaxed this position in the later works. He uses this to undermine the general epistemology and social developments corresponding to the capitalist mode of production. As a result, the dialectic between the economic base and the superstructure is disrupted and gets turned on its head without regard to the degree in which the base is operational. Chairman Mao Zedong has solved this problem as a resolute Marxist, indicating that the superstructure only becomes determinant at early stages of a new mode of production, and is otherwise subordinated to it; Marx and Engels could predict this, but did not live long enough to see its affirmation in practice. What the Bernsteins of the world attempt to do with their theory is not express the role of the continuation of socialist revolution under the dictatorship of the proletariat, but to negate the necessity of the military solution, the role of the proletariat, the Party, and the dictatorship of the proletariat.
“We do historical materialism more harm than good,” the revisionist wrote, “if, from the onset, we superciliously reject as eclecticism any accentuation of influences other than those of a purely economic nature and any consideration of economic factors other than the techniques of production and their predicted development.” Here we encounter a philosophical sleight of hand and a political economic one to go with it, Bernstein is masking the word “eclecticism” outside of the context of materialist philosophy, disguising it in a non-philosophical sense. At the core of this is neo-Kantianism. Likewise, he is focusing on the “technique of production” and not the contradictions at the heart of the mode of production.
Bernstein defines eclecticism while practicing philosophical eclecticism: “Eclecticism—selecting from different explanations and ways of dealing with phenomena—is often only the natural reaction against the doctrinaire desire to derive everything from one thing and to treat everything according to one and the same method.” Why do we object to this statement? First, because there really is only one thing at the core of it, the law of contradiction. Secondly, this point can be understood through the great Lenin’s insistence on understanding eclecticism from the perspective of its contradiction, that is to say that eclecticism combines both materialism and idealism in order to defend God from materialism assailing the notion of God. There are no two methods to historical materialism; there is no method that can ignore the contradiction in the mode of production and reach an understanding of the process of becoming which is inherent in history. Class struggle is simply the only perspective to look at history; all other perspectives are idealist and belong to the other, non-proletarian classes.
Modern capitalist society, according to Bernstein, is not determined by the capitalist mode of production, but other factors: “…because men pay greater attention to the economic factors, it can easily seem as if these factors play a greater role today than they did before. This, however, is not the case.” Dialectics, and not eclecticism, is capable of explaining to even the worst student in philosophy exactly how the economic factor can and does express itself in uncountable ways by creating the “other factors.” This is not a question of how one looks at it, but the objective law.
Bernstein splits apart dialectical materialism from historical materialism, like his proteges who followed and live among us today. This schism is an attack on Marx to rob Marxism of its essential principles. Bernstein writes that the Marxist conception of history led Marx “into all kinds of false conclusions, how much more, then, all those who have neither his genius nor his knowledge at their disposal!” and “…the further development and elaboration of Marxist doctrine must begin with criticism of it.” His proteges indicate that since dialectical materialism cannot apply to society, economy, or nature, that historical materialism must be separated from it, and that this is the real Marxism, all of it is reduced to method. By way of this separation a kind of bankrupt historical materialism is put forward, which denies the inevitability of armed revolution, treating it as a mere option. It is not a matter of will, as Marxism consistently indicates, but a matter of the existing contradictions of class society forcing a violent transformation.
The above positions of revisionism have one major aspect in common, which is to deny the inevitability of an armed military conflict between the classes, i.e., to deny revolution as the violent overthrow of one class against another, which is to come about regardless of man’s will, a denial which will be examined below. When splitting apart Marxist philosophy we find a stub that is neither dialectical nor materialist. The attacks on the Marxist conception of history are always made in the name of saving it from Hegel and correcting the messy work of Marx and Engels, the Hegelians.
For Bernstein, Marx was hampered by the “remnant of Hegelian contradiction dialectics. To the end of his days, Marx, like Engels, never completely got rid of it, but at that particular time of general ferment [1844-1847] it was all the more fatal to him.” We find a thesis here, resurrected from the dead, by Louis Althusser, a revisionist of the so-called “Communist Party of France” who spent his life, driving himself mad, in an effort to “prove” the existence of the “epistemological break” in Marx’s work—originally he charted it up to the publication of Capital, but then came to the conclusion that the father of revisionism was correct, and that Marx maintained the Hegelian deviation throughout his entire life. The French revisionist could only find two instances in Marx’s entire career which he did not suffer from Hegelian deviation: that is the Critique of the Gotha Program and an unpublished letter to Wagner.
For revisionists, Marxism needs revising. It does not develop in class struggle, it was faulty to begin with because of Hegel, and of course they at times separate Marx and Engels and counter-pose their views. Bernstein expresses that Engels was not fit to offer the necessary corrective to Marx’s wrong ideas, “…nor could Engels by any means be expected the necessary revision of the theory itself. Had he done so, he would without fail have had to come to terms with Hegelian dialectic, if not in so many words then with the thing itself. It is the treacherous element in Marxist doctrine, the pitfall that lies in the way of any logical consideration of things. Engels could not, or would not, transcend it.” We can all be glad that the great teacher and first soldier of Marx, Friedrich Engels, would not surrender in the struggle against revisionism, and remained a Marxist to the very end.2
We have expressed the philosophical negation of Marxism by classical revisionism, and must now express that philosophy is the central part of the three integral and component parts of Marxism. Marxist philosophy is what has been applied, studied, and practiced, in order to create and develop Marxist political economy and scientific socialism. But for the revisionists, these are also wrong and deformed because of Hegelianism, which is just their word for Marxist philosophy. And what do the Hegelian Marx and Engels do with it in scientific socialism? Well, they become the followers of August Luis Blanqui.3
“In Germany, Marx and Engels working on the basis of the Hegelian dialectic, arrived at a doctrine very similar to Blanquism.” This is how Bernstein understood the struggle for the seizure and defense of political power by force of arms. He uses this to negate the reality that the Manifesto of the Communist Party was and is valid, and will always be valid and a red flag until we enter the luminous communist society. “The program of revolutionary action in the Manifesto is Blanquist through and through…[in other works by Marx, according to Bernstein,] the Blanquists are presented as the proletarian party.” We arrive, via the negation of Marx’s important works, at not only a negation of revolutionary violence, but a negation of the Communist Party. “Marxism has superseded Blanquism in only one respect, method.” This revisionist perspective is what is behind efforts to reduce Marxism from a doctrine into a simple methodology.
Bernstein wrote: “Every time we see the doctrine which proceeds from the economy as the basis of historical development capitulate before theory which stretches the cult of force to its limits, we find a Hegelian principle.” Of course we do: the contradiction as the force of motion is a Hegelian principle, in fact it is central to the Science of Logic, but what we really find is the Marxist principle that has been raised to new levels by Lenin and Mao and defended masterfully by Chairman Gonzalo—that contradiction is the sole fundamental law of the incessant transformation of all eternal matter. History after all is based not only on economy, but on the struggle between the classes in a given mode of production; this is what the revisionists attempt to confuse. We all worship power in the cult of force, because power is fundamental—violence and war are omnipotent.
For Bernstein, Marxist philosophy is the main problem and it must be gotten rid of to save Marxism from its violent principles: “The great things Marx and Engels achieved were achieved not because of Hegelian dialectics, but in spite of it. When, on the other hand, they heedlessly passed over the grossest errors of Blanquism, it is primarily the Hegelian element in their own theory that is to blame.”
Bernstein, having dispensed with Marxist philosophy, proceeds to dispense with everything Marxist in the name of saving Marxism. Outlining preconditions for socialism, he wrote “The second precondition is, according to Marx’s doctrine, the seizure of political power by the proletariat.” He focuses on “…the use of force by means of revolution”, highlighting that “…Marx and Engels considered [the use of force by means of revolution] as inevitable nearly everywhere, and even today various adherents of Marx’s doctrine believe it be unavoidable. It is also often held to be the shorter way.”
To challenge what is fundamental in Marxism, political power conquered and defended by armed force, led by the Communist Party, Mr. Bernstein had no other choice but to attack the role played by the proletariat in the revolution and the Manifesto of the Communist Party as the basic program for revolution. “… [M]odern wage earners are not,” he wrote, “the homogeneous mass uniformly devoid of property, family etc., as predicted in the Communist Manifesto….” Let us not forget that the Manifesto is here talking about a specific type of “wage earner,” the proletariat. Here another sleight of hand is used to reduce a class to one of its characteristics which can exist as well outside of this class. By doing this he has replaced the revolutionary subject—the proletariat—with ambiguous wage earners, simply because the proletarians also earn wages. It was necessary then and is necessary now for revisionists to attack the relevance of the Manifesto and to do away with its primary conclusions. All revisionists do this to one degree or another, and revisionism today finds eager audiences conditioned by postmodernism to look elsewhere, namely individual identity, for a subject of social change that can replace the proletariat. This forces them to redefine proletarians or to dislocate them entirely from the process of social transformation.4
Bernstein continues in his elimination of proletarians by negating how class consciousness develops among them based on the inherent contradictions in the capitalist mode of production when he writes, “The assumption that industrial workers yearn for socialist production is also, for the most part, an assumption rather than an established fact.”
It does not matter whether or not the proletariat yearns for socialism; socialism does not come about from yearnings, but from actions, conditions that force the activity of men, and which then develop their “yearnings.” The argument for socialism, and it is the argument made by Marx and all great Marxists, is that it is not a matter of man’s will, proletarian or not, but a matter of historic necessity. In other words, class interests are opposed and antagonistic, and are forced into irreconcilable conflict in which one has to defeat the other; one has to transform from the ruled to the ruling class. The proletariat is unique here from the bourgeoisie in that the proletariat can rule over a society which eliminates the contradiction between social production and private ownership by instituting a system of social ownership in which the bourgeoisie is expropriated and suppressed; the proletariat, by doing this, brings the world closer to ending the system of class rule entirely.
Had the proletariat been vested from its inception with these clear and conscious yearnings, we would not still be talking about violent revolution but would be living in the result of its highest stages. Consciousness develops in the protracted class struggle, a violent process; the most violent degrees develop the most supreme class consciousness, and the two are inseparable and inevitable.
Bernstein, in arguing against Kautsky before the latter was a revisionist, indicated that Marxism neglected the question of social development through cooperatives mainly because of the idea that “Marxist practice is predominantly political and is directed at the seizure of political power… almost the only significance it attaches to the trade union movement is a direct form of class struggle of the workers.” Revisionism sees these principles of Marxism as defects to overcome, and will put anything else in their place to seduce the masses into innumerable dead ends. After all, to revisionism, Marx had his “great analytical powers” “hampered by the preconceived doctrine, or formula, of expropriation.”
“…Social Democracy [referring to the socialist movement at the time] does not threaten all equally, and it threatens nobody personally,” the revisionist declares, “…it has no enthusiasm for violent revolution against the whole non-proletarian world.” And he passes over from class struggle to class collaboration in the following: “…many elements of the bourgeoisie experience oppression from other quarters and would rather make common cause against their oppressors.” While it is true that there are elements of the bourgeoisie, especially the small ones, the ones in the third world, etc., that experience oppression—and not from vague “other quarters” but from the imperialist bourgeoisie—revisionist theory comes only to class collaboration. Postmodernism, which traffics in the same logic, comes only to identity politics as a basis for organizing class collaboration. Marxism answers the question with New Democratic revolution, the united front, all of which are not class collaboration but are passing without stopping to proletarian rule. For Marxism, and Chairman Mao set this out clearly, the proletariat’s relations to all other oppressed classes must be led by the proletariat only and in its strategic class interests, because this class only can emancipate humanity.
“…we will certainly make [the bourgeoisie] bad allies if we tell them that we want to help them destroy the enemy but that immediately afterwards will destroy them as well.” It is telling that it is the proletariat helping the bourgeoisie here, just like they did in the bourgeois revolutions, and not the petty bourgeois and national bourgeois helping the proletariat as they have in New Democratic revolutions. This is a question of which class is to lead, and Bernstein, as we will see later, cannot imagine proletarian leadership. It is worth studying in history how the allied classes under proletarian leadership were expropriated in the world’s great socialist revolutions, including the rich peasantry, petty bourgeoisie, and national bourgeoisie.
Contrary to the arguments of the communists and to how history would play out, the revisionist offers another perspective: not through expropriation since its not possible immediately and all at once but only through “…a piecemeal settlement by means of organization and legislation,” meaning “it would certainly not interrupt the development of democracy to bid farewell to outdated militancy in our language as well as our practice.” Having done away with how societies develop and decompose historically, the revisionists can imagine a “development of democracy” which just gets better and better, and cannot imagine its decomposition.
Unlike feudalism, which took force to overthrow, revisionism believes that “…liberal institutions of modern society” are “flexible and capable of change and development.” The Marxist Bernstein has turned into a liberal, and the revisionist Kautsky would do the same in reverse by turning Marx into a liberal. The liberal institutions, according to Bernstein, “do not need to be destroyed; they need only to be further developed” with “organization and energetic action, but not necessarily a revolutionary dictatorship.” There is the revisionist program designed to replace the Communist Manifesto; do not offend liberals, do not disrupt their liberalism, do not destroy their organizations and institutions; just be non-offensive and they will come around. For him, democracy is not only a precondition of socialism but its means and its substance, a stance that has nothing to do with actual scientific socialism.
From these many negations, the first revisionist moves on to the negation of the Marxist principle of internationalism. Bernstein: “…has Social Democracy, as the party of the working class and of peace, an interest in maintaining the nations readiness to fight? From many points of view, it is tempting to answer the question in the negative, especially if one starts from the position in the Communist Manifesto: ‘the proletarian has no fatherland.’ However, although this proposition might perhaps apply to the worker of the 1840s, deprived of rights and excluded from public life, nowadays it has already lost much of its truth….” The social chauvinist aspect of revisionism immediately readied the ground for social-imperialism right at the point in history where imperialism was making itself known. “…[T]he worker ceases to be a proletarian and becomes a citizen through the influence of Social Democracy.”
“Nations nowadays no longer go lightly to war….” Bernstein declares. The heaviness with which the nations go to war, according to this logic, prepares the advanced imperialist countries to become the stewards of the world, which is the same logic of the imperialists themselves; we can see this when we consider this revisionist’s perspective on colonialism: “Colonial positions cannot even have any serious political affect on political conditions in Germany,” and “…there is no reason to regard such acquisitions as being reprehensible as such.”
His logic goes like this: “Germany now annually imports a considerable amount of colonial produce, we must note that the time may come when it might be desirable to produce at least a part of these products from our own colonies.” If we do not oppress, plunder, exploit and rob the world, someone else will so it is better to see to it directly. After all, “…we cannot be blind to the fact that it will be a long time before a large number of other countries go over to socialism. However if there is nothing wrong with enjoying produce of tropical plantations, there can be nothing wrong with cultivating such plantations.” First we must indicate that this very naked defense of colonialism, which in every way is the same as the capitalists, finds its best opposition in the proclamation of the great Lenin that the world revolution had pivoted to the east, and in Chairman Mao’s development of this, that the center of the World Proletarian Revolution has become today the nations and countries oppressed by imperialism. Revisionism is ignorant and vile in its logic, attempting to negate the fact that markets create consumers to support the markets, and that inferior products are dumped in the colonies, doing the same thing. The demands for coffee or bananas are not the fault of those who enjoy them, but the fault of those who oppress and exploit to satisfy it. Supporting self-determination and promoting the making of revolution in one’s own country are the solutions presented by internationalists. In this respect, new democracy and socialist revolution would transform both agricultural production and the country’s self-sufficiency and what they export to foreign markets. We think that the revolution will provide better services and goods to the world than the plantations can with all their backward bondage and misuse of land.
Inversely, “…[W]e can recognize only conditional right of the savages to the land they occupy,” Bernstein proclaims in the voice of every slave owner. “Higher civilization has ultimately a higher right. It is not conquest but the cultivation of the land that confers an historical right to its use.”
Having appeared in its repugnant colonial form, revisionism declares that “…the more Social Democracy decides to appear to be what it really is, the more will it improve its prospects of achieving political reforms” and “…the Chartist5 movement was at its most revolutionary when they abandoned revolutionary slogans and forged alliances with the radical bourgeoisie for the achievement of reforms.”
Bernstein’s entire revision of Marxism in all its aspects resides in debasing its philosophy and transforming it into methodology, which is to deny its status as doctrine. Hence his famous position that the goal means nothing, the movement is everything. “What deserves to survive in Marx lies in the building not the scaffolding.” This is the view of our revisionists today who with abandon reject all the established positions of Marxism and proclaim that new positions must always be taken by inclusion of bourgeois ideas in their development. “…[T]he more devoted of those Marxists who have not yet been able to detach themselves from the dialectical framework of [Capital]—the aforementioned scaffolding—seek to maintain certain positions… which have been overtaken by events.”
And what is being denied is precisely the development of the revolutionary situation on the world scale, the fact that wealth accumulates in fewer and fewer hands while poverty develops on a mass scale. This fact has to be denied by all who worship at the altar of exploitation, because it is a fact that indicates the decomposition of imperialism, the rebellion of the masses, and the inevitable triumph of the revolution. They must deny that capitalism produces above all its own grave diggers, and that the proletariat has nothing to lose but its chains and has a world to win.
Here is how the revisionist put it: “the dialectical scheme seems to prescribe it [the position we have articulated above] and a plank threatens to break away from the scaffolding if one admits that the social surplus product is appropriated by an increasing instead of decreasing number of property-owners.” Ronald Reagan could not have put it better than this “socialist.” Bernstein suggests that the prospects of struggle depend on “…the growth of social wealth and of the social productive forces, in conjunction with general social progress, and in particular the intellectual and moral advance of the working class itself.” He denounced Marxism as “the doctrine which incorporates the idea that progress depends on worsening circumstances.”
Constitutional legislation and compromise, the revisionist insists, “is more powerful than revolution wherever the preconceptions, the limited horizon, of the great mass of people stand as an an obstacle in the way of social progress, and it offers greater advantages where it is a question of creating permanent and viable economic arrangements; in other words, it is better for positive socio-political work.”
But of course, the proletariat is not, as he has established, the revolutionary subject; it is still beholden to the “great mass of people” standing “in the way of social progress” and as such, “Despite the great progress which the working class has made on the intellectual, political and industrial fronts since the time when Marx and Engels were writing, I still regard it as being, even today, not yet sufficiently developed to take over political power.”
Hence, we see all the faith and promise in the world bestowed upon the liberal bourgeois ruling class, who will be helped by the workers on the one hand, and the not-yet-ready-to-rule working masses in the way of progress on the other. How then do real communists consider the workers’ ability to rule? How do they become ready to rule? By fighting to conquer and defend political power, and nothing else.
Bernstein was the first revisionist. He did not drop from the rafters of the capitalists’ mansions down onto the shop floor; he was not a simple capitalist who came over to wreck the Marxist movement from outside. On the contrary, the ideology of capitalism is ever present in the workers’ movement, and the class struggle is reflected inside of the workers’ organization. While he was the first revisionist, he was not the last, and revisionism became in short order a large social movement—first those who came out to fight the original revisionism, Georgi Plekhanov and Karl Kautsky, became revisionists themselves. These ideas did not go away with either Lenin’s exposing of them, nor with the proof against them in the practice of the Russian revolution. They still exist in one form or another today, and we examine them not to prove anything about Bernstein—no one today would proclaim themselves a Bernsteinist—but to help readers be more ready to identify the ideas and how they can arise in their own revolutionary attempts.
Photo: Portrait of Eduard Bernstein.
- This argument is the cornerstone of the other neo-Kantian revisionists, such as Louis Althusser, Bob Avakian, and Joshua Moufawad-Paul, among others. ↩︎
- Engels carried out, under Marx’s leadership, the outlining of their philosophy in such works as Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classic German Philosophy, Anti-Duhring, and Dialectics of Nature. ↩︎
- For our readers less historically-armed, we have to issue a word on Blanqui. He was a significant revolutionary in France; he believed that the revolution required a committed and disciplined band of armed men who acted on the will of the people and used purely conspiratorial methods to conquer power. The defects in his theory, acting on and not with the masses, have been corrected in the Marxist military strategy, and because Blanqui was so important, because he was elected to rule the Paris Commune en abstentia, every Marxist since, including Marx himself, have been accused of Blanquism, but no one has been accused of it more than Lenin. It was Marx who correctly pointed out that in the Commune, the followers of Blanqui rejected their Blanquism and the followers of Proudhon rejected their Proudhonism, and in essence were coming close to the positions of the Communists led by Marx and Engels. This is the Marxist theory of learning demonstrated by history, and we further note that the Manifesto of the Communist Party would spread rapidly to the workers of the world after the Commune, as it was understood that the Communists had solved the problem. ↩︎
- This can be seen in Kites Journal, the pivot of the Avakianites in the 1980s away from struggles in production into “social justice” arenas, the works of the Combahee River Collective, Sojourner Truth Organization, Herbert Marcus’s One Dimensional Man, the ‘Intercommunalism’ of Huey Newton and many other places. ↩︎
- An early working class movement in England that aimed to gain political rights for the working class. ↩︎
