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Socialist Pessimism
It seems every single year, we have a new pessimism grow within the American socialists about our own people. The idea seems to be that we'll never have a revolution so long as the American public is "stupid", "brainwashed", "hostile", "lazy", "right-wing", "broken", or even "petty-bourgeois". But what about self-sufficient, independent, duty-bound, efficient, full of integrity, and revolutionary? I would remind these socialists that to be a correct socialist you must be a scientist.
Daniel De Leon said (1896):
"Socialism is neither an aspiration of angels nor a plot of devils. Socialism moves with its feet firmly planted in the ground and its head not lost in the clouds; it takes science by the hand, asks her to lead and goes whithersoever she points. It does not take science by the hand, saying: "I shall follow you to the end of the road if it please me." No! It takes her by the hand and says: "Whithersoever thou leadest, thither am I bound to go." "
As scientific socialists, you don't study something one-sidedly. You don't assume some force can act on something else without an opposite force acting back. So for every dark side one may witness in the American public, it in fact takes on a class transformation from some other existing proletarian value. But from what and how? Our bourgeoisie have long-since inverted many of the American values we hold dear. I'm going to cover those as the main aim of this article, but first a note on what America is and who Americans are:
Americans vs United States
America is not the United States for the purposes of this article and in my opinion generally. This will be short for the main point, due to the nature of such a statement requiring an article unto itself. The United States is an economic zone (much like Europe) and imperialist state power that extracts the sovereignty of the domestic American nations and foreign colony nations for itself and enacts an imposed state power upon the people of America. Thus, "America" and "Americans" are the internal colony of the United States. Or one could say "The United States is the state apparatus of America", shorter still: "The United States OF America". The contradiction of United States//America is on the Imperialist//Colony level of motion. The contradiction of US and American bourgeoisie//American proletariat is on the class level within the country as a whole. This does not mean "America" occupies the exact same imaginary borders the United States has claimed on maps. It includes and omits some on any side of the US claimed border, so long as the colony is still internal. Puerto Rico are Americans despite not actually being in the state borders. Some Canadian proletariat enter into definite and inseparable relationships with those inside the US Borders that are Americans, and they too are American. Canada's entire history is that of a synthetic colony, which makes this easier to analyze.
The dominant relationship for "Americans" is that of the increasingly third-worldized nations occupied by imperialist powers. This makes us an internal colony. The United States is the bourgeois state power of Americans and unmatched imperialist power globally. This means, American communists are defeatist with regards to "our" own government and "our" own state power. It is in fact our enemy that we are bound to by struggle for state power. So long as the international monopoly capitalists control the US state power, the American proletariat cannot. But America is also a long history of people which are similar in some ways and dissimilar through changes in production and therefore culture. The US also shares the same history, though not all parts of America were in contradiction with the US at all times of history. There are points of relativity where new struggles are born and points of absolute struggle between the classes. The US has always struggled to maintain close capitalist control of the means of production, especially the land and industry; now finance capital as well. Americans have long-suffered under the capitalist ownership of the land and other means they must work, live, and be connected to.
I can therefore sum up the US of A point as "America is the land and her people. The United States is the highest imperialist state power".
Values Inverted
First I will show the bourgeois and pessimism-worthy version of Americans and then explain the other side of that value object by showing where that values comes from. The aim is to provide strategic connections with the masses by reclaiming our revolutionary values. This will become increasingly relevant as American Marxism develops more rapidly this year (2022). Despite past stagnation, we are already seeing a proletariat (and petty bourgeoisie) that have become more politically active, educated, and miseducated. It is the job of the socialists to correct educational errors and gain the trust of the people.
Purity Fetish
[Edit for context, I get many of this section's ideas from Carlos Garrido]
Like any commodity fetish in Marxism, Purity is something granted undue power. From the perspective of the bourgeois "Left", it is produced as ontological social credibility with respect to one's deeds and beliefs being Liberal. It is the image of a mythical free and moral person who respects others and asks to be respected in return in their Liberty. Essentially: be good to each other. The bourgeois "Right" demands the purity commodity in the form of virgin women, unchanged gender, non-deviant sexuality, sovereignty of the family. Essentially: be unchanged, "untouched". However, both sides of the bourgeois class are unified by the instilled value of purity being the unchanging relations to production, regardless how much the forces of said production (the workers and their tools) advance far beyond their "pure" system of perfect liberty. When instilled in the American people in this way, we get reflections of the same Left-Right idealism held by the bourgeois class themselves. But unlike the bourgeois class, the proletariat are not unified in their idealist purity causes. This is why we see the "wing" splits and party splits among the proletarian class: idealism can only serve the bourgeois ruling class, never the proletariat. The proletariat are the ones that work with hands and feet, concretely in the real world, scientifically, and as of this point in history for wages.
The US didn't invent purity fetishism. This goes all the way back to the Greek philosophers who split many times over their pure and perfect "schools" of thought. The Puritanical social consciousness was carried to the "New World" by the Church powers and the bourgeois who wanted a new kind of Christianity that could serve the individual (Protestantism). American purity, including atheists, comes from this puritanical protestant tendency, which saturates the very methods we use for prison, economy, welfare, schooling, parenting, and so on. It very much does not allow change (except towards "God") and focuses heavily on punishment to correct "sins". The idea being that pain and torture purifies the individual's soul. The idea of the soul being an unchanging spiritual nugget where people's actions come from. So it goes that if your soul is corrupted by sins or covered by wrong deeds, it must be "cleansed" with fire and pain. Among them are many forms of 'unorthodox' sex, disrespect, changing of the body. Even when the "Left" and "Right" seem irreconcilable, they both share this same history and unify to a higher (current day) level of it.
Marx said (1843):
"Luther, we grant, overcame bondage out of devotion by replacing it by bondage out of conviction. He shattered faith in authority because he restored the authority of faith. He turned priests into laymen because he turned laymen into priests. He freed man from outer religiosity because he made religiosity the inner man. He freed the body from chains because he enchained the heart."
Here we can see Marx demonstrating the effect of Protestantism on the New World bourgeois ideology that was to come, and therefore all its individualist focus on purity. American religious purity has passed through the old feudal system and into a new method of binding individuals to a particular set of social rules that serve the current ruling class. When the old monarchy were the ruling class, religion (and therefore the religious notion of purity) was opposite in precisely the way Marx said above.
The extreme Left (ultra-left) version of purity comes as a fetishization of utopian socialism. The extreme Right version of purity comes from evangelical and traditional religious sanctimony. Both are unified in their struggle to "purify" the world of, essentially, its reality. For reality is not the perfect world imagined by the mind, it is what is real and asymmetrical. It is "messy" and disorganized to the minds of us humans that benefit from organizing. (But so contrary a species are we sometimes, I believe if reality developed in such Platonic perfection, there would be a period of human development where we fetishize different ways to mess it up!)
Integrity & Duty
But the working-class American source for purity doesn't start at purity. Each American is born into a ready-made society and seizes the current social positions from what exists, changing and tinkering them unconsciously as they do. Along the line, our values become inverted. Americans across all stripes are taught integrity and duty to one's self and others.
For Americans, integrity is the tendency to stick to your word, talk straight without deception, be consistent in your thoughts and actions, never rip anyone off (be honest and mutual in all dealings), and expect the same of others knowing they expect this of you. These are not values the capital-owning class can follow by the very nature of owning the capitalist means of production. Ultra-leftists see other countries and based on lies fed to them by our government, accuse them of basically lacking integrity. This is what you see when they deny that a country is progressive or even socialist because there exists any living contradictions within the other society. This is a projected sense of integrity being corrupted. The same with the recent upsurge in vaccine and virus denial in the other camp: they correctly see a lack of all integrity in the pharmaceutical industry information/production and government handling of it, to the point that it becomes a lack of integrity in medicines themselves. At a societal and production level, American integrity means our country must not break promises like the land treaties with our indigenous brethren; must not lie to foreign nations as we did when the US invaded Libya after they disarmed nukes; means we must not allow our own people to suffer, die, and industries and infrastructure to crumble to dust; it means our social constitution (what we are made of) must be kept strong and healthy, and that the productive forces which supply society with the means of existence must be kept safe, clean, and fully operational.
Duty is easily misinterpreted as something abstract. But throughout American history, the working class duty has always had a common connection of meaning. We must fulfill our roles and obligations faithfully, provide for our family (including society, as the "family" transforms into the social family), work for a living and for the betterment of our society. This is inverted for "conservatives" to mean uncritical support for our imperialist US army that terrorizes other nations; allowing zero role deviation including gender and sexuality; and an image of welfare as "hand-outs" and parasitism. On the liberal side, duty becomes showing up to vote when politicians say the other side is evil, giving the go-ahead to invade some nation with backward treatment of women; and for the ultra-left is the idea that actual socialist countries aren't doing their duty to their people by having any forms of capitalist-like motion in their society, or any types of class struggle, that a single hungry person is the failure of the purity and duty of the whole government. At the societal level, our honor of duty as the American working class means that we value...the working class! Working for a living is virtuous at our current time while scheming and leeching off the wage labor of others is cowardly and sick. It means the whole society must not fail the individual and let them starve, be homeless, wither in sickness, be alone as they age into elder years; just as the individual has a duty to work to keep that same society able to function and provide for themselves and others and the duty of each individual to not only keep but improve the society, both the tools and methods, and the people.
Proletarianization...again
Self-Sufficiency & Independence
The American working class has a very acute sense of self-sufficiency and value on independence. This comes from our production being heavily clustered early in the country's history. This made it difficult to get necessary commodities out to the remote areas, thus was borne the value of taking care of yourself so you can keep working and living. Even urbanites took on this value, albeit in a different attitude of maintaining a grueling hustle pace, which is difficult when you have to stop to explain or help every of the thousands of people filling the street.
Independence does not mean living in a prepper bunker off the grid growing all your own food. Americans are neighborly too. In fact, we recognize ourselves as "independent" only when we can see others being independent and they see us too. This is where the inverted value suburbia gets of lying about your financial stability to maintain the image of a good life: to show a lack of independence at that period of history and in that PB class was to be unable to authoritatively give recognition of stability to others. American independence means being free from debt. It means being able to survive within the society without utter reliance on others. Inverted, this means a disdain for those trapped in perpetual debt and a society designed to be hostile to the homeless and disabled. At the societal level, American working class independence means that
the society is created to serve the independence of the people; it means the society itself must be independent and not overly reliant on foreign imports, rely on ready-made goods, indebt others nations (making them lose independence), or make our money from money, or playing financial games.
Self-Sufficiency is achieved for Americans by engaging with the necessary social relationships. It's being able to get your own life moving in a stable way that keeps you in close relations to others. We each must learn how to take care of ourselves, our families, our neighborhoods and communities. It also means we are expected to broaden our skills, study, and constantly improve ourselves and our capabilities to become more well-rounded as individuals, capable of broad powers. "Self"-sufficiency is broadened as society's production has become heavily socialized. The self of course means the self but also the next closest group to the self, and the next to that, and so on. At the societal level therefore, working-class self-sufficiency means America must extract its own minerals, make its own means of subsistence, focus on the use-value and not the exchange value of commodities, and grow its own food, cotton, and wood. And that everyone must work together to ensure the society's production is for the self-sufficiency of that same society. Meaning at all levels, we value the central planning and initiative required to achieve self-sufficiency.
Right-Opportunism
American Efficiency
Marx said (1843):
"The weapon of criticism cannot, of course, replace criticism of the weapon, material force must be overthrown by material force; but theory also becomes a material force as soon as it has gripped the masses... Theory is capable of gripping the masses as soon as it …becomes radical. To be radical is to grasp the root of the matter…"
Unfortunately for Marx, The philosophy of "do it" has prevailed more in America than anywhere else. We are a get-shit-done people. But the rulers perverted our courage to act into "do anything" which of course always turns into "do the easiest thing that serves those high and mighty rulers". The best things ever said for the positive, and original versions of American "pragmatism" (as I roll my eyes into the back of my damn head) were ironically from a Russian-Georgian, and thus I will leave this section to a great hero and admirer of the American people.
Stalin said (1924):
"American efficiency, on the other hand, is an antidote to "revolutionary" Manilovism and fantastic scheme concocting. American efficiency is that indomitable force which neither knows nor recognizes obstacles; which with its business-like perseverance brushes aside all obstacles; which continues at a task once started until it is finished, even if it is a minor task; and without which serious constructive work is inconceivable.
But American efficiency has every chance of degenerating into narrow and unprincipled pragmatism* if it is not combined with Russian revolutionary sweep. Who has not heard of that disease of narrow empiricism and unprincipled pragmatism which has not infrequently caused certain "Bolsheviks" to degenerate and to abandon the cause of the revolution? We find a reflection of this peculiar disease in a story by B. Pilnyak, entitled The Barren Year, which depicts types of Russian "Bolsheviks" of strong will and practical determination who "function" very "energetically," but without vision, without knowing "what it is all about," and who, therefore, stray from the path of revolutionary work. No one has ridiculed this disease of pragmatism so incisively as Lenin. He branded it as "narrow-minded empiricism" and "brainless pragmatism." He usually contrasted it with vital revolutionary work and the necessity of having a revolutionary work and the necessity of having a revolutionary perspective in all our daily activities, thus emphasizing that this unprincipled pragmatism is as repugnant to true Leninism as "revolutionary" scheme concocting."
(My emphasis)
*Note: I have replaced the translation "practicalism" to match with Lenin's translated use of "pragmatism", due to Stalin opinion here being formed from his mentor and the use being exactly the same (and practicalism being a nothing word, to my knowledge). At some later time, I will investigate if these were the same word in Russian but until then I want any reader to know this substitution is correct in my opinion after reading both thinkers on this same subject.
Bourgeois Revolution
I don't have time for this one. Look, the "Liberty"-suckling bourgeoisie today have decided to smear the revolutionary parts of American history because it suits their class interests. A dialectical view of history tells us there are points of relativity (e.g. after a revolution, at a point of unity of opposites), where if you look back from your own new point relative to that one, it seems like they're less moral or could've done better. This is utter nonsense. It is only from the privileged position of what was built up from the past that we can even say see it in such a way. At every point of relativity, the seeds for a new absolute struggle are sown. And thus begins the contradiction of Relative//Absolute anew, with the new classes now as enemies where they were previously allies. It's an abstract explanation, but absolutely critical to understanding the American revolutionary war, the American civil war, and many other events after. Just remember: there are no one-sided actions. With every oppression is also a struggle against it. One cannot dismiss entire swathes of history because they did not bear out an ideal moral and economic structure relative to today. That is to spit in the face of every abolitionist, every worker, and yes every slave too.
Revolutionary Americans
We have an American Revolution yes, but also Revolutionary Americans. The American working class look up to heroes so powerful the bourgeois had to weaken their image, nullify them from public consciousness, or corrupt their image.
We have Martin Luther King Jr, assassinated by the CIA for his (albeit utopian) calls for socialism and militant revolutionary struggle to unite the races and the whole proletarian class together.
Eugene Debs, leader and a founder of the Socialist Party of America and "Bolshevik from head to toe" who served jail time for never abandoning his principles and duty to the American worker.
W.E.B Dubois, an American socialist and civil rights activist who helped found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the first to research and uncover the anti-black racism built into the system of the United States, and a prominent articulation of the Black nation (which concerned a nation, not nation-state, of black people in America known as the Black Belt to have national sovereignty and was in contradiction to the bourgeois plan of forced integration.). Eventually, he became a Communist member.
William Z. Foster, a labor organizer, Communist leader, and co-founder of the IWW. Foster fought for a non-reactionary "red" trade unions, wrote extensively on historical materialism of the communist movement internationally and in America (The History of the Three Internationals), and was well-received when he ran for president on the establishment of a worker's republic. Foster defended Stalin and the USSR against smears, fighting against the wrecker opportunists that had infiltrated the Communists.
"Big Bill" Haywood (William Dudley) was a co-founder of the IWW and labor organizer. He is famous in the American consciousness for uttering the legendary words "I've never read Marx's Capital but I have the marks of capital all over me". Haywood was on the executive committee of the Socialist Party of America (the party of Eugene Debs). He served in the Colorado Labor Wars, the Lawrence Textile Strike. Like many American heroes, he was falsely persecuted by our class enemies, trying to set him up on murder charges which failed.
Daniel De Leon was a Marx-Engels contemporary and scientific Socialist American, established Socialist Labor Party of America. I've already quoted him just for this post. He wrote on "Reform or Revolution" decades before Rosa Luxembourg graced us with her brilliant piece on the subject. And he made it accessible to the American working class. He wrote "Anarchism or Socialism", beating even Stalin to the punch by a few years.
[Edit for names omitted from my notes]
Joseph Weydemeyer was a German immigrant to NYC that fought in the Union army of the American Civil War as an officer. Prior to that, he saw the war coming and helped the emerging (original) Republican party, along with many German immigrants, on the grounds of anti-slavery. He was a staunch Marxist and had regular direct contact with Karl Marx, as both were born in Prussia in the same year and were contemporaries. Weydemeyer originally resigned the Prussian army to begin a life of solving social problems. In America, he taught the workers about Internationalism with his newspaper Die Revolution. Weydemeyer was a major reason the First International was available to Americans and he fought for harsh taxes on the civil war profiteers as well as founding the American Workers League, which made several labor and egalitarian demands that the US would eventually be forced to adopt by social forces.
Harry Haywood was a brilliant American activist that advanced the material and academic status of "race" in America. Armed with an understanding of nations and black people in America, Haywood determined African Americans in the South of the US were an oppressed nation. Using the Leninist concept of uneven development of capitalism and the Stalin concept of a nation (not a nation-state), Haywood studied the ante-bellum South's unresolved agriculture question. His conclusion was that the majority-black areas in the South (termed the "Black Belt") were a definite nation and grounded this finding in the development of production. Thanks to Haywood, we now understand so much more about the true America that was whitewashed and hidden, and black worker consciousness advanced rapidly from this point. It's Haywood's study of this nation as an "internal colony" that led to my own study of the many American nations and my own conclusion I stated earlier: that Americans overall comprise an internal colony (Americans loosely being the sum of all its internal people, regardless of nation). Without Harry Haywood, I don't think we could fully understand the totality of America.
[End edit, remaining names I was too sleepy to expound]
[Minor detail edits in next sections]
John Brown was a heroic abolitionist (bordering on an American Spartacus), Malcolm X was a revolutionary civil rights leader and thinker that advanced international and black thought, Fred Hampton was a revolutionary Black Panther Party member and friend of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, Woodie Guthrie was an aspiring communist writer of "This Land is Our Land" and unbowing defender of Stalin.
There were the heroic "Rednecks", miners that fought against capital at the Battle of Blair Mountain (the largest labor civil battle in post-Civil War American history), mercilessly mowed down by the capitalist mercenaries and eventually US Army. The heroes of the Haymarket Massacre, "Mother Jones" (Mary Harris), Lucy Parsons, "Eugene Dennis" Francis Waldron, Claudia Jones, Elizabeth Gurly Flynn, Hellen Keller, and many others involved in the IWW and SPA. America produces heroes like we have a hero factory.
We do not have perfect heroes by any means. But we are an intensely revolutionary people who have inherited a history saturated with Revolution. Every single one of our values are not only revolutionary but Communist. Our values would stand up in the Chinese Communist Party, probably the strictest communists ever. I never want to hear revolution pessimism about our people again. Instead, we will redouble our efforts as is the American working-class way and simply build and develop what must be done to move to the next stage of revolution, when our working class becomes a class for itself.
Comments
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OrEoO kItTy
A very common mistake of "Americans" is to think that America is a country
technically it is and it isn't based on the context of the conversation you can see what defention the person is using for america. sorry if this is rude
by scenemo.mess666; ; Report
It does not make sense
by OrEoO kItTy; ; Report
what i mean is america has 2 meanings/defentions 1 is the continents of the americas and 2 is the country of America and based on the context of the conversation you can see which definition they are using. i hope this makes more sense and isnt rude.
by scenemo.mess666; ; Report
american its a continent
by OrEoO kItTy; ; Report
and a country
by scenemo.mess666; ; Report
Let's see average gringo that you think that America is a country is up to you but that it is a continent is a continent
by OrEoO kItTy; ; Report
is it impossible for words to have multiple meanings? unfortunatley thats the name of the country thats whats its called in the country
by scenemo.mess666; ; Report
Yes, indeed, as you say, unfortunately, the country was named America, even though it is incorrect, but no way, the fault lies with those of their own country.
by OrEoO kItTy; ; Report
nail
Amazing paper, ccing all the humanities professors at my uni to come read and cute this 10/10
Cite*
by nail; ; Report
Hey I'm glad you liked it!
Since this was for my personal blog, it's less rigorous than I usually am. For example, in the purity section I would've cited Carlos Garrido who goes over it in much better clarity than me: https://www.midwesternmarx.com/articles/a-critique-of-western-marxisms-purity-fetish-by-carlos-l-garrido
Let me know how many criticisms your profs have lol
by Alice; ; Report