Line for Revolutionary Study Groups
Introduction
As a revolutionary study group, we must reject postmodernism, and postmodernist distortions, because they mystify history and thus revolution — the most significant historical process — by placing our liberation just out of reach. They do this by rejecting the existence of objective laws guiding the development of society, rejecting the ability to have a science of revolution, and rejecting the connective tissue that exists within and between all societies. Why is this dangerous for our movement? It forces us to be eclectic. To reject a fundamental, scientific foundation that can guide our thoughts and our praxis, and to do so while considering everyone and everything else around us. A revolutionary science must necessarily be international if we are to destroy capitalism-imperialism. For it to be truly international, it must mean that the majority of humans share a common dream, a common goal, and share fundamental ways to achieve this dream, in order to link our constituent, collective praxis. There will always be particularities, but these are already linked together via a universality/commonality/generality.
These objective laws do not exist above society, like an “invisible hand,” but are thoroughly entrenched within every aspect of society, and are expressed through its internal development. All social formations and developments have limitations set independently of human will. They are not set by us, but through us, as we are the only beings capable of realizing them in mind and in material reality, oftentimes only one and not the other. If they are not set by us, then who are they set by? No one, of course. This is not a question of whom, but what. To answer this we must answer a simple question. What keeps humans alive? Food. How do we get food? And that is where these laws begin working. As the human species, our fundamental implements are our hands and our brains. To give structure to the movement of both, we need thought. Praxis is how we interact with all reality outside of our head and is thus principal to the development of thought. Thus, the laws which determine the limits of our praxis, are in themselves determined by all other laws at play around us. The success of a revolution depends on the grasping of these historical laws: allowing us to unite the subjective and the particular with the objective and the universal. Laws exist solely for development, are ultimately formed by development, and stay throughout the entirety of a process of development.
How individualistic and anthropocentric must one be to believe that humans are the only species to not have laws of development affecting their populations (societies)? Postmodernism rejects these laws and is thus unscientific. How can we claim to be a study group if we aren’t studying scientific theory?
In one of my social science classes at my university called Gender and Radicalism in Modern China, our professor began speaking about “the masses” as a new analytical subject that arose during China’s May 4th and Nationalist movements. She asked us “Who exactly are the masses?” I said, “Those oppressed and exploited.” She placed “class struggle” as one of the possible meanings, next to “national struggle,” as if the latter is not simply a political form of the former. Other students said things like “women” or “the Chinese people” or “masses as in mass consumption” or “the majority.” This was an activity in postmodernism, in “discourse”. It was simply a ploy to “prove” that we could not have truly defined what “the masses” are because it had not yet been agreed upon at that point in Chinese history. One can only find subjective meaning about who “the masses are”. There are simply too many different types of people, too many definitions, and too many aspects of society to abstract a “the masses” from. It wasn’t until the CPCh began imposing a certain “homogenizing” definition of “the masses”, that “the masses” could be defined.
Disregarding the fact that if you take the phrase’s usage out of its most important context in China’s history, during the Chinese Revolution and the New Democratic and Socialist eras of China, disregarding the fact that in each era society was guided by a Communist Party, disregarding the consistent class analyses made throughout the history of its usage, as well as patriarchal analyses (itself a production and reproduction of class struggle, and in general, struggles for and against economic systems of private ownership), disregarding the protracted internal struggle over the continuity of class struggle under socialism, then yes one could say the slogan that “the masses and the masses alone make history” is devoid of class-character, gendered-character, is homogenizing, etc. This is a similar position put forth by some revisionists (“Marxists” who suck the revolutionary quality out of Marxism), claiming Mao was a “class-collaborationist” during the New Democratic period by including the progressive sections of the national bourgeoisie and petty-bourgeoisie in the United Front, and the construction of New Democracy, and by anarcho-communists who claim that socialist China wasn’t really socialist, but state capitalist. “The masses” lumped in the oppressors with the oppressed. I would tell them to read “Analysis of the Classes in Chinese Society” by Mao. My professor certainly has, but she clearly read it as a simple primary source document: just because Mao and the CPCh defined “the masses” in a certain way means nothing as there were so many competing definitions of it. The mass line is reduced to pedantic sophistry rather than a fundamental tool for the revolution against imperialism.
None of the above, including my professor, have a concrete understanding of Marxist political economy, philosophy, or scientific socialism. That is, objective political economy, philosophy, and socialism. Indeed, one of the many counterrevolutionary strengths of postmodernism is the denying of objective historical laws; revolutionaries cannot claim to have an objective view of history, because all history is subjective; history is what you make of it. This is incredibly individualistic. For them, historical development rests on “discourse”. The Chinese Revolution occurred due to chance instances of leaders and ordinary people going through discourse; discourse surrounding the past, and discourse surrounding the future. The strong men chose to take “the masses” on a certain pathway, and it just so happened to work out as they planned. Their plans, naturally, came from discourse. Like all strong men, they forced the helpless people silent and they quieted collective discourse, thereby strengthening their power through repressive bureaucracies serving these quieting goals. Marx long ago struggled against this very thinking in classical German philosophy: the “Big Man” theory; that society develops because a few people will it as such.
For postmodernists, knowledge is so powerful that it can move history on its own. That is why it is so dangerous when held in the hands of a few, and that is why those few who have it must reproduce their power. But because everyone is capable of knowing, power is diffused throughout society from top to bottom. There is no class distinction of power. Economic systems like capitalism only serve the goal of concentrating knowledge. It is all knowledge, which is subjective. No one should “confine” knowledge to so-called objective laws aka “meta-narratives.”
This is simply idealism, a reproduced theology masking itself as “scientific,” which serves those in power, the ruling class, by mystifying history and society. The ruling classes have been doing this for thousands of years! The capitalist class more than any other! Marxism is premised on demystifying history, putting human society back in context Nature as a whole, and acknowledging that, as a form of matter, like all other forms, we must follow certain objective laws whether we like it or not. Why is this so potent to the ruling class? Once we establish society has objective laws, and begin prying history open to find these laws, what we find is class struggle, rebellion, and the necessity of revolution. A capitalist gets its wings every time someone shouts “Everything is subjective!”
Marxism
Society develops as, what Marxists call, a “unity of opposites.” All matter must develop in this way. Within everything, there is contradiction, a thesis and antithesis, where one cannot exist without the other, and one must struggle with the other for principality due to their opposing natures. This struggle is called the content of unity and produces what is called the form of unity. The contradiction inherent to the content, and the contradiction between content and form, we call these internal contradictions. The form of an object, its outward appearance, changes as the struggle of its content develops with every other thing around it. The latter aspect is what we call interaction with external contradictions. Mao pointed out that internal contradictions are primary to external ones. A stone exposed to the same amount of heat as a fertilized chicken egg will not hatch into a chick, because the internal contradictions are completely different.
At first, development happens quantitatively. When we put a pot of water on a stove, and wait for it to boil, the internal heat of water rises gradually, meaning, the speed of water particles bumping into each other increases step by step, expressed in “degrees.” However, quantitative intensifications can only occur for so long until a — LEAP — a qualitative change in form occurs. The water particles have begun bumping into each other so fast, that the hydrogen bonds holding them together have broken! A new unity has occurred! The character of the struggle between the individual water particles changed, resulting in a new form of outward appearance, and a new set of internal characteristics, however, the fundamental struggle in the content, that between h2o molecules, did not change. For chemists, outlining changes in states of matter is extremely important for knowing how certain molecules and elements interact with each other given different conditions. Some elements may be non-lethal in a solid state, but once they become gas, and are inhaled, they could easily kill humans. Society too, as a unity of matter, of human matter, goes through quantitative changes and qualitative changes.
However, the path of development for certain contradictions in society is not entirely in the hands of humans. This is in itself an incredibly important contradiction for Marxist analysis. The contradiction between objective laws and subjective conditions. Between objective thinking and subjective thinking. Finding the objective laws acting on the subjective (“seeking truth from facts”), and finding the possible subjective developments, those we can control, of these objective laws. What is the purpose of all science? To advance society in some shape or form. Either to advance our society’s knowledge or to advance our society’s praxis. Marxists say that we should not advance our knowledge if we aren’t also going to advance praxis. We should not separate theory and praxis because they are in a dialectical relationship with each other; a unity of opposites that sustain and develop each other.
So, if the purpose of physical science is to advance society’s technology, what is the purpose of Marxism? Advancing technology is good, and something Marxism can do as well, but it only advances society quantitatively. A leap in a certain technology, say, from the simple weaving machine to the spinning jenny, intensifies contradictions, but is in itself not enough to produce a qualitative leap of society as a whole. Marxism wishes to do just that: to transform capitalist society into Socialist society, and from then from Socialism to Communism. The history of class society has been a history of class struggle. In each stage of it, be it a form of slavery, a form of feudalism, or a form of capitalism, one could develop into the other only through revolution. The Roman Empire collapsed, and in its place left feudal Europe, after countless slave revolts weakened it to a point where it could be defeated by Germanic tribesmen; nomadic societies having economic and military capabilities paling in comparison to those at the height of the Empire. The ruling class of slave owners had written their death wishes upon taking ownership over living, breathing people.
Every past revolution, though, has simply replaced one ruling class with another. Communists wish to bring about a classless, stateless, and moneyless society that can fulfill the needs of every human no matter their abilities or labor contributed. Socialism is the transitional stage from Capitalism to Communism. Communist humanity will labor because we want to, not because we have to. This want will come from our intense love of humanity and for the Earth. We will need no material incentive, only love and empathy. Is this utopian? No. The majority of humanity’s time on Earth has been without class society. Communal societies were based on love and empathy, however, this is because they were forced to. Dialectical materialism tells us that a thing can develop into its opposite. We will once again develop a society without class, not because we want to, but because we have to, or else humanity, along with countless other species, will go extinct. Capitalism in its imperialist stage has presented the absolute limit of exploitation. The Earth cannot handle it any longer, and its objective laws are now revolting against us. Its destruction will not differentiate between the ruling class and the working class. As climate change has shown so far, it destroys the oppressed much faster than it does the oppressors, for the same reasons climate change is occurring in the first place.
The Dialectical Process of Historical Development; Historical Materialism
Marxists understand class society as a further development of private ownership, defined as individual ownership over the means of production (tools, land, raw materials) rather than communal ownership. This is where Proletarian Feminism comes in. Engels was the founding father, however ironic that may sound, of Proletarian Feminism. His defining work The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State imbued the findings of anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan with the characteristic historical materialist science of Marxism; with the ideas of his closest friend, his brother and comrade, Karl Marx.
In Morgan, he found astounding new data on pre-class society and its historical development. During the initial communal stage of society, during the hunter-gatherer mode of production, the family was an extremely enlarged group of leader-Mothers, sisters, undefined fathers, and brothers. There was no distinction between the like of cousin, aunt, uncle, or grandparent. Marriage took the form of what he called “group marriage,” where all members of society, all ‘men’ and all ‘women,’ married each other, developing what we would classify as romantic bonds with several people at once while maintaining what we would classify as sibling bonds with secondary spouses, and having sexual relations with both principal and secondary partners.
Here are some new insights: There was no queer or straight. There was truly no conception of “male” or “female”, but only Mother-leaders, sisters, brothers, and eventually Shamans. Because of the polyamorous nature of sexual activity, and the non-monagamous nature of marriage, the moniker of “parent” could only be applied to biological mothers but not biological fathers. Several men could’ve been the father, as multiple men had relations with women during singular ovulation cycles. It was clear who the Mother was by giving birth to their child. Thus, Mothers had sole claim over children, were their main teachers, and thus the main leaders of society. At all times, this was collective leadership. It wouldn’t be until later that Chiefs or “big men” would arise. However, this sole claim, what Engels titled “mother-right,” meant that Mothers, and potential mothers (sisters), were the main ones tasked with child-rearing. They did not stay “at home,” as there was no “home” outside of the bounds set by the community and environment, but raised their children collectively whilst gathering the most nutritious food items. Furthermore, they were at the forefront of developing technology like clothing, mortars and pestles, and pottery.
Before hunting technology like the bow-and-arrow, gathering was a task undertaken not just by Mothers, but all members of the community, and all could occasionally find larger sources of meat to potentially kill and butcher. It is unclear whether or not Mothers and sisters took part in the crafting of stone tool technology, or whether brothers were the main ones doing it, but most likely, they had access to whatever technology to help with butchering, and especially, skinning animals.
Moving on though, hunting presented a much more dangerous, but extremely significant development in human society. It was most likely a result of linguistic development, population increase, and environmental pressures, and occurred independently all over Africa. This created the first instance of a sexual division of labor, not because communities consciously wanted to develop this division on sexual lines, but because objective conditions forced them to if they wanted their communities to survive and reproduce. This, however, did not automatically result in a new-founded binary and immutable conception of gender, based completely, and one-sidedly on sex. This division occurred due to the contradiction of knowing the biomother but not the biofather, and the necessarily uneven collective effort of mothering, in relation to the dangers of hunting.
Those who were the most important reproducers of children, the new sources of labor, and thus food for the community, could not afford to be lost in battle with animals, or other humans. This did not always mean bio females gathered and bio males hunted. The sexual division is called such because it is an expression of the contradiction that is human sexual dimorphism. This division is one of the main things that will be resolved under Socialism and Communism. But subjectively, communities developed what could be seen as feminine and masculine characteristics that applied to the tasks of hunting, gathering, and mothering, but the development of Shamans necessitated a somewhat androgynous gender, as gender characteristics were directly linked to divisions of labor.
Femininity and masculinity weren’t completely separate from sexual characteristics, but sexual characteristics were not the only things being observed to distribute and regulate new labor, a process in which Mothers naturally took the leading role. The reaction of children to their exposure to different labors, and new knowledge, that is, their personality, also played an important role in regulating labor. But again, the objective conditions limited how much deviation along sexual lines that the divisions of labor could take. History has shown, consistently, that many “females” became hunter-brothers and many “males” gatherer-sisters. What we would see as gender-queer people, also became intrinsically linked to religious practice and leadership, as they symbolically served as an organic link between the two main sexual divisions of labor. During communal society, religion developed solely to reproduce communal ownership and Mother-Right.
In the historical processes laid out above, we have seen further the development of quantitative change into qualitative change. The contradictions inherent to pre-HG society became intensified upon changes in environmental conditions, as well as the evolution of language, which necessitated a qualitative leap in the mode of production to hunter-gathering, in which the form of the family changed qualitatively as well: from a state of “promiscuity” as Engels called it, to group marriage. The form of society changed, and the character of the content did as well, but the material content of humanity did not change qualitatively, simply quantitatively, and what Mao called partially qualitatively (the development of language; qualitative in terms of species evolution, but quantitative in terms of societal evolution).
This outline also lays out another fundamental contradiction of society espoused by Marxism; that between the economic base and superstructure. The economic base is split into two main parts: the productive forces (ability to produce defined by access and usage of raw materials: land, most divisions of labor, skills of production, and technology) and the social relations of production (the form of ownership over the means of production and the major divisions of labor embodying this system of ownership). Marxists understand the economic base as being the determining factor of society because without food and shelter, and the technology needed to produce both, society could not survive. From this economic base arises a superstructure: those aspects of social consciousness able to regulate labor and reproduce the social relations of production and the divisions of labor reproducing this knowledge, being limited mainly by a society’s productive forces. This is where we find things like religion, the form of the family, and in class society; the state, ideology, and science.
However, there is not a one-sided interaction between the two, just like there isn’t a one-sided interaction between theory and praxis although praxis is the main determinant of theory, as Marxists repeatedly stress time and time again. Many people lay hard on the “economic determinism” critique of Marxism to reject it, without ever having investigated Marxism enough to understand historical materialism or Marxist political economy or dialectical materialism (Marxist philosophy; the unity of opposites). The precise form of a state or an ideology is entirely coincidental from a historical standpoint, that is, its form is not wholly determined by the content of the economic base.
However, the development of the economic base presents a necessity for the existence of this form. These forms can only exist to sustain and reproduce the economic base. Furthermore, the symbolism used in the state and in social consciousness are direct reflections (or refractions) of material reality, particular to the specific conditions of the communities reproducing them. Thus, there is a limit to the independent development of social consciousness, the state, the family, and ideology, to a point where in the last instance of every development of one of these things, there must have been an economic development and there must follow an economic development. Let us see what Engels says himself in Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy:
“We will now in addition deal only briefly with religion, since the latter stands further away from material life and seems to be most alien to it. Religion arose in very primitive times from erroneous, primitive conceptions of men about their own nature and external nature surrounding them. Every ideology, however, once it has arisen, develops in connection with the given concept-material, and develops this material further; otherwise, it would not be an ideology, that is, occupation with thoughts as with independent entities, developing independently and subject only to their own laws. In the last analysis, the material life conditions of the persons inside whose heads this thought process goes on determine the course of the process, which of necessity remains unknown to these persons, for otherwise there would be an end to all ideology.”
Concluding Remarks
Theory and praxis, subjective understanding and objective understanding, superstructure and economic base, revolution and counterrevolution, the ruling class and exploited class. All of these follow certain historical laws and paths of development. The greatest developments in matter are qualitative, and they are split into stages because this reflects in words the real, concrete, and objective processes of development. Furthermore, each new leap represents a higher stage of development. There is progression, and direction, inherent in all development, outlined by certain objective laws. Marxism correctly claims that “the world and its laws are knowable.” These developments do not occur in a perfectly straight line but in a wave-like, spiral motion. There are zigzags in all forms of material development: successes and failures, retreats and advances.
It is not a question of whether or not we should define history based on stages, but whether or not our definitions reflect the true process of development. Marxism is full of definitions that do, and these definitions have been used to liberate various oppressed classes from various capitalist, imperialist, and feudal classes. Society has to be divided into progressive stages, because it develops progressively, in qualitative iterations, whether we like it or not. It must and it has. Post-modernists wholeheartedly reject this. “No!” they say, “We do not have the right to divide society like that! These are simply meta-narratives that abstract from the actual discourse that went on in these societies. It is preposterous to say society goes through progressive development. No form of society is better than the other. All forms of centralized power are bad and must be struggled against through discourse. That is the only way society develops. Whether or not it develops progressively depends on how progressive our discourse is.”
How has this line of thinking been allowed into the “scientific” community? Try applying this to any other field of science. Try claiming that dividing matter into different states is a meta-narrative, try stating that water transforms into gas because it can and it wants to. Try claiming that species evolution is not a progressive process, but a chaotic development that doesn’t follow any “meta-laws” like “natural selection”. You would be made a mockery of the chemist and evolutionary biologist communities. Why should it be any different for the social sciences? How can any social science claim to be scientific when they reproduce the thought of the rotten sperm donor of postmodernism; Foucault. Postmodernism is now an enshrined “perspective” of sociology. It has seeped its way into all bourgeois social sciences like History, Anthropology, Gender and Sexuality studies, and Abolitionist/Decolonial theory.
Why do I categorize the former as bourgeois? Because it is now present in all major private universities and is thus funded by the bourgeoisie. Furthermore, it is the breeding ground for counterrevolutionary mystifications and revisions of Marxist theory. These “scholars” are very much happy sitting back in their chairs and spending 5 years on a singular book written from their dissertations instead of using their knowledge to actually help the revolutions that can decolonize this world, end imperialism, and abolish capitalism and the prison-industrial complex. No, for them, it ends and begins with “decolonizing our minds.” If they were truly indebted to these things, they would be Marxists and part of a revolutionary organization, they would be attempting to provide revolutionary leadership to the masses, uniting them against the bourgeois dictatorships and imperialism, and helping to construct socialism. This is a fundamentally reactionary development in so-called anti-capitalist theory. They have professionalized the science for the emancipation of the working class, of women and queers from patriarchy, of colonized nations from their colonizers, and have gone back to the point of philosophy in the 18th century, which necessitated Marx’s famous thesis: “the philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world, the point is, however, to change it.”
Postmodernism has made them think, to which I am sympathetic, that they are changing the world simply through “discourse” and reformist efforts. I do feel bad for these theorists. I know that they see the atrocities of imperialism and patriarchy and wish to see it gone. I know that their entire reason for studying these “leftist” theories has been so that they may be able to change the world. These are folks who have paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for education, who have poured decades of work into their academic fields, and who have read more literature than I could ever wish to. However, they are fundamentally incapable of broaching their goal through postmodernism, and without Marxism; just as an evolutionary biologist is incapable of understanding the development of a species and mutations, and applying this to help humanity, without Darwinianism and Mendelian genetics. Because Marxists are talking about political theory, and bourgeois society has convinced people that all that is political is subjective, they believe we’re simply posturing and being dogmatic when we say that “Marxism is the only objective social science, and the only ideology capable of emancipating humanity from class society and all forms of exploitation and oppression.” They have convinced themselves that the Russian and Chinese revolutions were thoroughly authoritarian, and horrendous applications of Marxism that produced fundamentally more bad than it did good.
Here is a contradiction. They claim to be decolonial yet must reject the Chinese, Russian, Vietnamese, Cuban, and Korean, etc., etc., revolutions against imperialism, who went about decolonizing themselves using the guidelines set out by Marx, Engels, Lenin, and yes, even Stalin and Mao. They fully believe Communism has failed when it has never even been reached. They fully believe Marxism is over and incapable of liberating the oppressed masses when it is being used right now in the Philippines, India, Turkiye, Peru, and Palestine towards that very goal. They claim to be decolonial scholars yet have no idea about the People’s Wars and National Struggles going on beneath their very noses until the reality of the fascist offensives against them hits them in their face. Ask them about the PCP, the CPI(M), the CPP, the TKP (M-L), the PFLP, the DFLP, the Al-Qassam brigades, or the Al-Aqsa Flood, and they’ll ask you what all these letters could possibly mean. They only see defeat. They only see death, violence, and authoritarianism. They only see genocide and mass incarceration. They only see destruction and not creation. Postmodernism is a hopeless endeavor. It forces oneself to ignore all that is concretely good and to simply imagine a better place. This is why I say it is theology, and Foucault is its God. The CIA meant it to be that way. They chose a perfect man and a perfect theory. When one is flooded with bourgeois ideology, yet shallowly recognizes the class struggle, it is incredibly difficult to swallow the Marxist pill. Postmodernism is an opiate of the masses and a much easier-to-swallow pill.
Let me leave with a quote from the article, “On the Origins and Development of Postmodernism”:
“The recently declassified CIA report entitled ‘France: Defection of the Leftist Intellectuals’ deals largely with the trajectory of this trend in theory and praises the ‘spirit of anti-Marxism … that will make it difficult for anyone to mobilize significant intellectual opposition to U.S. policies.’ It goes on to say that ‘The wide acceptance of this more critical approach to Marxism and the Soviet Union has been accompanied by a general decline of intellectual life in France that has undermined the political involvement of leftist intellectuals.’ In this report, the CIA credits Foucault with the ‘critical demolition of Marxist influence in the social sciences,’ which it celebrates as a ‘profound contribution to modern scholarship.’ Needless to say, if the CIA thinks something is good, then it certainly isn’t.”