It goes without saying that things are bad. Between the ongoing pandemic, economic stagnation, housing crisis, mental health crisis, escalating New Cold War, resurgence of fascism, multiple wars raging, ethnic cleansing in the DRC, civil war in Sudan, genocide in Palestine, and the looming climate apocalypse, the challenges faced by the Communist movement and the urgency of our mission have never been greater. And where is the Communist movement? In the imperialist countries there’s barely a “left” to speak of, much less a mass movement against capital. It’s easier than ever to allow yourself to give in to despair and numb yourself to the horror with escapism.
Doesn’t matter. We are lucky to be in this moment right now. For most of history the oppressed have had no way out of their miserable conditions. How many millions of lives were wasted toiling as slaves? How many millions died after a short brutal life at the hands of oppressors? We stand today at an unprecedented turning point in history — we have an arsenal at our disposal that none of the oppressed have ever possessed. We have the clarity of scientific socialism, which allows us to truly comprehend our conditions and our tasks. We have over a century of socialist struggle and revolutions to study and learn from. We have the thoughts, teachings, and experiences of past revolutionaries who dedicated their lives to arming us with the knowledge necessary to defeat capital. We have the internet giving us instantaneous access to all of this information, something undreamed of before our generation. Finally, and most importantly:
We have a dying empire to topple — Imperialism is on its way out. This constant onslaught of increasingly severe crises are the empire’s death throes. We know that fascism arises in response to a crisis of capitalism, as it did in the 20th century in response to the rise of the communist movement. What does the current resurgence of fascism tell you about the state of capitalism? The rate of profit continues to fall as the world economy shifts away from the empire and towards the new socialist superpower. The successes of Chinese socialism cannot be understated, their explosive rise to the economic juggernaut they are today is doing two things to make our task possible: 1) proving to the world the superiority of the socialist mode of production, 2) undermining the economic foundations of imperialism through win-win trade partnerships, preventing the empire from exerting its coercive neocolonial trade practices on underdeveloped nations.
As socialism in China continues to develop and mature it will increasingly outcompete and lay bare the utter obsolescence of the capitalist mode of production. Already production in some key industries has reached levels of centralization and automation which capitalism struggles to match. Competition from advanced Chinese firms is cratering the rate of profit in these industries — capitalism already can’t compete in green energy and electric vehicles and is turning to extreme protectionism in a desperate bid to stave off the inevitable. Socialist state-directed research and education have secured China’s lead in many emerging technologies, a trend which is likely to continue as capitalist education falls further behind with increasing state austerity measures. Where will we be after another ten years of capitalist decay and socialist development? It must be stressed that this situation is wholly new. Imperialism has never been weaker, and this gives us a world-historic opportunity to finally slay capital for good.
We know from Lenin the three key aspects of a revolutionary situation are: 1) a crisis in the ruling class, where they are unable to continue to rule in the old way, 2) the suffering and want of the oppressed classes grows more acute than usual, and 3) as a result of the above the activity of the oppressed classes increases and they begin to take independent action. Does any of this sound familiar to you? If you live in America you know as well as I that nobody in Washington has any plan whatsoever for how to solve any of the increasingly dire issues tearing American society apart, and as crises continue to pile up they will inevitably be faced with issues which necessitate and force change which they are similarly incapable of responding to, which is when we need to be prepared to take action. It is clear that this is the direction we are heading.
Everyone is desperate for change, and anti-capitalist sentiments have gone from the political fringe to a pressing issue on everyone’s mind in the space of less than a decade. The 2020 uprisings proved conclusively that the American people have revolutionary spirit and are willing to stand up and fight for a better future. The resurgence of the trade union movement proves the masses are beginning to remember the necessity of organization against capital. All we are missing is a revolutionary vanguard party capable of taking charge of the situation and leading the masses to a higher stage of struggle, to revolution. With only slight variations, we can see these trends across the entirety of the imperial core.
The left in the imperialist countries is small and disorganized, but it is within our power to organize it. No movement has emerged because the left is plagued by infighting and scandals — why is this? We as a movement are lacking a humble commitment to political education.
Political education is the single most essential component of a revolutionary struggle. It binds the other components together. Following the counter-revolutions at the end of the 80s, Marxism experienced a tremendous decline across the world as the masses lost faith in its liberating power. In its place has grown opportunism, revisionism, anarchism, and all other sorts of deviationist tendencies that history has proven are dead ends. We desperately need educated Marxists to combat these tendencies and to educate other socialists. This is not a sectarian sentiment; much of Lenin’s enormous body of works is dedicated specifically to tearing apart incorrect tendencies. Mao greatly encouraged “line struggle” within the party for this reason. This is fundamental to revolutionary struggle. This does not mean splitting into tiny irrelevant sects whenever you disagree with anyone. Lenin struggled tirelessly for many years within the RSDLP to push it towards a correct revolutionary Marxist line. We need to follow his example.
Revolutionaries of the past prioritized political education for good reason. Ho Chi Minh personally translated Marxist texts into Vietnamese and read them aloud to illiterate peasant farmers because he and they understood they could only be truly revolutionary if they were educated. The Bolsheviks took great pains to set up entire illegal press operations in secret so as to publish Marxist literature. They understood, and we must understand, that Marxism is a science and it must be treated and studied as such. You could not take up chemical engineering without first a rigorous scientific study of chemistry, and you can not become truly revolutionary without first a rigorous scientific study of Marxism.
We must each dedicate ourselves to study with the aim of being able to:
- summarize and teach fellow proletarians the content of the theory
- creatively apply the dialectical method to the issues facing us today
- decisively combat incorrect ideas and tendencies
With political education comes the ability to form a correct and coherent political line. With correct political lines comes unity of purpose and action. It is only through this unity that we can begin to win the masses over to the revolutionary struggle. At the same time, it is important to avoid book worship, to do better than to dogmatically copy the words and actions of dead men. We learn from their methods and build on them and apply them to our context. We learn to become scientists of revolution, we learn from what the great minds in our field have already figured out and we go on to work out our own problems.
We cannot afford to wait any longer. We do not have the luxury of the easy comfortable life so many in our parents’ and grandparents’ generations led. The very biosphere that sustains us is in mortal peril. Our very lives depend on revolution. Our children’s lives depend on it. Our grandchildren’s lives depend on it. Every human being who will ever be born depends on us taking action right now. I urge you to take a moment to reflect on this. Unknowable billions are watching us in this very moment through their history books. What will they see? We each have only a single precious irreplaceable life to live on this single precious irreplaceable Earth. Will our descendants see us willfully wasting our lives numbing ourselves with entertainment and escapism as our oppressors willfully lay waste to our world? Or will they see us heroically dedicating our lives to at long last put a decisive end to capitalism? Will we choose the easy path of slow suicide, or the difficult path of asserting our humanity and reclaiming our dignity by casting off our shackles?
The empire is ripe to fall, but it will not fall of its own accord — we must make it fall. We must learn to form a truly revolutionary, dedicated, disciplined vanguard. We must learn to become leaders. We must learn to wage the class war in organizational, theoretical, and military terms. We can’t wait around for someone else to take the lead. It has to be us. It has to be YOU.
The theory is more accessible than ever. M.L. Reading Hub has a wonderful curriculum with free annotated PDFs and study materials. Marxists.org has thousands of Marxist texts available for free. ProleWiki has thousands of articles to help deepen your understanding of Marxist theory and history, and an extensive resource library. Red Menace podcast has brilliant explanations and breakdowns of key Marxist texts. Socialism For All on YouTube has hundreds of excellently narrated audiobook recordings of nearly every major Marxist text. Gather the politically curious and fed up people in your life and study with them. There is no excuse. YouTube videos and memes are great for propaganda but nothing substitutes actually engaging with the material, studying it, internalizing its lessons, and carrying it into the real world to put it into action and build a mass movement.
We need revolution, and it is within our grasp. Not in a hundred years. Not in fifty years. We can and must build it and carry it out within the next decade. If that sounds unrealistic, consider that it is far more unrealistic to sit around waiting for revolution to arrive on our doorstep “some day, eventually” while the imperialists strangle our Earth to death. We must have a clear goal in mind in order to seriously carry out our task. Revolution is a deadly serious business. Revolution demands serious, disciplined, professional commitment. The future of humanity and life on Earth demands this. We must thoroughly internalize this truth and make revolutionary struggle the chief priority in our lives.
Communism will prevail! Let’s make it happen!
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