Now, please proceed to forget all of that. The matter is much simpler than you’d assume reading individuals like Althusser or Eagleton. The answer is found in this oft-cited but rarely understood section from Marx’s 1859 Preface to a Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy: 

“In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or – this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms – with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure.”¹

Let us narrow in on the key phrase, this time with some asterisks at the end of key words, and with a slash inserted in a key element: “The totality of these relations* of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises* a legal and political superstructure / and to which correspond* definite forms of social consciousness.” 

Read carefully and you will see why I have highlighted these words. The “real foundation,” the “base,” refers precisely and exclusively to the relations of production. No means. This has a very important consequence: The base is social. It is interrelational, interpersonal, describing real relations between real individuals. Production itself is a social activity. Therefore, the importance of economics is not “economic determinism,” it is social determinism. Social in a collective sense, beyond any single person’s will, but still social. 

And the superstructure is “legal and political.” If the base is the relations of production, it becomes necessary to point out that Marx has said that property relations are merely the same thing as relations of production but in the legal sphere. That appears to be the identity of our superstructure: The legal and political mechanisms by which the relations of production are made stable, which organically arise from the activities of the economy. 

So what about ideology, culture, so on and so forth? These are relegated to the third category, “social consciousness.” This “corresponds” to the base, rather than arising from it. That should not be too shocking: Just as language does not change overnight when feudalism becomes capitalism, because language is a medium of communication regardless of class, social consciousness in general exists regardless of class. The concerns of consciousness are inevitably tied into class, however. This is because, as pointed out, the base is already social. The activity of labor, as such, has a huge impact on a person’s consciousness. But so too does everything else a person does. To quote Marx again, this time from Theories of Surplus Value: 

“Man himself is the basis of his material production, as of any other production that he carries on. All circumstances, therefore, which affect man, the subject of production, more or less modify all his functions and activities, and therefore too his functions and activities as the creator of material wealth, of commodities. In this respect it can in fact be shown that all human relations and functions, however and in whatever form they may appear, influence material production and have a more or less decisive influence on it.” ²

So what does this mean? It means, functionally, that the base/superstructure model is massively overblown. The base is taken to mean “the entire economy,” when it really means “the relations of production.” The superstructure is taken to mean “everything that is not economic,” when it really just means “legal-political structuring of productive relations.” It’s a metaphor which is very limited in scope. Before you cite Engels, keep in mind that Engels and Marx were not one person. They neither agreed all the time nor disagreed all the time. At any rate, the expansive version of the superstructure used by Engels was used by Marx, but only early on, and after that, he consistently maintained this legal-political definition. Engels simply did not realize this in his own later writings, and used the version Marx had already moved on from. The notion that expansive version is an advancement of the 1859 version is contradicted by the fact that Marx moved from the expansive version to the 1859 version. 

As for the forces, the instruments of production, their relationship to the relations stay more or less the same. Their exclusion from the base/superstructure model does not mean they float freely in the void. The only real note is that any notion of determinism stemming from them is undermined by the social nature of the relations of production, social in a manner which is very much impacted by ideology and culture. Culture has genuine weight here. Economics are normative from the start. 

The mode of production, often flattened into merely “mode + relations of production,” is much more than economics. It is an overall organic whole of relations which produce societies as wholes. The entire concrete totality of a given society in a given moment. There is no pure “capitalist mode of production.” There is only a self-differentiated social totality laden with endless determinations from economic to legal to conscious, with no separating topology. Social consciousness interpenetrates all elements of life because humans, as a collective, live every element of life. Determination, at best, exists in a law of large numbers. It does not magically come from the existence of a fancy new way of making shoes, even if that is an enabling factor. In practice, productive relations always flow into seemingly non-productive relations and vice versa. 

The mode of production as a social totality, which includes all factors which influence production and reproduction of the society writ large, with the economy as the conditioning factor which is nevertheless always already social, ideological, cultural, is the solution. 

As for operationalism, I am not demanding one abandon heuristic models for abstracting one element out and examining it. In fact, I’d very much still recommend splitting analysis into matters which are economic, legal-political, and what I call “interpersonal” (such as culture and ideology) for ease of use. But this should be done delicately and temporarily only. Why? Because this model risks implying that the economic and legal-political spheres of society are not interpersonal, are not social, are not ideological. The idea that they are not is precisely the sort of error Marx identifies in commodity fetishism. Treating the economy like it is self-contained and that everything else is merely epiphenomenal is an error we make at our own peril. As such, every effort should be made to be able to interconnect these spheres, in truth mere elements of one sphere, fluidly in analysis once the heuristic separation has outlived its usefulness. Marx’s own analyses never treated these issues as separable. Neither should ours.

1. Marx, “Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy,’ 2. ︎
2. Marx, “Theories of Surplus Value, Part 1,” 288. ︎

“Commodities begin to be exchanged because of an act of will: their owners agree to dispose of them reciprocally. In the meantime, people gradually come to rely on use-objects produced by others. Constant repetition makes exchange into a normal social process.”

“Our commodity owners learn, then, that the same division of labor that makes them into independent private producers also makes the social production process — and their relations within it — independent of them, the producers themselves: they learn that their independence from one another emerges in and is complemented by a system of all-around dependence on things produced by other people.”

Karl Marx, Capital, pg. 82 (2024)

Introduction

Recently, Cde. Potato published a work in Red Clarion entitled “No One is Coming to Feed Us.” While the piece brings to the forefront important issues regarding food supply chains in the United States, its surface level analysis coupled with individualistic calls to action reflect a deeply disruptive tendency within the contemporary communist movement. This paper serves as a substantive critique to the faulty theoretical lines of thought contained within Cde. Potato’s piece, while also providing a new framework for systematically addressing political issues that will aid us in our struggle to obtain political power and bring about a socialist state.

The Dialectic of Revolutionary Struggle

As communists, using scientific analysis of contemporary and historical social relations to determine the correct path of revolutionary struggle is the key aspect of our work. What differentiates Marxism from other pseudo-intellectual attempts at social analysis is that humans are not prescribed natures as independent actors or socially dependent subjects, but are understood in their contradictory truth as both. As an individual you can act in ways that benefit both yourself and those around you. You can go vegan, reduce food waste and compost the rest, and even plant native flowers to help local pollinators. The issue with individual action lies not in its moral nature as a good thing that you should do, but in its quantitative relation to broader society. One person going vegan in a country of over three hundred million is going to have a negligible effect on average consumption habits and their subsequent environmental impacts. However, local concentrations of thousands of vegans and a national population of over a million can begin to introduce qualitative changes in broader society. This is the dialectical nature of social development.

Historical progressions in social-economic relations keenly reflect this process. The bourgeoisie did not always exist, nor did they simply emerge from the mist to bring about a new age of gunpowder and roaring steel. Instead they emerged slowly out of the contradictions of feudal society. These small groups of proto-bourgeois eventually found one another and began to organize towards the interests of their class. Bit by bit the bourgeoisie concentrated and began to disrupt the feudalist biospheres. By the time feudalist society caught onto this process it was already too late to prevent the capitalist age. Feudalist classes had two options: they could either consign themselves to a slow death or face the guillotine. The bourgeois eventually won their class war through bitter struggle and brought about the contemporary age, in which capitalism has subsumed and guaranteed the death of all former social divisions of labor.

Anyone who calls themselves a communist must understand this process, as it is by the same means which we will bring about communism. There are no shortcuts or tricks that allow us to avoid direct confrontation and simply declare the world anew. We are as much subjects to history as we are its progenitors. Winning our war with the bourgeoisie will necessitate a strict dedication to proven revolutionary strategies and the scientific development of new tactics informed by historic failures and contemporary material conditions. The population of cadres politically developed enough to engage in such a struggle may still be small in number, but just as the bourgeoisie and feudal lords before them, we will achieve our social revolution through quantitative action.

Now is a time of unprecedented opportunity for our movement. In the face of the end of unimpeded imperialist expansion, the liberal mask of the American empire has fallen. The bourgeoisie have turned their gaze to the core in the hopes that by ripping out the copper wire and using the floorboards as fuel they can hold out against a global turn towards anti-imperialism. We have seen this self-destructive tendency emerge in several ways. On the international scale, the American bourgeoisie have begun to forcibly open up the empire’s vassal states for rapid and brutal economic exploitation. This has primarily emerged through the use of economic crises induced via tariffs, the threat of annexing territories, and the move to end NATO to demonstrate the European bourgeoisie’s reliance on the United States as an occupational force. While these moves have shocked liberals within the imperial core, they are simply a continuation of the empire’s shift towards open imperialist brutality. The longstanding strategy of obscuring the violence necessary to maintain the settler and aristocratic laboring classes has been replaced with an ideological drive toward fervent celebration of complicity in the brutal murder of the globally hyper-exploited. With socialist and anti-imperialist resistance drastically reducing the ratio of surplus-value that can be extracted from the third world, the first world has been turned to as a fresh store of labor and resources prime for rapid primitive accumulation. 

On the national scale, we have seen the violent enforcement of the patriarchal social division of labor through the targeting of transgender people as a third sexed class. Making state backed and extralegal violence against transgender people an acceptable social reality makes all deviations from gendered norms, particularly those done by women (trans or otherwise), a viable marker for increased levels of exploitation. Regarding the nationally oppressed, the state has abandoned the policy of courting select segments of these populations to increase their tokenistic representation in the exploitative classes of the bourgeois, petit-bourgeois, and aristocratic labor to justify the continued brutal immiseration of the vast majority of their populations; replacing it with the open and fetishized brutality of their hyper-exploitation. This too is not unprecedented. Over the last two decades the state has forced migrant laborers into increasingly precarious conditions of survival through the slow erosion of legal protections, the expansion of surveillance, encouragement of settlers enacting extralegal violence, and the expansion of administrative violence through Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Department of Homeland Security. Conditions of precarity that have forced this population into becoming a slave-like class of hyper-exploited laborers.

With capitalism’s barbarism now laid bare, millions have been galvanized to take action against these systems of exploitation. While the revolutionary energy of this moment is undoubtable, the ability of any of these movements to effectively harness them to bring about lasting social change is doubtable at best. Once again liberals squander this energy through haphazard and disorganized fits of reaction, such as the recent “economic blackout” that excluded small businesses from their supposed boycott of the American economy, or the national “hands off” protest which included an ideologically muddled list of complaints and no real demands. Those who have yet developed socialist consciousness mistake these protest movements as the means to develop and consolidate power. However, their lack of organization and long term planning leads to apathetic nihilism among the masses when the movements inevitably fail to achieve any of their idealistic goals. As long as there is no a communist party to lead the masses and uplift them from base trade union consciousness, these spontaneous actions will continue to act as a roadblock in the path of socialist struggle. To seriously address these crises requires us to direct our efforts away from spontaneous action, and towards the extensive construction of the communist movement’s organizational capacity. 

You can engage in this work by joining or organizing a local Marxist Leninist book club. After building up a solid base of educated and militantly consistent cadres can you then direct your organizations capacity around a central project, whether that be communal gardening, mutual aid, becoming an anti-ice rapid response network, etc. This tiered process of development will provide you the means to effectively harness local revolutionary energy to not only enact social change, but to slowly institutionalize your organization as a node of political power. This essential work on the micro level will aid in the eventual consolidation of these nodes into a communist party that can harness our collective power towards dismantling the empire once and for all. While the struggle may seem daunting, revolutions have never been won in a single decisive blow. Rather they have succeeded against all odds by dismantling the enemy piece by piece.

The Conquest of Crumbs

As communists in the heart of the imperialist core, there is a vast array of issues we must address to build the foundations for socialism. A key issue that is rapidly exacerbating social contradictions is capitalism’s tendency towards ecological destruction through the metabolic rift. Current production processes and consumptive demands outstrip our environment’s ability to reproduce the raw resources these commodities rely upon. A process from which we have witnessed the total destruction of biomes through pollution, over extraction, and the mass eradication of hundreds of species. Faced with the existential threat that climate change poses, the global bourgeoisie was faced with a choice: either perpetuate the capitalist system by having the state intervene in the process of accumulation so as to restabilize the environment’s process of self-reproduction, or remove all fetters and pursue accumulation at any cost in the hopes some miracle cure for climate change will come along. Being nothing more than soulless husks that physically embody the spirit of capital, the bourgeoisie enthusiastically chose the latter. The ramifications of which have only just begun to hit the insulated imperial core. As Cde. Potato notes in their work No One is Coming to Feed Us, the rapid spread of pollution, disease, coupled with climate change are overlapping factors that will cause serious disruptions in food supply chains. Conditions that require us to face a serious question, who will feed the people?

Cde. Potato’s answer to this question is rather slapdash. Instead of outlining tactics and strategies by which local orgs could begin building the logistical means to feed the masses, we are given six individualist actions one can take to help bring about ecosocialism.

The short term steps towards ecosocialism are:

1. Grow your own food as much as possible to get a functional understanding of what your local ecosystem can produce
2. Support the food sovereignty of Indigenous communities by learning about what they are already doing
3. Support migrant farm workers by learning about what they are already doing
4. Organize to end child labor and prison labor through boycotts, advocacy, and direct action
5. Support local farms with an emphasis on perennials and orchards. Trees take YEARS to replace, these are the farms we can’t afford to lose
6. Recognize that “farmer” is not a specific term that automatically means petit bourgeois. Focus on the ownership class of agribusiness or Big Ag.

The author’s call for everyone to learn how to not just grow their own food, but to can and preserve this food on their own demonstrates a clear lack of understanding of how systematic this issue truly is. This call for individual and small group preparation for a food crisis calls to mind the settler-colonial prepper mindset more than an effective socialist strategy. There will never be the spontaneous emergence of enough gardeners and small scale farmers to feed the people. These pressing conditions require a deeper centralization of agricultural production, not its decentralization.

Let’s say that you, as an individual, want to become more independent from national and international bourgeois agricultural production. So you decide to grow some potatoes in your backyard. Let’s assume you’ve got a natural green thumb and through hard work you’re able to produce 80 potatoes each containing about 100 calories. Assuming you consume 2,000 calories a day, that would result in only a 1.09% decrease in your caloric dependency. If you were to compare the value of each potato given the labor time it took to till the soil, add fertilizer, consistently water them, cover them with leaves so they don’t freeze, harvest them, etc., the amount of labor stored within each potato would far outweigh the price of any you could buy at the store. Attempting to produce your own food at home, while a lovely hobby, is a complete waste of socially productive labor, as the socially necessary labor time to produce these products at scale will always be far outside your capacity as an individual laborer.

If you wanted to reduce your dependency by 10% you’d have to produce at least 73,000 calories, and spread that caloric intake across several nutritional sources such as onions, potatoes, rice, and beans. Of course this work would be made easier in a collective, but doing so comes with exponentially increasing costs. If each person is working towards the same goal you have to produce 73,000 calories for every member within the collective, divided across X number of crops, times an array of values for each crop’s individual requirements for land, water, and labor time necessary to produce a decent yield. Not to mention the financial costs of tools, seeds, etc. Taking on such a monumental task requires one to effectively answer several questions. For example, how are you acquiring enough land to grow that many crops? The majority of people do not own several acres to just start a farm. Even in suburban areas you’d require several front-and-back yards worth of land to feed more than a handful of people. Furthermore, which members of the working class have enough free time to dedicate themselves to farming on top of their jobs and domestic labor? Existing subsistence farmers still rely on the daily work of the whole family to produce enough food to eat or trade to maintain themselves. Finally, where will you obtain the money to maintain this project? Your comrades may be able to chip in through dues, and perhaps well-off members of your community may donate to such a noble cause. Yet, as soon as a financial crisis hits your pool of funds will dry up. There is simply no way to succeed on this path without the substantial support of an emergent socialist state.

When it comes to Indigenous food sovereignty Cde. Potato tells readers to research what their local Indigenous groups are, offer up support for their food sovereignty projects, and to “…shift your mindset to default the authority on agriculture and land management away from profit-driven science and towards Indigenous knowledge.” While it is good for comrades to know the conditions of their local tribes, the lack of direction given shifts the responsibility of politically activating readers from the author and onto the backs of these tribes. Indigenous organizations already have to deal with the incessant ignorance of well meaning liberal “allies” that come to the table with no means or tools to aid tribes in their liberatory struggle, yet demand to be educated and cultivated as activists so they can achieve moral salvation. As communists we must avoid adding to this feckless pool of good samaritans, and instead work to achieve the organizational capacity to work with these tribes in coalition. To have cadres who can be put to work using spades to put spuds in the ground or be an active presence to help in the protection of Indigenous farmers from settler violence. 

Beyond this lack of political activation, Cde. Potato refuses to explain what the struggle for food sovereignty looks like in the United States. In the place of such an explanation readers are given a collage of random news articles about Indigenous organizations, federal programs, and small businesses, with no context given for what each meaningfully does in the long term struggle for tribes sovereign management of their own food production, consumption, and distribution. No thought is given to the ways in which ecological colonization, the capitalist enclosure of land, and the genocidal destruction of Indigenous languages, knowledge, and traditions has made many tribes’ traditional food systems nearly impossible to reproduce. Nor is there consideration given to the fact that not all tribes have a strong traditional relationship to agricultural production. Take the Northern Arapaho tribe. Situated in the plains, the tribe’s primary form of caloric intake came from hunting local wildlife and gathering wild grown food. This in turn led to periods of extreme precarity before the introduction of the horse and gunpowder rifle guaranteed a more consistent means to sustain the tribe on wild game (Arthur and Porter, 2019, pg. 74-75). The same level of nutritional variety and food security did not rematerialize until the 1940’s with the emergence of family gardens and increased levels of small game hunting. Gains that were again swept away within a few decades due to capitalist and colonial encroachment (Arthur and Porter, 2019, pg. 78-80). While contemporary efforts such as the Growing Resilience project on the Wind River Reservation was able to achieve some gains in food sovereignty through the development of home food gardens, further efforts are still drastically constrained by extremely limited access to resources and capital.

To understand what role we as communists can play in the work to achieve Indigenous food sovereignty it’s important to first contextualize the project within contemporary material conditions. Food sovereignty represents several political goals in one project: tribes securing access to plentiful and healthy food, the ecologically sustainable production of this food, and the means to develop agricultural production in relation to their own needs and ambitions. While each is key to achieving the political project as a whole, most Indigenous people in the United States struggle with either hunger or being able to regularly obtain nutritious and healthy food, so of central importance to the current struggle is securing access to food. When food sovereignty is brought up by non-Indigenous people the focus is rarely on ending the systematic colonial violence that is the infliction of hunger on Indigenous populations, rather the ecological benefits of Indigenous food systems are made to be the main focus. This is because liberal interests lie not in aiding Indigenous people in their struggle, but using their knowledge to save the Bourgeois and the settler-colonial classes that served as their foot soldiers from the environmental catastrophe they themselves brought about. 

Despite these ideals placed on the back of Indigenous tribes they currently do not have the means to fix over two centuries of genocidal environmental destruction. The level of development required for tribes to achieve food sovereignty may at first look nothing like the ideals of ecological stability or growing crops native to a geographic area. It may very well require industrial levels of agricultural development owned, operated, and managed by the tribes themselves. Instead of family and community gardens that feed a handful of people, it may look like the efficient use of socially productive labor through the implementation of heavy machinery, greenhouses, and a variety of other large scale forms of agricultural production. The burden of fixing climate change alongside feeding not just their people, but everyone who will remain on Turtle Island, is a burden that should not be placed solely on the back of these nationally oppressed peoples who are pushed to the absolute extremes of precarity. To expect them to pick themselves up by their bootstraps and fix the ongoing environmental catastrophe forced upon them with nothing but a small amount of individual financial, moral, or volunteer support, is not merely an absurdity, but outright cruelty.

If communists are genuinely interested in helping to achieve Indigenous food sovereignty, then we have to develop the means to materially support them. The collective efforts of a communist club can do far more to aid these tribes than any individual deciding on a whim to look into what’s going on. A club could work with food sovereignty projects by helping to organize a donation drive, volunteering club members labor to help build and maintain gardens or farms, or find other ways to provide material and logistical support like offering car rides or free mechanical maintenance. Instead of this ceaseless chatter about what Indigenous sovereignty could do for us, we should be figuring out what we can do at scale to aid in their struggles and fight to restore their land.

When addressing the conditions of migrant farm workers, Cde. Potato again refrains from fully addressing what these conditions are and how readers can engage in migrant workers struggles. The only direction readers are given is to follow United Farm Workers (UFW) “for updates and attend a ‘Know Your Rights’ training if you can.” Information that is only useful if you live in California, as the UFW has little to no organizational presence outside of the state. Further, this call to action yet again shifts the responsibility of politically activating readers from the author and onto the backs of self-organized migrant workers. Workers who are expected to trust absolute strangers with not just their personal safety, but the safety of their family. An astounding amount of trust has to be given for these workers to tell a stranger they’re a migrant, particularly when ICE agents are rounding folks up while in plain clothes and many white people are more than happy to report migrants so they can take part in the spectacle of state enacted colonial violence.

Migrant workers can be found in every state of the country, doing not only local agricultural work, but much of the hard physical labor of proletarian jobs that the broad swath of Americans are totally uninterested in doing. Just as these workers can be found in every state so too can you find organizations fighting to improve their material conditions. Some states may have orgs dedicated to this specific struggle or chapters of national organizations such as the ACLU may have rapid response networks of trained legal observers who can show up to ICE raids to inform people of their rights and do everything within their legal ability to prevent an abduction. As an individual it is far more useful for you to get in contact with one of these orgs so they can train you and put you to use in the local struggle rather than simply keeping up on the news. What migrant workers need is not self-educated sympathy, what they need is organized groups of people who will fight to protect them from the violence of their employers and the settler-colonial police force that is ICE. Politically centralized orgs, even in some of the most rural and conservative states, have been able to use long term strategic planning to prevent both deportations and the construction of ICE detention centers. The only way migrants can regain any sense of stability is through the support of highly organized groups that provide safety through rapid-response networks, legal support, volunteer translators, or even the provision of daily necessities such as food and water.

Child and prison labor are similarly under-discussed by Cde. Potato. Child labor is nothing new to capitalist development. Whether it be in the cotton mills, coal mines, or modern day meat processing plants, the blood of child laborers has long served as a fountain of youth for the dead labor known as capital. Liberalism’s main function in the United States has been to obscure the violent exploitation contained within nearly every commodity so that aristocratic laborers can consume them without guilt, so they can eat their $10 cheeseburger without once thinking about the child who lost their hand carving up the flesh they now so greedily consume. The reappearance of such overt exploitation in the imperial core is merely a sign that the imperialist super-profits that once protected America’s aristocratic laboring class from such conditions have drastically eroded. All this change means is that to maintain current rates of surplus-labor extraction within the imperial core now requires adult laborers’ direct competition with child labor. This will continually get worse until we bring about socialism. Cde. Potato also engages in the longstanding myth that prison labor is a profitable enterprise, and thus believes a boycott could do anything to affect it. Prisons in America do not exist to produce a profit, but primarily serve to suppress and concentrate the nationally oppressed and precariat so as to sequester their classes revolutionary potential. The carceral state is a central foundation for maintaining the imperial settler-colonial state. These conditions cannot be ended without engaging in long term socialist struggle.

If feeding people is a genuine concern and if, as Cde. Potato argues, supporting local farmers is imperative to achieving this goal, then we must undertake a serious analysis of their needs and character as a class.  Despite Cde. Potato’s claims to the contrary, farmers are a petit-bourgeois class. Renting land, tools, and having to buy fertilizer do not disqualify farmers from membership in this class. If renting one’s constant capital is all it takes to not be a member of the petit-bourgeois class, then the local cafe or bakery owner is also a member of the working class because they have to rent the building in which their business operates. Whether they own or lease the land, becoming a farmer still requires having access to the capital and labor necessary to not just start their farm, but maintain ownership of it through the exploitation of surplus labor. This labor may come from their unpaid family members, migrant workers, or seasonal agricultural workers. Whatever the case may be, they actively engage in exploitation and thus cannot be labeled as peasants, proletarians, or even aristocratic laborers. Further, Their reliance on government subsidies and the willingness of locals to buy their produce at higher prices places them in a reactionary position against both the bourgeoisie and those that seek to overturn the state. Without state intervention their class would be fully subsumed by what Cde. Potato describes as “Big Ag.” Not only are they petit-bourgeois, but they serve as an active force of colonization.

It is a simple fact that anyone who owns land in the United States is an active participant in settler colonialism. On the east coast this participation is rarely seen and felt as there the tribes’ physical, social, and historical relationship to the land have been the most thoroughly eradicated. It is in the West, wherein lies the largest concentration of reservations, that we witness continuous acts of heinous violence inflicted on Indigenous populations. Police, white workers, ranchers, and farmers regularly engage in the trafficking, sexual assault, and murder of Indigenous peoples. White settlements built on reservation land expand themselves to further exploit native people and resources, while the means of social reproduction is restrained to conditions of utter desperation within the tribes. These conditions of precarity provide an opportunity for settlers to engage in further exploitation by getting Indigenous people addicted to drugs and alcohol. The war against Indigenous people never ended in the United States, the same tactics and tendencies have been in continuous use by colonizers for well over 500 years. Liberal society simply chooses to wash away the blood on its hands by silencing Indigenous voices and sequestering their violent subjugation to the least populated areas of the country. 

Local farmers are just, if not more, guilty of perpetuating this systematic violence. They have no legitimate claim to the land they till and grow food on beyond that which is enforced by the settler-colonial state. The right of eminent domain makes this relationship clear, as any land can be claimed by the state for the expansion of infrastructure to benefit the military and the national means of production. This makes their class one of highly concentrated, yet split reaction against all those who may attempt to expropriate their land and capital, i.e., the industrial bourgeois, the state, and Indigenous tribes.  This is why as communists we cannot allow ourselves to fall into the anarchist tendency to reduce every class and struggle to that of David and Goliath. Just because a class of people views the bourgeoisie as a threat does not mean that they are our ally in the socialist struggle. The petit-bourgeoisie’s reliance on the capitalist system of exchange to maintain their means of production and access to a wide pool of exploitable labor puts them in a natural opposition to the socialist cause. Even if that were not the case, Lenin’s critique of the cooperative movement remains a salient reminder of why we must struggle against these anarchist tendencies contained within Cde. Potato’s work:

“Do you really think that the capitalist world will pave the way for the cooperative movement? Capitalism will try to take power over the cooperatives by any means necessary. This ‘anti-authoritarian’ cooperative group of English workers will be crushed in the most ruthless way possible and will be made into servants of capital. They will depend on capital via a thousand threads so that the newly created trend, which you sympathize so much with, will be caught as in a spider’s web. Pardon me, but all of that is unimportant! Those are all details! What is needed is direct action of the masses, and as long as that is not happening, nothing can be said about federalism, communism or social revolutions. Those are all children’s toys, prattling without any firm ground under our feet, without power, without means, and it does not bring us any step closer to our social aims.”

Vladimir Lenin, A meeting between V.I. Lenin and P.A. Kropotkin

Capitalism will not allow you to leave its social relations! You can free yourself as much from their overwhelming pressure using collective farming, housing, cooking, etc. as a submarine can free itself from the pressure in the Mariana Trench by opening up its hatch. The capitalist class will smash you into mush just as it has done with every attempt at individualist revolution for well over two centuries. The choice is simple. Engage in vanguardist organization, or die being remembered for nothing but hindering the revolutionary movement. In order to win, these petit-bourgeois anarchist fantasies must be smothered in their bed, before we lose another decade to their cult worship of spontaneous and individual action.

If you want power you have to think as if you already have it. You have to think about how resources will be transported, you have to think about how people will be supported, think about where funds will come from, think about how to maintain people’s morale, and you have to take your enemies seriously. If we take for granted the fact that local farmers’ agricultural production will be of key logistical importance in the revolutionary struggle, then to prevent local farmers’ total capture by reactionary forces our short term strategy must be to direct the energy of their class struggle against our mutual enemies. Such work has already been done in getting farmers to join the ecological struggle against the construction of pipelines by arguing against the use of eminent domain and demonstrating to them how their farm could be destroyed if a leakage were to occur. Further work can be done to organize the struggle against factory farms due to their mass production of and spread of livestock diseases. Gaining the full trust of these farmers in the socialist cause will necessitate the construction of a sophisticated party that has the logistical means to ensure their goods are transported and traded at a fair price, can secure the maintenance of their means of production, and possibly reduce the economic pressures they face by providing free technical, mechanical, or physical labor through party cadres. To manage this contradiction of aiding this settler class and fighting for Indigenous sovereignty, the emergent socialist state’s mass agricultural production must be placed under the management of Indigenous experts. Through this process the land and capital of industrial agriculture can be expropriated into the hands of Indigenous tribes, providing the foundation for the eventual expropriation of all settler-controlled land for the benefit of Indigenous and nationally oppressed peoples.

This paper is not a condemnation or a call to shy away from the necessary work to provide food security for the masses. It is however a call for comrades to recognize the path to do so is not an easy one with simple solutions. Taking on the task to feed the people is a vital struggle for our movement to take on, and doing so will significantly aid the development of our logistical capacity and political power. If your club or organization is interested in taking on this work then you should follow these steps: first, ensure you have developed the institutional means to take on and cultivate new cadres. If local needs outstrip your organization’s capacity and it collapses, that will harm the movement far more than developing the essential skill of patience within your cadres. Second, secure a regular supply of food through donations, organizational funds, or whatever means are at your disposal. Third, find and build connections with those in your area who lack the means to secure food on a regular basis. Learn their stories, struggles, and work to find out what they want and need. Fourth, connect with other organizations doing this work. Ask how they’ve come to their current strategy, what has worked and what’s failed, see if there’s any way you can support one another.

The struggle for a socialist world is not a game and there is no salve by which we can fix all the harm capitalism has brought upon humanity. The only path for liberation is to engage in massive struggle propelled through the people. As communists our responsibility is to become a collective leadership the masses can trust, to not just courageously overturn the present, but to safely guide them through this tempest with vision unclouded by idealism. When the people ask the question of who will come to feed them, our goal must be that it comes with the quick reply, “The party is here to feed you.”

Citations

Arthur, Melvin, and Christine Porter. 2019. “Restorying Northern Arapaho Food Sovereignty.” Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community Development 9 (2): 69–84. https://doi.org/10.5304/jafscd.2019.09b.012.

Lenin, Vladimir Ilich. (1902) 1961. What Is to Be Done? Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow. Marxist Internet Archive. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1901/witbd/ii.htm

Marx, Karl. (1872) 2024. Capital. Edited by Paul North. Translated by Paul Reitter. Princeton University Press.

We’ve written a lot about the masses; we’ve written a lot about the advanced, the middling, the tailing — that is, what portions of the great mass of U.S. workers and small professionals are discovering their existence as a collective group with shared interests and goals. What we haven’t written about is the way in which people who are becoming disillusioned with capitalism, people who can see and feel that the social system and the way we live is wrong, brutal, inhuman, can be brought together. That task, the awakening of the discontented to the possibility of another world, another way of living, a real existence where people no longer exploit each other for economic gain, is fundamental to our mission of bringing about the advent of such a society.

Before learning theory, before studying Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Gramsci, Rodney, Cabral, people must want to learn. They must feel deeply that society as it exists is unjust.

The society we live in has worked out a kind of self-defense mechanism to deal with people who realize this. They get called burn-outs, idealists, unrealistic. The child of a professional family who doesn’t want to go into business as a CPA or a doctor or a lawyer is “troubled.” Because they’re told by everyone they know that what they feel is abnormal, that most people know the world is an unjust meat grinder, that they know the lifestyle the great majority of the people in the U.S. is based on the misery of others and they just choose not to think about it — this causes a kind of socially-induced sickness. The people who feel the most deeply and most humanly are constantly told that, far from being the most ordinary, they are defective.

In a sense, this is true. They are defective from the point of view of the architects and engineers of society. They are gears with broken teeth in the eyes of the ruling class, the capitalist class, that group of bankers and industrialists who own everything yet do nothing. In ever-greater numbers, people are beginning to realize that their feelings of discomfort are valid — that they should feel moral outrage at the existence of sweatshops making fast fashion and child-slaves in the Congo mining minerals for their iPhones. Allowing yourself to feel that feeling is the first step on the road to awakening class consciousness. The second step is making the connection between that feeling and the way society is structured. The third step on that path is the realization that it doesn’t have to be this way.

We can do something about it.

In an ideal world, one where we’d already built a powerful working-class party that had gathered up all the theoretically advanced Communists together, we would have not one but many newspapers. There would be a mass paper solely to address those people that are still waking or who are awake but not yet willing (or able) to take the last steps to being militant Communists and then a theory journal for those militant Communists to  debate the truth, the best way to overthrow capitalism, etc. Because our movement isn’t unified behind that kind of party (despite what the poseurs at CPUSA say), we have been mixing those types of articles here at the Clarion. Our core readership is mostly already-committed Communists.

But we can’t rely on people coming to Communism spontaneously. We have to reach the group of people who are being torn out of their social positions — people being sidelined. Revolutionaries going back to Lenin have been warning about the pitfalls of relying on spontaneous action; it was only through conscious development that the revolution of October was possible. Without intervention, lots of those children of professionals or the relatively well-to-do will do what comes naturally as the inevitable result of spontaneity: burn out, become despondent and chronically depressed, or turn into anarchists.

In all likelihood, that means you, the reader, are either the Communist militant who has the task of helping people you know move from realizing that capitalism is a theater of horrors to real class conscious Communism or you are someone who has seen that things are bad and getting worse. Maybe someone sent you this article so you could know that you are not alone.

The next steps won’t feel like doing much at all because the truth is that this realization alone is not enough. You have to study. You’ve got to develop your understanding of how the capitalist machine works so you can help us all build weapons to take it down. Studying isn’t fun and it isn’t glamorous. It doesn’t feel like accomplishing anything, much less setting out to make a revolution, but it is necessary. We can’t avoid our mistakes without reviewing them and we can’t bring down an enemy that we don’t understand.

We’ve got to get together, not just on our own, but in groups, and start to put together an organization that spans the entire U.S.-canadian empire, examine and report on its local conditions in each region, and create a plan to annihilate it root and branch. We have to plan to unite with all the oppressed peoples — each of the Indigenous nations, the Black nation — and get ready to strike.

The work has already begun: the All-Empire Workers’ League and other similar groups are preparing to create a Decolonial Communist Party.

You should join us.

You are not alone.