Outline: Introduction
This polemic focuses on writings and ideas from Revolutionary Marxist
Students (RMS) and Maoist Communist Union (MCU). RMS is a student group
focused primarily on education and organizing around college campuses
and MCU is a pre-party organization with more varied activities. Each
derive from a shared settler “Maoist” ideological tradition in the
United States concentrated on trade unionism and influenced by
Trotskyism. This paper focuses on their misunderstandings of
settler-colonialism, the national question in the United States and the
labor aristocracy. Let it be noted that ideological strengths in their
literature are largely omitted from discussion of these central
issues.
Theses
- RMS/MCU ignores the national question in the US and misunderstands
settler-colonialism. This contributes to a pardoning of white settler
workers and acting as though their economic demands will not directly
reinforce imperialism and colonization.
- RMS/MCU presents no explicit class analysis identifying and
demarcating the revolutionary from counterrevolutionary forces in
society.
- RMS/MCU distort Marx, Engels and Lenin’s understanding of the labor
aristocracy to mean a small privileged upper strata of workers in any
country, rather than the majority of labor having been bourgeoisified
within the imperial core.
Palestine and Settler
Colonialism
The RMS Statement on the Genocide in Palestine is a useful
starting point for investigating the errors of this political
tendency.(1) There is much worthy of praise including rebuttal of some
imperialist propaganda and recognition of, considering Palestine, a
“need to keep up with future development and critically assess the
forces at play. Our primary role in the United States is to understand
and oppose our own state’s involvement in this genocide.”
However, given the importance of opposition to settler colonialism
within the Maoist theoretical lineage, RMS’s adherence to Trotskyist
interpretations of settler labor is unorthodox. In contrast to Mao and
Stalin, Trotsky believed that a socialist government in only one country
would be doomed to failure unless it found rapid new socialist allies
across the world: unless it was accompanied by a global “permanent
revolution.” As Trotsky says himself, “Without direct state support
from the European proletariat, the working class of Russia will not be
able to maintain itself in power and to transform its temporary rule
into a lasting socialist dictatorship. This we cannot doubt for an
instant.”(2)
This was not a view restricted to the specific context of Russia,
however. In the basic postulates beginning Trotsky’s The Permanent
Revolution, written in 1931, he writes that:
“Socialist construction is conceivable only on the foundation of the
class struggle, on a national and international scale. This struggle,
under the conditions of an overwhelming predominance of capitalist
relationships on the world arena, must inevitably lead to explosions,
that is, internally to civil wars and externally to revolutionary wars.
Therein lies the permanent character of the socialist revolution as
such, regardless of whether it is a backward country that is involved,
which only yesterday accomplished its democratic revolution, or an old
capitalist country which already has behind it a long epoch of democracy
and parliamentarism.”
The above-outlined sketch of the development of the world revolution
eliminates the question of countries that are ‘mature’ or ‘immature’ for
socialism in the spirit of that pedantic, lifeless classification given
by the present programme of the Comintern. Insofar as capitalism has
created a world market, a world division of labour and world productive
forces, it has also prepared world economy as a whole for socialist
transformation.
Different countries will go through this process at different tempos.
Backward countries may, under certain conditions, arrive at the
dictatorship of the proletariat sooner than advanced countries, but they
will come later than the latter to socialism. A backward
colonial or semi-colonial country, the proletariat of which is
insufficiently prepared to unite the peasantry and take power, is
thereby incapable of bringing the democratic revolution to its
conclusion. Contrariwise, in a country where the proletariat
has power in its hands as the result of the democratic revolution, the
subsequent fate of the dictatorship and socialism depends in the last
analysis not only and not so much upon the national productive forces as
upon the development of the international socialist revolution.”(3)
[Bold ours]
This Trotskyist conception that workers from the most advanced
capitalist nations must revolt to assist revolutionary struggles in
backwards, feudal and colonized nations is manifested in RMS’s theory on
Palestine. Like their theoretical forerunner, RMS incorrectly identifies
the friends and enemies of the international proletariat, but without
the excuse that the labor aristocracy was embryonic in Trotsky’s
time.
RMS claims to evaluate the “Hamas October 7th attack” – more
accurately, a counter-attack orchestrated by the resistance Joint
Operations Room groups(4) – in relationship to the supposedly more
“diverse strategy” within the Vietnamese, Chinese and Algerian
revolutionary wars. They claim Hamas is wrong to support a two-state
solution, without acknowledging that Hamas only supports the policy as a
temporary strategic measure.(5) RMS prioritizes “Israeli” citizens
through their critique of a two-state solution, claiming that “Only
through the implementation of one secular and democratic state for both
Israelis and Palestinians in place of the religious-fascist state
currently ruling over the region can this brutal apartheid come to an
end.” RMS misunderstands the inherently settler, counterrevolutionary
designation of “Israeli” which must be abolished alongside the zionist
entity in order for Palestine to be free.
Instead of abolishing the settler class role, RMS claims that “in
order to wage any sort of successful national liberation struggle in
Palestine, a significant section of the working Israeli masses would
have to turn against the apartheid state and link up with the
Palestinians” and that “Historical precedent proves the need for such an
alliance of both the colonized and colonizer working classes in ending
Apartheid, as seen in the South African example.” Here the term “working
class” obfuscates settler-colonialism by equating the class interests of
settler and colonized populations, ostensibly because they each receive
wages, ignoring their wages’ dramatically different quantities and the
fact that one group faces national oppression and the other constitutes
an oppressor nation. RMS also cites the numeric majority of “Israelis”
within Palestine to justify the need for an alliance between the two
groups.
Their singular case study with regards to settler workers cooperating
with colonized workers within a successful revolutionary movement is a
multi-national trade union struggle against apartheid in South
Africa.(6) As RMS writes, “historical precedent proves need for an
alliance of the colonized and the colonizer working classes in ending
apartheid. In South Africa, while less than 10% of the population was
white, an alliance with the working class of said population was not
only possible but necessary for the ending of the apartheid regime.”
While the above source which RMS references argues the significance
of the South African Congress of Trade Unions, it omits the
representation of various nations in the formation or the involvement of
white settler labor. Moreover, despite apartheid being “defeated”
national oppression amd segregation endures in South Africa alongside
the revisionism of the African National Congress.
RMS criticizes the Palestinian resistance militarily through
reference to Algeria, China and Vietnam, while the class compositions of
these nations’ struggles against colonialism and imperialism are not
considered. While no two cases are perfectly analogous, successful
liberation movements against colonialism and imperialism have been won
not through drawing from the sympathy of the oppressor nation “workers”
but through organizing the indigenous masses. Although no socialist
states remain today from 20th century revolutionary movements, victories
against imperialism in a multitude of socialist African, Latin American
and Asian governments during the late 20th century were achieved by the
(mostly) guerrilla warfare of the colonized populations, often fighting
in direct contradiction to enemy settler-labor formations. The Chinese
revolution, which Maoists uphold as the most significant advance towards
socialism, didn’t concern itself with the characteristic mineutia of the
enemy class; they opposed the Japanese occupiers – labor and all. What
is particularly alarming about RMS’s analysis of international settler
situations is the transativity of the analysis on occupied Turtle Island
where settler labor has directly led in colonization and genocide,
especially in the United States.(7)
In every revolutionary struggle, there are those who commit class
suicide and join the side of the oppressed despite their origins as
exploiters. Hence, a rejection of an “alliance” between the settler
workers and the oppressed nation workers must not serve as a mechanical
rejection of individual revolutionaries’ ability to transcend their
class origin. As a class however, settlers have never rejected their
class except when forced to migrate out of a colony by the revolting
oppressed.(8) With respect to colonized nations, settlers everywhere
form a reactionary, exploiting class.
Fundamentally, RMS misunderstands the class role of settler labor as
parasitic and antagonistic to the liberation of their country’s
colonized peoples. Settler labor is understood as the labor and
political organizations representing the class interests of the settlers
as workers – more wages, better work conditions, expansion of settler
lands, and access to resources. Class interests and the demands they
beget represent the improvement of the well being or wealth of the
respective strata. This is especially true within capitalism where the
potential of class mobility is present. No strata is without class
demands, and no labor formation is capable of completely shedding the
class demands of its composite strata as the purpose of forming labor
and political advocacy organizations within capitalism is improving the
lot of a given group, usually through struggle with employers or the
state. It is possible for segments of a strata to reject their class
demands but that is not what RMS is advocating for in the case of
settler labor.
What makes settler labor organizations reactionary is that the
settler class material interest is the dispossession of an indigenous
population, by which the settler class is afforded free land, cheap
resources, access to improved citizenship benefits as dividend from the
immense plunder of the settler bourgeoisie and the cheap labor of the
colonized who are relegated to reservations, often little more than
concentration camps. Settler labor organizations will seek to advocate
for greater dividends of the whole stolen wealth of the nation for the
respective spheres of workers for which they advocate. Conflicts between
the settler bourgeoisie and settler petty-bourgeoisie, including all
settlers who receive wages, do not arise because the state can increase
the levers of indigenous dispossession and genocide, creating settler
class positions for sections of the former-proletariat whenever the
possibility of class struggle presents itself.
This plays out in “Israel” as there are no trade unions, much less
nonprofits or “leftist” activist organizations struggling against the
zionist entity as a colonial project. Israel mandates that every
settler, except the ultra-orthodox, serve in the Israeli Occupation
Forces, learning to kill and hate Palestinians. Remaining are isolated
instances of military defectors and other peaceful protesters being
brutalized over even milquetoast objections to the scale or extent of
the occupation or specific massacres, such as those occurring in Gaza
currently. Settler labor as a class, and indeed the entire settler
population of “Israel” has yet to demonstrate revolutionary potential
and it is unfortunate that RMS excludes any criticism of this settler
“left” from their piece despite calling for the Palestinians to unify
with them.
Imperialism and the
National Question
The trade union movement in the US has historically concentrated
significantly on the labor aristocracy, which to quote Zak Cope:
“is that section of the working class which benefits materially from
imperialism and the attendant superexploitation of oppressed-nation
workers. The super-wages received by the labour aristocracy allow for
its accrual of savings and investment in property and business and
thereby “middle-class” status, even if its earnings are, in fact, spent
on luxury personal consumption. Persons who may be compelled to work for
a living but consume profits in excess of the value of labour either
through some form of property ownership or through having established a
political stake in (neo) colonialist society, may be bourgeois without
hiring and exploiting labour-power” (9)
Cope applies the concept globally to argue that within the OECD
working class – 38 European nations, Mexico (a more complicated case in
The Dawnland Group’s opinion), Australia, New Zealand, Israel and Japan
– there is no legal exploitation. Rather, Cope argues the first world
working class is recipient of super-wages comprised of wages for their
labor in addition to wages from the super-exploitation of the third
world which provides them with cheap commodities and shares of
imperialist profits. In particular, Cope notes the exploitative role of
the first world working class, writing that “where workers seek to
retain whatever bourgeois status their occupational income and
conditions of work afford them through alliance with imperialist
political forces, they can be said to actively exploit the proletariat.”
(10)
Cope calculates the value of super-exploitation through two methods,
namely international productivity equivalence, and
international wage differentials, assuming an international
equalized wage rate. Using these two methods Cope finds a combined value
transfer from the non-OECD to OECD countries of $4.9 trillion in the
year 2008 alone.(11) While a renewed study of imperialist value transfer
is necessary for US communists today, that is beyond the scope of this
polemic. It should suffice to observe that wages in gross disproportion
to the productivity of first and third world workers indicate an
exploitative dynamic benefiting one group at the expense of the other.
There may be challenges cultivating revolutionary empathy and culture in
the imperial core if working conditions and wages here cannot be viewed
in a global context and value transfer is not appreciated.
As recognized by Lenin, Marx and Engels, the global proletariat has
nothing to lose but their chains. This is a category of workers afforded
zero or next-to-zero wealth through imperialism. Formations such as MCU
and RMS refuse this definition because it would broaden the
petty-bourgeoisie and labor aristocracy to include most of the
industrial workers who they consider the “revolutionary proletariat” and
dramatically reduce their organizing base within the imperial core.
The most acute struggles in the United States today are national
rather than based on class. The internal nations in the US show the
greatest sites of exploitation, oppression and direct, violent conflict
with the capitalist class. These are the indigenous protesting at
Standing Rock against the Dakota Access Pipeline, movement against the
murderous national oppression carried out through police and prisons,
resistance and labor organizing from migrants forced from their home
countries by imperialism, and rebellion among the literal colonies
retained by the US empire today in Hawaii and Puerto Rico. These
instances of struggle go beyond wishing for middle-class living
standards. Not only have they demonstrated increased levels of militancy
against the state, but the roots of these conflicts are irreparable
antagonisms against the structure of capitalism and imperialism which
necessarily go beyond economic demands and have not been placated
through the dividend of super-profits.
Maoist Communist Union (MCU) writing about politics in the United
States focuses on trade unionism and overlooks national questions.
Despite the manifold contradictions between nations on Turtle Island,
within their theory journals, Notes from a Conversation Among
Comrades on the George Floyd Protests: Lessons for Ourselves and
Beyond discusses the oppression of Black people but does not lay
out a conception of their struggle for national liberation or their
nationhood.(12) No other articles discuss national or even “racial” (a
popular but unscientific concept) oppression on Turtle Island, and their
extensive writing about Maoist formations from the Global South and
trade unionism in the US reveals that they view the US as simply another
country that can carry out revolution domestically by replicating Maoist
strategies from the third world. They are mistaken: different conditions
warrant different strategies.
MCU’s Some General Theses on Communist Work in the Trade
Unions exemplifies this view.(13) Ignoring national oppression, the
article instead finds that “in order to have a socialist revolution in
this country we must first develop a strong Communist (Maoist) Party
capable of leading a powerful trade union movement and of freeing that
movement from the domination of reactionary leadership.”
The chronology is important. If communists must first develop this
“Maoist” trade unionist movement, it means any organizing around the
national – or racial, according to language used by MCU – questions and
colonization are peripheral or secondary to this central cause. It
suggests communists might first unite the trade union movement and
later, if at all, use this militant union formation to liberate
oppressed groups within the country rather than working with these
groups as mutually constitutive of a revolutionary struggle, much less
prioritizing struggles of oppressed nations. In reality, organizing a
bulwark of settler labor will negatively impact national liberation
movements.
Instead of oppressed nations, MCU sees trade union aristocrats as the
US’s revolutionary masses. The core reference to the “labor aristocracy”
in Some General Theses is when the authors claim that “the most
secure and consistent base of the reactionary union leaders is the labor
aristocracy which is only a small subsection of the working class, and
in our day is not equivalent to the trade union membership as a whole.”
Having sidestepped an investigation of the various relationships to the
means of production, they claim that the “vast majority” of US trade
union membership is not a “reactionary base.” MCU overlooks an
investigation of total worker compensation including public and private
benefits, the means by which the labor aristocracy is maintained within
imperial core countries. Luxurious positions at the apex of global
commodity exchange and artificially high wages give labor aristocrats
wealth above the means of subsistence on which the proletariat must
endure, and doled out above the value created through their labor.
Without an investigation of international class relations, wages, wealth
and labor productivity it is impossible to determine where the
proletariat ends and where the labor aristocracy begins and ends, much
less between the proletariat and the petty-bourgeoisie. It is thus
impossible to determine who the revolutionary masses are.
MCU claims that “A Communist Party must necessarily equip itself with
the most advanced revolutionary science, based upon a summation of the
whole of the proletariat’s revolutionary experience up to the moment in
question.” Despite this, MCU presents no historical summation of
“communist” work in US trade unions for the past 80 years that could
support their conclusion of the necessity or even possibility of
building a “Maoist” trade union movement in the US today. In tandem with
a thorough class analysis, a historical account of why an ideology finds
certain groups revolutionary or counterrevolutionary must be
established. If the US trade unions have not taken up any
anti-imperialist politics since before the New Deal era despite
consistent unsuccessful communist infiltration, what has been the source
of these failures?
In their more recent MCU and the Working Class Movement
summarizing the tendency’s recent organizing initiatives, the
aforementioned mistakes are repeated, particularly a failure to analyze
US classes, their only attempt at defining the proletariat being “the
only class that has an interest in communism as a class.” This is not a
definition. MCU does not scientifically demarcate the proletariat from
the non-proletariat. Their interesting commentary about the significance
of creating a “specifically proletarian line” around which all other
classes must be drawn is inapplicable to any context without an
accompanying class analysis.
Because of the labor aristocracy thesis, workers who benefit from
super-exploitation of the third world are not exploited, they are
exploiters. This entails that the economic interests of the vast
majority of imperial core workers are counterrevolutionary. Trade
unions, tenant organizing and other locally “progressive” economic
campaigns threaten to bolster standards of living and strengthen
citizens’ relationship with imperialism. More specifically, the labor
aristocracy thesis suggests there is no antagonism between first world
capitalists and their citizen labor aristocrats to begin with, the two
instead being allied in consuming value from the Global South.
(Mis)Identifying
the Labor Aristocracy and the Proletariat
To examine historical Marxist origins of the term “labor aristocracy”
as distinct from the proletariat, Marx, Engels and Lenin should be
studied. As written in the Maoist Internationalist Movement’s
Imperialism and its Class Structure in 1997:
According to Marx, the portion of society that is parasitic increases
over time: “At the dawn of civilization the productiveness acquired by
labour is small, but so too are the wants which develop with and by the
means of satisfying them. Further, at that early period, the portion of
society that lives on the labour of others is infinitely small compared
with the mass of direct producers. Along with the progress in the
productiveness of labour, that small portion of society increases both
absolutely and relatively.”
Despite the focus given to the labor aristocracy by Lenin, Marx and
Engels were the first to speak of the labor aristocracy of the colonial
countries. Even in Capital, Vol. 1, Marx speaks of “how industrial
revulsions affect even the best-paid, the aristocracy, of the
working-class.”
Engels in particular is famous for some quotes on England. Here we
only point to the quotes from Engels that Lenin also cited favorably in
his book Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism. As we shall see,
Lenin’s approval and careful attention to the quotes from Engels on the
labor aristocracy are very important in his own thinking.
One of the clearest quotes from Engels as early as 1858 cited by
Lenin is: “The English proletariat is becoming more and more bourgeois,
so that this most bourgeois of all nations is apparently aiming
ultimately at the possession of a bourgeois aristocracy, and a bourgeois
proletariat as well as a bourgeoisie. For a nation which exploits the
whole world, this is, of course, to a certain extent justifiable.” We
should also point out that from Lenin’s point of view it was a matter of
concern that this had been going on for over 50 years already. Just
before expressing this concern, Lenin says, “Imperialism has the
tendency to create privileged sections also among the workers, and to
detach them from the broad masses of the proletariat.” Writing to the
same Kautsky who later betrayed everything, Engels said, “You ask me
what the English workers think about colonial policy? Well exactly the
same as they think about politics in general. There is no workers’ party
here, there are only Conservatives and Liberal Radicals, and the workers
merrily share the feast of England’s monopoly of the colonies and the
world market.” Spineless Mensheviks internationally regret this blanket
statement by Engels. The more dangerous revisionists of Marxism are only
too gutless to say Engels was wrong while contradicting him at every
chance. The spineless flatterers of the oppressor nation working class
fear the reaction of the oppressor nation workers to being told they are
parasites. Likewise, these spineless social-chauvinists evade the task
before the international proletariat – a historical stage of cleansing
the oppressor nation workers of parasitism. This task cannot be wished
away with clever tactics of niceness.” (15)
Referring back to Some Theses on our Work in the Trade
Unions, MCU writes that “with the development of capitalist
imperialism, Lenin considered it was no longer possible to bribe such a
large section of the working class: ‘It was possible in those days to
bribe and corrupt the working class of one country for decades. This is
now improbable, if not impossible. But on the other hand, every
imperialist ‘Great’ Power can and does bribe smaller strata (than in
England in 1848–68) of the ‘labour aristocracy.’” Lenin’s claim flowed
from the reality that in 1916, imperialist world war had broken out and
large segments of British and German workers were re-proletarianized.
However, the era of inter-imperialist world war has since been
profoundly interrupted by over seventy years of peace in the core
imperialist countries throughout which the labor aristocracy to which
Lenin referred has grown. Lenin’s writing in Imperialism, the
Highest Stage of Capitalism, published in 1917 the year after
Imperialism and the Split in Socialism, should be given
authority.
While MCU are correct to recognize the socialist NGO’s, revisionist
parties and capitalist rulers of most trade unions as class enemies,
these do not comprise the labor aristocracy, which instead is the wide
majority of bourgeoisified workers compensated with super-wages through
imperialism.
MCU writing of their conception of the labor aristocracy says that
“In the US, the ruling class has been able to bribe a minority
subsection of the working class for a long period of time. The height of
this bribery was likely reached during the New Deal era, but especially
since the mid 1970s more and more of the labor aristocracy has seen its
privileges severely eroded. We need to do much more investigation
however to determine more exactly how the labor aristocracy in this
country has changed over time, how large it ever truly got and how large
it is today.”
MCU seems to assume that decreasing wages relative to GDP since the
1970s has meant the decrease of the US labor aristocracy, but GPD does
not reflect global class relations nor wage differentials between
nations: “Through this negative account balance (though not only it),
the US working class is able to consume products which its labour has
not paid for. Global neoliberal restructuring has thus maintained the
privileged position of the core-nation working class relative to the
Third World proletariat, albeit on terms less favourable to the former’s
independent political expression than during the long boom of the 1950s
and 1960s.” (16) The persistence of the labor aristocracy despite
neoliberal reform can be measured through the significant increase of
homeownership,(17) vehicle ownership,(18) higher education(19) and real
weekly wages(20) throughout the country since 1960. Based upon these
statistics, MCU is incorrect to claim that the height of bribery was
during the New Deal era.
Clearly, MCU is using a different definition of the labor aristocracy
than Marx, Engels and Lenin because theirs is not based on bribery,
unequal exchange or surplus exploitation within the domestic “working
class” but entirely restricted to political roles among the
petty-bourgeoisie which exist regardless of the compensation of imperial
core workers in general.
Conclusion:
Impact of Faulty Class Analysis on Mass Work
A closer look at MCU and the Working Class Movement which
summarizes the formation’s recent work demonstrates the effects of their
ideological commitment to the settler labor aristocracy through their
focus on the US “industrial proletariat.”
Discussing some problems they had faced while organizing tenants, MCU
claims they were unable to “find and unite with the resolute fighters
among the working-class, raise consciousness amongst them specifically
and wider masses more broadly, and thereby…build up revolutionary
organization” due to “major ideological difficulties in developing
significant numbers of tenants into communists or even clarifying the
larger nature of the struggle beyond the immediate fight against
gentrification.”
They conceived of their task as creating a “united front of all the
class forces – workers, lumpen, petty-bourgeois – affected by
gentrification.” The following section bears quoting at length:
“In a confused attempt to make the central focus of this united front
still be the working-class, we specifically concentrated first on the
homeless, and then when we realized that was going nowhere we shifted to
tenants in public/subsidized housing – respectively perhaps the most and
second-most pauperized and lumpenized sections of the working-class –
despite the fact that we had studied and criticized the Black Panther
Party’s lumpen-line. We justified this by downplaying the degree of
lumpenization among these segments of the population and arguing,
correctly, that many of these tenants were still working-class. What we
did not consider was which segments and sections of the working-class
are most favorable to organize amongst.”
They discuss this line of work saying that
“Naturally, our efforts among the homeless and tenants bore little
fruit. We basically failed to make strong and lasting links with the
working-class, develop Communists from amongst the masses we were in
contact with, build sustained mass-organization, or sustain any
struggles involving substantial numbers of people.”
All of this led MCU to conclude a need to “proletarianize” their
ranks – through taking up industrial jobs, partly in an attempt to
challenge internal petty-bourgeois class tendencies and partly to make
more connections with “advanced workers.” (Recall Trotsky) Finally, they
list an outpouring of petty-bourgeois students into industrial jobs as
“incredibly promising” because they could numerically bolster a
communist party.
MCU quotes Lenin’s 1897 Task of the Russian Social Democrats
to show how it is necessary for US communists today to focus primarily
on the US “industrial proletariat.” MCU claims Lenin
“clearly puts forward that it was specifically the industrial
proletariat working in the urban factories that was the most advanced,
the ‘most receptive to [Communist] ideas, most intellectually and
politically developed.’ Lenin arrived at this conclusion because,
following in the footsteps of the rest of the European industrial
workers throughout the last several decades, the Russian factory workers
had proven themselves in practice to be the leading section of the class
during the waves of strikes in the 1880s and 1890s in Russia.”
MCU fails to discuss the difference in working conditions, wages, and
wealth between US factory workers and those of semi-feudal Russia.
Despite significantly basing their theory on Lenin they have failed to
consider the key ways workers in 21st century imperial core countries
differ from 20th century peripheral feudal workers; they fail to
adequately study imperialism. MCU’s first theory journal includes an
article titled Lenin’s Five Point Definition of the Economic Aspects
of Capitalist Imperialism and its Relevance Today, during which the
term labor aristocracy is never mentioned.(21)
Although it is later downplayed, MCU’s obsession with industrial
workers is perhaps best explained by this quote:
“Without a firm foundation among the industrial proletariat, and
without winning over the majority of the organized workers to a
revolutionary line, it will be impossible for the Party to direct a
general political strike across key workplaces and industries during a
revolutionary crisis. The general political strike is a key tool by
which can we paralyze the ability of the capitalist class to move goods,
troops, and military equipment. Alongside splitting the repressive
forces, paralyzing the bourgeoisie’s ability to run the economy is
essential for a successful revolution during such a crisis. Doing this
in key military industries – especially if, as is likely, the crisis
arises amid a significant war – undermines the bourgeoisie’s ability to
deploy repressive force to crush the revolution.”
According to this picture of revolution, industrial workers formed
the “leading section of the working class” during recent strike waves
because they have struck in the greatest numbers, to the greatest impact
on the national economy. Whereas US industrial workers overwhelmingly
only struck for a greater share of imperialist plunder in the last
century – such as when the recent “historic” UAW strike in winning mere
wage increases for the union and none else(22) – industrial strikes in
feudal Russia were far more frequently communist. Still, MCU’s strategy
is an essentially mechanical application of insurrectionist revolution,
derived from feudal Russia, to the US context.
The US is not an underdeveloped feudal country with only nascent
capitalism. It is the leading core imperialist country and has been for
over seventy years. It is the wealthiest nation in human history, and
has risen wide swaths of the population into allegiance with imperialism
and, at times, fascism based upon the material benefits of empire.
Revolution will be carried out by a minority-of-a-minority in the
country, not by a strike sweeping all sectors of the working class. Our
situation cannot be compared to that of the Bolsheviks.
Most charitably, MCU’s summation of tenant work can be read as the
belief that their chronology was incorrect: first organizing a communist
trade union movement will make work among tenants, lumpen and oppressed
nations far easier. Yet, this is still a narrow application of Bolshevik
tactics to 21st century US contexts. There are many reasons MCU’s tenant
and homeless mass work may have failed: ideological incoherence, focus
on labor aristocratic tenants, ignorance of the primary contradiction of
national oppression facing the masses, lack of a prior conception of
eventual revolutionary civil war around which to mobilize,
petty-bourgeois sensibilities among cadre, or even simple human error.
It is unreasonable to expect MCU to discuss these factors when they are
preoccupied with a nonexistent industrial proletariat, imposing models
from incomparable historical contexts.
MCU’s errors in mass-work and their shift towards “key industry”
organizing may seem like a simple error of studying one revolutionary
circumstance too much at the expense of others, as failing to apply
Marxism to the US context. While partly true, the better explanation is
a combination of opportunism – increasing numbers at the expense of
revolutionary vision – and a failure to prioritize class analysis.
Focusing on certain industries is important, but it fundamentally cannot
tell you about class within various industries, and it cannot replace
determining who the revolutionary and counterrevolutionary forces in
society are; “who are our friends, and who are our enemies?” to quote
Mao himself.
Focus on workers in specific industries is a strategic
decision likely to be prefigured by an ideological line. MCU has
established a line prioritizing Labor Aristocratic workers that
necessarily rejects the importance of national contradictions to the
revolutionary objectives on Turtle Island, and in doing so promotes
imperialism. RMS falls close behind in promoting an impossible
allegiance of the colonized nations with the settler working class. Each
organization takes part in a prominent tendency of US “Maoist”
organizations to follow Trotskyism despite its contradictions with
Maoism.
These are deeply troublesome trends. To organize the labor
aristocracy, to promote imperialism and Trotskyism is to do the enemy’s
work. The global proletariat is the only force which can make
revolution, and they are held back by settlers and labor aristocrats
alike. The longer communists on occupied Turtle Island fail to embrace
these positions, the further away a Dictatorship of the Proletariat.
Notes:
(1)
https://web.archive.org/web/20240227044053/https://marxiststudents.wordpress.com/statements/
(2) Zinoviev,
Gregory Bolshevism or Trotskyism. 1925
(3)
https://web.archive.org/web/20240227044746/https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1931/tpr/pr10.htm
(4)
https://web.archive.org/web/20240227044944/https://unity-struggle-unity.org/resistance-news-network-media-guide/
(5)
https://web.archive.org/web/20240227045151/https://irp.fas.org/world/para/docs/hamas-2017.pdf
(6)
https://web.archive.org/web/20240227045539/https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/congress-south-african-trade-unions-cosatu
(7) Sakai, J. “Settlers: The mythology of the White proletariat from
mayflower to modern.”(2014). Kersplebedeb.
(8) See Haiti,
Vietnam, China, Korea, and even South Africa, where millions of
emigrating whites has driven many to re-settle in Israel
(9)
Cope, Zac “Divided World Divided Class” Kersplebedeb 2012, pg. 9
(10) Ibid. pg. 175
(11) Ibid. pg. 200
(12)
https://web.archive.org/web/20240227050314/https://maoistcommunistunion.com/red-pages/issue-3/notes-from-a-conversation-among-comrades-on-the-george-floyd-protests-lessons-for-ourselves-and-beyond/
(13)
https://mcuusa.files.wordpress.com/2023/10/mcu-theses-on-trade-union-work-2.pdf
(14)
https://mcuusa.files.wordpress.com/2023/12/mcu_and_the_working_class_movement-2.pdf
(15)
https://archive.org/details/ImperialismAndItsClassStructureIn1997_254/mode/2up
(16) Cope, Zak “Divided World Divided Class” Kersplebedeb 2012, pg.
9
(17)
https://web.archive.org/web/20240228014852/https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RHORUSQ156N
(18)
https://web.archive.org/web/20240228015215/https://transportgeography.org/contents/chapter8/urban-transport-challenges/household-vehicles-united-states/
(19)
https://web.archive.org/web/20240228015942/https://www.statista.com/statistics/184260/educational-attainment-in-the-us/
(20)
https://web.archive.org/web/20240228015618/https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q
(21)
https://web.archive.org/web/20240228020932/https://maoistcommunistunion.com/red-pages/issue-3/lenins-five-point-definition-of-the-economic-aspects-of-capitalist-imperialism-and-its-relevance-today/
(22)
https://www.businessinsider.com/uaw-strike-contract-raises-pay-details-ford-gm-stellantis-2023-10?op=1&r=US&IR=T
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