PART 1: REVOLUTION AND THE STATE

In the Manifesto from our Party, Communism: The Beginning of a New Stage, the parallels are drawn between development and change (evolution) in the natural world and change in human society. In the words of that Manifesto, the dialectical materialist understanding of human society and its historical development:

provides the basic answer to those who raise: Who are you to say how society can be organized, what right do you communists have to dictate what change is possible and how it should come about? These questions are essentially misplaced and represent a fundamental misunderstanding of the dynamics of historical development—and the possible pathways of change—in human society as well as in the material world more generally. This is akin to asking why birds cannot give birth to crocodiles—or why human beings cannot produce offspring that are capable of flying around the earth, on their own, in an instant, leaping tall buildings in a single bound, and having x-ray vision that can see through solid objects—and demanding to know: Who are you to dictate what can come about through reproduction, who are you to say that human offspring will have particular characteristics and not others? It is not a matter of "who are you" but of what the material reality is and what possibilities for change actually lie within the—contradictory—character of that material reality.

A Fundamental Understanding of Human Society—and How It Changes

With this in mind, it is important to review "where we are" with regard to how human society has actually developed historically (in interrelation and interaction with the rest of nature) and what pathways for change actually exist—and must be seized. This gets us right to the heart of historical materialism: the relation between the economic base in any society and the superstructure of politics, culture and ideology, including morality.

More specifically, it is important to focus on the question of why, with all the contradictory dynamics involved, fundamentally and ultimately the economic base of society sets the terms for the superstructure of politics, ideology and culture, and why the superstructure must, in the final analysis, conform to the economic base. And it is worthwhile "doing a thought experiment" about what happens if the base and superstructure are fundamentally out of alignment.

Matter has not disappeared—reality is not just "virtual"

Now, as we have pointed out a number of times (in the Manifesto from our Party, and elsewhere), in a society like the U.S.—with the seal of parasitism set on the entire society, as Lenin so incisively put it—for many strata, particularly the broad middle strata which are to a significant extent divorced from the basic process of producing and distributing the material requirements of life, it is very easy to lose sight of the fact that without this production and distribution of the material requirements of life, life would in fact grind to a halt and all the things that go on in society which seem so far removed (and in some ways are far removed on an ongoing daily basis) from the fundamental economic activity that underlies society, would no longer be possible.

There was that movie A Day Without a Mexican which tried to get at what would happen—and this is very relevant in the context of the anti-immigrant hysteria that's being whipped up—if all the Mexicans didn't go to work on a particular day. Well, you could expand that and ask: What would happen if all the masses of people in the world, including little children, who labor under conditions of exploitation, and often extreme exploitation, stayed away from work? All of a sudden, all these people who think "matter has disappeared" would discover that they needed to go on a desperate search for this matter because they couldn't do hardly anything without it. Before long—and especially if this "staying away from work" were extended over any period of time—they wouldn't have the basic boards for their computers and all the other things which they think exist in some airy "virtual reality" totally divorced from material reality.

So that's a bedrock point. That has to do with production—the production of the basic material requirements of life, and in fact the production of everything which constitutes the foundation for what people do in society. But as we know—this is a basic scientific Marxist understanding—production doesn't get carried out in the abstract. It can only be carried out through certain relations of production that people enter into; and, as Marx also emphasized very importantly, these relations of production have been established and are in effect largely independently of the wills of individuals. In other words, the relations of production are not arbitrarily determined by the will of individuals, including individuals who comprise the ruling class of society and who dominate in the ownership of the means of production—they don't get to choose arbitrarily what kind of relations of production will be entered into. Those relations are basically "handed down to them," along with everybody else in society, by prior historical development—including radical changes that have been brought about in previous times on the basis of transforming what previously existed—and not by certain people just "conjuring up" changes out of their imagination, in a way that is fundamentally independent of and divorced from the material conditions with which they are confronted. Here again is the analogy between changes in human society and changes—evolution—in the larger natural world.

This was also Marx's point when he stressed that there is a certain "coherence" to human history. We have emphasized that there is no inevitability about communism, no inevitable direction to human society. But there is a certain coherence. So everybody, including the members of the ruling class of any society, have to deal with what is handed down in terms of productive forces—and production relations—from previous generations, even though at certain critical junctures leaps are made in terms of transforming the production relations through a revolution in the superstructure—which, as we know, occurred with the emergence and triumph of capitalism, for example, through the overthrow and replacement of feudalism.

So people enter, and can only enter, into this most basic of human activity—the production and distribution of the material requirements of life—through definite production relations. Now again, this is, on the one hand, the ABC's of Marxism; but, unfortunately, this is also very little understood in society at large and, frankly, by most Marxists, at least in any living sense. People all too often tend to divorce political, ideological and cultural phenomena from this underlying economic base; or, on the other hand, especially in the case of some very poor Marxists, mechanical materialists, they tend to treat politics and the rest of the superstructure (culture, morality, ideology in general) in a very reductionist way in relation to the economic base, rather than really applying a dialectical materialist understanding of this relation, in which the base does set the foundation, but there is a great deal of initiative and autonomy in the superstructure even as ultimately, unless there is actually a profound revolution in society, the superstructure cannot rupture with the bounds and confines set by the economic base—or else, in fact, within the confines of the existing system, if the superstructure and the base were essentially out of alignment, society would break down.

Why there is no basic "right to eat" under capitalism

One example that I've cited before—and it's worth citing again because it very sharply gets to this point, and to the very nature of capitalism and the historical limitation of capitalism, with all of the proclamations about its being universal and being the highest and final point of human development—is the question of the "right to eat." Or why, in reality, under this system, there is not a "right to eat." Now, people can proclaim the "right to eat," but there is no such right with the workings of this system. You cannot actually implement that as a right, given the dynamics of capitalism and the way in which, as we've seen illustrated very dramatically of late, it creates unemployment. It creates and maintains massive impoverishment. (To a certain extent, even while there is significant poverty in the imperialist countries, that is to some degree offset and masked by the extent of parasitism there; imperialism "feeds off" the extreme exploitation of people in the Third World in particular, and some of the "spoils" from this "filter down" in significant ways to the middle strata especially. But, if you look at the world as a whole, capitalism creates and maintains tremendous impoverishment.)

Many, many people cannot find enough to eat and cannot eat in a way that enables them to be healthy—and in general they cannot maintain conditions that enable them to be healthy. So even right down to something as basic as "the right to eat"—people don't have that right under capitalism. If you were to declare it as a right, and people were to act on this and simply started going to where the food is sold as commodities and declaring, "We have a more fundamental right than your right to distribute things as commodities and to accumulate capital—we have a right to eat"—and if they started taking the food, well then we know what would happen, and what has happened whenever people do this: "looters, shoot them down in the street."

If this became a mass phenomenon—people taking something as basic as food, for which they have a vital need but which many cannot afford under this system—the system would come completely unraveled. And that is why, although the law does not make it illegal to lay people off work and have people unemployed—since that is actually crucial to the dynamics of capitalist accumulation—it does make it illegal to act on the right to eat without paying for what you eat. And, if people do declare that they have a right to eat, regardless of whether they can be employed in a way that makes profit for some capitalist, then they are denounced by at least certain representatives and spokespeople of sections of the ruling class as "lazy" and "undeserving" people. We have heard this in the whole debate about unemployment insurance in the U.S.—where some politicians declare: "We shouldn't extend unemployment benefits because then people won't really go out and look hard for work, they'll just be eating off the fat of other people's work." It's like that reactionary bumper sticker: "Work Hard, Somewhere There's Somebody on Welfare Depending on You." That kind of fascist mentality. Well, that kind of thing would be invoked: "You can't do this, you can't just take food because you're hungry, you have to go out and find a job and 'work like everybody else' in order to have a right to eat." That is a reflection, in the realm of ideas, of the way the system actually operates. It does actually operate so that you have to go out and get a job, if you can—you have to create more capital for whomever you can find who will hire you, in order to then get remuneration in the form of money, which you can use to buy commodities that you can consume in the form of food and other basic necessities of life.

So if, in the legal sphere—or in the political sphere, or in the cultural and ideological sphere—you were to promote and enact a basic rebellion against that whole set-up, the economic functioning of society would grind to a halt and things would become chaotic. You can go down the line and think about other basic necessities besides food and other realms in which, if the superstructure is not in line with the capitalist economic base, society will, in fact, fly apart—it will not be able to be maintained and function with the dynamics that are necessary for that economic base.

The base and the superstructure—economics, politics, the state, and ideology—and why this system cannot be reformed

You can think of this in terms of politics and the state: If you didn't have, not only laws but a state apparatus of repression with the armed forces, the police, the courts, the prisons, the bureaucracies, the administrative function—if you didn't have that, how would you maintain the basic economic relations of exploitation and the basic social relations that go along with that? How would you maintain the domination of men over women, the domination of certain nationalities or "races" over others, if you did not have a superstructure to enforce that, or if that superstructure—the politics, the ideology and culture that is promoted, the morality promoted among people—were out of alignment with those social and, fundamentally, those economic relations? Once again, you wouldn't be able to maintain the order, stability and functioning of the system.

This is fundamentally why a system of this kind cannot be reformed. This goes back to the point that's in the Revolution talk about systems, and how they have certain dynamics and "rules." You can't just play any card you want in a card game or slap a domino down any time you want, anywhere you want, because the whole thing will come unraveled. And you can't have, as any significant phenomenon, cooperative economic relations in a system that operates on the dynamics of commodity production and exchange in which labor power itself, the ability to work, is a commodity.

A lot of reformist social democrats will talk in these terms: "Let's have real democracy in the superstructure" (they don't generally use terms like "superstructure," but that's the essence of what they mean) "and then," they'll say, "on that basis let's 'democratize' the economy." What would happen if you tried to implement this "democratization" of the economic base? That economic base would still be operating on the basis of, would still be driven by, the anarchy of commodity production and exchange in which, once again, labor power is also a commodity—in fact, the most basic commodity in capitalist relations and capitalist society—and soon your "democratization" of the economy would completely break down, because the dynamics of commodity production and exchange would mean that some would fare better than others, some would beat out others—plus you have the whole international arena where all this would be going on.

A lot of points relevant to this are made in Communism and Jeffersonian Democracy, talking about the agrarian ideal of Jefferson: If, as Jefferson advocated, you had a society based on a bunch of yeomen, a bunch of small independent farmers, pretty soon you'd get polarization, once again. You couldn't maintain such a society unless you tried to use the superstructure to maintain it—and if you did that, the whole thing would once again rupture and break out into warfare and violent conflicts of various kinds. You couldn't maintain such a society as a viable, stable system while you had the dynamics of commodity production and exchange churning away.

This is what's so little understood by people, with all their various utopian and reformist schemes. If you don't transform the economic base into something radically different, you will always end up back with the same system, the same fundamental economic relations and the same superstructure—with some particular variety within a basic framework. And, on the other hand, if you don't make revolution in the superstructure and bring into being a radically different state power—not just with a different name or with different people sitting in certain positions but really a radically different superstructure, and in a concentrated way political power that's exercised in a radically different way that conforms to the economic base that you're bringing into being—you will not be able to bring that economic base into being, or you will not be able to maintain it.

Just think of all the spontaneous as well as conscious forces of capitalism which will work to undermine any attempts to establish a different economic base if you do not and cannot utilize the superstructure to reinforce and maintain that economic base and enable it to be further developed. This, of course, is acutely the case in the radical transformation, the epochal transformation, in which socialism replaces capitalism, and in eventually moving on to communism—which is a whole, radically different world from anything that humanity has so far experienced.

So this, once again, is a bedrock point. The economic base will sooner or later—and often sooner—to put it this way, "take revenge" on attempts to make changes in the superstructure which are fundamentally in conflict with the base; this base will ultimately, once again to use a certain phrase, "assert its predominance."

So you have a dialectical unity where, if you don't transform the economic base, you cannot maintain a different superstructure and, on the other hand, if you don't transform the superstructure in a radical, qualitative way, you cannot bring into being, and then you cannot maintain and further develop, a radically different economic base. The two work together, one way or the other, in one system or another. And what's being spoken to here in terms of the ultimately determining role of the base in relation to the superstructure on the one hand, and on the other hand the dialectical living relationship between them—and not a mechanical materialist understanding of that relation—applies not only to how politics and law but also how ideology, culture and morals, as part of the superstructure, relate to the underlying economic base.

Here enters in a very basic point that I'll talk about repeatedly as we go along—the whole idea of "human nature" being unchangeable and for this reason it is impossible to have a radically different system. But why is the morality that's constantly pumped at people, and promoted in a thousand different ways in this society—why is that what it is, and not a different morality? Why aren't values of cooperation and acting for the larger good promoted—except in a perverse form, for example, in the bourgeois-imperialist military, which in fact is structured and run on a very hierarchical basis, as an instrument enforcing the most brutal exploitation and oppression? Why isn't the idea of a cooperative association of human beings, freed from the kinds of competition and conflict that are characteristic of this society, asserted as the highest value? Why is it constantly said that society cannot operate any other way, except through the market and market relations, through commodity production and exchange? Why—other than the fact that this corresponds to the way the system we live under actually operates and has to operate?

Imagine if every television program you watched and every movie and every song were promoting the values of cooperation instead of competition and, along with that, were promoting uprooting thousands of years of tradition's chains and oppression of women by men and one people over another within a particular country and throughout the world. Why, pretty soon you'd have the politicians and other representatives of the ruling class mounting a massive counter-offensive to remind you that all this might sound nice, but it just leads to horrors, it leads to the breakdown of society, and since it leads to the breakdown of society and society can't function this way, it leads to tyranny—because then some people step in and, in an effort to implement these lofty-sounding utopian ideas, impose this with a brutal force and a violent hand.

Actually, in a certain way, this resembles the rather crudely expressed theory of Trotsky and Trotskyites about what went wrong in the Soviet Union: The revolution became limited to backward Russia, it didn't win enough of Europe, the socialist revolution was defeated in Western Europe (I'm only slightly vulgarizing now, if it's possible to vulgarize Trotskyism): They didn't get the advanced productive forces of Western Europe so, since Russia was backward, they had scarcity; because they had scarcity, they had to have rationing; because they had to have rationing, they had to have bureaucracies; because they had to have rationing and bureaucracies, they had to have police to keep people in line—and so then you got "Stalinism." Now, that's only a slightly vulgarized version of the Trotskyite critique, if it is vulgarized at all. But, in any case, a chorus of this kind is what you will hear from the ruling class of capitalists, and others, including some who claim to be socialists, if you try to promote communist values within capitalist society.

Or what about "the breakdown of the family"? How can you have a situation, within this society, in which the role of women is not quintessentially to be a wife and mother? Yes, many women can go out, these days, and be professionals and so on, but they still have to spend $50,000 on a wedding and they still have to play this traditional role of wife and mother above all. Why? Because, we are constantly informed, "the family is the basic unit of society—that's the way it's always been ever since Adam and Eve." Why is this promoted? Yes, in that form it's crude and we can laugh at it, but on the other hand it is necessary for the functioning of this system, perhaps not to always and among all sections of the people promote this in such crude terms, but to promote this basic idea. What if other, radically different ideas were to hold sway? What would happen if the basic nuclear family that we're familiar with were undermined fundamentally in a society based on commodity production and exchange? Things would break down. The "traditional nuclear family" is an integral and, in a real sense, indispensable unit of such a society based on the dynamics of commodity production and exchange and the particular expression of that with capitalism.

And this is why you have so many songs—whether in country music or some other genre of music (they each have their own particularities) that are about "the battle of the sexes." Some of it is sappy, sentimental love songs. Some of it is more aspiring to, or wishing for, better things. Some of it is downright cut-throat, raw relations of commodity exchange. Some of it is extolling crude, even brutal male domination, while some of it (to paraphrase Engels' observation on this in The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State) is an expression of philistine sentimentality. But it is all a reflection and an assertion of traditional relations—which are fundamentally relations of patriarchy and male supremacy—because if something else were being promoted as the dominant culture, values and morality, that would seriously undermine the social and production relations of this society.

And the same thing is true with regard to social upheaval. Different social systems and different ruling classes respond to social upheaval differently, depending on the character of that social upheaval, what social forces are in motion and what their objectives are, or in what direction they are trying to push things, with whatever degree of consciousness at a given time. This is also a point that's made in Communism and Jeffersonian Democracy.

So, for example, the ruling class of the U.S. (and countries generally allied with it) romanticized and distorted what was involved, for example, in the Tiananmen revolt in the late 1980s in China. They treated this rebellion very positively and roundly condemned the violent suppression of it by the Chinese government. And this involved a great deal of hypocrisy on their parts: There is not one of those ruling classes that would have acted any less repressively than the Chinese ruling class ultimately did when confronted with such a revolt.

Now, I'm not defending the revisionists in power in China, I'm just making a point that ruling classes respond to social upheaval according to the way in which they perceive their fundamental interests. The ruling class in the U.S., to say the least, does not welcome something like the 1992 L.A. rebellion or other similar rebellions. But the U.S. imperialists welcomed a Tiananmen rebellion because it could serve their interests in their rivalry with China, and they utilized it to promote anti-communism through distorting the actual events and, more than that, distorting the actual class forces in motion and what was represented by different forces, including the Chinese ruling class—obscuring the fact that this was actually a new capitalist ruling class, and not a "communist dictatorship," not actually the rule of the proletariat, in the broad sense in which that should be understood.

And, in not only opposing but forcefully suppressing something like the 1992 L.A. rebellion, the U.S. imperialist ruling class was acting in a conscious way in its interests, because the order of their system is threatened in very stark, and in some ways fundamental, terms by something like the L.A. rebellion or other major social upheavals. The operation of their system would, in fact, be qualitatively undermined if the logic and momentum of those rebellions and upheavals—even with the varying degrees of consciousness among those involved—were to continue and exert growing influence. It's not just that such things are disruptive of society's order in immediate terms (which is the case), but it's the content of such rebellions—it's what people are basically fighting for, even with varying degrees of consciousness, and what they're fighting against. It's what the logic and momentum is of those rebellions, even if that's not fully consciously understood by many of those participating. It's what questions this raises, and what social forces are in motion in what way.

So that is why, from the point of view of the ruling class, the organs of repression of the state have to be viciously brought out. You have to have things like you had in the Detroit rebellion in the 1960s with the Algiers Motel incident—where people were mass executed, taken to that motel and mass executed—and other ways of terrorizing the masses back into "their place" within the dynamics of the system.

This cannot change fundamentally within the confines and dynamics of this system. Not because we say so, or because some dogma written somewhere says so, but because of what I've been emphasizing about the actual dynamics of how society operates and the actual relation—the dialectical relation—between the economic base and the superstructure, in which the base is ultimately determining and will sooner or later, and often sooner, "exact its revenge" on attempts to act in the superstructure (in the realm of politics, but also ideology, culture and morality) in a way that fundamentally is in conflict with the necessities and dynamics of that underlying economic base.

Now this, once again, is in fundamental opposition to—and, in a very basic sense, is a direct refutation of—the views which now hold such currency in this society, because these views correspond ultimately to the outlook and interests of the bourgeoisie (the ruling capitalist class) in general and specifically with regard to the much vaunted "human nature." In reality, as Marx pointed out: All of human history involves the continuous transformation of human nature. Things that are generally taken for granted as being part of the way society and people "just are," for example, or things that have been raised, and insisted upon, by the theoreticians of the bourgeois revolution and of bourgeois democracy as the highest end point of human development—including the relations of people in a system of commodity production and exchange, and the way this finds expression in the superstructure—all this is a reflection of the underlying dynamics of a particular system, namely capitalism.

The "Divine Right of Kings" and "Democracy"—Two "Cohering Mythologies" of Two Different Systems of Exploitation

In feudal society, it was "natural" that everyone had their particular place. I've spoken to this before: Thomas Aquinas—who was a theologian, but also a theoretician in a broader sense, whose ideas corresponded in basic terms to the relations of feudal society—put forward the idea that everything in the universe, even rocks, had their place, all ordained by God. And then there is "the divine right of kings," a cornerstone of feudal society. This was considered such an outrage by bourgeois revolutionaries and bourgeois theoreticians. Recently, I was reading Thomas Paine again, and he goes on and on about what an absurd and criminal idea the divine right of kings and hereditary role of kings is. All this guarantees, he insisted, is that you could get a moron having absolute power in society just as well as a wise person. You could get someone mentally defective being declared to have divine right to rule. And on and on.

Well, yes, this condemnation of the "divine right of kings" is understandable, from the point of view of the rising bourgeoisie, which needed to break through the constraints of feudalism ultimately in the economic base. But let's not be reductionist—they did battle it out in the realm of the superstructure, and the theoreticians of the rising bourgeois class and the bourgeois revolution believed what they were arguing for, at least overwhelmingly. To them that really was an absurd and criminal idea—the divine right of kings and the absolute order of things as established in such a way that to try to change it would be to go against the very fabric of reality and of the universe as ordained by God and maintained by God's will. As much as those bourgeois theoreticians saw this as absurd and outrageous, in the feudal order it was just the opposite: to rebel against the king, the monarch, was to rebel against God and the God-ordained order. And everyone, from the nobles to the serfs, was supposed to know their role and play their role accordingly and appropriately.

Now, if we move a little bit further away from the bourgeois era and look back on it from the historical perspective of where things need to go and can go—not are bound to go, but need to go and can go—we can see that the great talisman of bourgeois democracy, elections and the right of the governed to choose those who govern them, in fact, in the reality of the functioning of bourgeois society, has no more absolute legitimacy than the divine right of kings. It is just another form in which the needs and interests of the ruling class are asserted in this particular kind of society, and a mechanism through which—and through the control over that process of bourgeois politics and elections—the interests of the ruling class are maintained and enforced. It is their version—DEMOCRACY, ELECTIONS is, in effect, their version—of the divine right of kings. It is a cohering mythology of a certain system. It's not mythology that they have elections, it's mythology what those elections are purported to be all about and what happens through them. In reality, they are not an expression of "the will" or "the sovereignty" of "the people," but an expression of the process through which the capitalist class maintains its system of exploitation and its domination, its dictatorship, over the classes and groups in society that it exploits and oppresses.

And the "human nature" that goes along with this society is no different—the "human nature" that people constantly assert as why things are and have to be the way they are, is nothing other than a reflection of the underlying relations and dynamics of a certain system, the system of capitalism.

This is a point of such importance that we do need to keep stressing it, particularly in this period in which there is so much confusion created around this, much of it the result of the distorting and obfuscating viewpoint of the ruling class, which has such widespread influence today, which seeps down among all sections of the people, so to speak, and is aggressively promoted at every turn by political and ideological representatives, operatives and apologists of the ruling class, and those who follow in their wake, while—and this is a very important point—it is also reinforced by the underlying dynamics of the system itself. This view of human nature is reinforced constantly by the underlying dynamics of the system itself—so that we need to continue to return to this, and dig into it deeply with people, bringing to light and to life Marx's great insight that all of human history involves the continuous transformation of human nature; that human nature, if (or to the degree) it has any valid meaning, is a part of the superstructure. It is an ensemble, if you will, of values and viewpoints, culture and morality, which correspond ultimately to a certain underlying system—underlying social and fundamentally economic/production relations. It is not some transcendental thing that has been with us "since Adam and Eve"—or, more scientifically, since human beings first evolved—and has remained unchanged and that will always remain unchanged and unchangeable.

The Real Bases for Change—and the Real Alternatives

So this is how things actually are in regard to the present circumstances of human society and the possibilities for how society can proceed and be organized: It is a matter of either bringing about a radical alternative to the presently dominant capitalist-imperialist system—an alternative which is viable, and sustainable, because it proceeds on the basis of the productive forces at hand and further unfetters them, through the transformation of the social relations, and most fundamentally the production relations and, in dialectical relation with that, the transformation of the superstructure of politics and ideology—creating, through this transformation, and fundamentally the transformation of the underlying material conditions, a radically new economic system, as the foundation of a radically new society as a whole; either that, or, what will in fact assert itself as the only real alternative in today's world—being drawn, or forced, into a society proceeding on the terms, and locked within the confines, of commodity production and exchange, and more specifically the production relations and accumulation process and dynamics of capitalism, and its corresponding social relations and relations of political power, as well as its prevailing culture, ideology and morality. It's either one or the other. Those are the two choices.

Who are we to say so? We are interpreters of reality; we're scientific investigators and synthesizers of reality, that's who we are. It's reality that says this, and we are those who, at this time, have come to understand this—not through some mystical or religious process but through applying a science that's been developed and is continually being developed.

So it's either the one or the other—and all other schemes will lead to one or the other. If they are not consciously striving for the first, they will lead to the second: if they are not consciously striving for a whole, radically new and different world, they will lead back to, or be co-opted within, or crushed by, the existing old world. You try to carve out little enclaves or ways in which you operate independently of the system—you're either eaten alive and spit out by the system, or you are an insignificant countercurrent, for a while, to the actual dynamics and prevailing relations of the system, a countercurrent which will sooner or later, in fact, be eaten alive—if not literally crushed politically, just overwhelmed—by the dynamics of this system.

This is a system that operates, just like every system, according to certain dynamics and through certain relations. And as long as you haven't radically ruptured with that system and brought about something in its place which can actually replace it and be viable and sustainable, you will be forced back into that system: that system of private ownership of the means of production, of capital, that system of commodity production and exchange, that system driven by anarchy of production and the resulting conflict among capitalists, a system in which capital takes form as many and competing capitals, not one gigantic block of capital, which itself would be out of line with the dynamics of commodity production and exchange and the anarchy of production, and would be broken up by those dynamics, repeatedly. Just look at the history of this country, including in more recent times: even gigantic amalgamations of capital go under or are broken up and re-formed in different associations of capital. This is all as a result of the underlying dynamics of this system. If you do not rupture with that, through a revolution in the superstructure, and the radical transformation of the economic base to something which can actually be viable and sustainable and function in place of those dynamics, you will get those dynamics back—because people have to eat and people have to have other necessities of life, and that will happen through one form or another in accordance with the productive forces at hand, generally speaking. So, if you don't consciously bring about the one, you will get the other. In one form or another and through one avenue or another, you'll get the same fundamental dynamics of capitalism, if you don't consciously rupture with that and actually make revolution to uproot and abolish the whole capitalist system, replacing it with socialism and advancing on the road to a communist world.

A Crucial Breakthrough, A Deeper Grounding in Materialism: Understanding the "Driving Force of Anarchy" as the Decisive Dynamic of Capitalism

Here I think it is important to mention—because this is also little understood, even in our own ranks, perhaps—what a crucial breakthrough it was, and what a crucial foundation for a radical break with economism, when back around 1980 our Party, through doing work to dig more fully and deeply into the dynamics of capitalism and how the contradictions in the world asserted themselves and interacted, identified "the driving force of anarchy" as the principal dynamic of capitalism, as opposed to the principal form of the contradictions of capitalism being the class struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. Of course, we were roundly, and in some cases viciously, attacked for this. It was asserted that we were leaving the people and the class struggle out of the equation, that this analysis was just filtered through the prism of our prejudice of living in an imperialist society, and so on and so forth. But this was such a crucial breakthrough—to understand, to really get a deeper materialist understanding of what it is we're doing and on what "stage" or what foundation we're actually doing what we're doing, in setting out to make revolution.

This has everything to do with whether you proceed from objective reality and recognize the basis, within the contradictory dynamics of that reality, for radical change—or whether you're just proceeding from a set of ideas, including an idealized vision of the masses, which you are trying to impose on reality, with both the masses and objective reality more broadly being seen as essentially "blank slates." That is a view that is in opposition to understanding the principal role of the driving force of anarchy in the system that we're up against, which does set the primary stage and foundation for what we have to do to transform society and the world.

Now, we may not like all this, but that's where we are. We may not like the fact that capitalism and its dynamics are still dominant in the world, overwhelmingly so at this time, and set the stage for the struggle we have to wage—we may not like this, but that's the reality. And in that reality is the basis for radically changing things. It's in confronting and struggling to change that reality, and not through some other means. It's through understanding and then acting to transform that reality along pathways that the contradictory character of that reality does open up—pathways which must be seized on and acted on to carry out that transformation of reality.

So this was a fundamentally important breakthrough when we firmly identified "the driving force of anarchy" as the principal dynamic of capitalism. And this has to do with everything I've been talking about: why you can't reform this system, in fact, and why you can't just arbitrarily try to replace it with any old utopian scheme of whatever kind, that you might like to impose on reality, proclaimed under whatever banner.

Along with all these dynamics of capitalism, which I've been speaking to, there are other aspects of the relations of production besides the ownership system, which capitalism embodies within its overall functioning, and there are other social relations that are embodied within the capitalist system. For example, what we call the mental/manual contradiction, the contradiction between people who carry out physical labor and those who carry out intellectual labor; patriarchy and the oppression of women; the oppression of various nations and peoples (national oppression); regional differences and disparities which can become antagonisms and often do; and other significant contradictions within a particular country or part of the world and between different countries, or different parts of the world, and different alliances of countries. These are all fundamentally encompassed within, and expressions of, the underlying dynamics of capitalism at this stage in the development of human society—not some predetermined development that was bound to happen, but how human historical evolution has actually taken place, and where it has actually brought us to.

You Want to Radically Change the World—You Have to Make Revolution, and Establish a Revolutionary State Power

But, as I've been emphasizing, the other side of the contradiction (in which the economic base is ultimately and fundamentally decisive) is the fact that the way to bring about radical, qualitative changes—in the economic foundation (or base), and in the political-ideological superstructure—is opened and is made possible only by decisively defeating, and then dismantling, the stranglehold of political and ultimately military power that is exercised by the ruling class of the presently prevailing system, and replacing this with a new, revolutionary state power. That cannot be underlined enough times. We can come up with all the ideas we want for change in society and the world—and others can come up with creative ideas which can make a contribution, especially if they're recast in a correct framework, a correct understanding of reality—but if that doesn't get translated into a movement which actually, when the conditions emerge to make this possible, succeeds in defeating and dismantling the repressive organs and the overall institutions and instrumentalities of power of what is now the prevailing system, there is no radical change that is going to occur. It's as basic as that.

People can talk about "let's make change without seizing power." Well, you can make some little changes temporarily around the margins and in the interstices, if you will, but you ain't gonna change shit about the basic character of society and the world without seizing power—without, through a mass struggle, in the appropriate form when the conditions exist or emerge, actually defeating and dismantling the organs and institutions of power of the old ruling class, and replacing that with a new system which is in correspondence with, which reinforces—and which embodies the power to continue the transformation of—the underlying economic base of society, as well as the superstructure itself. It's just that basic.

Just think about it. You want people not to be shot down on the streets, time and again, by the police, with the killers then being exonerated in one form or another—usually outright, "justified homicide"? You want that to stop? You have to have a different state power. Why do we want state power? Why do we keep talking about it? Because we don't want these outrageous things, and everything that they are a concentration of, to keep on happening to people—when it's totally unnecessary as well as outrageous and egregious. You want to put a stop to rape, you want to put a stop to impoverishment of people, all the other horrors in society and the world today? You have to have a different set of social and economic relations, and you have to have a different set of power relations that corresponds to and backs that up and furthers it. You have to have a different culture and ideology. And you're not going to have them if you don't have a new state power—yes, a radically different state power, but state power. It's that basic.

These things that people do abhor and hate, and do repeatedly protest and rebel against—you can go down the line, the wars, the torture, the treatment of immigrants, all the rest of the outrages—are not going to be eliminated unless this existing state power is defeated and dismantled and a new state power, a radically different state power, is established and, on that basis, things go forward from there with transformation in the economic base and further transformation, in turn, in the superstructure—back and forth—all aiming for the ultimate goal of a communist world.

We really must not underestimate both the need and the importance of deeply grasping this in its full dimension and significance, and being, yes, really "pit bull" in proceeding on the basis of this understanding—including in how we present and discuss with people the question of revolution: both the necessity of revolution and what becomes possible through actually breaking the hold of the old, reactionary state power, which enforces these relations of exploitation and oppression, and all the outrages they give rise to, and establishing and consolidating in place of that a new, revolutionary state power, representing a real and truly great leap on the road to abolishing all such outmoded relations and the outrages to which they continually give rise and the antagonistic conflicts among human beings to which they continually give rise.

In short, a truly radical change in society as a whole, in its basic nature, is really possible only through a revolution whose first great leap takes place in the superstructure—particularly in the realm of politics (although the realm of ideology is extremely important, as is culture in particular, which I'll speak about later) but particularly in the realm of politics—and more specifically political power to rule and set the terms in society as a whole. At a certain point, this struggle assumes a concentrated form in the battle to seize the power to decisively determine the character and direction of society. This revolution, upon succeeding in that first great leap, then must proceed to carry out the transformation of the economic base, and the social relations, as well as the superstructure itself as a whole, in the cultural and ideological (including moral) as well as the political spheres.

This is really what's being gotten at in the article "There Is No 'Permanent Necessity' For Things to Be This Way, A Radically Different and Better World Can Be Brought Into Being Through Revolution." This is something we should be repeatedly coming back to: there is no permanent necessity for the existing system. Within the actual reality that we are confronted with, and the contradictory dynamics of that reality, is the possibility—not a guarantee, not a certainty, not an inevitability, but a real possibility—of a radically different world; but it can only be brought about on the basis and in the ways that I have been speaking about.

A Materialist, Not a Utopian, Approach to Changing the World

It is worth repeating once again—and we need to be continually illustrating this in a living way, and going into it deeply in a living way with people—that the kind of radical change that is necessary and possible does not and cannot involve the imposition of some utopian scheme or philosophically idealist notion of how society ought to be, abstracted from the actual conditions that exist and the actual contradictions that are driving things. Rather, this involves the transformation of the—contradictory—reality with which we are confronted, with both the pathways for change, and at the same time the constraints, that this presents. Here is another analogy with evolution in the natural world. You can't have evolution just of any kind you might want. In fact, it's one of the proofs of evolution—as opposed to the idea of "intelligent design" or god bringing about changes—that changes in the natural world do occur on the basis of what already exists at a given time and both the possibilities and the constraints that this poses in regard to such change. You can't just come up with an entirely new species, for example, that bears no relationship to anything that ever existed before. The same is true in human historical evolution, and revolution. And that is why you can't just impose on reality any utopian scheme or philosophically idealist notion that you might come up with.

So it is important to grasp both the material basis for what we're about, for radical change in society, and the contradictory nature of this material reality, which has its positive side but also its negative side, in relation to our objectives. It opens up the possibility, while it also places obstacles in the way of realizing that possibility—which, if you think about it for a second, is obvious because we run into these obstacles all the time. But this is rooted in material reality. It's not just some stubborn quality of masses of people, for example, that makes it difficult at times to mobilize them around the goals of revolution. That is often a factor—the reluctance of people at times to take risks in order to bring about needed change—but that in turn is rooted in material reality, in underlying conditions that are independent of people's will and larger than the individuals whom we might be interacting with or who might be on the political stage more broadly at any given time.

This is a point that's emphasized in the Manifesto from our Party—and it's important to grasp this very deeply and firmly—that both the basis for change but also constraints and obstacles and difficulties are posed in this contradictory nature of reality that we are confronted with at any given time, a constantly changing reality.

All this sheds further light on the point that was stressed earlier: In today's world, given the actual material conditions that have resulted—not conditions that were "bound to" result but conditions that have in fact resulted—from the historical development of human society, there are now fundamentally only two alternatives, in terms of what the character and direction of society will be and, correspondingly, how society will be ruled: Either the capitalist-imperialist system—in which an exploiting class, and in particular the capitalist class (or bourgeoisie), through its political and administrative, bureaucratic and military functionaries, holds and exercises political power, expressed in a concentrated way as a monopoly of "legitimate" armed force, and along with that and underlying it the dynamics of capitalist accumulation, setting the fundamental terms for how society functions—either that, once again—or the socialist system, in which society is ruled in the most fundamental and largest interests of the formerly exploited class, the proletariat, and this political power is increasingly exercised by masses of people who are led, yes, by a communist vanguard, and conscious social planning of production increasingly replaces the driving force of anarchy of capitalist production (even while of course, there will always be ignorance as well as knowledge and necessity will always confront human beings, with the challenge of transforming it into freedom through struggle).

To speak in terms of how this finds expression in the superstructure, and to boil this down to its basic political terms, the only real alternatives at this point are the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, in one form or another, or the dictatorship of the proletariat—with all the radical differences there are between those two dictatorships.

We can see the reality of this and the radical differences reflected very strongly and powerfully in the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America (Draft Proposal), recently published by our Party. Embodied there you can see both the need for a state, in order to have a new system, and the radically different nature of that state, as well as the radically different nature of the society as a whole and its dynamics, in contrast with capitalism.

A valuable experience, and valuable lessons, in method and materialism

Here it's worth just taking a moment to tell a story which I think sheds a lot of light on what I've been talking about—the basic materialism that is so crucial to everything we are about. This has to do with the time, back in the days of the Revolutionary Union (the forerunner of our Party), when we were working on Red Papers 7 about the Soviet Union—analyzing it as a social-imperialist state (socialist in name but imperialist in fact and in deed), an analysis which was highly controversial and contentious within the movement, broadly speaking, and among those who were claiming the mantle of communism, at that time. I remember there was, for example, this group, the Communist Labor Party, and they published an article which denied the theoretical possibility of capitalist restoration in a formerly socialist country. That article made the analogy that it's like a baby—you can't stuff a baby that's been born back into the womb—which, among other things, revealed a rather mechanical materialist understanding of society! But those of us working on Red Papers 7 went through a whole process of agonizing over the question of how to understand the reality and dynamics of capitalist restoration in a former socialist country.

We had done enough work to be convinced that the thesis that the Soviet Union was a capitalist (social-imperialist) state was true, that it reflected reality accurately in basic terms. But we were trying to understand, and therefore be able to explain in more living terms: why is it that if you have a revisionist political line, you will inevitably restore capitalism? So we went through the actual process: OK, what would happen if you had a revisionist line in leadership of what had been a socialist country? How would you actually carry out and guide the functioning of society, and the economy in particular? What principles would adhere and would be the governing principles, so to speak, in the underlying economic base and in the actual dynamics of the economy? And we "walked through" the process where, with a revisionist line, you could not implement genuinely socialist planning and carry out the socialist transformation of the economic relations—the ownership system, the division of labor, and the distribution of wealth resulting from that. How, with a revisionist line, you could not lead, and fundamentally rely on, the masses to carry out, in an increasingly conscious way, the development of the economy and transformation of the economic relations, but would end up having to fall back on bureaucratic methods to regulate the economy; you would have to have some way that everything wouldn't fall apart; you would have to go back to the mechanisms and dynamics of the capitalist system, of commodity production and exchange, with the law of value in command.

We actually walked through this (I'm simplifying this somewhat in summarizing it briefly here—we spent days and weeks struggling with how to understand all this) because we didn't just want to assert this: "Ah, you've got a revisionist line, you're going to get capitalism—what's the big deal?—now let's move on, next discussion." No, we actually wanted to understand these dynamics, and so we spent weeks, actually—a group of us were working on this and we would meet periodically, but as we were getting close to actually publishing Red Papers 7 we met quite frequently—and we went back and forth, sitting in a room and out over coffee and all the other ways that you're familiar with, wrangling with: OK, what are the actual dynamics here? Why couldn't you maintain a socialist economic base with a revisionist line? If you think about what's involved in having an economy functioning in a way that doesn't rely on the market mechanisms of capitalism and the accumulation of capital privately, etc.—and how you would meet the needs of the masses of people and the larger needs of the revolution, not only in that country but in the world, and actually do it in a way that didn't fall back on the masses being essentially mindless machines of production, alienated from the very process that they were carrying out—it became clear in really going through this that you couldn't do it without a revolutionary line in command. It would break down.

This, I believe, sheds a lot of light on the basic points I'm making here—about how it's one system or the other, and the dialectical relations in all that, between the economic base and the superstructure of politics and ideology.

But through all this, of course, it is necessary to continually come back to and emphasize the fact that the socialist system is radically different than the capitalist-imperialist system (and other systems ruled by exploiting classes). And the interests of the proletariat, in the largest sense—not in a narrow and economist sense but in the largest sense—are radically different from those of all previous ruling classes: the fundamental interests of the proletariat, as a class, really do lie, and can only lie, in the emancipation of humanity as a whole from systems which are founded on exploitation, and in which the fundamental and essential social relations are in antagonistic contradiction with a socially conscious approach to interacting with the rest of nature. That is basically what I was getting at in relating the story about the grappling we were doing in the writing of Red Papers 7, in coming to understand more deeply the nature and dynamics of the Soviet Union as a capitalist (social-imperialist) state.

Socialism, while itself an economic system and a form of class rule (the dictatorship of the proletariat), is also a transition to a still more radically different society and world; and the goal of this transition is the transformation of both the economic base and the political/ideological superstructure to achieve the abolition of all class divisions, all exploitative and oppressive relations among human beings in general, everywhere in the world, and with that the elimination of any need for, or possibility of, dictatorship of any kind by any group or class—the elimination, in other words, of the state as an instrument of rule by one or another class, and for the suppression of the classes and forces in society which are in opposition to, or pose a threat to, the interests of the ruling class—and, along with this, it is a transition to a world in which we have moved beyond a situation in which any group in human society will, in comparison with and even in opposition to certain other groups and individuals, have institutionalized power, or disproportionate influence, with regard to the fundamental character and direction of the interactions among human beings, and between human beings and the rest of nature.

Democratic Intellectuals, Idealist Notions, and the Need for Materialism

So this brings us back, once again, to the democratic intellectual and the shopkeeper (our old acquaintances to whom, in an important way, we were introduced by Marx). The ideas of "absolute equality" and ultrademocracy, of which certain democratic intellectuals are so fond, correspond to the objective social position of both the democratic intellectual and the shopkeeper, even with their "heaven and earth" differences, as Marx characterized them. The desire of the democratic intellectuals (or at least some among them) to have no "hierarchies," no inequalities of authority and power, and especially no institutionalized ones, corresponds to the outlook of the "shopkeepers" (or, more broadly, small property owners and proprietors), enmeshed in capitalist commodity production and exchange, who want that commodity production and exchange to be on an (ideally) equal basis without any force having a monopoly or built-in advantage (or at least no force which is other than, and in competition with, them!); who want (at least so long as they are not in the advantageous position) no barriers to the "pure operation" of the dynamics of commodity production and exchange—when in reality these very dynamics lead, and can only lead, precisely to conditions of inequality, polarization, and in fact monopoly by a few.

The attitude of this kind of petit bourgeois (whether, again, in the persona of the shopkeeper, or of the democratic intellectuals of various kinds), and specifically their attitude as posed against the materialist-based understanding and program that is put forward by communists, can be compared to that of an extended-beyond-its-limit and in-need-of-a-nap toddler, whining: "Wah, wah, wah—I want to level everything off right now...Wah, wah, wah—you won't let me...Wah, wah, wah—I hate you!"

In contrast to this more humorous, somewhat "higher (or perhaps lower) than life" representation of a certain particular form of the petit bourgeois outlook—and in contrast to this outlook in all its forms—the communist viewpoint, method and approach leads to a scientific understanding of historical development and the pathways for change; and the communist revolution represents the path to radical change which is really possible—and is really liberating—leading to the emancipation of the exploited and oppressed throughout the world, and of humanity as a whole, from all relations of exploitation and oppression and the destructive antagonistic conflicts to which these relations continually give rise.

This is the whole point of Marx's emphasis on the need to move—for society to advance and human beings to advance—"beyond the narrow horizon of bourgeois right," beyond all the relations that are reflected in the bourgeois concept of "right." Here it is worth referring again to and reflecting on what is said in the opening sections of "Making Revolution and Emancipating Humanity"—on what is bound to go along with the assertion of bourgeois right: all the relations that are dominant in the world now, with all their horrors that are necessary in order for bourgeois right to be operative and in effect. As emphasized in "Making/Emancipating," you can't have bourgeois right without all those other things, either already being present or being restored where they have been, in at least significant dimension, overcome and eliminated. This gives perspective and emphasis to the need to in fact move beyond what is in reality a very narrow horizon of bourgeois right and everything bound up with it.

This relates to another important statement from Marx, which has very vital meaning and vital relation now especially to the environmental emergency facing humanity as well as broader meaning and importance. And this is Marx's observation that:

From the standpoint of higher economic forms [socialism and communism], private ownership of the globe by single individuals will appear quite as absurd as private ownership of one human by another. Even a whole society, a nation, or even all simultaneously existing societies taken together, are not the owners of the earth. They are simply its possessors, its beneficiaries, and must hand it down to future generations in an improved state. (Capital, Volume 3, Chapter 46)

We are having dramatically illustrated for us today how and why under capitalism it is utterly impossible for human beings and their society to be fit caretakers of the earth. And why, in fact, things are as Marx emphasized in the statement cited above. Living within the confines of this system, and with the prevailing ideas in this society, it seems like a jolting statement to say: "From the standpoint of higher economic forms, private ownership of the globe by single individuals will appear quite as absurd as private ownership of one human by another." But if you think about it, it should seem absurd in that way—and it already does, once one has begun to get a glimpse of the future that is actually possible.

This statement by Marx speaks both to the role of human beings as caretakers of the earth, and to the way in which it is only with socialism, and more fully with communism, that conscious planning and regulation of production can take place, in a qualitatively new and radically different way, as compared with what happens under the capitalist system, shaped as it is by the driving force of anarchy (and as compared with the blindness to the consequences of production and other activity which also to a very significant degree marked previous human society). These higher economic forms, as Marx refers to them, enable human beings, especially when we reach the stage of communism throughout the world, to actually be caretakers of the earth on a whole new level and in a whole new, radically different way.

So the point that keeps coming through here, and that we need to keep bringing out in a living way and from many different angles, drawing from reality constantly—which does provide the basis for making this point over and over again—is that it is necessary to proceed from what is, and to go forward on that basis, rather than trying to conjure up what you would like to be and then trying to impose that on reality—which, in reality, does correspond to the outlooks and schemes of the petit bourgeois (and in particular the democratic intellectual) and not to the outlook and objectives of communism.

The hierarchical nature of this society… the deeper roots and larger implications

Now a lot of people, including those who are caught up in various utopian schemes and idealist notions, respond on the level of looking at capitalist society (or the present society, however they conceive of it in theoretical terms), and seeing that this society, like those that preceded it and were also societies divided into different classes and groups (including, for example, feudalism), is extremely hierarchical. What they are objectively confronting is the fact that this society is ruled through a dictatorship of a class, the economically dominant capitalist class, which constitutes a small minority of society but monopolizes political power as well as having a dominating role and influence in the economy and every other sphere of society. But here is a very important point: While many, including many of those who are alienated by the operation of the current society, recognize the "hierarchical" character of a society like this, there is, especially in these times, very little understanding of the real reasons why this is so—and therefore very little understanding in regard to changing this, both in terms of the possibility of changing it and in what way to change it. As I put it in an exchange with some other leading comrades of our Party recently:

The world is very lopsided, every society is very lopsided. You're not going to overcome that with ultra-democracy. Everyone can see that this is a hierarchical society, but most people don't see that there are deep-seated material reasons for that. It's not arbitrary. Capitalism is not in its essence greed, and undue influence on the part of certain people or groups in society is not a matter of the arbitrary assertion of authority, at least not in its essence. There is very little materialist understanding of how societies actually function. If you think that it's just greed and arbitrary assertion of authority, you think the solution is much easier than it actually is... and when people get a whiff of how difficult and complex it is, they're out the door—they give up on really changing the world in any fundamental way—unless, of course, they make a leap to a real materialist and dialectical understanding.