Ep 401 Toppling Trump and Marxism Leninism RIP

Episode 401 of RevolutionZ addresses our Trump Problem and, to finish out a sequence, our Marxism Leninism problem. Trump doesn’t need everyone to love him to become even more deadly dangerous. He only needs enough of us to look away, stay tired, or treat politics like a bad weather system that will pass on its own. What is we refuse that comfort story and ask the harder question: What can we each actually do to help stop authoritarian power before it hardens into something even worse?

If you’re a teacher, we talk about telling the truth in the classroom and turning schools into real community hubs after hours. If you’re a worker, we dig into the first steps of organizing with coworkers, raising demands, and using collective leverage instead of private despair. If you’re a soldier, a police officer, or close to someone who is, we wrestle with the ethics of “just following orders” and what it means to build solidarity that can collectively refuse unjust commands. We also look at how students, athletes, health workers, parents, and faith leaders can use the space they already occupy to raise the social cost of repression.

Then we pivot to a deeper, longer-term issue summarizing and topping off the past: three episodes again addressing what ideology should guide movements that want a new world? We close our series assessing Marxism Leninism, rejecting its narrowness, its fetish of hierarchy and discipline, and the historical failures of Bolshevik practice. If revolution needs hope, vision, and human growth, we ask, what concepts and strategies can actually get us there?

Then, to conclude, we ask contemporary Marxist Leninists some serious questions in hopes they will take some time to contest or to agree with what we have offered. Resurect Marxism Leninism--or Marxism Leninism RIP.

Transcript

Welcome And What’s Ahead

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Hello, my name is Michael Albert, and I'm the host of the podcast that's titled Revolution Z. This is our 401st consecutive episode. In part, it finishes the current sequence excerpted from what is to be undone by presenting a very brief chapter that concluded that book's assessment of Marxist Leninism as a whole. Will that sequence of episodes spur a public assessment by people who seek a new world of what ideology we should broadly share? Should we look to Marxist Leninist texts and practices to arrive at a shared ideology? Or should we try to transcend that framework and arrive at a new shared vision, theory, and strategy?

Trump As Antichrist Framing

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Additionally, however, in this episode, I'd like to also return to a familiar and more immediate but still related topic dealing with Donald. So first, the immediately pressing and existential Donald part of this episode. I call it Trump is the Antichrist or Resistance is the antidote. What next? Outside theology, the term Antichrist has a broader, more secular and highly descriptive sense. It names a powerful, grossly malevolent person who persistently parades wealth and preens perverse tastes, who is bad to the bone, who is the polar opposite of good. A person like, say, Adolf Hitler, as he fostered and rode the Nazi tide. Or nowadays, a person like Donald Trump, as he resurrects and rides a neo Nazi tide. You might reply, big deal, so what? Trump is a buffoon. He's a moron. There have been and there are now others like him. Time is his antidote. Time passes and so will Trump. Meanwhile, you might say, I look the other way. Yes, time waits for no one, but meanwhile Trump covets being fur of the fascist states of Trumplandia. Trump is an antichrist on supersteroids. He is locked and loaded. The longer Trump rules, the more people he tramples. The longer he rules, the harder removing him and his ilk becomes. Time is too slow a solution. He is fucking odious, yes, sure, I get that, you may reply. But he has so many resources. What can I do other than avoid his wrath? You can help stop him. Did you do no kings? Sure I did. And I can rally once every few months, but what does that achieve? What more could I do that would help stop him? The big rallies get steadily more people to act and then ask what's next. Well, next we can help grow the opposition to Trump and to his enablers. We can help deploy that opposition to diminish Trump's capacity for doing harm. We can help remove Trump from history. We can go on to help remove the underlying structures that produced and elevated Trump in the first place. To avoid Trump's wrath leaves his wrath in place. It ignores those who can't avoid his wrath. Okay, sure, that sounds nice, you reply, but I have to ask again, what can I personally

From Big Rallies To Organizing

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do to help topple him? You can empower the opposition to Trump or to anyone like him. You can oppose his executive orders that remove obstacles to his fascist plans or that establish new tools to move aggressively to more aggressively pursue those plans. You can raise the social costs for Trump and Co until those costs are too high for them to endure. Come on, those are just vague words you say. I need personal clarity. What specifically can I, me, this person who is right here replying to you do? Let's say you're a teacher. Each day you stand before your students. They face onrushing hell. You know it, but you ignore it. You say not even one word to them about it. You don't want to upset them. You don't want to upset their parents. You don't want to upset Trump. Really? Is that the best you can muster? How about if instead of seeking cover you teach? I'm sorry to be a bit brutal about this, but I can't deny what I feel. Why not say to your students not just if you teach social studies or current events or history, much less ethics, but even if you teach literature, chemistry or math. Students, the world outside our classroom matters. The world outside our classroom calls for attention. Here's why. And then you spell out the dangers, pain and suffering that Trump's agenda enforces. With that said, you continue. Students, you, your families, your friends, and all people matter. Here is why. And then you spell out the predictable impacts of what is happening now and what will happen later if Trump isn't stopped. And you say, So students, our next course topic is to discuss the evil that is escalating out there and to discuss what we can do about it. That would be impressive. It would be exemplary. But how about if you also talk with your fellow teachers about how they can really teach too? And how about if you tell your students to tell their friends and their families that they need to also get involved? And how about if you then join together with students and also with students' parents to fight to open your school in the evening so that the parents and others can get together to talk about what else to do and how to use the school as a base from which to work to stop Trump? You must be kidding, you might reply, but no, step by step, I am not kidding. And if you saw those those type acts prepared and undertaken in a movie, you'd admire the teachers who did it. You'd applaud them. So why not do what you would admire and applaud? Well let's say you were a worker for Amazon, General Motors, or whatever. You truck and carry hammer hammer and clean each day without influence, your dignity being defiled. You work to earn enough for food and housing, daycare and medicine for yourself and your family. You may hate your days, but you need your job. Okay, how about if you talk with your workmates about the evil going on inside and outside your workplace to get a fair share and to get dignity? Not easy to do. But you do it anyway. You urge that to look away is to welcome steadily worse conditions, not only for you, but for your families and friend and communities. You ask what people think, you listen, and finally, when plausible, you entreat. Quote, we need to act. We are many. We are who this corporation depends on. We are who society depends on. Together we can raise demands. Together we can withhold our work. Together we can reach out to the consumers of our products. We can reach out to the communities that our companies pollute. We can resist Trump and Trump's billionaire sidekicks and his puppet masters too. Everything new looks impossible until after it gets done. We can do what looks impossible, but not if we don't try. Or let's say you were a soldier or a police officer, or maybe you were a relative or a neighbor of one. How about if you discuss what would be admirable, helpful, ethical things for justice keepers to do? And also what are ugly, harmful, unethical things that justice keepers are now too often commanded to do. Did you become an active duty enforcer of law

Teachers And Schools As Bases

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to hurt people or to help people? To be just or to impose injustice? When Trump orders you to deport, to club, to intimidate, to shoot, how about if you just say no? You may reply I get it, but that is seriously hard. I'd be fired, I'd be jailed, maybe worse. Yes, so how about if you first converse off duty about it with your fellow soldiers, or policemen and women? How about if you identify those who share your concerns and your desires and you talk together, and when ready you organize together to collectively resist? How about if you go to demonstrations against injustice and suffering not to crush dissent, but to register your own dissent? Does that sound impossible? Like you'd be attacked for it? Well yes, and that's why you first ask around about it. You first make a case, you first develop a group, you first grow that group, then the group makes careful plans, and then when you are too many to dismiss and too righteous to deny, you go public. It may sound impossible, but it is what you can do to stop to help stop Trump like he has never been stopped before. Or suppose you personally know police or soldiers, National Guard or ICE members, and you live near them or you socialize with them. Okay, how about if instead of avoiding the issues, you sincerely listen to them and talk with them? How about if you bring them well conceived literature? How about if you set up tables at their police stations or their military bases and you patiently hear them and make your case with them day after day? Yes, it would be risky, but it has been done before. Watching a documentary about past war resistance in the dark of a theater, you might even cheer for those who did it. So why not cheer for yourself doing it? Well, let's say you are a college student and you are on a campus that is obeying Trumpian demands. You weren't asked your opinion, your dean caved and then ordered you to follow your administration's cowardly hypocritical plans. How about you then hold meetings and discussion sessions in dorms and even in classes too? How about you collectively discuss what is happening to your school, to the community around your school, to your state, your country, and the world? How about if you ask what you and your school are doing about what's going on? You ask what you should do about what's going on. You organize dorm to dorm and room to room until you have numbers sufficient to demand that Trumpian demands and Trump himself must be rejected. Until you have numbers enough to demand that your school stop complying with oppressive policies, whether about distant war or ecology at home. You demand your school aids immigrants and not ICE, that your school aids dissenters and not perpetrators, that your school aids the resistance, not the Antichrist. And if it doesn't, you shut it down, and then open it up to pursue new values. How about that? How about sustained resistance? Well let's say you play football or basketball, college or pro. How about you think about and discuss with your fellow athletes how you and your sport conducts itself? What could be done to aid those who can't even afford your tickets? What could be done to make your neighbors better off? What could be done to disavow macho violence? You not only dribble on court or run and tackle on the field, but you also use your notoriety and your wealth to better society. You stand tall with banners saying, quote, dear Donald, you are not welcome here. Dear Ice, get out of our city, get out of our state, leave now, or there will be no more

Workers Withhold Labor And Organize

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games until you are gone. You take a little break from dribbling and tackling to rally in march. Or let's say you were a health worker in a hospital or a clinic. How about demanding free medical care for all? And how about doing no harm but also demanding that Trump stop doing harm? Or let's say you were a Republican Congressperson. Okay, how about you grow a spine? You leave hypocrisy behind. Or let's say you were a mainstream Democratic governor or senator. How about you face facts? Mainstream institutions and practices birth Trump. You need to think harder to serve the people, to provide power to the people. Or perhaps you write. How about you write less about murder and mayhem and even about all that is wrong in society, and more about what to do about it right now and over the longer term as well? Or maybe you are a mom or a dad, or a son or a daughter. You care about your children's or your parents' future. How about you care enough to address the forces perverting that future? Or perhaps you are a priest or a rabbi, you care for your congregation's future. But how can that be if you passably watch their world turn to shit? So you make your religious center a sanctuary for immigrants. You preach peace but also resistance. I think you get the idea. We all need to think and think again about what to do, and then we need to do it. And I bet you can yourself think up many more ways in which you yourself, in whatever your situation may be, might lend your mind, lend your time, and lend your energies to help stop the rush toward fascism, and simultaneously to replace the many ugly factors that have brought that rush to the fore. But if resistance is new for you, and you are still unclear about what you might best do, about what you can do given your means and given where you are at and all your responsibilities, that's okay too. In that case, the task is to raise questions, to read up a bit, to converse a lot, and to think on it all until you get clear enough to act. The key first step is not to look the other way. Think for just a minute about Germany in the nineteen thirties. I am no historical expert, not even a little. But even I know that Hitler couldn't do what he did alone, and he couldn't do it with just Himmler, Goebbels, Bormann, Eichmann, and the rest of his henchmen. Not even with them, and also with the ultra millionaires who sought to benefit from his rule, and not even with help from the rank and file workers and youth who fell for his lies and manipulations and then doted on him and supported him. Hitler also needed, and indeed Hitler absolutely had to have the disbelief, the passivity, the fear, and the surrender of what came to be called quote good Germans. That is, Hitler needed regular folks who didn't like what he was doing and who even hated what he was doing to do nothing much to stop what he was doing. History never exactly repeats, but in that one respect, in a growing number of places around the world, this is the thirties again. In the US, for example, Trump needs more than the likes of Vance, Hegseth, RFK junior, Rubio, and the rest of his gang of psychophantic toads. And he also needs more than his billionaire supplicants and puppet masters. And he needs more even than his rank and file worker and youth support, especially since that seems to be finally wavering and even unraveling. Trump additionally needs people who don't like and who even hate him and his policies to do nothing much to stop him. If they're scared to act, that's fine with him. If they just don't believe hell can happen here, that's also fine with him. Lazy or too busy is fine with him too. Whatever keeps people submissive, distracted or aware, but silent is absolutely fine with him. Trump needs quote good Americans just like Hitler needed, quote, good Germans. We won't be that, will we? So many of us are very clear about Donald to the extent of wanting him gone. What we aren't in as large numbers so clear about is what to do about it. Do we watch the situation unfold and hope? Do we also donate some funds to the cause

Soldiers And Police Refuse Unjust Orders

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and hope? Do we also assemble and register our distaste on national demo days, donate some and hope? Do we do all that but also do the kinds of things described in this essay to organize not just to be done with Donald, but also to in time remove the institutions that brought us Donald and the daily oppress so many citizens. All resistance is good, but I hope people will consider what we might call the organizing options as much as the hoping, helping, and mobilizing options. And PS, if you want to find a specific project or organization that does good things that you favor and which you can volunteer to help where you live, and that has aims and inclinations that you share, and that needs help that you can provide, you might want to check out all of us.org. One word, all of us.org. It's an online tool that is designed to help you find your, let's call it, action match. Not a date, a cause. You enter your locale and your interests, the site displays organizations and projects that fit your conditions that you can choose to contact and perhaps decide to help. Okay, now for the rest of this episode, we have the finely toppling Marxism Leninism part, a relatively brief sum up of the prior episodes in that series. The chapter from What is to be undone that this segment of this episode offers, the last piece in the series, like other chapters I have excerpted for this series, began with an offset quote, this time from the French philosopher Maurice Merleau Ponti. Quote Nevertheless, there comes a time when a detour ceases to be a detour, when the dialectic is no longer a dialectic. Then the chapter offered a summary of the sequence's results with these words. At this point, we shall do a summary review of the past three chapters in an order that is more conducive to seeing causal relations than to slowly working out an analysis. I interject. Please keep in mind, the issue at stake is what concepts, connections among them, aims and methods should we utilize when we think about current society in order to change it. The chapter continues. Classical Marxism is a powerful social theory that presented a compelling understanding of some of history's dynamics and that uncovered a great many of its hidden but important attributes. Nonetheless, it had and has numerous weaknesses, which are highly consequential precisely because of the ways they affect classical Marxist practitioners' abilities to fully understand their surroundings and to consciously change them for the better. Classical Marxism is based on a dialectical approach that is somewhat unbalanced and quite narrow, and that thereby causes excessive dichotomizing and fixating. I interject, I have to set things a bit straight as of twenty twenty six. Beyond what I have already offered from the early nineteen seventies, I now have to admit that I doubt there is such a thing as a general dialectical approach that anyone would reject or even not recommend. That whole books get written about dialectics, however, eludes my comprehension. After all, what does a general dialectical approach really say? I think it says pay attention to the inner nature of things and systems and also to the external pressures on those things and systems. So who disagrees with that? I think it also says when looking at things and systems, notice if within them there are things. There are aspects that are contradictory to one another, meaning aspects that pursue mutually incompatible ends. And then note that the resolution of those may be especially important to what emerges in the thing or system over time. Again, does anyone say otherwise? So I admit that to my ears referring to quote the dialectic and the dialectical method as something really pivotal and special and uniquely important to one theory, but not to others makes little sense to me. More, why use a vague academic word whose meaning is incredibly vague and obscure? Beyond that, I think that classical Marxism's dialectics adds to an agreeable, general, almost universally shared, common sense attitude about looking at things and systems is an a priori virtually universally binding instruction that the things or systems we look at or internal features will be paramount, and that contradictions of a certain sort economic will always be present there and should always be our primary focus. And to me, that instruction is where classical Marxist dialectics problems seem to me to reside. Maybe the reason for retaining the vague academic word dialectics is precisely to make it appear that the classical Marxism's

Students And Athletes Use Leverage

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additions to common sense attitudes are so indisputably part of the whole approach called Marxist dialectics, that we can't dispense with them without also dispensing with the effective common sense part of the approach. In any case, the chapter from nineteen seventy two seventy four continued Classical Marxism is also based on a theory of knowledge that is narrow and that does not understand the full dynamics of thought processes, that overemphasizes the dominating importance of material needs, that does not understand the dynamics of defensiveness and sectarianism, and that therefore postulates no methods for dealing with either. Similarly, and derivatively, classical Marxism is also based on an unenlightened understanding of human behavior that largely ignores the importance of many human needs, tendencies and desires, and as a result has almost no understanding of the full complexity of human motivation. Worse, it tends to assert all such issues in any case to be secondary, unmaterial, and therefore not worth much of our time. As a result, classical Marxism is not well suited to analyzing tactics with regard to their likely effects on real, concrete in the world people. I interject. I am not suggesting that someone seeking to change the world must know what in fact no one knows or probably no one could ever even know, which is precisely how thought emerges and proceeds or even all factors that can affect it. We all have no choice but to operate with less than comprehensive, infallible knowledge of human consciousness formation and use. But we don't have to operate with so little knowledge and even with a dismissive attitude towards such knowledge that we repeatedly and consistently overlook or even intentionally ignore centrally important aspects of how people arrive at and utilize views. We need to have sufficient understanding to formulate effective strategy and to help us avoid destructive defensiveness, sectarianism, and simplistic explanations of motivation. The chapter continues. Further, classical Marxism develops a theory of history called classical historical materialism that is also lacking. It is based on an unbalanced view of historical forces that underestimates and misunderstands the relevance and dynamics of racism, sexism, authoritarianism, and even classism. It is based on a nonpsychological, highly abstracted theoretical foundation, and so it does not understand the dynamics of short run events and day-to-day occurrences, all of which it most often dismisses as simply accidents or as irrelevant to history. It is based on a view of people that stresses scarcity almost entirely, and that therefore creates a theory that overemphasizes the importance of class and underestimates the importance of other groups and of ideas. It is based on a theory of contradictions that makes classes dominant but ignores the reality of revolutionaries who are no longer explicable as solely class motivated people. It is not self-critical, and protestations aside, it does not promote self-criticism among the people it selects for creating change. It doesn't really understand oppressive dynamics in their totality, and it gives no very powerful understanding of why oppression is and has always been so prevalent. It abstracts away much that has been important to history's course and then protects itself against understanding its own resulting deficiencies. It doesn't provide any means for postulating goals, because it doesn't really talk about human fulfillment. It does not really say where the good will come from or what it will look like, merely that it will arrive.

Good Germans And Good Americans Warning

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Perhaps most important of all, because of the peculiar dynamics of its weaknesses and because of the ways it affects its practitioners and the ways they affect it, classical Marxism does not change over time. It becomes a kind of religion in which people have an ongoing interest causing them to worship rather than to try to critically understand and advance its tenets. Classical Marxism gives believers a vested interest in stability rather than in change, and it creates a strategy that reflects all those weaknesses in a variety of ways. I interject. Once again, this is classical historical materialism and classical Marxism. It is not everything that every Marxist thinks or does. In fact, that is inevitably the case, because to abide the classical concepts that obscure or even rule out everything beyond them would be, well, so mechanical and so closed that of course lots and lots of practitioners try to do better. But and this is a critical point throughout, in the practice that results from classically advocated political parties, the ills appear and collectively tend to dominate. So you get what we saw in Bolshevik practice. The chapter continues. Classical Leninism exaggerates the importance of miseration and underestimates the importance of a knowledge of viable future alternatives. It has no capacity to understand the dynamics of tactics as they affect practitioners or recipients, and so its decisions about such issues are highly problematic and often quite wrong. It doesn't arm people to effectively compose or evaluate their own programmatic efforts. I interject. It considers how opposed choices appear likely, as seen through Marxist Leninist filters, to impact some large scale aims like the party's power, but it rarely considers how opposed choices would impact the mindsets, morale, personalities, and commitments of those who undertake them, like party members and wider populations, and in turn how those human effects would abet or instead undo or even corrupt the sought large scale aims. The chapter continues It makes a fetish of discipline and hierarchy to the absolute detriment of real revolutionary potentials in the people who use it and the people they encounter. It overemphasizes the importance of class conflict and underemphasizes the importance of struggles around race, sex, power, dignity, freedom, and alienation. It compels people to be, quote, Protestantly worker like at exactly that moment in history when they are struggling to be free of old identities and definitions in order to adopt newer, better ones. It pushes people to submit to new authorities at exactly that moment when it is most critical that they confront all authority. It makes a fetish of whatever it first finds important and hardly ever flexibly adapts to changing conditions. It is sectarian to an extreme that increases as its practitioners have more and more power. It's a poor blueprint for a power takeover. It says almost nothing important about the dynamics of an all sided revolution that would successfully eliminate exploitation much less all other modern forms of oppression. I interject. That was perhaps a bit too strong. Leninism does say some things that are important, but they are things which virtually everyone already knows. What it adds to people's conceptual commitments

Find Your Action Match Online

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beyond what virtually every activist already knows, such as that economy matters, workers matter, owners matter, tactics matter, working together matters, and so on, is where Leninism's problems arise. The chapter continues. And Leninism leads to practice that reflects all these weaknesses in their most brutal imaginable forms. Practice that ignores most human needs, tramples opposition, learns almost nothing from experience, and becomes progressively more and more despotic as its practitioners gain power, or more and more irrelevant as they encounter insurmountable difficulties they can't really understand. I interject, is that too strong? Well, consider Bolshevism. Consider what Leninism wins when it wins. Consider how often it fails to win, and why. Don't take for granted that to critique and reject Leninism is intrinsically to accept oppression, exploitation, and injustice. So that to favor fundamental change we must accept Marxist Leninism and then just do better than, say, Lenin and Trotsky, even while thinking their same thoughts and cleaving to their same system. The chapter continues Classical Marxist Leninists don't grasp what revolution really is. They limit themselves to a less than full picture of the society they wish to change. They have only a minimal sense of the people they expect to do the changing, and they have almost no serious institutional vision of what the new society should be like. They don't perceive the importance of a clearly outlined goal. They don't really understand that revolution doesn't come as because a situation is totally intolerable, but because of a clash between what is and what people want and realize could be. They don't see that misery alone usually produces only demoralization and competition, while political understanding of viable alternatives produces action. They don't know the dynamics of oppression. They refuse to acknowledge the oppressive behavioral baggage they have been given by their capitalist backgrounds. Modern movements must open up new potentials through their practice and their demeanor for their practitioners and for the masses. Classical Marxist Leninists don't see that revolutionizing all people's thoughts is the priority, while revolutionizing just the thoughts of a few leaders is impossibly counterproductive. And they don't realize these things not because they are stupid, but because the weaknesses of classical Marxist and Leninism steer their consciousnesses away from understanding. And because the dynamics of classical Marxist Leninists' revolutionary practice and their own bad traits give them vested interest in this ignorance. Classical Marxist Leninists cannot see that a revolution to a classless society can't arise from traditional class conflict over property, but only from the dissolution of all oppressed sectors and the emergence of a revolutionary collectivity. A modern revolution will be carried out against the ruling class, not by oppressed classes, but by masses of democratically organized revolutionaries no longer primarily identifiable as class people. Classical Marxist Leninist understanding is based on a revolution wherein people are concerned

Transition To Marxism Leninism Summary

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with power transfers at the top, but people are now and perhaps always concerned as well with an all-sided revolution that would deal with every aspect of the social question. Workers and others develop revolutionary ideologies precisely to the extent they throw off their old traditional patterns of thinking and of acting. Classical Marxist Leninists don't realize that the worker must become less capitalistically worker like and more revolutionary, that the doctor must become less doctor like and more revolutionary, that each remains a worker or doctor, though each may also develop new skills, but that both become in the first place revolutionaries. And classical Marxist Leninists don't understand that the same is true for women, service employees, youths, blacks, etc. Classical Marxist Leninists have yet to realize that work under capitalism inculcates more bad habits and more bad ways of thinking and acting than good, and that that is a large part of why it is so oppressive. They have yet to sense that it is necessary for people to step outside the dictates of their present roles, so as to construct new ways of being more suitable to their own needs and to the needs of people around them. Though people must preserve what is good in their old ways, they must also drop what is bad, make fetishes of nothing. Classical Marxist Leninists don't realize that when they cynically exploit the nature of the hierarchical factories' effects to bring people into hierarchical parties, they are doing more harm than good. They don't have any idea of what it takes to create an environment that will allow people to escape from reactionary worldviews into revolutionary ones. They don't even address many of the major forms of oppression workers and others feel. I interject. I was on a roll in those paragraphs, and you may feel that to maintain the flow I was being unfair. But again, remember Bolshevik practice led by Lenin himself and Trotsky too, and by led I mean overwhelmingly decided by them. Do their acts, and not what they sometimes say or write to appeal to some constituency, show what it means to be Leninist? I think so. The chapter continued. Marxism Leninism problem isn't even that it would lead an abortive American revolution, but that it would lead no American revolution at all. Americans, and I was writing in the early seventies for if I was lucky in distribution, likely at most a small US audience, won't risk comparative comfort and security because a central committee so orders them. Those Americans who are at the point where they might move spontaneously and then be co opted as happened in Russia, know that they are too few and too weak alone. No one is too interested in taking risks for a central committee that is part racist, part sexist, authoritarian, and bourgeois. It looks more promising and less dangerous to take lesser risks for fascists or capitalists who offer substantially the same rewards and have the same attributes. But there are exceptions. Some people do rapidly feel their injustices and further recognize that socialism of some kind is the only possible remedy. They then try to function in existing socialist movements, but more often than not, they are unable to grow there. The movement dynamics there foster the movement members' own worst tendencies. People become slaves of their movements, or they become immobile and despondent and drop out, or they rise in its hierarchy and make other members miserable. Classical Leninist parties, classical Leninist centralism, and classical Leninist narrowness just can't sustain revolutionary activism over long periods in people who are struggling for freedom, integrity, and an end to illegitimate authority. I interject. That is what I saw looking around in the early seventies. I watched fine, committed people go

Why Classical Marxism Falls Short

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down Leninist rabbit holes. To expect fundamentally different trajectories for people now while they don shirts with Lenin's or Trotsky's pictures on them, sort of like billboards for Bolshevism, or even when they are more restrained than that, seems profoundly unwise to me. The chapter continued. Modern Western revolutionaries are confronted by a situation that the classical Marxist Leninists have yet to fully appreciate. As Murray Bookshin wrote, quote, the process of the disintegration of old forms now becomes generalized and cuts across virtually all the traditional classes, values, and institutions. It creates entirely new issues, modes of struggle, forms of organization, and calls for an entirely new approach to theory and praxis. The classical Marxist Leninists rely on economic crisis even though it doesn't appear likely for the US and isn't essential to revolutionary success. They aim at only workers even though many strata are in motion. They focus entirely on poverty when the distribution of centralized wealth is a major problem. They have a negative approach that attacks existing conditions when what is needed is a positive approach that aims at new conditions. They centralize and demand obedience when decentralization and anti authoritarianism are critical. They prove incapable of understanding racism and sexism, and of relating honestly to anti racist, anti sexist struggles, even though these are growing more and more important. They cling to old tactics, old thoughts, and even old culture, and they do it because their identities, their interests, and their ideology demand that they do it. And though the best classical Marxist Leninists quite obviously often get beyond many of these weaknesses, a little study usually shows that they are simultaneously and to the same extent getting beyond classical Marxist Leninist dogma. Classical Marxism is supposedly a philosophy of change, and yet classical Marxist Leninists do almost nothing to overcome the most pressing reactionary philosophic beliefs of our times. The belief that most, if not all, people are essentially lazy, dumb, evil, and greedy, and the belief that no one can ever form a societal organization that is significantly better than that now existing in the United States. Classical Marxist Leninists damn just about anything and everything, but they do almost nothing to constructively suggest new possibilities. There is very little in classical Marxist ideology that convince that can convince people things can get better, and there is almost nothing in their practice that convince people of the same possibility. In fact, their practice usually does more to prove the reverse. Perhaps Maurice Brinton is not going too far when he wrote In the struggle for these truly human humanitarian objectives, Bolshevism will eventually be seen to have been a monstrous aberration, the last garb donned by a bourgeois ideology as it was being subverted at the root. Bolshevism's emphasis on the incapacity of the masses to achieve a socialist consciousness through their own experiences of life under capitalism, its presumption of a hierarchically structured vanguard party and of centralization to fight the centralized state power of the bourgeoisie, its proclamation of the historical birthright of those who have accepted a particular vision of society and of its future, and the decreed right to dictate the vision of others, if necessary, at the point of a gun, all these will be recognized for what they are, the last attempt of bourgeois society to reassert its ordained division into leaders and led and to maintain authoritarian social relations in all aspects of life. Or Svetozar Stojanovich, when he suggests, it would seem that the theory of the unconscious should be applied more broadly than it has been to include revolutionary groups as well. The phenomenon of the inversion of ends and means leads one to suspect that from the very first there were subconscious goals underlying the conscious ones, and that great differences existed between them. The conscious goals, centered upon a society without classes or a state, in circumstances like these only served to conceal the movement's subconscious desires to absolutize itself once it reaches power. Individual Marxists have also contributed to this tendency, albeit unintentionally, by giving simplified and ultimately vague definitions of the goal of socialist revolution, which in their view is the seizure of power. In any quase, classical Marxism Leninism does not provide a suitable basis for truly revolutionary activity. It rules out too much that is important, emphasizes things that aren't as crucial as they might have been, makes a fetish of organizational and behavioral forms that are destructive and totally unappealing, and creates a dynamic which leads seemingly inexorably to dogmatism. It is not a growth ideology. The relations between theory, strategy, practice, and practitioners are not such as to lead to constant improvements. Marxism Leninism's weaknesses have been made worse over time if they have changed at all. Its latest practitioners have no real choice. They bend reality to suit their conceptions rather than bending their conceptions to suit reality. They are not very self conscious. They bend revolutionary impulses and movements to fit their desires rather than vice versa, or some middle course. The Russian Revolution has given us a lesson in what is not to be done. It killed the Soviets, it bombarded the Kronstaders, it destroyed the Maknovites, it trampled opposition and reestablished capitalistic authoritarian dynamics, and then later, and quite consistently, it unleashed Tallinn upon the peoples of the Soviet Union and the world. There is a tremendous amount we can learn from Marx and those who followed, but a great deal of care should be taken lest we turn out as the Bolsheviks did. Being part right and cocksure is at least as bad as being all wrong but humble about it. Kurt Vonnegut has a passage in a book essentially about fascism's roots and human capacities for self deception that with some literary license provides a fitting close to our present somewhat similar discussion. I have never seen a more sublime demonstration of the totalitarian mind, a mind which much be which might be likened unto a system of gears whose teeth have been filed at random. Such a snaggle tooth thought machine, driven by a standard or even substandard libido, whirls with the jerky, gaudy pointlessness of a cuckoo clock in hell. Jones wasn't completely crazy. The dismaying thing about the classic totalitarian mind is that any given gear, though mutilated, will have at its circumference unbroken sequences of teeth that are immaculately maintained, that are exquisitely machined. Hence the cuckoo clock in hell, keeping perfect time for eight minutes and thirty three seconds, jumping ahead fourteen minutes, keeping perfect time for six seconds, jumping ahead two seconds, keeping perfect time for two hours and one second, then jumping ahead a year. The missing teeth, of course, are simple, obvious truths, truths available and comprehensible even to ten year olds in most cases. The willful filing off of gear teeth, the willful doing without certain obvious pieces of information. That was

Leninism’s Discipline And Hierarchy Trap

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how a household as conspicuous as one composed of Jones, Father Keeley, Vice Brundus Fuhrer Krappertower, and the Black Fuhrer could all exist in relative harmony. That was how my father in law could contain in one mind an indifference toward slave women and a love for a blue vase. That was how Rudolf Hess, commanded of Auschwitz, could alternate over the loud speakers of Auschwitz great music and calls for corpse carriers. That was how Germany could see no important differences between civilization and hydrophobia. And perhaps that was also how the Russian Bolsheviks could simultaneously proclaim revolution and repress all worker and repeasant initiatives toward real self managed freedom. So ended the short summary chapter excerpted here with some additional interjections from now. Not with a whimper, but with a slashing bang it ended. Looking back, the material is interesting to me for being very, very aggressive when I was twenty five, writing as a new leftist in the new left's waning years. I don't now agree with every sentence I have relayed to you in these episodes, but I do agree with most of them, and with way more than enough of the substance to feel that to return to or to double down on or to in any way now adopt and advocate Marxism Leninism would in no way prepare ourselves, guide ourselves, sustain ourselves, much less improve ourselves to pursue fundamental social, political, cultural, and economic change in coming years. Listen to Trotsky. Bolshevik practice wasn't derailed in his eyes, rather it created what it sought, and what it sought, through my eyes, removed capitalists, but installed what I call the coordinator class to rule the economy. It retained misogyny and racism. It resurrected political dictatorship. Leninism's core lessons, what differentiates it from common sense, are a dead end or worse for feminism, anti racism, and anti authoritarianism, and even for classlessness. And classical Marxism Leninism didn't prevent, but actually abetted all that. Lenin wasn't a poor applier of classical Marxist concepts. He went where in real use, in real conflicted and complicated struggle undertaken by real people born and brought up in oppressive societies, the ideology led. So ended our sequence of articles addressing Marxism Leninism. I wonder if anyone who advocates that ideology will respond. I admit that I do not understand how one can see the words and choices of Lenin and Trotsky and the derivative practice of Bolshevism and still want to claim the label Leninist or Trotskyist. I also don't understand how revolutionary activists can, on thinking about these matters, not want to develop and share new underlying concepts to arrive at new ideology better suited to the aims of worthy sustainable revolution. I can't see it that is other than in perhaps one of three ways. One, such advocates of Marxism and Leninism like what they encounter in Marxist Leninist practice, and thus also in its strategy and underlying conceptual framework. And yet I think nearly none will say that that is the case for them unless they claim to literally quote see in Leninist practice not what is there, but instead what is in fact not only not there, but what is overwhelmingly denied by what is there. two, such leftist advocates or even just non critics of Marxist Leninist ideology believe that classical Marxist conceptual commitment, Leninist commitment, Leninist strategic commitments, and Bolshevik practice are literally beside the point. In their view, the ideology is instead what these advocates each say it is or each believe it is, and not what it has been in actual practice and what history shows it overwhelmingly tends to become in current practice. Or three, well, I guess what Vonnegut said, albeit he said it about fascists. So I have some questions. I have done five episodes in this sequence. Two presented first classical Marxism and second Leninism as plausible systems to now advocate in pursuit of fundamental change in our times. The third presented Bolshevik practice as not at all positive, but instead as evidence to consider and thinking about the wisdom of turning to classical Marxism and Leninism for guidance. The fourth critiqued Leninism in light of its namesake's own words and practice. And finally, the fifth critiqued classical Marxism, also in light of its associated practice. And no one has, as yet, at least that I have seen, taken issue with any of those episodes or the subsequent printed articles. No one has written even a comment or a tweet or whatever else rejecting the offerings, much less offered a full critical reaction. No one has defended what I have rejected, nor has anyone rejected what I have asserted. Not publicly, at least. So why is that? I am seriously asking in hopes to hear answers. What did I get wrong? Why are my rejections invalid? This would seem like a good opportunity for serious advocates of looking toward Marxist Leninist ideology for future guidance to make their case, or at the very least, to reject denials of their case. Such people are in my experience rarely reticent about attacking opponents, or even just people who appear to maybe be opponents. Certainly Lenin and Trotsky never ignored dissent. They responded, and Marx and Angles did too, though not quite as militantly and even violently, at least in my awareness of their actions. So honestly, dear Marxist Leninist, why not trounce what I have offered, lest it impact anyone at all? I get that you may feel that my arguments are trivial, idiotic, unsound, and unsupportable, but someone might be moved by them. Don't you want to prevent that? You need not hesitate because you don't want to be hurtful or you worry public disagreement will impact others adversely. If any of that is a concern for you, I get it. But in that case, just reject my rejection of Marxism Leninism with evidence and argument, not with ad hominem hominem rhetoric. I don't think evidence and argument offered in pursuit of progress will put anyone off. I, for one, would certainly welcome it. And all that said, this is Michael Albert, signing off for Revolution Z, until next time.