6 Questions All Marxists Should Know the Answers To
1. What is the current state of the masses?
The majority of the people of the world are oppressed by wage-slavery and facing the contradictions of capitalist-imperialism in sharper and sharper ways. This is reflected in the rising cost of food, housing, and all kinds of other basic commodities the people need, which are growing more and more out of reach for many. The “economy,” when measured as the stock-prices of companies, may be “healthy,” but this does not translate to the majority of people, who suffer as the bourgeois raise prices.
The ruling class has created this problem. As the overseers and benefactors of chains of production that are old, bloated, and no longer energetic, they are facing profit stagnation at increasing rates. Because of this, they must raise the prices of their commodities. This is so that they can maintain the price of their stock, and thus, their wealth.
The lowering of purchasing power belies the greater classic contradiction within capitalist production generally, that the capitalists require a purchasing populace to buy their commodities, and that their own capitalist accumulation denies this power to the masses. This contradiction is becoming more and more antagonistic by the day. In addition, the routine economic “crashes” of capitalism are occurring at greater rates too, helped along by the late-stage contradictions and overwhelming power of speculative finance capital. While money can be printed, and the central banks bailed out, the financial maneuvering of the ruling class to maintain their shaky dominance dramatically increases the wealth disparity, and consolidates both capital and productive forces in fewer and fewer hands, ensuring future crises of even worse magnitude. It is no exaggeration to say that the current orientation of capitalist-imperialism is on the decline, and expired, facing its contradictions, which are growing more antagonistic. With it, the economic situation for the vast majority of the world is only worsening,[1],[2],[3] and will continue to worsen. Relatedly, discontent grows throughout the majority of society due to the masses’ worsening conditions, as we are seeing now.[4]
Bear with us now as we spend some time discussing the particular motions of a section of bourgeois within the masses, which we must devote considerable effort towards understanding because of their power to influence society and especially “radical” politics. Within the masses, and within this motion of growing discontent and worsening economic conditions that the masses are experiencing, there is a section of petty and low-level bourgeois who don’t have enough capital to establish multi-national corporations, or otherwise become larger imperial financiers who have parasitically “bought” their way out of production. This section of smaller bourgeois own productive forces and capital, but they are stuck with them, domestically bound, dependent on the investments of their financial betters to maintain their stock prices and manage their businesses, which are often nothing more than links in the production chains of the big monopolies, which are owned by similar sections of financial imperial bourgeois.
Like the workers, the lumpen, and the majority of society, the domestically-bound petty and industrial bourgeois are also facing worsening conditions, though they are shielded from the worst of it at a rate that corresponds to the amount of capital they have at their disposal. The aforementioned reduction in purchasing power affects them too, and it affects, mostly, their ability to buy from the imperial monopolists all that they need to run “their” businesses. As economic downturn casts a spirit of miserliness onto the financiers, and onto their rate of investment, they squeeze the smaller industrial elements as consumers — raise the prices of the commodities smaller bourgeois depend on in the course of their production. This understandably frustrates the business of the smaller bourgeois, who often have very little overhead and have a hard enough time staying open as is. As they attempt to maintain their American delusion of “ownership,” the small bourgeois sink even further into financial debt, chaining themselves even more to the imperial bourgeois.
The imperial financiers’ miserliness during times of economic downturn also has them squeezing their own wallets tighter, being much more tight-fisted with their investments, collecting rather than lending, forcing the smaller bourgeois to go without the kind of financial support they had grown accustomed to, and that their production depends on, and even forcing stock splits, mergers, lay-offs and other objectively disintegrating actions on the smaller element as they attempt to maintain their own profits and lifestyles. We should not forget the existence of the contradictions between industrial and financial capital, and between smaller and bigger bourgeois, and we have only touched on a few of them here. There is a real oppressive, dialectical relation between the dominant financial imperialists and the smaller, domestically-bound industrial bourgeois that plays out in numerous ways on the global stage, and we are horrible Marxists to ignore this fact.
Of great importance to the masses, because the smaller bourgeois are not wage-slaves, and possess capital and some ability to influence the wider fabric of society, their contradictions play out in political action. When they suffer (which, for the bourgeois, means not being able to valorize labor and oppress the worker at a sufficient rate), society is gifted with a movement of theirs, a spontaneous movement, born from the current orientation of capitalist society and completely subservient to it, that paints these beleaguered business people as honest, hard-working entrepreneurs who have been denied the products of their labor, victims of a society that has been co-opted and taken over by foreign influence. This movement of domestically-bound bourgeois is growing across the world, across many different countries globally because of the heightening contradictions of capitalist-imperialism globally, and the assaults that these contradictions enact on the smaller bourgeois the world over, decreasing their capital and sending many of them down into the ranks of the petty bourgeois and proletariat, which they do not like and struggle against at every turn, transforming themselves into a politically radical contingency. While they can and do put up numerous economic critiques of society, the bourgeois who lead this movement do so according to their class interest, which, because they are bourgeois and wish to remain so, is incapable of genuinely critiquing capitalism or even acknowledging the ubiquity of classes at all.
It is this section of smaller bourgeois, due to their capital and power over the masses, that brings form to the masses’ discontent; that airs this discontent to society as a whole through their many vehicles of propagating information. But they make it known their way, broadcasting their own discontent, and painting their bourgeois class interest and bourgeois demands as the interest of the whole society. Because of this, discontent is not expressed in a working class way, but in a bourgeois way — building bourgeois theory, bourgeois political movements, bourgeois organizations, and even bourgeois “revolutionism” that targets the status quo political situation, absolutely wishing to change it, but ultimately perpetuating the same contradictions of capitalism that act against the workers and the masses.
While it remains bourgeois and never transcends the bonds of capitalist-imperialism, the revolt of this stratum of domestically-bound bourgeoisie has different character depending on which side of the imperial contradiction we’re examining, and can be in the interest of socialism, and thus progressive, or against the interest of socialism, which is reactionary.
Within the dependent countries, those that are dominated by the “more developed” countries and whose state and economy run on investments from their bourgeois, this stratum of bourgeois and their movement against the status quo is a direct attack on the current orientation of capitalist-imperialism. They are a bourgeois who are nationally oppressed, and their attempt to throw off foreign financiers and reclaim their productive forces is progressive. In the hands of the imperialists and their compradors, the productive forces of the dependent country act against even the bourgeois of the country, and frustrate their ability to valorize labor. The country is oriented outward, and serves to enrich the foreign capitalist monopolists abroad and those few nationals who are aligned with their production over and against the vast majority of the country. Therefore, a successful bourgeois revolt here, the kind that claims property and productive forces for the nation’s own low-level bourgeois, is in the interest of global socialism. It aggresses the most egregious of bourgeois (the foreign financiers and monopolists), and aids in the toppling of the current orientation of imperialism, quickening the imperialists’ rate of profit stagnation, destabilizing the dominant imperial countries, and allowing for the global dialectical opposition to their empires to grow and develop against them, socialism included. In addition to lessening the strangle-hold of imperially-dominant nations on the world, a successful bourgeois revolt in the dependent countries is required for them to build socialism. A country is unable to perform socialist construction or maintain the dictatorship of the proletariat if it has no access to its own land, labor, and resources, as is the case with the dependent countries. Thus, a successful bourgeois revolt in the dependent countries is progressive from the viewpoint of Communism for that reason as well.
While the bourgeois revolt of dependent nations can be used for the cause of socialism, bourgeois revolts within imperially-dominant countries generally have reactionary character, working against the cause of socialism. In the case of dependent countries, the weaker national bourgeois often decry foreign oppression by European “white” business owners, which, while not a correct position to take since it is purely national and doesn’t speak to class forces, still targets an actual oppressive force, albeit badly. In contrast, within the dominant imperial countries, “the foreign oppressor” the bourgeois point to is more often than not, an illusion shrouded in mysticism and idealist reaction. Within these dominant countries — the United States, France, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, the UK, Australia, and the majority of West European countries, but also, (to a lesser extent) China, Russia, and a few others —it is inaccurate to say that there is a significant amount of foreigners dictating over the economy. What the smaller bourgeois are really responding to in their revolt is not foreign domination, but the domination of their own national financiers, who have made alliances with other powers and chained the world to their production lines and credit. Where there is foreign domination in the imperial countries, it has worked in tandem with the domestic bourgeois, cementing a unity of the market beneath a multi-national group of monopolist financial capitalists, subsuming the interest of the country’s bourgeoisie into that of the market as a whole. Under these conditions, the smaller bourgeois of empire are unable to put forward any real economic critique, or even acknowledge class society at all in the final view, even while they face oppression by their capitalist betters and feel the desire and need to express their discontent. So they use the tools that history and their chauvinism as citizens of a dominant imperial country has provided them and create a political movement that seeks to make accumulations not against any particular foreign oppressor, but against their own countrymen, “foreigners” made out to be national and cultural minorities. The movements of revolting bourgeois in the imperially dominant countries manifests as fascism, the bourgeois building racial bogeymen, setting up targets for their accumulations out of their own national citizens, lowering their costs of labor through the worst of oppression towards minorities and their political opposition and then propelling the country outward militarily in order to expand their rate of profit further through violent conquering, the subjugation of foreign labor and resources; in effect, eroding the expired chains of imperialist production and creating more energetic ones capable of greater rates of profit through the bringing in of new slave-like labor forces...capitalism recycling itself.
This class movement of reactionary domestically-bound bourgeois boiled over into the fascist governments of the last century, but within our current period, it is still in its infancy. However, the lust for new, cheaper labor forces has the fascists’ bourgeois economic base already directly assaulting the rigorous welfare states that are a pillar of modern imperial countries.
The big imperial financiers get their profit by exploiting the most desperate workers from over the whole world, centering their operations within the countries where wages are lowest, offloading the worst oppression to foreign nations, enforcing debt and austerity in them in order to lower labor costs and build their profit. The welfare systems that are in place globally today are in-line with the current orientation of imperialism and the biggest bourgeois’ chains of production, propped up by the big banking institutions and aligned with their profit motive. It is part of their method of achieving profit, and maintains the lower sections of workers at appropriate levels of economic dependency as their production requires. But when the smaller, domestic bourgeois cannot make their profit, they enforce austerity for their own country — which is the only field they have influence over — in order to create desperate workers out of their own countrymen, creating a laborer who will accept lower wages (thus driving up bourgeois profit), and to fill the holes in previous government services with their own private business operations.
The UK’s National Health Service (NHS) has been targeted by far-right politicians and their bourgeois handlers, for years, with a growing section on the right calling for a private option, or its complete dismantling.[5] The far-right and Trump-esque Reform UK party advocates for NHS-distributed vouchers for private health services within their 2024 program,[6] echoing many such sentiments we are familiar with here in the US concerning the conflict between public and private education, another field that reflects the wider struggle of the lesser bourgeois against the existing imperial order we are describing. The sentiment that government is inherently wasteful and oppressive, and that welfare recipients “abuse the system” is a basic idea of the Republican Party, Reform UK, and many other rightist political formations worldwide. And their lobbying and political maneuvering bears fruit. Notably, Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” which was passed last July cut federal funding for SNAP, and put the impetus on states to cover the difference, amounting anywhere from 5% to 15% of their state SNAP budget and with most states needing to cover more than $100 million when the law goes into effect in 2028.[7] The only way the states will be able to pay their SNAP bill is by raising taxes or cutting their own welfare systems, thus the offloading of federal SNAP costs onto states creates a snowball effect of further austerity and low-wages.
What’s happening with SNAP in the US and the increasing anti-NHS rhetoric in UK are part of a wider turn within the dominant imperial countries. When the programs that so many depend on are no longer available, it will drive a good majority of the masses into desperate proletarianization, destitution, and even death. Pushing the lower classes into this lower position allows for greater labor valorization by a wider swathe of bourgeois, and moves capitalist production forward through imperial crisis.
The elimination of the welfare state is a more immediate consequence faced today, but, in the general view, the ensuing conflict between liberal democracy on the one hand (supported by the class of the larger, but decaying, imperial financiers) and fascism on the other (supported by the class of revolting smaller bourgeois) defines the experience of the masses in the imperial countries. This experience is just beginning.
The current state of the masses of the world, in both the dependent and imperially dominant countries, can be summed up as this: they are caught between the late-stage contradictions of the big imperialists’ production, and the brewing revolts of the lesser bourgeois. No matter the case, the people are tugged along by their class oppressors, powerless as conditions continue to worsen, while war — the re-divisioning of the world’s productive forces through violent conquering — breaks on the horizon.
2. What is the current orientation of global imperialism?
By this question we mean, how is capitalist power oriented geo-politically, in the viewpoint of competing “nations”? We answered this question in our article on imperialism, Demarcating the Proletariat, and we’ll include some sections from that work here:
The country with the highest concentration of imperial bourgeois financiers and exporting the most capital is overwhelmingly the United States, as it has been for the last several decades since at least the end of World War 2. We should understand the United States as itself a product of capital – the investments of the European proto-capitalist merchants and feudal aristocracies of the 15th-18th centuries into colonial companies. The independent U.S. came to dominate the imperial landscape through first the cheap labor of chattel slavery, and then the cheap labor provided by waves of immigration and the development of and full use of the prison system (both through in-prison production of commodities by the incarcerated and through the threat of incarceration cast over a wide swath of the domestic proletariat). With this domestic base, it was able to birth financiers and dominate post-war European reconstruction. Carrying forward with this momentum it engaged in open conquests for its imperial bourgeois financiers in the name of “anti-Communism” during the Cold War, especially in Central and South America. The Korean, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan wars, plus many more wars, coups, and terroristic attacks on governments all reflect the actions of American imperial bourgeois financiers to conquer new markets and reinforce their dominance on proletarians for cheap production costs and profit.
Additionally, all of the big international imperial financial associations like the IMF and World Monetary Fund are dominated by American financiers, with the so called “democratic West” (even those portions like Australia that sit resoundingly in the East) being “defended” by NATO, a military alliance where two thirds of the total defense spending is supplied by United States taxes.[8] The Euro-American imperial bourgeoisie that benefited from the returns of post-war reconstruction cemented Europe under the umbrella of American capital, effectively making the countries of Western Europe the privileged underlings of American imperialism, satellite markets under their American overlord that retain a huge degree of parasitism, allowing them and their countrymen opulent lives on the backs of the vast majority of the world.
Outside of the overwhelmingly dominant imperialist power of the United States and its European cohorts, there are less dominant countries. China, despite espousing Marxism, is the worlds’ second-most powerful imperialist. U.S. and European capitalists invested in Chinese manufacturing heavily in the 1980’s and 1990’s – it being open to them after the capitalist reversal under Deng Xiaoping. The low wages of Chinese proletarians made these investments highly-profitable, allowing for cheaper manufactured goods and higher returns for the imperial financiers as well as profit for the Chinese compradors. After decades of this trend however, China’s manufacturing sector has matured considerably, due in no small part to the international investments of the imperialists. Dialectically related, the imperialists have watched their own countries’ domestic manufacturing shrivel, unable to compete against the cheaper wages, leading to rising unemployment and general labor crisis while the Euro-American financier minority reaps in mountains of wealth. The capital China has received from this exchange has allowed for the growth of their own financial bourgeoisie, and for their ability to make their own international investments and become imperialists in their own right. This has been relegated towards the most impoverished nations at the moment, most notably African countries that hold raw minerals, but this trend will only grow and mature. The Chinese financiers have nearly arrived in a unique position to capitalize –in the actual sense – upon the growing crisis within the United States and imperialist production at large, becoming the world’s next #1 parasitical section of humanity and catapulting their country into becoming the world’s greatest imperialist power. While still possessing a significant portion of their economy that has been co-opted towards the Euro-American imperialists, China is rising out of dependent status and into the vile role of a dominant imperialist country, soon capable of openly rivaling the United States.
Below China sit several countries that are not as dominant, possessing fewer financial bourgeoisie. These countries are generally getting more capital exported into them than they are able to export out, but are still able to export some degree of capital themselves. These can be considered semi-dependent countries. Russia, Japan, Brazil, South Korea, and some of the more developed countries of the Middle-East like Saudi Arabia, Iran, and the United Arab Emirates, are representative of this group. These countries generally sit in the “pockets” of the bigger imperialists, with their capitalists generally aiding in the foreign imperialists’ extraction of surplus labor value and resources from their country’s proletariat. However, they still possess portions of substantial industrial and financial bourgeoisie that have capital and interests that are opposed to the interests of the bigger imperialists, and are able to gain profit. These forces scrape and claw for greater rates of labor value extraction from either their own countrymen, or from their own access to foreign labor power in the more dependent countries, always facing an uphill battle against the bigger imperialist forces of the world that are stacked against them.
The truly dependent countries are mostly kept out of imperialist accumulation – that is, they are not possessing very many financiers – and have their economies oriented outward as cheap exports, supplying the majority of both the surplus labor value, and the raw materials for capitalist-imperial production globally. In these countries, the proletarians are oppressed by the entire global capitalist class, both domestic and foreign. The vast majority of the countries in Asia, Africa, the Middle-East, Eastern Europe, and South America – countries, which are less capitalistically developed and often called “3rd World” or “developing” countries – are relegated to serving the interests of the bigger imperialists over and against their own countrymen. The domestic market is choked out by the imports of the imperialists, preventing productive forces from developing. The leading bourgeoisie here are compradors subservient to foreign capital. They and the country’s crony government officials receive incentives from imperialist governments and associations like U.S. AID, The World Monetary Fund, and the IMF to secure open-market policies and austerity measures, serving the entire labor force of the country up to the imperialists and assuring that the workers remain at a poverty level and that labor costs are cheap.
As done above, we can group countries into dominant, semi-dominant, and dependent based on the amount of financiers within the country, and the amount of capital they export to other countries. This allows us to understand the imperial division between countries in an accurate way. This division is so that we may discern the national divisions of the proletariat, however, for “countries” are nothing more than the grouping of classes, and as Communists, we stand for the proletarian class.[9]
3. What is the current state of the working class?
The working class comprises the majority of the masses. They are those who do not own capital or equity in businesses, that is, they do not possess monies used for investment or ownership of productive forces, and are dependent on their wages from employment for their livelihoods. As stated earlier, workers face the worsening conditions of capitalist-imperialism at a higher rate than the bourgeois owner classes. But we should not think of their experience as a monolith. Though the proletariat is an international class, they experience wage-slavery at different degrees depending on their adjacency to the big imperial bourgeois, as in, depending on whether they are members of one of the countries in which the imperialists reside, or whether they are members of a country that is assaulted by their investments, and thus, under their political and financial domination. In other words, the proletariat experiences differing degrees of wage slavery whether they are within a dominant or dependent country in the viewpoint of global imperialism.
Within the imperially dominant countries, the workers are cushioned from the worst oppressions, and display a degree of parasitism. Most of the time, they are only tangentially related to the production of commodities, and are widely employed in the “service industry,” performing the “front-end” labor necessary to bring a commodity to market, while the majority of the labor that actually produces the commodity occurs outside the national boundary where labor costs are cheaper. This is less the case the less dominant a country is, but the fact remains that, due to sharing a country with the highest level of bourgeois, the workers within the highly imperial countries are, like their bourgeois masters, removed from production (though, as workers, this of course cannot be a complete removal) and made parasitical, experiencing relatively high-wages and living off of the commodities created by the more desperate workers abroad. Even the lowest levels of workers are cushioned from economic oppression, drinking from the superprofits tied to the aforementioned welfare programs, which are indivisible from the imperial order. Additionally, manufacturing and industrial production has shifted indubitably from dominant countries into the dependent satellite countries, who are kept in bondage to the stronger “usurer’s states”[10] through the imposition of debt and austerity measures, which keeps both the wages and the livelihoods of the proletarians in dependent countries low and readily exploitable by the monopolists abroad.
This parasitism has developed considerably, birthing an egregious stratum of worker that has grown up in, and is dependent on, the imperial superprofits of the bourgeois financiers. Representing the other end of the imperial spectrum from the abjectly oppressed workers of the dependent countries, the privileged labor aristocracy is an especially parasitical section of worker within the imperial countries that serves as a real impediment to socialism. They generally have the ability to become fractionally bourgeois themselves through the purchase of company stock, inevitably siding with the bourgeoisie politically. Today, living under developed (we could say expired) capitalist-imperialism, the labor aristocracy has whole industries — financial industries — employing “workers” whose main task is the manipulation and preservation of imperial finance capital. But they are dependent on the superprofits of the financiers, those profits gained from the monopolistic high-levels of capitalist-imperialist accumulation, and are a stratum that will fall into the proletariat proper due to the inevitable shifts in the orientation of global imperialism, and the natural degeneration of developed monopolies.
The parasitism displayed by the workers in the dominant countries just shows us that Stalin was right when, in The Foundations of Leninism, he says,
...that the road to victory of the revolution in the West lies through the revolutionary alliance with the liberation movement of the colonies and dependent countries against imperialism. The national question is a part of the general question of the proletarian revolution, a part of the question of the dictatorship of the proletariat.
... is there any hope, any basis, for utilising these potentialities for the proletarian revolution, for transforming the dependent and colonial countries from a reserve of the imperialist bourgeoisie into a reserve of the revolutionary proletariat, into an ally of the latter?
Leninism replies to this question in the affirmative, i.e., it recognises the existence of revolutionary capacities in the national liberation movement of the oppressed countries, and the possibility of using these for overthrowing the common enemy, for overthrowing imperialism.
The mechanics of the development of imperialism, the imperialist war and the revolution in Russia wholly confirm the conclusions of Leninism on this score.[11]
Regarding the dependent nations however, they are dependent. Just because their national liberation movements, their political attacks upon the foreign financiers and calls for popular land reform, spell the doom of the imperialist system, this does not mean they magically have been gifted the tools to defeat imperialism. Quite the opposite is true. As is often the case within any nation, the revolutionism displayed by these locales is incapable of solving the contradictions of the country on its own; they are incapable of solving imperialism without the interjection of the socialist movement, of the rule of labor through the dictatorship of the proletariat. This is because, in the general picture, and as we mentioned previously regarding the class of small owners, the bourgeoisie dominate the movements of the “nation,” and they will simply raise up new imperialists from among their leading strata. Moreover, bourgeoisie are themselves dominated by the most leading strata, the imperial financiers, and it is rare even to get an authentically petty bourgeois or industrial bourgeois program through to the revolt. In a similar way that the bourgeois co-opt the movements of the workers, the imperialists co-opt the movements of the smaller bourgeois. The interest of national movements usually reflect some or another section of imperialists, with the bourgeois who lead the national revolt serving the interest of imperialism, not reflecting the actual interest of the nation at all. The national bourgeois of dependent nations (who are, by virtue of their dependent status, some of the weakest bourgeois in the world) have even more difficultly influencing the mass movement; not to mention the difficulties faced by the class-conscious proletarian element, which is opposed to bourgeois of all sizes.
However, it is true that the proletariat of dependent countries is more central to production — becoming more so as production develops — and that their labor movements are more energetic, and reflective of the proletariat as a class (whereas the labor movements in imperially dominant countries are often inundated by petty bourgeois and labor aristocrats). They will achieve victory in the course of history. The workers in the dependent countries are more thoroughly proletarian, facing the abject oppression of the bourgeois and their governments at a much higher rate. This, coupled with the movement of the oppressed national bourgeois against the big financiers, is what makes the dependent countries revolutionary, evidenced by the political unrest that surrounds such countries, for example, in Africa, South America, and the Middle-East.
But, generally speaking, the working class everywhere is disorganized and, especially in the dominant imperial countries, without a strong labor movement. They do not typically have strong unions or worker organizations, and those that do exist are intimately tied to the bourgeois state, where all opposition to the owners on the part of labor can be liquidated along bourgeois lines. The proletarians do not see themselves as a class, that is, they do not have class consciousness, and partake in the popular trends of the masses as individuals. This is less the case in the dependent countries, whose desperate labor conditions make organizing, union negotiations, and the basic labor union struggle much more central to the people’s wellbeing, but the overall trend is one in which the workers see themselves as individual employees rather than members of a global class of exploited laborers.
The present state of the working class is dialectically related to the (temporary) defeat of their political movement, Marxist-Leninist Communism. Devoid of theoretical, political, and organizational form, which was given to the labor movement by Communism, the workers evade their destiny in class consciousness, and are left to lie dormant in the belly of the bourgeoisie… for now.
4. What is the current state of the socialist movement? That is, the working class’ political movement — scientific socialism — or Marxist-Leninist Communism?
We can think of the socialist movement as entering a third revolutionary period, or cycle. The first began with Marx and Marxist theory itself, ending with the defeat of the French Commune. The second culminated in the first industrial socialist state, the USSR, and ended with the turn towards “market socialism” that Deng helped usher China into, liquidating socialist construction and the last real holdout of proletarian power globally. Now, on the cusp of a third cycle of revolutions, Communism is in a state of temporary defeat that we comrades must resolve.
At one point, Russia and China constituted vanguards of the global proletarian movement, enormous forces of collectivized industry who were actively abolishing private property and the parasitical class attached to it, not just for their own “countrymen,” but for the entire working world, rivaling the global capitalist-imperial system, building strategy based on sound Marxist theory and performing extra national actions towards the liberation of the whole world’s workers. These were societies that, though not without their contradictions, the whole class of the proletariat and all progressive people could look up to as their true defenders and champions.
There is no vanguard today. While certain governments may be portraying their societies as such, an even cursory analysis of the productive forces shows that they are incapable and, in many cases, unwilling, to perform the necessary actions to collapse the rule of capital. This is the case with countries like China, the DPRK, Venezuela, Cuba, and others, who, though claiming socialism, cannot oppose the chains of capitalist-imperialism, and cannot rise to the rank of vanguard, or even to the basic tasks of socialist construction within their country.
The temporary defeat of world Communism likewise indicates the temporary victory of the world’s bourgeoisie. Their victory over our camp can be clearly seen in the bourgeois trends that dominate our movement; revisionism does not appear from thin air, as many like to believe, but originates from a bourgeois base. With the worldwide socialist movement saturated with bourgeois revisionism, principled Marxism-Leninism and the dialectical materialist worldview it propagates has lost its dominance within “leftist,” socialist, and even “Marxist-Leninist” spaces, forced to compete with numerous non-class and bourgeois revisionist theoreticians, groups, and political parties to even assert itself at all within the field of organizing.
The overwhelming presence of Social-Democracy or, as it is known in the U.S., “Democratic Socialism,” which denies the Marxist demand for the empowerment of the proletarian class through the “state” form of the dictatorship of the proletariat, is also in line with Communism’s temporary defeat. While these types of “socialist” parties often contain “Marxists,” they can alleviate none of the primary contradictions that antagonize the masses, and serve only as corruptors of popular revolt sentiment and liquidators of the socialist movement. Because there is no material base within the class of workers, no force outside of the bourgeois state that is capable of defending the anti-capitalist reforms of the Social-Democrats, these reforms only aggravate the capitalist beast and isolate socialism, gathering socialism into bourgeois organizations, into the reach of the capitalists, so that it may be readily located and eliminated by the inevitable bourgeois countermovement, all while the “pro-small business” and “whole-society” “socialists” who lead these Social-Democratic parties scurry off into their gilded hidey-holes (or make outright alliances with reactionary forces) like the opportunists they are.
There is no Social-Democratic path to class empowerment, and the sooner our entire movement purges the Social-Democrats, and revisionism more generally, from our ranks the sooner Communism’s defeat can turn around. Anyone unfamiliar with the need to struggle against such faces and ideas must read up on Lenin’s struggle concerning Kautsky and the Second International, and also his analysis of the state in The State and Revolution.
5. What is the current state of the spontaneous movement, that is, as Lenin says, “the movement along the line of least resistance,” which reflects “consciousness in embryonic form?”
In response to the many contradictions plaguing them, the masses, and the working class as the majority of them, are losing faith in government and the traditional institutions of society. Their discontent has the positive result of developing into a political consciousness, an idea (but, under the usual circumstances of capitalist domination, only an idea) of the class and economic forces acting against them. Lenin elaborated this phenomenon, contrasting it with class consciousness, in his work, What is to Be Done?, naming it spontaneity.
...the “spontaneous element”, in essence, represents nothing more nor less than consciousness in an embryonic form. Even the primitive revolts expressed the awakening of consciousness to a certain extent. The workers were losing their age-long faith in the permanence of the system which oppressed them and began... I shall not say to understand, but to sense the necessity for collective resistance, definitely abandoning their slavish submission to the authorities. But this was, nevertheless, more in the nature of outbursts of desperation and vengeance than of struggle.[12]
The “theory” of spontaneity is a central tenet of Marxism-Leninism, and it allows us to make an appropriate division between strategy that is conducive to the system of capitalism, representing the “outbursts” that Lenin mentions in the above passage, and actual conscious revolutionary action, which acts against the capitalist class and their oppression as a whole, carrying the masses’ revolt into professionalism and struggle instead of outbursts. Right now, the masses in the spontaneous movement are beginning to critique authority, and this must be supported absolutely. The more the masses make this critique, and the more they are supported in it, the more the movement for Communism, as the highest development of this critique and of politics generally, will grow and develop too. But it is not a straight shot upward.
While the widespread protests, CEO assassinations, warehouse arsons, and other artifacts of the ensuing conflict between the spontaneous movement and the decaying capitalist society we are seeing now will train the masses for struggle, the spontaneous movement inevitably reproduces bourgeois movements when left to its own devices, as Lenin describes in What is to Be Done?.
But why, the reader will ask, does the spontaneous movement, the movement along the line of least resistance, lead to the domination of bourgeois ideology? For the simple reason that bourgeois ideology is far older in origin than socialist ideology, that it is more fully developed, and that it has at its disposal immeasurably more means of dissemination.[13]
Despite what the many spontaneity-worshiping “socialists” believe, many of them even so-called “Marxist-Leninists,” there is no natural, even progression of the masses that leads to their empowerment, not even if we promote socialist ideas and tell them to read Marx from time to time. On its own, the spontaneous movement will continue to develop along a bourgeois path, encased in the worldview of the bourgeoisie.
And why are they encased? Why can’t they develop along their own path and become capable? They are encased and trapped in their spontaneity, requiring the efforts of conscious revolutionaries, because of the opportunism of the bourgeoisie, who take up and reproduce each spontaneous trend of the masses, turning it into a market to sell their wares. Often these days, and within the highly parasitical imperialist countries like the United States, the bourgeoisie sell actual commodities to the adherents of the spontaneous movement (think of the commercialism now surrounding the once supposedly “revolutionary” Black or queer liberation movements), but even when this is not happening, the bourgeoisie will bend these spontaneous elements into their own class interest and away from the interest of the workers and the masses...[14]
Without the interjection of capable and conscious Communist leaders today, the revolt of the people will remain steeped in revisionism and bad “socialist” politics, taken up and reproduced by the bourgeois in their own image while retaining “socialist” aesthetics (and, at a later period than we are experiencing now, widespread “Marxist” and even “Marxist-Leninist” aesthetics). For the first time in a long time in the US, socialism has found its “marketability,” and thus we see the prominence of bourgeois Social-Democrats like Bernie, AOC, and Mamdani. But characters like them are nothing new, and Social-Democracy, a strategy of the bourgeoisie for co-opting the spontaneous movement, is nothing new either. The Social-Democrats take up “socialism” to win elections, certainly providing more for the people than a Republican or an otherwise conservative party, but certainly not building the power of the working class, or even interested in (or capable of) liquidating private business at all. They feed parasitically off of the spontaneous movement, and are a primary impediment to its development.
It is good that the people are interested in “socialism” — in this kind of spontaneous way — but there can be no socialism so long as Social-Democracy and revisionism more generally is empowered, able to perform its opportunistic work against the masses and turn their just outrage away from the class of owners and property relations and back into the capitalist system, distorting the only theory that can lead to their liberation. But, still, the masses’ outbursts will grow in both frequency and intensity so long as the contradictions that act against them are not solved or their antagonism lessened, both things the current alignment of capitalist-imperialism and the productive forces are incapable of accomplishing in the general view.
While it will not develop into a force to oppose the ruling class in any real way without the drastic imposition of the conscious Communists, the spontaneous movement, against its own interest, is serving to sharpen the already developed security forces of the capitalists. We are finding the ruling class and its state rapidly developing mass surveillance technologies, increasing police budgets,[15],[16] and instituting draconian “anti-terrorism” policies worldwide as they attempt to maintain their control over an unruly populace, which is growing more unruly, exploring political alternatives that the ruling class will not tolerate in the long run, even while the DSA, CPUSA, and other revisionists like them continuously preach the nice-sounding but naively stupid belief that the system will accommodate socialist sentiment in its “democratic” processes.
6. How are we Communists to act?
Communists should not act in-tandem with the masses and their spontaneity, but at their head, giving their movement a plan and guiding them toward revolutionary goals. Communist organizations should be oriented towards raising the consciousness of the masses, and allowing for the development of worker organizations that are aligned to the completion of these goals. If we are Communists, we must acknowledge that one of the most important goals we must accomplish is establishing the rule of the working class over the bourgeois of society via the “state” form of the dictatorship of the proletariat. It is this form of society alone that can empower the working class and eliminate the rule of capital, and thus it is to this end that all of our strategy and tactics should be oriented. The building up to this end, the work of socialism in our current time, is not solely the work of the vanguard Party or even the Communists generally, but of the masses, but this does not change the fact that we require, now, in our current time, a unity of capable and professional comrades completing practical goals towards this end. The need to empower professionals is even more sorely felt now due to Communism’s temporary defeat and the low consciousness of labor generally, which necessitates intense labor of the few conscious Marxists in order to bring the movement its initial footing. We must lead at the head of the movement, not use the movement’s general sluggishness as an excuse for our own laziness.
And what kind of practical goals should these professionals work towards? Because the work of socialism is the work of the masses,the basic theoretical necessity for a vanguard Party and for sound Marxist-Leninist leadership must be understood by at least a good portion of the masses, especially the proletarians, and an alliance between the socialist political movement and the practical movement of laboring working people must be made. We lay out a strategy for accomplishing this in our pamphlet, Where to Begin When We Already Started?, building off of Lenin’s newspaper strategy and calling for a country-wide media group.
A media group possesses the exact same organizational capabilities Lenin ascribes to a newspaper, most importantly allowing for “a permanent organization” to “take shape that will engage, not only in local activities, but in regular general work,” capable of training “its members to follow political events carefully, appraise their significance and their effect on the various strata of the population, and develop effective means for the revolutionary party to influence those events.” The construction of a country-wide media group within each country will also serve as the “frame” upon which to construct the “permanent organization”[17] of the Communist Party of each country at the proper time. We cannot build a Communist Party with revisionist comrades or class-unconscious workers, and since our movement is inundated with both, a principled Party is not viable now. The media group would serve as a kind of “pre-Party” formation that tackles the most pressing tasks of our movement at the same time as it builds towards the eventuality of a Party in the future by the very nature of its work. In our current period, and so long as the “free speech” afforded to media in the liberal societies holds out, the work we do is mostly public, aimed at the whole society; ideological production meant to unite the developed Marxists and draw out the conscious element among the working class. But the connections made between the media group cadres, labor organizations, and allied members of the masses in the course of this public work will birth more than just ideological workers, creating a whole network that is capable of going underground if need be, and, most importantly, capable of diverse work.[18]
It is the organizational side to a newspaper that most people fail to understand regarding Lenin’s strategy. Regardless of how this point is misunderstood though, the effectiveness of literary and media organizations to not only influence the superstructure of society, but also to organize members for further political tasks, should not be underestimated today.
But, as we mention in our pamphlet, our work of illuminating the workers and organizing through our ideological production is immensely frustrated by the current “illuminators,” the revisionists and Social-Democrats, who lead labor parties without laborers, and preach a “Marxism” devoid of the working class, dialectical materialism, or any of Marxism’s profound and revolutionary truths. Until the power of revisionists — reflected not only in the overwhelming amount of revisionist “theory,” but also in the big “Communist” and “socialist” parties of revision — is sufficiently diminished, an actual Communist movement for the international proletarians is hindered in its development, frustrated, and unable to form. Therefore, it is necessary to not only build an organization for the propagation of Marxist theory and news journalism, but also to struggle against revisionist organizations in a practical way. Our pamphlet describes this situation as our movement’s “dual problem.”
The first side of the problem is the revisionist problem; high levels of Marxist revisionism within our movement. These bourgeois theories fuel the second side of the problem, low worker consciousness, which itself creates an audience for the opportunism of the revisionists, thus perpetuating the loop. When we correctly solve both sides of this problem — when we actively work to combat revisionism and raise worker consciousness — we will have eliminated the biggest roadblocks to our movement, and created fertile ground for it to progress.Without this foundation, it is impossible for a true socialist movement to develop and achieve victory.[19]
As the struggle against revisionism is a real struggle, there is no getting around the fact that subversive activity must be applied towards the existing revisionist formations. We cannot defeat their organizational power by joining them as individuals and trusting that their own internal party processes will allow us to simply “debate” the organization into a vanguard one. Such a notion is ridiculous and idealistic. Rather, we must utilize the connections of our proposed country-wide media group to subvert the parties, to build alliances and turn them, or at least a good section of their membership, towards principled Marxism-Leninism and the positive program of the media group, as this (somewhat long) section from Where to Begin When We Already Started? describes:
While we are generally opposed to the revisionist organizations, we must understand them correctly, not as a monolithic group that must be completely suppressed from the outside, with its membership ridiculed and chastised as a whole, but as a theater of struggle, with each revisionist formation within a country constituting its own “front.” Throughout this entire country-wide theater of anti-revisionist struggle, we must maintain our position on all of these fronts, prioritizing the biggest and most powerful of these groups, just as the most populous front in a war must also receive the lion’s share of the recruits. Who are our fighters in this front? They are our sympathizers within the revisionist formations. Within each front, that is, within each big revisionist party, we must form sympathetic defenders of our own side to “hold the line” and to act as our agents, reporting the goings-on of the party and engaging in secretive diplomatic work within it. We must train these defenders up out of their narrow party consciousness and into capable cadre members; ready them for the assault by uniting them towards a common plan of attack, one which takes into account not just the internal politics of their specific revisionist organization, but of the entire theater as a whole. From underneath the noses of the many revisionist leaders who arbitrate over the many diverse revisionist parties and formations, we will unite all the revolutionary elements they have long ignored and sidelined, namely the principled Marxists, preparing our forces secretly for the proper time. At the proper time, when our work has reached an appropriate level of development, we will coordinate the execution of our preparations, make our presence known within the revisionist organizations, call on the entire organization to adopt proper Marxism, and seize the organization for principled Communism.Only through such a real split with revision can the country gain a proper Communist Party.
As the anti-revisionist struggle is demanded by the dialectics of history, we will not shy away from the necessity of this kind of subversive strategy towards the revisionist formations, and we will promote it openly in all our propaganda, specifically naming the organizations which are in need of this kind of subversion. By exposing the state of revision within these organizations, comrades within them who are already forming associations with these kinds of “splits” in mind will be emboldened, joining the media group so as to increase their own efficacy and unite with a broader mission. In this case, the media group serves as a sort of centralized federation-structure by which to facilitate the actions of different subversive groups, bringing them needed coordination within many parties simultaneously. The theory produced according to the media group’s anti-revisionist line acts as the light house that pulls these divided groups together ideologically, and as the media group will have open avenues for volunteers (and is always looking to invite those who are principled, tested, and capable into the ranks of its professional cadres), a working body of sound anti-revisionist collaborators will be built in the course of the media group’s every-day work. All of the divided subversive anti-revisionist groups in current revisionist parties will be inspired and affirmed in their own understandings when they see a prominent Communist media group exposing the treachery of their organizations, and, when they see also the treachery of other organizations like theirs, not only in their country but all over the world, exposed by the comrades working in the media group, they will be brought into the international struggle for Communism, and via our media group, which is directly connected to that wider struggle.[20]
This is the orientation of the real movement towards the revisionist organizations, and the plan that all principled Marxists should commit themselves to. A country-wide media group is the appropriate organization to not only carry out the anti-revisionist struggle, but also to illuminate the masses of working people for the class struggle generally.
As Marxist-Leninists who take seriously the maxim, from each according to their ability, to each according to their need,[21] and who possess the ability to act within a strategy that will lead to the empowerment of the international working class, Sparkyl will continue to pursue our work. If you would like to unite your efforts with our own and help build a needed magazine for the socialist movement, please visit us at sparkyl.org.
Endnotes
[1] Nanji, Noor. “People face biggest fall in spending power for 70 years.” BBC. 15 Mar 2023. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-64963869.
[2] Knibbe, Merjin. “The ECB and the disastrous decline of the purchasing power of EU wages.” Real-World Economic Review Blog. 5 Jan 2025. https://rwer.wordpress.com/2025/01/05/the-ecb-and-the-disastrous-decline-of-the-purchasing-power-of-eu-wages/.
[3] Ngai, Rachel L. Sevinc, Orhun. “A multisector perspective on wage stagnation.” Review of Economic Dynamics. Vol 56. Apr 2025. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1094202524000589.
[4] Foa, R.S., Klassen, A. Slade, M. Rand, A. R, Collins. 2020. “The Global Satisfaction with Democracy Report 2020.” Cambridge, United Kingdom: Centre for the Future of Democracy. 2020. https://www.cam.ac.uk/system/files/report2020_003.pdf.
[5]Barber, Olivia. “Multi-millionaire Reform MP Rupert Lowe advocates for dismantling NHS and ‘buying own healthcare’.” Left Foot Forward. Jan 2025. https://leftfootforward.org/2025/01/multi-millionaire-reform-mp-rupert-lowe-advocates-for-dismantling-nhs-and-buying-own-healthcare/.
[6]Reform UK. “Our Contract With You.” 2024. https://assets.nationbuilder.com/reformuk/pages/253/attachments/original/1718625371/Reform_UK_Our_Contract_with_You.pdf.
[7] Bergh, Katie. Llobrera, Joseph. “States’ First-Ever Bill for SNAP Benefits Could Cost Billions.” Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. 24 Jun 2026. https://www.cbpp.org/blog/states-first-ever-bill-for-snap-benefits-could-cost-billions.
[8] North Atlantic Treaty Organization. “Funding NATO.” Last updated Jun 27, 2025. https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/topics_67655.htm.
[9]Sparkyl Magazine. “Demarcating the Proletariat: Internationalism, Imperialism, and the Labor Aristocracy.” 9 Feb 2026. https://www.sparkyl.org/articles/demarcating.
[10] Lenin, VI. Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism. 1917. Lenin Collected Works. Vol 22. Progress Publishers. 1977. Pg. 277.
[11] Stalin, J. V. The Foundations of Leninism. Pravda. No. 24. 1924. J. V. Stalin: Works. Vol 6. Foreign Languages Publishing House. 1953. Pgs. 146-147.
[12] Lenin, V. I. What is to Be Done? 1902. Iskra.No. 19. 1 Apr 1902. Lenin Collected Works. Vol 5. Progress Publishers. 1977. Pg. 374.
[13] Ibid. Pg. 386
[14]Sparkyl Magazine. “The American ‘Clown’ Party and American Spontaneity.” 18 Jun 2026. https://www.sparkyl.org/articles/acp.
[15] U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary. “What They Are Saying: Law Enforcement Officers Laud Senate Judiciary Provisions in the One Big Beautiful Bill.” 18 Jun 2025. https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/press/rep/releases/what-they-are-saying-law-enforcement-officers-laud-senate-judiciary-provisions-in-the-one-big-beautiful-bill.
[16] ABC News. “Most police budgets increased despite defunding claims.” 17 Oct 2022. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpKo12e9Pb0.
[17] Lenin. Where to Begin?. Iskra. No. 5. Jun 1901. Lenin Collected Works. Vol 5. Progress Publishers. 1977. Pg. 22.
[18]Sparkyl Magazine. Where to Begin When We Already Started?: Revisionism and Organizational Strategy. 31 Mar 2026. https://www.sparkyl.org/articles/wtbas.
[19] Ibid.
[20] Ibid.
[21] A non-gendered iteration of Marx’s famous phrase from Critique of the Gotha Programme.