Sparkyl and economic exposures so far

We haven’t written as many economic exposure pieces as we would like. The articles on the Samsung protests and the Economic Freedom Fighters in South Africa are about the only ones we think fit the label, and the Samsung protests one does not really do a great job in that respect.

And why? Because it spends so much time diagnosing spontaneity within the South Korean labor movement that it has hardly any time to examine the class of labor...and our articles are long enough as they are! The article uses valuable space performing this diagnosing because “socialism” is so inundated with Troskyistic tailism that any exposure of a labor protest (which should be the bread-and-butter of any Marxist publication) immediately puts the fire in the eyes of an enormous mass of supposed “Marxists,” who believe that falling headlong into the labor movement is in socialism’s best interest, completely (in words and deeds) sidelining the construction of an organization that is capable of leading that struggle and raising the labor struggle into the political struggle of the whole international class.

And so the Samsung protest article spends a good deal of time talking about how Communists should orient themselves to the labor movement in the country, but not a lot time talking about the proletariat in South Korea -- their economic situation and those particular features of the state of South Korea and their society that act against them, and especially the class or political organizations that are aligned with the workers’ struggle, which is vital information that we are well aware our movement is ignorant of on the whole.

What happened in the Samsung protest article is a wider trend in our work. It is a trend that we won’t be able to do away with because of the low consciousness of our movement generally. The trend is a contradiction, reflecting both the need to unite intelligent Marxists around the truths of their own professed worldview, and to expose a mostly degenerated class movement, whose exposure (because of the degeneration of the socialist political movement in response to the degeneration of the spontaneous class movement) necessarily unites all kinds of revisionist “Marxist” elements, making the uniting of intelligent Marxists all the more difficult.

So far, we have, correctly we believe, gone with the side of uniting intelligent Marxists, and so economic exposures have gone to the wayside in some respect. We have focused more on theory, and speak to and about a specifically Marxist audience. As a publication, we are just now beginning our activities, and, as Marxist-Leninists, we cannot allow our political or theoretical line to be taken up without proper training, meaning we cannot accept just anyone into our activities. A correct prioritization of our limited pool of labor has us siding more on theory for now, because we understand the need to unify the actually existing Marxists around a central organization and plan of action, and that that those tasks can’t be done without a sound theoretical literary body by which to do the unifying.

It’s true that, so far, we have not catered much to the living proletariat. Economic exposure articles require gathering a lot of data, and are much harder to write than you might think, requiring a lot of time and labor. In some ways, the work is more empirical, and so that is “easier” than exposing ideological trends or working with more theoretical topics, but it is difficult to  keep your head above the water, and parcel out which data is pertinent to both the thesis of the article and, especially, to the material situation of the proletariat. This question requires a deep understanding of Marxism, and so we find that economic exposures are some of the most difficult articles to write on the whole.

As we grow, we will write many more economic exposures, but our ability to do so depends (at least partly) on the socialist movement’s ability to read and study the theories of Marxism-Leninism.

If we (as the socialist movement) can all agree that a protest is unable to change the hearts and minds of the productive forces, which, I think, sadly, we cannot, then it will be this publication’s task to not only tell you to READ LENIN, but also to explain and clarify Leninist theory for our current times, which is an enormous task in and of itself.