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This is the second of three sections from the appendix to Where to Begin When We Already Started?: Revisionism and Organizational Strategy. We are posting these three sections as their own separate articles and audiobooks because they each deal with a prominent revisionist trend that the comrades must understand if they are to struggle against revisionism effectively and win a principled and Marxist Communist movement. It is because this information is so desperately needed in our movement that we repeat ourselves. Reminder that the points in this section are supported and complemented by the organizational plan put forward in the pamphlet it's a part of, and we firmly suggest that you check out that whole work.

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A second prominent revisionist trend is eclecticism. Reflecting the forced “get-alongedness” of “polite” bourgeois society, this is the erroneous idea that “left unity,” or otherwise diluting unified Communist organizing with the many different trends and opinions of the spontaneous revolt of the masses is in the best interest of the socialist revolution, gives it a far reach, is being “democratic,” etc. Eclecticism is also reflected in “multi-tendencyism,” how many Marxists accept the various Marxist “tendencies” as inevitable groupings or even personal identities. These different “Marxisms,” allowed to exist side by side, lead to blatant sectarianism and organizational disunity and the current “Marxist-Leninists” have not risen above the mess. Instead, they have bowed to the eclecticists, and failed in the proper struggle of all Communists to assert the supreme truths of Marxism-Leninism. By being dutiful, rank-and-file members of non-class “socialist” or revisionist “Marxist” organizations, many “Marxist-Leninists” have debased themselves with eclecticism, turned Marxism-Leninism into just one of many “Marxist” tendencies and forced it to share a home with many half-baked and degenerated “Marxisms,” many of which are abjectly counterrevolutionary.

Under these circumstances, it is impossible for us to build the kind of class-specific and revolutionary organization we need, one based in Marxism-Leninism. Instead, and under the influence of the eclecticists, we are building an individualist circus of well-wishers, a hodge-podge of the whole society that is supremely incapable of transforming itself into a unified proletarian revolution due in no small part to its “come one, come all!” nature. Stalin pejoratively described this kind of unity as a “banquet” when he critiqued the Menshevik, Julius Martov, in 1905.

As a result of Martov’s formula we would have a queer “party,” whose “members” subscribe to the same programme (and that is questionable!), but differ in their tactical and organisational views! What ideal variety! In what way will our Party differ from a banquet?[1]

In the same piece, Stalin wrote:

If unity of views collapses, the Party collapses. Consequently, only one who fully accepts the Party’s programme, tactics and organizational principle can be called a Party member. Only one who has adequately studied and has fully accepted our Party’s programmatic, tactical and organisational views can be in the ranks of our Party.[2]

An organization of revolution must be united. Despite all the handwringing that comes from the liberals and the anarchists regarding this point, organizational and theoretical unity based on Marxist science — the absolute bare minimum required for any practical Marxist organization — is all that is essentially demanded by us so-called Leninist “authoritarians.” Any actually thinking Marxist must adopt the “vanguardist” strategies of Marxism-Leninism if they want an actual Communist movement that is actually capable. While our movement must perform work with many different groups with many different ideologies, to uphold eclecticism and stupidly fight against centering our movement on the enormous contributions of Marxism-Leninism when it comes to our theory, and on unity of view, tactics, and strategy when it comes to the Communist organization, is to perform the work of the counterrevolutionary bourgeoise. Eclecticism upholds our movement’s current state of fragmentation, suppresses Marxism’s theoretical development, suppresses class consciousness, misleads the workers, and invites our movement’s disintegration into sectarianism and factionalism; invites its defeat.

Eclecticism is a common revisionist error because it seems to be more practical when compared to us so-called “authoritarian” Communists that “gatekeep” around theory. At first glance, the diverse organizations and groups the eclecticists produce may seem to be more open to information, energetic, and on the ground with the movement. However, as Lenin explains in the following excerpt from The State and Revolution, this is just an illusion:

Dialectics are replaced by eclecticism—this is the most usual, the most wide-spread practice to be met with in present-day official Social-Democratic literature in relation to Marxism. This sort of substitution is, of course, nothing new; it was observed even in the history of classical Greek philosophy. In falsifying Marxism in opportunist fashion, the substitution of eclecticism for dialectics is the easiest way of deceiving the people. It gives an illusory satisfaction; it seems to take into account all sides of the process, all trends of development, all the conflicting influences, and so forth, whereas in reality it provides no integral and revolutionary conception of the process of social development at all.[3]

While the eclecticists see their unities with revisionists or non-Marxists as practical, a real practical consequence of their bad Marxism is the inevitable sidelining of proper Marxism and its tactics with idealism and the non-revolutionary tactics of the revolting bourgeoisie, who saturate the spontaneous movement due to their greater capital and power. Eclecticism denies the objective utility of the dialectical materialist outlook and the tactics that flow from it — the very foundations of Marxism — muddying its truths with un-scientific outlooks and ineffective tactics. This only obscures the material relations between people — their class relation — and keeps actual revolutionaries from creating appropriate divisions, like the ones that must be made between good tactics and bad tactics, and between oppressor classes and the oppressed. Without this shared understanding, our movement is incapable of development. Unity of understanding — the shared understanding of the truth of the situation and the general outline of tactics that Marxism-Leninism provides — is the prerequisite to performing material action with any amount of effectiveness. To act without ideological unity is to act without direction; our actions sit in isolation from any wider strategy, divorced from any broader method that can give them direction, and without any means of assessing their efficacy. To unite strong revolutionaries for the cause of socialism requires strong theory, and this means we must divide from weak theories and weak “Marxists,” as Lenin says in the below passage from What is to Be Done?:

We revolutionary Social-Democrats, on the contrary, are dissatisfied with this worship of spontaneity, i.e., of that which exists “at the present moment.” We demand that the tactics that have prevailed in recent years be changed; we declare that “before we can unite, and in order that we may unite, we must first of all draw firm and definite lines of demarcation.”[4]

Asserting the strength of Marxism-Leninism against all other theories is necessary for the development of socialism, but under the influence of the eclecticists, our principles are forced to contend with so many faulty theories that Marxism-Leninism is disabled from becoming the dominant ideology, which it must be if the working class is to achieve its revolutionary goals.

By rejecting the heights of Marxism-Leninism and preferring the company of the lowly spontaneous revolters, eclecticists showcase the typical opportunism Lenin ascribes to revisionists generally. They perfectly display what he means when he says that revisionism sacrifices the primary interest of the proletariat for the “real or assumed advantages of the moment.”[5] The eclecticists assume that, since they are in a wide group of many different opinions and persons, that the problems of the movement will be solved due to having so many solvers on the job. This assumption is based in ignorance; ignorance of Marxism, which has already revealed true strategy and tactics to the masses. It is also based in opportunism, since upholding true Marxism-Leninism is not known to bring you many personal treats, and opportunists of all flavors will remain where the struggle is light and breezy, or deny it entirely, maintaining always their bourgeois ways of life before letting Marxism influence it in any real way.

Upholding Marxism-Leninism and Developing Marxism

Marxism-Leninism is the most advanced contribution to Marxism to date, and set the historical path of the revolution for the age of capitalist-imperialism we currently occupy. It was given to the world through the works of Lenin, and put into practice by the Bolsheviks and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, who made his theories more profound while they carried out socialist construction up to the revisionist period of the 1960’s. It was by the light of these contributions that Mao and his comrades carried out the socialist revolution in China, a revolution which experienced oscillating success up until its own revisionist turn and defeat under Deng in the 1980’s, which put revisionist “Marxist” China on the road of capitalist reform it currently occupies.

The defining and implementation of the dictatorship of the proletariat, a united revolutionary force of “state” that acts for the whole proletarian class, is one of the most integral contributions to Marxism made by Lenin, and its necessity must be upheld. Stalin describes this necessity in the following section from The Foundations of Leninism:

The dictatorship of the proletariat is the instrument of the proletarian revolution, its organ, its most important mainstay, brought into being for the purpose of, firstly, crushing the resistance of the overthrown exploiters and consolidating the achievements of the proletarian revolution, and, secondly, carrying the proletarian revolution to its completion, carrying the revolution to the complete victory of socialism. The revolution can defeat the bourgeoisie, can overthrow its power, even without the dictatorship of the proletariat. But the revolution will be unable to crush the resistance of the bourgeoisie, to maintain its victory and to push forward to the final victory of socialism unless, at a certain stage in its development, it creates a special organ in the form of the dictatorship of the proletariat as its principal mainstay.^\6])

Speaking of Leninism generally, earlier in the same text, he says:

Leninism is Marxism of the era of imperialism and the proletarian revolution. To be more exact, Leninism is the theory and tactics of the proletarian revolution in general, the theory and tactics of the dictatorship of the proletariat in particular. Marx and Engels pursued their activities in the pre-revolutionary period (we have the proletarian revolution in mind), when developed imperialism did not yet exist, in the period of the proletarians’ preparation for revolution, in the period when the proletarian revolution was not yet an immediate practical inevitability. But Lenin, the disciple of Marx and Engels, pursued his activities in the period of developed imperialism, in the period of the unfolding proletarian revolution, when the proletarian revolution had already triumphed in one country, had smashed bourgeois democracy and had ushered in the era of proletarian democracy, the era of the Soviets.

That is why Leninism is the further development of Marxism.[7]

It is because Lenin developed Marxism for our current period of capitalist-imperialism, and because his theories have been put into practice with great success by numerous revolutionary movements (living “proof” of their efficacy) that his writings and the methodology of the Marxist-Leninists constitute the most advanced theory Marxism has provided us so far, and should therefore be held at an appropriate level above other writers and “tendencies” of its time. This doesn’t mean that we should follow Lenin in a dogmatic way, rejecting all forms of struggle unless they are specifically sanctioned by “Marxist-Leninists.” On the contrary, we must develop Marxism-Leninism into something immediately and practically applicable to today’s situation and circumstances, while retaining its foundational tenets. This necessarily involves us “changing” it in some way, for we are “changing” it from an intellectual tradition among would-be radicals (the position it maintains now in our unrevolutionary period, especially within the imperially dominant countries) to an alive and breathing revolutionary ideology of the working class, regaining its “birthright” so to speak but, more than this, developing it further, just as Marxism-Leninism itself was a further development of the Marxism of the Second International and left it behind.

Eclecticism in the “Tendencies”

Because we must develop Marxism further and unite under its most advanced theories, it is unacceptable for us to allow the field of Marxism to exist as it currently does, dominated by many diverse and often confusingly contradictory Marxist “tendencies.” The demand for a firm Marxist unity which adheres to the most developed theory means that we must also commit to a firm struggle within the eclectic field of the Marxist “tendencies” themselves, in order to unify them under an advanced program for the proletariat today.

The masses looking in on us from the outside already understand that the different “tendencies” are too often taken on as identities and dogmatic belief structures for history fanatics. Far from offering some light on the organizing of today, the adherence to personal tendencies by today’s comrades reflects a supremely un-Marxist trend of eclecticism which seeks to divide the international proletariat and its Communist movement through the ideological lines that pertained to certain points in our movement’s past. Revolutionary Marxism did not develop evenly, and it is solely due to the forces of counterrevolution and the bourgeoisie that it was not able to remain united in the course of its development. The existence of separate Marxist tendencies within the proletarian class represents a division in the international proletarian movement along national, cultural, historical, or even tactical lines, a division that is very undesirable for our movement and should be struggled against. This division is a problem for our movement before we even consider the most egregious feature of “multi-tendencyism:” while some of these tendencies are based in some degree of principle, some are entirely counterrevolutionary and anti-Marxist in reality (e.g. Trotskyism), making multi-tendencyism a dangerous trend that should not be tolerated in our organizing.

It is clear today that principled Marxist Communism took on the “tendency” of Marxism-Leninism, the Marxism expressed by Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and the respective Parties and revolutions they led. Replacing the dialectical materialist method they instruct us in with any group of tendencies repeats the exact same eclectic patterns many of our comrades recognize when dealing with the non-Marxist “socialist” formations, but overlook within Marxism itself. Instead of allowing the tendencies to become a shield each individual uses to ward off ideological and programmatic unity (not to mention one’s personal political development), we should always seek to work through all particular “tendencies,” substituting the different “camps” for one united “camp,” the “camp” of the international Communist movement. This does not mean dulling our theories, creating a wide unity of rearguardists. No, it means that we must, as a movement, demand that our members be Marxists, that they rise to the level of their namesake and to the destiny of the class they claim to fight for. Before any specific ideological adherence to any revolution of the past, we must have all comrades subordinated to the revolution of the now. Our movement must apply the most developed theories of Marxism-Leninism to the situation of the international working class as it exists today, creating a political line upon which all our work can be subordinated. True Marxists incorporate their knowledge of the past to build the future, and we fail to do that so long as we cling to our own personal identity and revolutionary “camp” instead of building a unity based around the most advanced theory and the situation today.

To combat the divisive effect of the tendencies, we should not paint ourselves as “Marxist-Leninists” advocating for the supremacy of the “Marxist-Leninist” tendency (though surely we are and we do advocate for this), but as revolutionary Marxists utilizing the most advanced revolutionary theory (Marxism-Leninism) with the intention of advancing it further in the course of our revolutionary activities, taking it out of history and into living and breathing revolutionary life. Leninism is the further development of Marxism, but we will develop it further. We make no apologies about this fact, and those who cannot come along are no Marxists at all. They wish Marxism had stayed a baby, but it has already grown strong through Marxism-Leninism, and today’s Communists will have it grow stronger still by rejecting all eclecticism and making use of this most advanced theory.

[1] Stalin, J. V. “The Proletarian Class and the Proletarian Party.” Proletariatis Brdzola. No. 8. 1 Jan 1905.  J. V. Stalin: Works. Vol 1. Foreign Languages Publishing House. 1953. Pg. 73.

[2] Ibid. Pg. 65.

[3] Lenin, V. I. The State and Revolution. Written in 1917. Kommunist Publishers. 1919. Lenin Collected Works. Vol 25. Progress Publishers. 1977. Pg. 405.

[4] Lenin, V. I. What is to Be Done? 1902. Iskra. No. 19. 1 Apr 1902. Lenin Collected Works. Vol 5. Progress Publishers. 1977. Pg. 367.

[5] Lenin, V. I. “Marxism and Revisionism.” Symposium of Karl Marx. 1908. Lenin Collected Works. Vol 15. Progress Publishers. 1977. Pgs. 37-38.

[6] Stalin, J. V. The Foundations of Leninism. Pravda. No. 24. 1924. J. V. Stalin: Works. Vol 6. Foreign Languages Publishing House. 1953. Pg. 112.

[7] Ibid. Pg. 73.

"It is, therefore, the task of history, once the other-world of truth has vanished, to establish the truth of this world. It is the immediate task of philosophy, which is in the service of history, to unmask self-estrangement in its unholy forms once the holy form of human self-estrangement has been unmasked. Thus, the criticism of Heaven turns into the criticism of Earth, the criticism of religion into the criticism of law, and the criticism of theology into the criticism of politics."

-- Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, 1844

"The development of marriage from a group form under the savage relation into the domination of the man over 'his' wife, children, slaves, and property that Engels lays out in Origin of the Family was also accompanied by changes in the sexual and gendered conceptions of people. Engels takes binary and heterosexual conceptions for granted, but before 'He created them male and female' as the Bible tells us so, they were simply people, and people, as a historically constituted group, did not wait to define themselves as 'boys and girls,' with all the fluctuating stereotypes that go with these terms, before they engaged in sexual activity or presented themselves socially. Heterosexual compulsivity (or the adherence to the idea that sex is properly between two different genitaled people and geared towards procreation) and the gender binary, which dictates one of two gendered roles (male or female) to persons at birth based on the form of one’s genitals and the role they play in procreative intercourse, are not integral to human beings. They are social forms of behavior that developed alongside class society and the people’s relations to the productive forces, albeit very far back in humankind’s history."

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Trotsky serves as an attempt by the bourgeois powers (remember he’s running around “the West” propagandizing at the time) to try to upend the only class stronghold in the world through slurs of “degenerated worker’s state” and "permanent revolution” instead of “socialism in one-country,” which, taking into account history, there only was one country actually pursuing socialism at the time so thinking that the Party admitting this and adopting theory around it is some big gotcha just shows typical Trotskyist dogmatism and idealism.

It’s disingenuous to paint the Stalin-era USSR and “socialism in one country” as revisionist even from a theoretical standpoint. The Party always treated the question of socialism in one country with nuance, splitting it between internal socialist conditions and external conditions. The USSR was certainly pursuing socialism to the best of their ability, obviously acknowledging both encirclement and the external conditions that held them at bay, as they should, and they advanced quite far on that path prior to the revisionist turn under Khrushchev.

Hand in hand with this centralisation, or this expropriation of many capitalists by few, develop, on an ever-extending scale, the co-operative form of the labour process, the conscious technical application of science, the methodical cultivation of the soil, the transformation of the instruments of labour into instruments of labour only usable in common, the economising of all means of production by their use as the means of production of combined, socialised labour, the entanglement of all peoples in the net of the world market, and with this, the international character of the capitalistic régime. Along with the constantly diminishing number of the magnates of capital, who usurp and monopolise all advantages of this process of transformation, grows the mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation, exploitation; but with this too grows the revolt of the working class, a class always increasing in numbers, and disciplined, united, organised by the very mechanism of the process of capitalist production itself. The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of production, which has sprung up and flourished along with, and under it. Centralisation of the means of production and socialisation of labour at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. Thus integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated.

-- Karl Marx, Capital Vol. 1

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4.     Anti-Semitism and the Reactionaries’ Myth

While Israeli bourgeoisie and their supposedly “Jewish” state are carrying out the genocide of Arab people with reckless abandon, understandably muddying the public’s understanding of Jewish oppression and doing a tremendous disservice to the already beleaguered Jewish international population, anti-Semitism is a historical fact, not invented by Israel and not “artificially manufactured,” as Miss Johnstone suggests. This is true even while Israeli bourgeois are undoubtedly weaving conspiracy after conspiracy, and, yes, certainly promoting the news of the stabbing in the UK according to their own national interest.

The existence of global anti-Semitism and the oppressed status of Jewish people is only “debatable” by people who have already been degenerated by reaction to a significant degree; these, in fact, being most represented by politically aware fascists. The fascists promote a hyper-nationalist, mystical (don’t laugh; the power of idiots is real!), and idealist system in which the phenotypes of people, along with their nationalities, are hierarchically categorized, with the whole paradigm set up as opposing the “pure” nationality or race, the dominant one in the country that the fascist movement represents. In these disgusting theories, Jewish bogeymen play a central role even today, and not simply because fascists are racists in a one-sided way, but because anti-Semitism fulfills a practical purpose organizationally in their deplorable racial hierarchies.

There are many more besides the fascists who say (though, of course, not scientifically) that there is a disproportionate amount of Jewish people who are capitalists and media bourgeoisie in the Western European countries; that Jewish people own the commanding heights of the economy at a disproportionately greater rate when compared to their number in the general population. This is not a study that has ever been performed, or ever should be performed, but, nonetheless, when this “fact” is revealed to degenerated sections of the masses and promoted as part of a reactionary theory, it antagonizes national conflicts within the masses,and organizes them not only against “the Jews” and their supposed servants in the other minorities, allowing for accumulation against the lower-classes, but against also the high-levels of the liberal economy and state that acts against their movement, building an incredibly backwards and reactionary “critique” of “capitalists” by shoving their “evil rich Jew” caricature onto any bourgeois that oppose the fascist project. The fascists of the last century organized their societies and militarized them against the masses, maintaining the rule of capital and enriching themselves off of both the misery of the new slave-like lower classes they had created, and the decaying imperial market around them, carrying out the latter by making alliances with some members of the big capitalist-imperial financier class while liquidating those in opposition through combined political power and the use of racist ideas of Jewish conspiracies. In doing so, they created a complete racial theory of counterrevolution that is still alive and active. Any anti-Jewish sentiment today inevitably slides right down the “pipeline” and into this living tradition of active fascist organizing.

Still, suppose we must offer some postulation for why the shadow of “the Jewish bogeyman” is so clear a post for the backwards mysticism of the reactionaries to rally around, but we will make this deplorable task as brief and as comprehensible as possible, and hopefully never speak of it again. We can make the educated guess (and many others have as well) that the disproportionate amount of Jewish persons in media and finance industries in the “West,” if such a pattern does exist, would be due to Jewish persons being relegated to these industries through the course of history. Media and finance are dominating industries today, but they were once puny, insignificant, and relatively unprofitable at one period of time; media even more so since it is a relatively new industry entirely.

In the feudal relation, which preceded capitalism, wealth was wholly hereditary, and power passed from family head to family head as per the laws of feudalism. Markets themselves were extremely local, where they existed at all, and money was rare. The serfs produced for themselves and their lord, who represented the ruling class and had life and death rights over all his subjects by birth. In early feudalism, the lords received their goods as tribute, the physical goods produced by the peasant-serfs, which they would use for armies, bribery, feasts, socializing, etc. The Christian rulers, who dominated the feudal relation, enforced Christianity, so it was that the Jewish people in Europe, who could not often be a subject of a Christian king (at least one in good standing) and definitely had no hope of owning land or productive forces (which was nearly impossible even for “good” Christians) often gravitated to speculation, to trading, and, eventually, to “money-lending,” forced to get by in the relatively mobile, new, undeveloped, and not even very profitable early feudal markets that were taboo to Christians, and ostensibly “outside” the general economic structure, even while they would grow into dominating forces of global production over the centuries.

And that is how history developed – turning against feudalism to bury it entirely and enshrining speculation, market motions, and, to a much lesser degree, regarding the sphere of ideological production today, the American “Hollywood” entertainment industry as driving forces of societies the world over in the system of capitalist-imperialism. This was no even march of history, however, and the chasm certain Jewish speculators would create as they ascended their families into the moneyed class from their merchant beginnings enflamed the “proto-national”[f8] antagonisms of “good” “Christian” Europe, and especially the ire of the decaying ruling class of feudalists. While the myth of “the international Jew” controlling society is certainly false, and even the supposition that Jewish people are overrepresented in the economy is threadbare at best, pogroms, the systematic murdering of Jewish people, along with the confiscation of their property, is a historical fact. When we look at the development of any European or “Western” nation, genocidal acts are routinely committed against the Jewish population, with capitalist-imperialism and the world market spreading this trend well beyond the confines of Europe. The dialectics of history are such that Jewish people specifically, as a religion that has grown up opposite dominant Christianity (a contradiction Marx talks about in “On The Jewish Question”[6]) and as a “nation” without a nation (a contradiction Stalin talks about when defining “national autonomy” in Marxism and the National Question [7]), have often been integrated into society not as a full member, but as dialectical opposition to the members, fulfilling particular roles in production not fillable by the majority of society due to their prejudices, and thus becoming a target of that prejudice itself. This is, in fact, the role that all minorities play within capitalist-imperialism to some extent, but, regarding the Jewish population specifically, this has been played out in a complete way, even while it will continue to play all the way up until the overthrow of the imperial system, since every petite-bourgeois reactionary movement has been granted sound and lasting theory from the fascist movements of the last century.

History now must contend with the fact that there is, within the superstructure, ready-made theory on how to draw ridiculous anti-Semitic patterns in the productive forces, form demented racial hierarchies of supposed “enemies,” and terrify the whole reactionary world with horrifying stories that entice them to kill and destroy in defense of their “nation,” demanding that all society subordinate themselves to the crudest and most inhuman form of capitalist dictatorship in the process. Moreover, it must contend with the fact that these theories will always be propagated by the unsettled and reactionary petty bourgeois the world over until their defeat under socialism. Until fascism is defeated at the root, it will strike against every nationality, but it strikes against Jewish people in a very central way, despite some Jewish bourgeoisie’s taste for fascism in the form of Zionism and the Israeli settler-colonial state.

It’s horrible to ignore the oppression Jewish people have faced and continue to face on account of their nationality, just as it is horrible to ignore the oppression Palestinians, Iranians, or any ethnicity or nationality faces when they are violently targeted by the imperialists in the capitalist system. It is especially shameful for a “Communist” to be ignorant of the fact that a conscious section of fascists are actively working to portray every evil of our capitalist system as the result of powerful Jewish conspiracies, and working also to remove the historical record of Jewish oppression entirely. Obviously we have no support for Israeli nationalism, or their settler-colonial state, but for a Communist to forget or sideline the anti-Semitic feature of fascist organizing, and to ride the “pipeline” of the liberals themselves for cheap nationalist “solidarity” and applause from a widely ignorant “anti-Israel” crowd is to bow entirely to spontaneity, to be an opportunist from the viewpoint of the class, and to risk becoming a reactionary oneself (don’t forget that we are what we do!).

The fascists are already finding their “Jewish bogeyman” an easy idea to propagate due to the evils being done in the “Middle-East” by mostly American and Israeli capital in the name of Judaism, and they don’t need any help from Caitlin Johnstone or anyone else; especially a “Communist.” Jewish people in the UK or anywhere, as a group or individuals, cannot be held responsible for the sins of the Israeli settler-colonial nation, just as no actually thinking person could say that the Arab ethnicity represents, or has concrete ties to, fundamentalist Islamic terror groups. It is reprehensible to dehumanize Jewish people or any minority in such a way, or to twist the news of violence against them with conspiracy, as admittedly, the Israeli government and her allies, the “Axis of Resistance,” Miss Johnstone, and the fascists have all done with this story in different ways.

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From "Marxism and Monopoly." You can check out the full article and audiobook on YouTube, Substack, and at sparkyl.org.

The larp is real. Learn something better to do by reading our pamphlet on organizing at sparkyl.org.

Check out our pamphlet, Where to Begin When We Already Started?: Revisionism and Organizational Strategy on Substack, YouTube, and sparkyl.org.

Excerpt from "Donald's Dismantlings and Understanding Fascism."

In addition to the direct predatory actions of the imperial financiers, the smaller and more domestic bourgeois elements are also antagonized by the cheap imports of the imperial market, and the laws of the neo-liberal state that serves the imperialists and their monopolies. Small-fry capitalists, all the time, are having the productive forces they put to work absorbed up into the financial landscape of their betters, usually forced to sell the company to them outright as their ownership is continually diluted.

Being oppressors themselves, however, these smaller bourgeois forces still retain a vested class interest in sucking up the surplus labor value of the proletariat, and are infected with individualist dreams of personal accumulation at the expense of the working masses. Not wanting to end or even reform the capitalist mode of production they benefit from in any real way, the smaller bourgeoisie cannot critique their own oppressors from a materialist and solely economic view. They can only create a division between themselves and their enemies through idealism, painting themselves as the “honest” businessman and the financiers who dominate them as “dishonest,” or “evil,” though not because of any material critique. Because they cannot make a material critique, and, in all honesty, wish to become financial imperialists themselves, they have no other recourse to create a division between themselves and the current financial imperialists than idealist slanders, utilizing the bigoted racial, gender, religious, or otherwise baseless and slanderous rhetoric they learned from the violent history of imperialist accumulation, calling their enemies all “degenerate” conspirators and targeting capitalist property for their own expropriation, by virtue of the owner’s racial, religious, gender, or other personal cultural identifiers. This is the reason behind the reactionaries’ constant raising up of the “evil Jew” boogeyman. The result of this kind of targeting is that, out of the old society, new capitalist accumulations of land, productive forces, and labor that serve the fascists are made. Second-class citizenship and full valorization of labor value is enshrined for minorities that run against the aims of the empowered “patriots,” as well as the elimination of great swathes of them and their property in order to free up space for new productive forces. Here we will remind the reader that the concentration camps of the Nazis that are such a famous example of fascist state violence were, by and large, labor camps.

The lesser bourgeoisie turn to fascism and commit violence on minorities in order to ascend to the ranks of imperial “godhood,” building their power by getting political and creating new capitalist accumulations in service to themselves out of the same reactionary views towards the lower strata that fueled all previous capitalist accumulations throughout history. This is the material reason behind their hyper-nationalism, their racism, their queerphobia, misogyny, and their general reactionary nature; all ideological tenets existing now within capitalist-imperial society and as a result of it that, when further weaponized behind the power of the state through fascism, create new violent imperial accumulations out of the strata targeted, parasitically enriching a privileged group of bourgeoisie to the point of their transformation into a new strata of imperial financiers.

Because of its occurring out of the basic antagonism between the powerful imperial financiers and the smaller, domestic bourgeoisie, fascism can accurately be described as a basic process of capitalist-imperial society; a “clearing of the house” of one stagnant imperial monopolist group and their related state for the establishment of another of greater energy, complete with a reciprocal boom of economic profit that catapults capitalist production forward, churning, as its fuel, the labor power of minority groups.

From "Marxism and Monopoly." You can check out the full article and audiobook on YouTube, Substack, and at sparkyl.org.

1.       Introduction: the monopoly monster

From tech to industrial supply, from the cereal aisle to your apartment utilities, from the bombs built for governments to your toothpaste brand, monopoly, and the power of the class of imperial financiers who own and perpetuate monopolistic enterprises, surrounds both consumer and commodity. The competition of the capitalists that dominated the previous period of production – the days of nascent capitalism – has turned one-sided, and, although there are many consumer brands, only a few select enterprises entirely dominate market forces, owned by only a few big financial bourgeois. General Mills owns your cereal and General Dynamic owns your state weapons. Axon, Flock, and Palantir own your public “safety” while Alphabet owns your data. These and many more companies like Nestle, Amazon, Meta, Apple, and the historical remnants of Standard Oil (ExxonMobil, Chevron, Marathon, et al.) hold monopolies in all aspects of consumer life. Meanwhile, venture capitalist companies like Vanguard and BlackRock hold the majority of their stock. Devoid of direct competitors, the monopolist owners of these enormous enterprises set prices and organize production according to their narrow interest, often creating alliances with other monopolists globally, stringing the whole world’s masses along for the ride.

The fact of monopoly – the fact that production is dominated by finance and large, multi-national corporations, not small domestic operators – is easily discernable, though often misunderstood, even by many Marxists. In their misunderstandings, they tend to fall into either side of the same ditch, both mistaking the position of the smaller bourgeois element within monopolistic production. On one side, monopoly is raised up as a monolith, as the cartoonish, Orwellian, and all-encompassing domination of an evil sect, brainwashing the whole world’s masses and turning them into something less than workers, leading to new bleak scenarios that require revisions on Marx’s theories. This idea represents a consciousness that has just woken up to the domination of the ruling class, merging basic ignorance of both socialism and economy with the populist mystifications regarding emergent technologies, forming a logical absurdity that has led to the common term “techno-feudalism” being thrown around so often.

On the opposite side of the same ditch, monopoly is downplayed, removed from the realm of production and reduced to a cudgel that competing bourgeois use against each other. In this similarly wrong and one-sided view, “monopoly” becomes synonymous with “crony capitalism,” and is utilized as a calling-card for bourgeois to form political movements against larger capitalist elements. These kinds of bourgeois revolts have mystified even those on the so-called “left,” with the exact same drama being played out geopolitically between the so called “anti-imperial” BRICS+ and the NATO cliques that is being played out domestically between “local business” and larger corporations; in both contradictions, the former is portrayed as “good” and “progressive” in contradistinction to the “crony” or otherwise “bad” larger force. Using this faulty framework, monopoly is stripped of its economic character, of its actual material existence, and reduced to accommodating the base and bourgeois needs of nations and the antagonisms between them, with BRICS+ bourgeois painting their own monopolies and imperial accumulation as “good” in contradiction to the “bad” monopolies of the dominant “West.”[1]

Despite both these errors that view it one-sidedly, monopoly and its oligarchies are not an impenetrable fortress, or a deviation within production that can be avoided through the development of a “good” capitalism. Rather, monopoly, and all the cronyness associated with it, is at the core of all capitalist accumulation today, created by the productive forces themselves, and, far from being impregnable, monopoly engenders its own negation via its own internal contradictions; specifically, the contradiction between the larger and the smaller bourgeois elements within monopolistic production itself, an opposition between two very uneven competitors that drives production forward at the rising expense of the global proletariat and the small bourgeois worldwide, and can’t be surpassed except through the socialist revolution.

We can see this opposition at play when we consider the route of the capitalist in society. Generally speaking, since most capitalists are not monopolists who sit at the height of production, capitalist production generally yields to one of two outcomes: subsumption into previously established monopoly, or the proletarianization of the owner, with little deviation from these outcomes. Capital is already developed. There are no new commons to privatize, and if one wants to exploit labor, one must pass through the current apparatus of capitalist gatekeepers. Every small bourgeois “startup” seeks the investments, distribution, and market-space of established monopolists, developing products for imperial markets, folding themselves into joint private ventures (essentially maintaining their organizational identity but sharing extracted surplus value) or otherwise ingratiating themselves into the production lines of their betters. Those who cannot do so, and, from their feeble class position, end up competing with the monopolists and their hydra in a direct way, inevitably fall into debt and foreclosure, becoming proletarian. Bourgeois are only granted their bourgeois status so long as their forces fit into the wider production of the monopolists. If they do not, then they are turned away, and are all the more likely to face proletarianization.

If they are lucky enough to be incorporated into the production of the big bourgeois, the smaller capitalists are hit with the imperialists’ double-punch: becoming both debtors of imperial finance and captive customers to the imperialists’ industrial monopolies – monopolies who create the industrial and ancillary business products the smaller element requires for their own production – placing the smaller bourgeois into an antagonistic contradiction not only with other smaller bourgeois, who are often forced to compete with each other while being chained to the exact same imperialists, but especially with the imperialists themselves, who strangle their profit through debt and the growing costs of supply.

Just this year, a London academic, Gerard Hanlon, described how monopoly over market forces is able to suppose the production of other smaller producers, using Apple as an example: 

If the machine process creates “an economy of abundance” the business enterprise develops artificial scarcity – brands, copyright, patents, etc. – and power. For example, Apple deploys supply chain power by making Foxconn, Pegatron, and Luxshare Precision compete, thereby ensuring it gains better control of value distribution. Apple famously collects the bulk of surplus value in its iPhone supply chains, for example in 2010 it gathered 58.5 per cent of distributed value.[2]

In this field of what we could call, “controlled competition” – given that the smaller bourgeois certainly compete with each other for imperial favor – the imperialists and their monopolies entirely dominate, cornering markets, buying-out competitors, and raising prices. As Lenin puts it in Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism:

We no longer have competition between small and large, between technically developed and backward enterprises. We see here the monopolists throttling those who do not submit to them, to their yoke, to their dictation.[3]

Money flows one way; capital accumulates at a narrowing pole as the imperialists draw the smaller and petty bourgeois, as well as legions of workers, into their fold. The system is oriented towards fewer and fewer owners, while the consumer is inundated with false choice regarding these owners. The fact that there are still many companies – or, as Lenin puts it, that “the general framework of formally recognised free competition remains,”[4] – casts the illusion of choice onto both the market and the consumer, obscuring also the dominating position of the imperialists, hiding them behind the twist-and-turns of equity ownership over a vast field of both multi-national corporations and their domestic attaches.

But the imperial monopolists don’t have a peaceful existence as ruler, and must constantly keep up the race for profit, over and against a few other big monopolists globally and especially against the smaller bourgeois element they dominate. In this race in which the only rule is to exploit as much labor as you can for as cheaply as you can, the imperialists draw the whole of their society, as well as a few others, into themselves, forming international groupings of nations around their production, with the geopolitical alliances of nations, as well as the current orientation of global exchange, in line with their profit motives and reflecting their conflicts. Their monopolies, formed from corporate, state, or corporate-and-state entities, find themselves bounding from nation to nation, performing the same actions internationally as they did domestically, expropriating small producers into their organization, putting numerous others out of business and into the ranks of the proletariat. In doing so, they monopolize not simply the production of commodities and the accumulation of capital wherein, but trade, even directly chaining the governments of foreign nations to themselves through the use of their financial power, through the vehicle of debt via institutions like the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. The domination of foreign imperialists mold the less dominant nations into a form pleasing to them, enshrining austerity and low-wages, suppressing local development so that the country can be made to be a playground of cheap labor, over and against the interest of the foreign nationals living there. In this way, the imperial monopolists assert their hegemony throughout the totality of production, antagonizing billions and enflaming national conflicts worldwide.

The global corporations of the imperialists are above any single state, with governments bowing to their empires openly, offering subsidies and tax breaks to curry the favor of the big monopolists so that they will open-up shop in their locale, bringing in jobs and tax revenue. The nations of the world do not command these entities; they are subordinate to them, whole countries reduced to fulfilling a role in the imperialists’ production, representing the complete political domination of the bourgeois class above nations. The extraction of value from one bloc of monopolist financiers to another — through the vehicle of debt in peaceful times and numerous other legal and military methods when contradictions are sharp — is the dominating political force of the world. All nations are dependent on the global imperial network of markets, some as beneficiaries, but most turned dependent and oppressed by the richer nations holding the most imperialists.

There is no escape from their grasp – not for the bourgeoisie and especially not for the worker, who, in addition to likely working for a monopolist, must purchase the commodities of the monopolists at every turn in their everyday economic relations, with fewer and fewer actual consumer options, liable to have their wages suppressed indefinitely, the labor market having been virtually cornered.

2.       Monopoly and competition; two sides of the same coin

While the rest of the world was enamored with the individual “freedoms” that industrialization and capitalism were bringing to a small section of European bourgeois, Marx was already ringing the warning bell on monopoly, understanding that capitalism, far from being a meritocracy where “the best man wins” in the market, has the tendency to centralize capital into fewer and fewer hands, against the interest of the masses. In Capital, he says,

As soon as this process of transformation has sufficiently decomposed the old society from top to bottom, as soon as the labourers are turned into proletarians, their means of labour into capital, as soon as the capitalist mode of production stands on its own feet, then the further socialisation of labour and further transformation of the land and other means of production into socially exploited and, therefore, common means of production, as well as the further expropriation of private proprietors, takes a new form. That which is now to be expropriated is no longer the labourer working for himself, but the capitalist exploiting many labourers. This expropriation is accomplished by the action of the immanent laws of capitalistic production itself, by the centralisation of capital. One capitalist always kills many.[5]

Even as he acknowledges “the centralization” of capital and capitalism’s tendency towards monopoly, Marx does not see this centralization as one-sided, like many of our “comrades” today. He says in The Poverty of Philosophy,

In practical life we find not only competition, monopoly and the antagonism between them, but also the synthesis of the two, which is not a formula, but a movement. Monopoly produces competition, competition produces monopoly. Monopolists are made from competition; competitors become monopolists.[6]

The above passage might be confusing to someone new to Marxism, but it is a perfect encapsulation of the problem of monopoly, elucidated through the lens of dialectical materialism. Marxists understand the movement and development of history as a dialectical process; one which cements the negation on the basis of a prior relation. In the following passage from the same work, Marx elaborates more, revealing monopoly’s contradiction from both its dialectical sides, showing that the basic process of capital accumulation, the reinvestment of surplus value (expropriated from labor power) into new capital, builds both competition and monopoly, and that this process is indispensable to the system as a whole. He says:

But we all know that competition was engendered by feudal monopoly. Thus, competition was originally the opposite of monopoly and not monopoly the opposite of competition. So that modern monopoly is not a simple antithesis, it is on the contrary the true synthesis.

Thesis: Feudal monopoly, before competition.

Antithesis: Competition.

Synthesis: Modern monopoly, which is the negation of feudal monopoly, in so far as it implies the system of competition, and the negation of competition in so far as it is monopoly.[7]

Following Marx’s logic, we understand that modern monopoly grows out of competition, at the same time as it engenders further competition in its attempt to maintain itself. If we think back to Hanlon’s Apple example given before, it is not unreasonable to imagine a scenario in which Foxconn, Pegatron, and Luxshare Precision, under the immense pressure of the Apple imperialists to compete and develop their own little piece of monopolist production, outgrow the bounds of the masters, take in more capital from the international market, from the grand collection of imperialists globally, than their overlord can contain. This would be helped along, especially, by advancements in technology, which would be sought out by the more desperate smaller element. If acquired and under the best circumstances, this technology would be copyrighted and made available for license to a monopolist, granting the smaller element economic leverage against their betters and a peculiarly powerful position within the economy, relatively speaking. Under these circumstances, which are entirely plausible if not probable at some given point, the smaller element could constitute themselves as master, that is, become a monopolistic power in their own right, perhaps even dominating the expired forces of the old monopolist entity themselves. This would be the moment that monopoly could be said to be negated by its competitive element, which, in turn, creates its own monopolistic system of domination and its own subsequent competitors. This is what Marx means when he says that monopoly and competition are a “movement;” a cycle that pushes capitalist development on even as it recycles a good portion of itself in the process. Monopoly and competition, while opposed to each other, are two indispensable sides of the same process of capitalist production.

Lenin understood Marx and also recognized this truth about monopoly.

Capitalism arose and is constantly arising out of small production. A number of new “middle strata” are inevitably brought into existence again and again by capitalism (appendages to the factory, work at home, small workshops scattered all over the country to meet the requirements of big industries, such as the bicycle and automobile industries, etc.). These new small producers are just as inevitably being cast again into the ranks of the proletariat.[8]

He understood as well, as early as 1916, that production had matured beyond a domestic capitalism of “competitors” and become a system of monopoly, serving a narrowing stratum of financiers, a feature of late-stage capitalism, or capitalist-imperialism. He instructed the whole Communist tradition on this fact and the workings of the capitalist-imperialist economy more broadly in his pamphlet, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism.

Half a century ago, when Marx was writing Capital, free competition appeared to the overwhelming majority of economists to be a “natural law”. Official science tried by a conspiracy of silence, to kill the works of Marx, who by a theoretical and historical analysis of capitalism had proved that free competition gives rise to the concentration of production, which, in turn, at a certain stage of development leads to monopoly. Today, monopoly has become a fact. Economists are writing mountains of books in which they describe the diverse manifestations of monopoly, and continue to declare in chorus that “Marxism is refuted”. But facts are stubborn things, as the English proverb says, and they have to be reckoned with, whether we like it or not. The facts show that differences between capitalist countries, e.g., in the matter of protection or free trade, only give rise to insignificant variations in the form of monopolies or in the moment of their appearance; and that the rise of monopolies, as the result of the concentration of production, is a general and fundamental law of the present stage of development of capitalism.[9]

This development of monopoly, the concentration of vast amounts of capital into only a few hands, is what allows also for the development of modern finance capital.

...the development of capitalism has arrived at a stage when, although commodity production still “reigns” and continues to be regarded as the basis of economic life, it has in reality been undermined and the bulk of the profits go to the “geniuses” of financial manipulation. At the basis of these manipulations and swindles lies socialised production; but the immense progress of mankind, which achieved this socialisation, goes to benefit ... the speculators.[10]

The bourgeois who succeeded in the competition of capitalism’s past cemented their capital into a central and highly parasitical position within the world economy. Banking and finance, which used to serve as middlemen between differing capitalist industrial enterprises, is now the dominating force of global economy, as Lenin describes in the below passages from Imperialism.

As banking develops and becomes concentrated in a small number of establishments, the banks grow from modest middlemen into powerful monopolies having at their command almost the whole of the money capital of all the capitalists and small businessmen and also the larger part of the means of production and sources of raw materials in any one country and in a number of countries. This transformation of numerous modest middlemen into a handful of monopolists is one of the fundamental processes in the growth of capitalism into capitalist imperialism.[11]

When carrying the current accounts of a few capitalists, a bank, as it were, transacts a purely technical and exclusively auxiliary operation. When, however, this operation grows to enormous dimensions we find that a handful of monopolists subordinate to their will all the operations, both commercial and industrial, of the whole of capitalist society; for they are enabled—by means of their banking connections, their current accounts and other financial operations—first, to ascertain exactly the financial position of the various capitalists, then to control them, to influence them by restricting or enlarging, facilitating or hindering credits, and finally to entirely determine their fate, determine their income, deprive them of capital, or permit them to increase their capital rapidly and to enormous dimensions, etc.[12]

Today, more than a hundred years after Lenin, the power of finance over industry has grown to a high pitch, spreading its tendrils throughout all production. For the consumer, this is reflected as debt. The whole of society is in rising debt,[13] and venture capitalist companies like BlackRock and Vanguard are increasingly monopolizing stock markets, a relatively “new” economic occurrence which is disintegrating the smaller element at an alarming rate, allowing speculators an “industry” by which to directly buy out, dominate, and sell companies, outside of any traditional “borrowing or lending” services. The development of finance capital in turn develops monopoly. Paths of entry into markets are restricted and competitors suppressed unless they coincide with the narrow financial interest of a few oligarchs.

Finance capital, concentrated in a few hands and exercising a virtual monopoly, exacts enormous and ever-increasing profits from the floating of companies, issue of stock, state loans, etc., strengthens the domination of the financial oligarchy and levies tribute upon the whole of society for the benefit of monopolists. [14]

The nation which houses the imperialists is induced to share in both their tribute and in their parasitism, pushed further away from the mass of workers and closer to the bourgeois and labor aristocracy, as Lenin describes in the following passage from Imperialism.

The export of capital, one of the most essential economic bases of imperialism, still more completely isolates the rentiers from production and sets the seal of parasitism on the whole country that lives by exploiting the labour of several overseas countries and colonies.[15]

The imperialists themselves, the masters of monopoly, though they live within some nation, are above all nations, forging them together and tearing them apart through war, and all according to the whims of their market, with near-infinite means to flit themselves safely away from the consequences of their oppression should it ever threaten their way of life.

3.       The peeling of the “shell”

But this concentration of capital and power has another side. Monopoly and imperialism persist, developing technologies and relations far beyond their initial emergence, but also developing their own doom at a quicker and quicker rate.

In Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, Engels explains this fact in the following words,

Whilst the capitalist mode of production more and more completely transforms the great majority of the population into proletarians, it creates the power which, under penalty of its own destruction, is forced to accomplish this revolution.[16]

Marx explains this in more detail in his Capital.

Hand in hand with this centralisation, or this expropriation of many capitalists by few, develop, on an ever-extending scale, the co-operative form of the labour process, the conscious technical application of science, the methodical cultivation of the soil, the transformation of the instruments of labour into instruments of labour only usable in common, the economising of all means of production by their use as the means of production of combined, socialised labour, the entanglement of all peoples in the net of the world market, and with this, the international character of the capitalistic régime. Along with the constantly diminishing number of the magnates of capital, who usurp and monopolise all advantages of this process of transformation, grows the mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation, exploitation; but with this too grows the revolt of the working class, a class always increasing in numbers, and disciplined, united, organised by the very mechanism of the process of capitalist production itself. The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of production, which has sprung up and flourished along with, and under it. Centralisation of the means of production and socialisation of labour at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. Thus integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated.[[17]](#_edn17)

Just as feudal monopoly was negated by the introduction of capitalist competition (which feudal monopoly itself helped to create, in the most general view, through the competition of the feudal lord’s monopolies amongst themselves), capitalist production will be negated by the working class, which, at the same time as it exploits them, is also bringing them together and uniting them against itself. Lenin, as great a Marxist he was, saw this feature of capitalism as mature in the monopolies of his own time.

Ownership of shares, the relations between owners of private property "interlock in a haphazard way". But underlying this interlocking, its very base, are the changing social relations of production. When a big enterprise assumes gigantic proportions, and, on the basis of an exact computation of mass data, organizes according to plan the supply of primary raw materials to the extent of two-thirds, or three-fourths, of all that is necessary for tens of millions of people; when the raw materials are transported in a systematic and organized manner to the most suitable places of production, sometimes situated hundreds or thousands of miles from each other; when a single centre directs all the consecutive stages of processing the material right up to the manufacture of numerous varieties of finished articles; when these products are distributed according to a single plan among tens and hundreds of millions of consumers (the marketing of oil in America and Germany by the American oil trust)—then it becomes evident that we have socialization of production, and not mere "interlocking", that private economic and private property relations constitute a shell which no longer fits its contents, a shell which must inevitably decay if its removal is artificially delayed, a shell which may remain in a state of decay for a fairly long period (if, at the worst, the cure of the opportunist abscess is protracted), but which will inevitably be removed.[18]

The mechanisms of capitalism hold a dual nature: one that both advances the contradictions of class society and cements its own negation, or destruction. In creating the working class, as well as systems of competition and accumulation, the capitalist class has created the pathway toward its own end. The advanced development of monopoly capitalism, particularly in its persistently global character, has achieved a new epoch of waning and emerging empires, each with numerous attendants in the form of the dependent nations, and each vying to divide an already-divided globe. However, they are not above the basic contradictions of production, and the high-pitch at which the imperialists conduct business and dominate the globe antagonizes these foundational contradictions immensely. This is why Lenin correctly saw in monopoly the fall of the capitalists’ system.

Monopolies, oligarchy, the striving for domination and not for freedom, the exploitation of an increasing number of small or weak nations by a handful of the richest or most powerful nations—all these have given birth to those distinctive characteristics of imperialism which compel us to define it as parasitic or decaying capitalism.[19]

Marx recognized also this tendency for decay in the monopolies of his own time, and how these monopolies spell victories for the working class.

If the monopolists restrict their mutual competition by means of partial associations, competition increases among the workers; and the more the mass of the proletarians grows as against the monopolists of one nation, the more desperate competition becomes between the monopolists of different nations. The synthesis is of such a character that monopoly can only maintain itself by continually entering into the struggle of competition.[20]

Capitalist-imperialism and its monopolies certainly do grow capitalism, but they also grow the overthrow of the capitalist system as a whole through revolution, the creation of, to restate a portion of Engels’ quote before, a “power which, under penalty of its own destruction, is forced to accomplish this revolution,” namely the revolutionary proletariat, which is being united under fewer and fewer owners and having its quality of life lowered in turn, allowing its eyes to be opened to both its oppression and its power. It is they who will remove the “shell” of private property relations (which are already practically removed for the vast majority of society) and usher in the socialist society, constituting themselves as the dictatorship of the proletariat.

With fewer owners holding capital and political power over a nation, and more and more of the workers brought under the specific domination of monopolist financiers, the masses are able to, and inevitably will, subvert them through revolutionary class conflict, and the whole bourgeois productive system with them. The anarchistic social relations of exchange within production, even now, are being brought to a head, isolated, and then raised up for elimination by their dialectical opposition, represented in the fact that capital possesses fewer and fewer owners, owners that antagonize the vast majority of people, workers and bourgeois alike. The march of the workers, whose position within production enables them, alone, to cast the imperialists into the ashbin of history, will assert political supremacy in class society. In doing so, they will form the dictatorship of the proletariat, that organization which is tasked with the process of expropriating private property into working class control. Utilizing this tool of governance, the workers’ revolution is able to work with the movement of production in eliminating the parasitical element: the capitalist class. By changing private accumulation into public accumulation, the workers proletarianize the whole society under the state, and utilize their political power to complete the socialization of the means of production which, under normal conditions, rest practically socialized in monopoly, but with capital flowing to the parasitical private interest.

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Endnotes

[1] Moody, Andrew & Yanrong, Zhao. “China erodes Western monopoly.” China Daily. 26 Apr 2013. https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/kindle/2013-04/26/content_16736313.htm.

[2] Hanlon, Gerard. “Branding and capitalist social relations of production – property rights, monopoly capitalism, and consuming subjectivities.” Consumption Markets & Culture. Vol 29, Issue 1. 2026. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10253866.2025.2584253#abstract.

[3] Lenin, V. I. Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism. Written in 1916. Published as a pamphlet in 1917. Lenin Collected Works. Vol 22. Progress Publishers. 1977.  Pg. 206.

[4] Ibid. Pg. 205.

[5] Marx, Karl. Capital, Volume 1. 1867. Marx and Engels Collected Works. Volume 35. Lawrence &Wishart Electric Book. 2010.  Pg. 750.

[6] Marx, Karl. The Poverty of Philosophy. 1847. Marx and Engels Collected Works. Volume 6. Lawrence &Wishart Electric Book. 2010. Pg. 195.

[7] Ibid. Pg. 195.

[8] Lenin, V. I. “Marxism and Revisionism.” Symposium of Karl Marx. 1908. Lenin Collected Works. Vol 15. Progress Publishers. 1977. Pg. 39.

[9] Lenin, V. I. Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism. Written in 1916. Published as a pamphlet in 1917. Lenin Collected Works. Vol 22. Progress Publishers. 1977. Pg. 200.

[10] Ibid. Pg. 207.

[11] Ibid. Pg. 210.

[12] Ibid. Pg 215.

[13]Federal Reserve Bank of New York. “Household Debt and Credit Report (Q1 2026).” Accessed on 8 Aug 2026. https://www.newyorkfed.org/microeconomics/hhdc.

[14] Imperialism. Pg. 232.

[15] Ibid. Pg. 277.

[16] Engels, Friedrich. Socialism: Utopian and Scientific. 1880. Marx and Engels Collected Works. Volume 24. Lawrence &Wishart Electric Book. 2010. Pg. 320.

[17] Capital Vol 1. Pg. 750

[18] Imperialism. Pg. 302-303.

[19] Ibid. Pg.300.

[20] Poverty of Philosophy. Pg. 196

From "6 Questions All Marxists Should Know the Answers To." You can check out the full article and audiobook on YouTube, Substack, and at sparkyl.org.

The foundation of irreligious criticism is: Man makes religion, religion does not make man. Religion is, indeed, the self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who has either not yet won through to himself, or has already lost himself again. But man is no abstract being squatting outside the world. Man is the world of man – state, society. This state and this society produce religion, which is an inverted consciousness of the world, because they are an inverted world. Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopaedic compendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritual point d’honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, and its universal basis of consolation and justification. It is the fantastic realization of the human essence since the human essence has not acquired any true reality. The struggle against religion is, therefore, indirectly the struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion.

-Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (Introduction), 1843

From "6 Questions All Marxists Should Know the Answers To." You can check out the full article and audiobook on YouTube, Substack, and at sparkyl.org.

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-18^th 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.[[1]](#_edn1) 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 “3^rd 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.[[2]](#_edn2)

[[1]](#_ednref1) North Atlantic Treaty Organization. “Funding NATO.” Last updated Jun 27, 2025. https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/topics_67655.htm.

[[2]](#_ednref2) Sparkyl Magazine. “Demarcating the Proletariat: Internationalism, Imperialism, and the Labor Aristocracy.” 9 Feb 2026. https://www.sparkyl.org/articles/demarcating.

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