THE BROTHERWISE DISPATCH, VOL.3, ISSUE#15, MARCH-MAY/2023
Brotherwise Dispatch – How would you describe the intended audience of your first work, The Communist Necessity, especially after making it clear that “Unwilling to accept that capitalism was the end of history, while at the same time believing that communism was a failed project, leftist organizations dealt with their confusion by either disintegrating or distancing themselves from the past. If the history of actually existing socialism had indeed proved itself to be a grand failure, then the only hope for the activist of the 1990's was to discover a new way of making revolution”?
J. Moufawad Paul – The intended audience was first world activists and organizers who, like myself, were raised in the shadow of the fall of the Eastern Bloc. Having been raised on a steady diet of anti-communist propaganda, and the story of socialist failure, the default way of organizing was the social movementist approach. Largely having been taught that there was nothing worthwhile in these failed projects, suspicious of disciplined organizations, our way of doing activism was what you call “protest-as-ritual-event” in the hope that all of these different kinds of protests, these spectacles of what Jodi Dean called “the politics of the beautiful moment” would somehow add up to an overthrow of the system whether these actions were reformist, militant, and any kind of combination of a multiplicity of sites of resistance. There was a lot of jumping from organizational group to organizational affinity groupings–-whether it be anti-war or anti-racist or anti-poverty or trade union or whatever––with no institutional memory. At the time I wrote it I had the anti-globalization and anti-war movements in mind, but Occupy had just happened and that kind of marked the nadir of this movementist ethos.
Before I wrote it, myself and others had started thinking of what I call a “new return” to the communist necessity, to thinking of what kind of discipline and structure would be required to make resistance to capitalism and imperialism and colonialism more sustainable, so it was written with that kind of audience in mind: those of us raised and nearly burned out on the movementist style of doing things, looking for a better alternative.
BD – In what sense have things either changed or remained the same since you accurately diagnosed that "We were incapable of understanding that all we were doing was uncritically replicating past methods of organization that had already revealed their ineffectiveness prior to the spectacular failure of communism”?
JMP – At the end of 2019 the publisher of the book wanted to release a second edition where I was invited to add an appendix considering the book after five years. In that appendix I discussed how the questions I raised remained relevant, but one thing that I wouldn’t be able to anticipate was how hard it was to pursue this kind of “new return” to the avant-garde party in the imperial metropoles, especially ones that –– like Canada and the US –– are also settler-capitalist formations. So while we could identify what was wrong with movementism, the ideological aspects of these capitalist formations are so difficult to overcome. And one big problem was this desire to have a perfect organization rather than seeing such an organization as one that is always in process, that will always be affected by internal struggle, and that it is an uphill battle to make such an organization sustainable in the context where movementism and especially where economism – which is something I talk about in my most recent book –– thrive.
Part of what I was arguing for, and that I still argue for, is the institution of the Maoist Party of the New Type: a programmatically united party that is also a comprehensive fighting party; a cadre organization that, understanding itself as a process, seeks to become (but is not yet) a vanguard formation; a resistance structure that is also driven by the mass line –– from the masses and to the masses. That’s a hard thing to build anywhere, but ideologically it is hard to build in a context where bourgeois and petty-bourgeois ideology is endemic. Other difficulties, like the kind of racial capitalism that is normative in settler-capitalist formations, are added on top of this. A number of us had worked hard to try and build such an organization, and so The Communist Necessity was initially written in a high period of that organizing building, and we had succeeded in making some important inroads, but by the time I wrote the appendix of the second edition that was falling apart due to organizational implosion over a variety of issues we had only half foreseen, complicated by the social context. I think my most recent book speaks to these larger problems with which we were theoretically aware –– after all that book is the result of a number of study groups and discussions from those days of cadre organizing –– but couldn’t adequately answer.
BD – What do you see as the implications regarding the collision of “angry first world resistance” and “the fact of highly organized and militarized states that, unlike the chaotic activists challenging the power of capitalism, were more than capable of pacifying discontent”, for the fate of contemporary social movements seeking to bring about historical change?
JMP – For me the implications were clear: the need for a disciplined and unified movement that had both a clear vision of organization and military strategy. Largely activists and organizers in the first world don’t think about strategy in this way: they simply assume the might of the people will manifest and some mythic organization will overwhelm police and military forces who spend their lives trained, with the arms and technology to back up this training, to put down insurrections. And as Dylan Rodríguez has pointed out, these forces regularly carry out domestic warfare on Black and Indigenous populations daily as part of their “training.” Meanwhile, those resistance organizations that have succeeded to any degree in the global peripheries have always had an armed front. Look, for example, at the New People’s Army of the Communist Party of the Philippines that has had a very long and slowly developing resistance movement. “Without a people’s army,” Mao once said, “The people have nothing.” The contemporary first world activist style of organizing I was writing against abjures this kind of strategic thinking: at best it assumes that a vague uprising will overwhelm the military forces, maybe even force large portions of this military/police population to join the people; at worst it is pacifistic and is horrified by works like The Wretched of the Earth or anything else that talks about the tragic necessity of violence. I always found the latter attitude to be moralizing idealism; the former is just wishful thinking. Way back in the early decades of the 20th Century, for example, Karl Leibknecht pointed out that capitalist militarism would be such that, inculcated at every level of society, you couldn’t easily convince cops and soldiers to join your side: they would be thoroughly socialized by capitalist militarism, you would need something capable of fighting them and facing their skill.
T. Derbent, a theorist of revolutionary strategy who was once part of an armed movement in Belgium, wrote: “Every social revolutionary project must think ahead to the question of armed confrontation with the forces of power and reaction. […] Organizations that claim to be revolutionary but which refuse to develop a military policy before the question of confrontation becomes a practical reality disqualify themselves as revolutionary forces. They are already acting as gravediggers of revolution, the quartermasters of stadiums and cemeteries.” That quote has always struck me, and always taught me the need of having an organization that pursues its organizational building with a military strategy in mind. And you can’t get this from an inchoate and disconnected movementist style of approaching things. It doesn’t take the enemy seriously in a strategic sense.
BD – Based on your ruthlessly incisive critique of ‘movementism’, how do you approach contemporary activist formations focused on climate change, LGBTQ assimilation and Black Lives Matter in relation to your concern for revolution?
JMP – Well obviously, I think climate change, LGBTQ struggles, Black Lives Matter, and a whole other sites of social struggle matter and shouldn’t be dismissed. My problem is in the activist disconnection of movementism. One reason they are so disconnected is that the old style of communist organizing, especially in the imperialist metropoles, relegated many of these struggles to “secondary” problems. Not always, but enough to cause an antipathy to the kind of workerist approach you find in a bunch of old Marxist organizations that still persist and say dumb sh*t about these other social struggles. What myself and others have maintained is that a “new return” to cadre organizational structures needs to take all of these other struggles into account and find a way to bind them together. To become a kind of movement of movements –– which I know is a serious uphill battle.
But if we go back to what are called “the three weapons of revolution,” that the late Revolutionary Internationalist Movement noted as important, we have the party, the people’s army, and the united front. A united front that can be initiated and led by the party and its people’s army can definitely unite these activist formations. In the Philippines, for example, the National Democratic Front does this kind of unification. There can be multiple mass organizations, initiated by but autonomous from, the central revolutionary organization that each address these separate movement issues but attempt to find ways to connect them to a central project of revolutionary overthrow.
What I find kind of odd about the old workerist communist formations that attempt to sideline these issues is that they tend to delete an entire history of struggle, which probably speaks to the limitations that are today imposed on thinking revolution in the belly of the beast. Limitations that need to be broken. For example, you can find so-called “communists” in Canada and the US getting upset that some of us are talking about settler-colonialism, as if this creates splits in an imaginary working class they believe is already united (when it is not). But in order for them to complain about some of us talking about the need to address settler-colonialism and racial capitalism they have to ignore large portions of 20th Century revolutionary theory. In the Second Congress of Third International there were lively debates about the national question with Lenin and his allies carrying the day by arguing for the necessity of anti-colonial struggle. Fanon was well aware of these discussions when he wrote Wretched. José Carlos Mariàtegui and Ibrahim Kaypakkaya also wrote significant work on this question. The notion that colonialism and racism deform socialist struggle is not a new idea; the response to this understanding was simply that revolutionary movements needed to incorporate this set of struggles in their overall struggle. The same goes for a whole host of struggles against oppression or other connected issues. The environmental issue, for example, is one that the living movement has always understood in different ways: you find Engels and Marx talking about how capitalism poisons the environment and, if left unchecked, will annihilate humanity –– a point I emphasize in The Communist Necessity. The tools exist to think through all these problematics in a unified non-movementist manner; the will to use them, or the memory of them, is lagging behind.
BD – Although your book certainly makes the case that “The word communism remains and will always be re-proclaimed and reasserted as long as capitalism remains. More than a hypothesis or horizon, communism is a necessity that will never cease being a necessity for the duration of capitalism’s hegemony.” How do you respond to those who feel that the failure of communism encompasses more than just a question of method and political organization, but rather because it refuses to relinquish a spiritually impoverished anthropology of materialist determinism(which strengthens and reinforces racist dehumanization) and still propagates an existentially untenable theoretical orientation of historical materialism grounded explicitly within modernity itself as imposed by a western imperialist continuum?
JMP – I love this question, but I know that what I will say will probably be in disagreement with your assessment. That’s okay: I love the way you have approached these questions in your most recent work and I realize there is going to be difference. But I hope the dialogue is meaningful.
One qualification I want to make before I get to the heart of your question is about the term “failure” which is a term I also used when I wrote The Communist Necessity. This is something I’ve come to critique, and spoke about when I wrote that appendix after five/six years of perspective. I think Pao-yu Ching is correct when she wrote, in Rethinking Socialism, that it is erroneous to use the term “failure” for these world historical revolutions of Russia and then China. She argued that it was more appropriate to use the term “defeat” because what happened, through the continuation of class struggle within the revolution, was a defeat of socialism by class forces intent on pursuing the capitalist road. The revolution did not fail by itself; it was defeated by internal and external enemies of revolution –– this needs to be said.
Next, I want to deal with the last part of this question about how historical materialism is grounded within modernity and western imperialism because I think that also speaks to the first part of the question about spiritual impoverishment. In an essay trilogy I wrote for the Turkish magazine Abstrakt I engaged with the problematic of modernity, addressing Enlightment, Science, and Sovereignty. My argument was, following Samir Amin’s Eurocentrism and Robert Biel’s Eurocentrism and The Communist Movement, that what we find with the story of historical materialism is a modernity critical of modernity. Was it the case that Marx and Engels were affected by Eurocentric categories? Yes, this cannot be denied. Was it also the case that their method provides the best tools to criticize this problem: yes, better than anything else –– both these books are unequivocal on this, and demonstrate how this is the case. There is nothing about this method that, in itself, is bound to the worst aspects of modernity anymore than Darwin’s theory of evolution should be dismissed because Darwin succumbed to vicious imperialist ideology himself. We know Darwin was correct; the science stands the test of experiment, but all science is also affected by ideology. What does the historical materialist method proclaim: that class struggle is the motive force of history, that we should look to material facts as the basis of this understanding –– this is demystification. I would wager that anything that tells us different, that seeks to make sense of things in a mystical and idealist sense, is the real problem. Like race science and a whole constellation of bullshit. That’s where ideology takes hold, and obviously it affected Marx and Engels in various ways as this methodology they supported demonstrates. A history of pursuing revolution in the global peripheries, outside of and critical of their initial conceptions, demonstrates this fact.
This brings us to the prior point of a “spiritually impoverished anthropology of materialist determinism” that “strengthens and reinforces racist dehumanization.” First of all, I don’t see anything impoverished about materialist determinism unless it is, in fact, the worst kind of workerist teleology –– which I reject. Seeking to make sense of phenomena according to materialist facts is quite liberating; idealist descriptions of reality are terribly imprisoning. Like take, for example, a famine in India during the height of British Imperialism. An anti-materialist explanation will blame this on Indian laziness, an appeal to cultural tropes; a materialist explanation will reveal the famine is due to colonial violence –– Mike Davis’ Late Victorian Holocausts is an excellent example of how the materialist analysis is better, and not at all impoverished, than the idealist version.
And let’s be clear, the notion that historical materialism “strengthens and reinforces racist dehumanization” is a page right out of Foucault, and one that Agamben popularized. For Foucault, all appeals to class struggle were somehow also about race hatred, as he argues in his 1976 lecture in “Society Must Be Defended” where his entire notion of social conflict is based on a weird understanding of race and class struggle –– where he thinks any revolt against oppression is racism. Which demonstrates he doesn’t understand racism, or the antagonism between the oppressed and oppressor, and yet critics of historical materialism lean on his work when it is clear he has not cared to think one iota of what Fanon wrote before him.
What is even worse is the reliance on Agamben, who not only takes his cue from Foucault but also appeals to Carl Schmitt, a consummate Nazi. So this entire discourse of this “spiritually impoverished anthropology” of historical materialism comes from Foucault’s liberalism and Agamben’s use of fascist thinkers. As Weheliye argued in Habeas Viscus, we should doubt the appeal to Foucault and Agamben because of their terrible politics, a politics you don’t find in the historical materialist tradition. Foucault was a liberal. Agamben is someone we now know as not only an anti-vaxxer but also wrote a glowing obituary of Ratzinger? These are the sources that have generated this narrative about historical materialism’s impoverishment.
So I happen to believe that we can learn something about historical materialism, if we sever it from its Eurocentric instantiations, through its living development of revolutionary movements. We can have an argument about it, we can debate this development, and that’s great! But I also think it is amazing to think something that has to do with the most revolutionary movements that have ever existed and that still exist in the world today. And to deny this, falls precisely, at least in my opinions, into the abyss of system maintenance.
BD – This has been another one of our BROTHERWISE FIVE interview series, during which THE BROTHERWISE DISPATCH interrogates intellectuals, artists and activists with five probing questions to the delight of our readers.
On behalf of J. Moufawad Paul and THE BROTHERWISE DISPATCH,
Peace.
-A. Shahid Stover
(this interview of J. Moufawad Paul for THE BROTHERWISE DISPATCH was conducted by A. Shahid Stover through email correspondence from January 5th – January 7th 2023.)
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