We need a Party. But to be We, the We that expresses ourselves in the Party, We need to stand as We.
To act as We demands a decision. Modern capitalism proliferates choices (for those with the money to spend). Particularly if you live in the United States, you can choose between seemingly infinite brands of shampoo, chips, shoes, cigarettes… But these choices are mere quantities. They can quite unproblematically be assigned a barcode, and they are literally interchangeable. When we go to the supermarket, we compare choices by quantified measures like price, sodium composition, best-by date…
But these choices are not decisive. The emergence of We cannot be but a product of decision — qualitative, creative, even destructive decisions. This decisiveness is both an exercise of freedom in the name of freedom — as opposed to the exercise of unfreedom in the name of freedom we are used to in everyday life — and it is accepting loss. Loss of what exists, loss of the old self that we know in this world, loss of the quantified plans we make for our future. But that loss is also a creation, a revolutionary struggle of transformation.
We cannot make peace with capital, which subordinates collectivity and cooperation to regimes of accumulation. But we also cannot act beyond society. We are too much of its products, and it is too dense to grow a new world in its gaps. The gaps of capitalism are breathing room and sites to mount resistance, but are not revolutionary destruction.
Modern communism, where it has acted as a mass political force, has always been a faction within bourgeois society. Early communists like Robert Owen and Étienne Cabet may have tried to escape capital into their Utopias, but their very attempts to escape into the borderlands of North America¹ merely became a handful among many fronts in the colonization of the continent for the exploitation of land and labor.²
The present internality of communism to capitalism is the truth whether we admit it or not. But it cannot become actualized as a civilization unto itself without the participation of a We. We communists must constitute ourselves into an autonomous political faction of capitalist society, a bloc which positions itself relative to the entire field of political alliances, balances of power, trickeries, integrations, expressions, violence…³ We must be our own, we must be Communism as a united and coherent force unto itself, but we can only be so in a conscious relationship to the social totality as a whole.⁴
To be such a force means to be a Party. But not a party in the bureaucrat-media-Non-Governmental-Organization sense like the United States Democratic Party, or in the parliamentary sense like the German Die Linke. This is a question of the Party in a broader, yet also more exclusive sense. Karl Marx spoke of it as the “historical party,” which is distinguished from formal organizations, or those “ephemeral parties” which come into being and pass away as formal groups of people with member lists, constitutions, procedures, etc.⁵ The historical Communist Party is not identical to a formal party organization. This Communist Party is rather that movement which expresses itself in forms.⁶ It is whatever embodies the active force of communist revolution in a given historical situation.⁷
The Communist Party might be described as the Zeitgeist , the radical truth of the moment.⁸ The Communist Party expresses the temporally and spatially — historically — defined universal. It expresses what is universal and revolutionary in a juncture. Form is necessary for the self-articulation of this Communist Party. But these must be organizational forms which are fit to ensure political continuity and to sustain this presence of the universal across moments and across generations.⁹
The Communist Party is an active decision, it is putting I in We. The Party is not many I’s melted down into one big I, but the universal within and between the multitude of I’s in becoming a We. No I is closed — it is not self-complete or even self-coherent. The I is open, and its openness is what enables it to constitute the Party. The party does not absorb the I. Where a formal party attempts homogeneity, it extinguishes its own vitality in the gray sludge of bureaucracy. Rather than crude formal unity, it is what is universal, politically revolutionary in the I that constitutes the universal We of the Communist Party.
But there are limitations of the We in our world . Everywhere, We are fragmented and blocked by atomization, consumerism, coloniality, patriarchy, domination, retreat… The old forms of mass politics, which the old formal Communist Parties acted through, have been gutted since the tail end of the 20th century.¹⁰ If there are to be mass politics again, rather than episodic explosions of social media-centered activity, then We must be constructed by excruciating effort.
We cannot limit ourselves to a rebirth of democracy, however. We are much more than that. Democracy confines itself to the interstices of atomized individuals, measuring the quantities of their polled opinions and votes to count up majorities and minorities.¹¹ But the communist revolution’s heart cannot be found beating amidst these measured masses, who can be expressed even in percentages.
Communism cannot spring forth from the interchangeable, from majority opinion, from citizenship.¹² Communism also cannot be said to embody true democracy, since it does not premise itself on the political self-determination of that abstraction, the People. We are not the People. We are freely associated, unique individualities, who desire to transform everything so that individuality may freely flourish. While democracy has traces of communism, as bourgeois mass society as a whole does, communism cannot be defined simply as true democracy.¹³ The development of communism from out of bourgeois society can in fact be measured by how far we manage to pull ourselves beyond democracy, even if through democratic means of organizing proletarian political rule.¹⁴
The majoritarianism associated with democracy leads to complacency and conservatism in normal conditions, particularly as political majorities are formed by the mechanisms of state power, media, and bureaucracy rather than being ready-made.¹⁵ This is even more true in those countries where citizen-majoritarianism leads to genocidal ends, such as Israel. Communism must be a mass movement, but not a majority. The Communist Party furthermore cannot be identical to the mass proletarian movement as a whole — such an aspiration would lead to marginalization, bureaucracy, or dogmatic commandism.¹⁶ The Party does not mandate, nor does it educate from outside, but expresses what is universal and revolutionary immanently within proletarian mass politics.¹⁷ The Communist Party articulates, it does not speak for or speak over.
We can and must use the forms and ethics of democracy, but We transcend it. We live neither as a majority nor a minority. Communism cannot be true democracy, but what is true in democracy points towards communism. Democracy is a means for us to express ourselves, to coordinate ourselves, to act, but it is not our end. We defend and fight to expand democratic rights, but we are not primarily democrats. Democracy is only one among many tools for our self-articulation, right alongside the most iron of discipline and sovereign force. The question is not the fetishism of a form, but whether the forms are appropriate means in a given situation for the self-articulation of the Party. The Communist Party cannot be subordinated to any form or measure. It is the seed of a fundamentally new civilization. It builds that new civilization by being the embodiment of proletarian political hegemony over bourgeois society, forcibly struggling to smash the old and build the new. Communist civilization will be a society where all are the blossoms of the free association cultivated through the Communist Party. The question of revolution is not one of constituting a majority, but of reaching a critical mass. It is a question of whether We can seize a revolutionary situation.¹⁸
Genealogies and Horizons
But the historical Communist Party, if it is to express the universal horizon of a new world, can only do so by struggling against the grain of the present world order. To struggle against the grain, one must know what one is tearing apart — intimately. We are not confronting the world from outside, but trying to tear our way out from within it. And that world is a Eurocentered one. It is a system arranged with all roads leading to Europe.
This does not mean the prime moments of value production occur in the West. Quite the opposite. Instead, capital accumulation is centered in the West, as is the linear historical narrative of world history. The West is supposed to be the culmination of history and the center of the world. In a way, this is true — but it only reveals the necessity for the destruction of the world order. Eurocentered bourgeois civilization is the culmination of a universal history of class societies, and the struggle against capital is also necessarily a struggle against Eurocentrism. In other words, communism must be decolonial in order to be thoroughly opposed to the world as it presently is.
The modern world is that of 1492, and so communism must be the transcendence of 1492. I do not mean 1492 as a chronological year on the Gregorian calendar, but 1492 in the sense of a historical break — the premiere emergence of a truly global system out of the European project to colonize the “Americas.”¹⁹ 1492 was not the emergence of coloniality as such, but the beginning of a world premised fundamentally on the coloniality of power.²⁰ There are many forms of domination across the history of class societies, but these coagulate into the forms of colonization in the modern class society of capitalism. It is not that capitalism conjures class society and colonization, but that it consummates it.²¹
The proletariat, the negativity of the system itself, has always been also the wretched of the earth. What G. W. F. Hegel called the rabble, those who find themselves in the ghettos of civil society, Marx called the modern proletariat.²² This dispossessed class is not only confined to national systems, but to the world order as a whole. As the Marxist Eric R. Wolf noted, the narrow Eurocentric sense of the proletariat falls away in the face of the fact that “[r]acial terms mirror the political process by which populations of whole continents were turned into providers of coerced surplus labor.”²³ Capital is bound up in and articulates itself through the coloniality of power. Living labor, the labor of the wretched of the earth, finds itself as the underside of capital.
For this reason, Marxism and decolonization have never been so far apart as we may think today. The two red threads cut deep to the world, revealing the sedimentations of butchered viscera and misery beneath its sleek exterior. But the two have never been identical perspectives, either. Most importantly, Marxism’s historical development into a global movement saw Marxists wrestle with a key problem — the fundamental internal differentiation of the modern world.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the fathers of modern communism, made great miscalculations on this issue during their careers. They considered the establishment of modern, bourgeois nations as a rite of passage for capitalist development.²⁴ The constitution of national systems with national citizenries, a bourgeois-democratic task, went hand in hand with the maturing of capital. As the Marxist Robert Biel argues, they initially considered capital to tend towards a homogenous, flat world-system of more or less identical units of capitalist production.²⁵ In content, nations were emptied of difference, while in form, their national security, territory, and populations became mere means for the coordination of a global capitalist system. The most advanced capitalist countries, such as England, thus offered a model of development which the backwards countries would follow more or less unproblematically. Colonization could serve as a means for this unification of the world into a homogenous, single general capital, preparing the way for global revolution.
However, the pair began to realize the illegitimacy of this analysis in the course of their political activity and study. The national struggle of Ireland in particular moved them to deeper consideration, as over the course of the 19th century the English workers proved to be backwards in direct relation to this colonial relation. Rather than the advanced English workers liberating the backwards Irish colony, it looked like Irish self-emancipation would have to be the spark that would jolt English workers into revolutionary action.²⁶ The differentiation of the world was not immaterial in relation to the articulation of a unified global capitalist system, but essential. Capitalist development did not occur along a single line, but variously. The general capital, or capitalist system as a whole, could only operate on the level of the global system rather than being replicated in miniature within each national unit.²⁷
Colonization was not something which unified the world homogeneously, but unified it in its differentiation itself. Colonization was thus an impediment to development for many countries, in particular India.²⁸ Anti-colonial struggle was not only necessary to break the forces of integration in the metropole of the world order, but for the development of advanced revolutionary consciousness in the peripheries.²⁹ This consciousness could include not only modernization projects, but ‘traditionalism’ — the self-defense of communal forms of life among peasants and indigenous peoples could be revolutionary.³⁰
Despite their later critiques of Eurocentrism, however, Marx and Engels never made a decisive break with it. They still thought of decolonial struggles in relation to the metropole. In other words, they thought from the perspective of Europe.³¹ If Marxism were to become a movement of the global periphery, and therefore a global movement, it would have to make a conscious choice to stand with the decolonial thread in Marx and Engels rather than stretch their mistakes into a barrier of integration, reformism, and complacency.
This struggle, where the One of Marxism threatened to divide into Two, took place across the history of the Second International. Both anti-colonialism and proto-fascist racialism clamored side by side within the organization.³² The outbreak of World War I cleaved the International in two, though the dividing lines had already been drawn. From this crisis in Marxism, a decision had to be made. Among those who opposed defenseism and participation in the slaughter of worker by worker, a new anti-colonialism emerged. With an eye to the colonized of the world, drawn into the war by the metropolitan masters, militant communists began to advocate the alliance of social revolution and decolonization.³³ Most exemplary among these was the Russian Bolshevik Vladimir Lenin.
Lenin, again and again, emphasized the importance of national liberation as a principle. To other communists, he appeared to be manically intransigent on the issue.³⁴ To Lenin, however, the relevance was clear. The capitalist world was differentiated through and through. There could not be an international communism without working through this:
“In real life the International is composed of workers divided into oppressor and oppressed nations. If its action is to be monistic, its propaganda must not be the same for both. That is how we should regard the matter in the light of real (not Dühringian) ‘monism’, Marxist materialism.”³⁵
But even Lenin understood decolonization first and foremost in the terms of national liberation. Like Marx and Engels, he considered these struggles to be “democratic tasks, the tasks of overthrowing foreign oppression.”³⁶ He basically agreed with the orthodox sense of this struggle as necessary to establish a unified capitalist system — though, in his view, this would carry over into the self-destruction of the capitalist system and the emergence of socialism.³⁷ Famously, he expressed his strategy for proletarian revolution in the global periphery, among the “weakest links” of the capitalist system, to act through two modalities — bourgeois-democratic and communist.³⁸ He considered the proletariat to be the most vital force of democratic struggles, as opposed to the vacillating or even complacent bourgeoisie (a position very similar to that of Marx and Engels).³⁹
Yet within this perspective, seeds of complacency lay waiting to be fertilized and bloom. And bloom they did, as early as 1921. In the wake of the 1917 revolution, and the failure of the 1918–1919 German revolution, the Bolsheviks turned to the East for signs of the future. There, they found kin in the Young Turk movement, considering it to be a model for revolution across Asia. In their eyes, the Young Turks were progressive bourgeois revolutionaries, a perfect model for the kind of movement that the revolutionary Russian proletariat needed to ally with against the repression of Europe. But Turkey also had its own indigenous communist movement, as committed to revolution as any. The Bolsheviks advised that they support the Young Turks in bourgeois-democratic tasks and not get ahead of themselves into socialist revolution, thereby sabotaging the necessities of nation-building. They continued to offer this advice after the Turkish state slaughtered communists en masse.⁴⁰ Further, this analysis of the Turkish situation even led the Bolsheviks to look on the genocidaire Enver Pasha as a possible useful ally during the 1920 Baku Congress — despite knowing full well what he had done to Armenians, Greeks, and Assyrians, and, according to Grigory Zinoviev, confronting him with this fact face-to-face.⁴¹ Any notion of Pasha’s usefulness later soured for them when he joined the Basmachi Revolt against Bolshevism rather than aiding the Red Army’s struggle against the rebels, as he had agreed to.⁴²
The furthest limitations of the Old Bolsheviks in decolonization are embodied in the figure of Mirsaid Sultan-Galiev, a Muslim Tatar. Coming from the perspective of a colonized people, Sultan-Galiev considered decolonization to be of prime importance for social revolution. He radicalized Lenin’s evaluation of the European working class, denouncing settler-colonialism and considering the entire metropolitan world to live at the expense of the colonized.⁴³ Sultan-Galiev’s perspective on revolution was almost the exact reverse of Marx and Engels’ — rather than the self-emancipation of the periphery creating an opportunity for the more advanced revolutions of the core, he believed that the stirrings of the core (for example, the German revolution) would create an opportunity for the more advanced revolutions of the periphery.⁴⁴ The wretched of the earth, the underside of the world, held the future in their hands.
Though Lenin was critical of figures like Sultan-Galiev, considering them to tend towards an excessive nationalism, he protected them from other Bolsheviks who acted in hostility towards ‘minority’ nationalism.⁴⁵ Lenin only acted harshly towards ‘minority’ nationalisms where he considered them to be tied to international reaction (for example, the White Army) or to impede the democratic development of a peripheral nation.⁴⁶ The charges of nationalism towards Sultan-Galiev held weight — he called for a unity of Muslims as a single people, and expressed certain pan-Turanist understandings of national liberation.⁴⁷ Yet the other Bolsheviks were not exactly innocent of such mistakes, since they held such great admiration for the Young Turks. After Lenin’s death, the atmosphere in the Soviet Union turned hostile towards ‘minority’ nationalists like Sultan-Galiev, leading to his marginalization and eventual execution.⁴⁸
But Sultan-Galiev’s radicalization of Bolshevism within and against Bolshevism-as-it-was would not be the last of its kind. The revolutionary turn to Asia extended far beyond Central Asia, all the way into the emergent nation of China. Just as in Turkey, many Bolsheviks (in particular Joseph Stalin) considered bourgeois-democratic revolution to be an initial priority, and so supported the Nationalists in their struggle to ‘modernize’ the country against the remnants of ‘feudalism.’⁴⁹ The Communist International told the Communist Party of China to follow suit. The Party did, up until the disastrous 1927 Shanghai Massacre, carried out by the Nationalist dictator Jiang Jieshi against the urban center of the Party. The Massacre proved the bankruptcy of this approach, and conversely empowered that faction of the Party which argued that the social revolution would have to begin in the countryside, which represented the majority of China. Key among the advocates of this thread was the young Mao Zedong.⁵⁰
The global visibility of the Communist Party in its role struggling against Japanese imperialism and its victory in the Chinese Civil War in 1949 brought it to prominence as the first major representative of a ‘Third World Marxism.’ This was a non-European, non-white nation led by militants articulating Marxism, an originally European movement, in indigenous terms — Mao was particularly well-known for his education in both Chinese and Western classics.⁵¹ Though they were not the first to do this — the 1920s had been filled with figures articulating relationships between decolonization and Bolshevism, from Muhammad Iqbal to José Carlos Mariátegui — they were one of the key forces in globalizing what Sultan-Galiev had begun a generation before. Thus, the emergence of Maoism on the global stage can be considered decisive in the genealogy of decolonial communism.
The truth of this is especially evident when one traces the influence of Maoism on contemporary decolonial movements. In continental Africa, Maoism was a core influence for the Tanzania African National Union and its radical expression of ‘African socialism’ in the 1967 Arusha Declaration.⁵² Fausto Reinaga (Quechua Aymara), the father of indianismo, declared his sympathy with Mao-era China as another colored people rebelling against the West — despite his fundamental ideological disagreements.⁵³ Among the ‘minorities’ and indigenous peoples of the world, Maoism was radicalized far beyond the statements of Mao Zedong himself, not unlike what Sultan-Galiev had done to Bolshevism. In North America, Maoism was the discourse which the Black Panther Party (BPP) expressed its Marxist form of Black Power through. The Panthers had greater continuity with local Black radical traditions than with Chinese Maoism, but to them, Maoism represented the bond between them and global decolonization.⁵⁴ The Panthers’ Maoist-inflected interpretation of decolonial communism spread to the far reaches of the earth, influencing decolonial movements in Canada, South Africa, Palestine, New Zealand, and Australia.⁵⁵ Black radical traditions had long been a key model for decolonial movements worldwide, and Pantherism was the newest iteration of that influence. The indigenization, in settler-colonial contexts, of Pantherism — and Maoism more broadly — heavily influenced the development of modern decolonial critique. Even within the United States itself, the radical faction of Indigenous sovereignty represented by the American Indian Movement (AIM) was influenced foundationally by Pantherism.⁵⁶
The historical moment represented by Pantherism is still a major expanse of the ground which modern communism and decolonization stand on. Contemporary decolonization thus cannot be thought of separately from communism, and vice versa. But this does not mean that the relationship between the two is now simple and straightforward, only needing to be cleared up by wiping away a thin veil of illusion. Rather, decolonization is not homogeneous, nor is communism — especially not in an age when the international movement has been fractured. There is a reason that the 1979 Iranian Revolution gave such a jolt to so many radicals. This was a primarily urban revolution, with a significant role played by proletarians, which was dominated not by communists, but by Shia radicals.⁵⁷ The Shia faction, led by Ruhollah Khomeini, purged the communists in the same moment that it declared itself as a force of decolonization intransigently opposed to Eurocentrism.⁵⁸ The Revolution blasted through the gap between communism and the newer generations of decolonization. In fact, during the 1979–1981 hostage crisis, the revolutionaries released African-American hostages, claiming sympathy with their oppression by American white supremacy.⁵⁹
The 1979 Revolution was not merely empty rhetoric. It was genuinely a decolonial project, and that is exactly the problem for formulating any kind of decolonial communism in the present era. We cannot think of the two as simply identical, because We find ourselves looking up at the thread of coloniality which communism must confront and the thread of conservatism which decoloniality must confront. I consider decolonization and communism to contain the truth of each other, but to discover this truth within each requires laborious struggle. We cannot constitute decolonial communism without working through the histories and presents of communism and decolonization. Only by doing this can we become a new generation, and rebirth the historical Communist Party on solid ground.
Others have already expressed this need. I claim only to offer sketches with my eyes towards the horizon. The re-emergence of the Communist Party demands committed struggle and the development of a strongly emancipatory political culture. We cannot consider this to be a linear step from point A to B, because to do so would impede our travels along the path to the communist horizon. In order to realize a free society, where all are kin, we must learn to free the world around us, and thus to free ourselves. We can only do this through a community of life, and we can only establish a community of life by consciously struggling against the marks of capital and coloniality around and within ourselves. Now is the time to pick the pieces of Our body up, constitute Ourself together in a sturdier shape, and begin once again walking towards the horizon. But we can only do so if we know where We have come from, where We are, and where We must travel.
