Editor's Note: The following is the edited text of a recent talk by Bob Avakian, Chairman of the Revolutionary Communist Party. This talk was given to a group of supporters of the RCP who are studying the historical experience of socialism and the dictatorship of the proletariat, and preparing to take up the challenge of popularizing this experience and engaging in discussion and debate with others about it, particularly on campuses but also more broadly.
I am going to talk for a while -- I don't know how long, but usually the smart money bets that it'll be a little while. [laughter] And then we can have some questions and discussion. So I'm very excited about all this.
As you know, the title of this talk is "Dictatorship and Democracy, and the Socialist Transition to Communism," but before getting more directly into questions relating to that, I want to talk about the importance of working with ideas, and the struggle in the realm of ideas. Many of you have probably read the article on this subject which was printed in the RW a while ago now by Ardea Skybreak, titled "Working with Ideas." And the article stresses the importance of actually getting deeply into this realm in its own right, really wrangling with ideas, and having an open mind about what you're dealing with, and then ultimately taking your ideas into the real world, into the realm of practice and testing them out there.
This is a very important approach generally for people in the sciences, or people generally who work in the realm of ideas. And it is something that people who seek to apply the outlook and methodology of communism should be the very best at. But that takes work. It isn't an automatic thing. Just because you take up the most scientific, the most comprehensive and systematic world outlook and method doesn't mean that you are therefore automatically good at working with ideas, or that you automatically arrive at the truth about something. And conversely, as we have also emphasized, there are people who not only don't apply this outlook and method, but who disagree with it -- or even detest it -- who nevertheless discover important truths. And understanding that is also a very important part of really grasping and applying the world outlook and methodology of communism. That's the contradictory nature of it.
So working with ideas is a struggle in its own right. It's something that has to be gone into deeply in its own right, while of course ultimately it can't be divorced from the real world, from the world of practice, from people struggling to change the world, and from the masses of people in all the different endeavors and spheres of life that they engage in. But even while we keep that in mind and remain firmly grounded in that as a basic point of understanding and orientation, it's nonetheless crucial to recognize that in any sphere, if you are really going to learn about it and make changes in that sphere, you have to immerse yourself deeply in it, you have to engage other people who are also working in that sphere, and you have to take their ideas seriously.
One time someone wrote me a letter and asked: how do you read things, do you do what's called "proof-texting"? -- which is a way of reading to refute something. Do you read it in order to make your point? What he was referring to was the approach of only looking for things that confirm what you already believe; for example, you start out with a disagreement with somebody and in reading what they write you look for those things that you don't agree with, things that prove your point, and then sort of tautologically you go around in a circle. You end up with: "Aha, it's wrong." And I replied, no I don't approach things that way. Even things I vehemently disagree with, going in, I still try to look to see what there is that they are grappling with, what ideas they may hit on even inadvertently or may stumble on, or may actually wrangle with more systematically. There are things to be learned even from reactionaries. There are things to learn from reactionaries, even about politics and ideology, let alone other spheres. That doesn't mean we take up their outlook or their politics. [laughs] But there are things to be learned. And this is an important point of orientation.
Now, I'm stressing this because, on the one hand, we know that the backbone of the revolution will be the masses of exploited and oppressed proletarians; but there is a great importance to winning people, and to bringing forward people broadly, from among other strata. And in particular there is an importance to bringing forward people from among the intelligentsia -- winning them to sympathy and support for our project and our vision of a radically different world, a communist world. We need to increasingly win as many of them as possible to become revolutionary communist intellectuals, actively partisan to our cause, and more than that, to become part of the vanguard. There can never be a communist revolution without this.
And there is a real question that comes up and is often raised: Can you actually work with ideas in a critical and creative way and be a member of a vanguard communist party? Or can you really do creative work in the arts or sciences and be a member of such a party? Many people answer this by adamantly saying no -- that, by definition, a party that is disciplined, that applies democratic centralism, that has a strong central core of leadership, and in some cases has a very strong individual leader, by definition will stifle the initiative of other people, will prevent them from really thinking creatively and critically, and will prevent them from bringing forward anything new; that by the dint and weight of the discipline and "bureaucracy" of such an organization, it's bound to crush and suffocate any kind of creative and critical impulse.
Well [laughs] this is a real question, and it doesn't have an easy answer. I do believe that fundamentally the answer is and must be resoundingly yes, this can be done. But again, it's not easy, and it's not simple and we haven't entirely solved this problem in the history of the international communist movement. There is much more to be learned, critically summed up and brought forward, that is new in this regard. There is important experience of the international communist movement and socialist society and the dictatorship of the proletariat, very real positive experience in this sphere, but also considerable negative experience, which again, needs to be critically examined and deeply and all-sidedly summed up. And, frankly, we need to learn how to do a lot better.
For example, I have spoken a number of times in various writings and talks about the Lysenko experience in the Soviet Union. Lysenko was an agronomist, a botanist, who claimed to have brought forward new strains of wheat that would make production leap ahead in agriculture. And this was a real problem in the Soviet Union, that agriculture was seriously lagging industry. And, of course, if that gap continues to widen it throws the whole economy out of whack and basically unhinges your attempts to build a socialist economy. So this was a very severe problem they were facing, particularly in the early and mid 1930s. And Lysenko basically brought forward a theory which contradicted basic principles of evolution and fell into the whole idea of the inheritability of acquired characteristics and so on, which is not scientifically correct. But pragmatically it seemed like a way to solve the agricultural problems, so Stalin and others threw a lot of weight behind Lysenko. And this did a lot of damage. Not only in the short run and in a more narrow sense -- it didn't lead to the results that they were hoping for -- but it also did a lot of damage in the broader sense in terms of how people were being trained to think, and how they were being trained to handle the relationship between theory and practice, and reality and understanding and transforming reality. There's a way in which this has had long-term negative consequences. First of all, it did in the Soviet Union. And it did in the international communist movement, because it trained people to think in a certain erroneous way.
Now, this situation was very complicated, because many of the people who were the experts and authorities in the field of biology, botany, and so on in the Soviet Union were carried forward from the old society. And many of them were political and ideological reactionaries. So here you see the contradiction is very acutely posed. Lysenko was trying to make a breakthrough to advance the socialist cause, and being opposed by authorities, many of whom -- not all, but many of whom -- were political and ideological reactionaries. But it just so happened that they were more correct than him about the basic point at issue. Yet political expediency dictated what was done there, and the people who were critical were actually suppressed.
So you can see the complexity of the problem. And it's not so easy to handle. These are real life and death questions. Whether people eat is a life and death question. That's what was at issue, was whether people eat, whether they have clothes in the winter. And the Russian winter is worse than Chicago, okay?
When you have a socialist economy you are not relying on the imperialists any more. And you are not relying on exploiting the masses of people. So you are trying to bring forward new forms, new relations in which to carry out production, and "it's all on you" -- it's all on us, it's on the proletariat, it's on its vanguard, it's on the masses of people. How do you solve these problems?
Well, Lysenko was trying to solve this problem, but the method he came up with wasn't correct. But what was worse, was that he was supported out of instrumentalist thinking. In other words, you make your ideas an instrument of your desires or aims. You want something to happen, so you "reconstruct reality" so it falls in line with what you want. You make reality an instrument of predetermined aims, rather than proceeding from what reality actually is, and then figuring out how to transform it on the basis of what it actually is and how it's actually moving and changing and developing, which reality always is. So this is a fundamental question of outlook and methodology.
And, beyond this particular experience of Lysenko, there is overall a real contradiction and real tension that objectively exists between the line and discipline of a party at any given time, and creative, critical thinking and work in the realm of ideas broadly speaking. There is a real, objective tension. The Party is trying to mobilize its own ranks and the masses to change reality. It has to make its best estimate of what the key aspects of reality are at any given time, and how to go about mobilizing people to change them. Which means by definition that there are many things that it can't pay attention to at any given time. And we have to resist the tendency to "know-it-all-ism." Communists are people who by definition have strong convictions [laughs]. So, there's nothing that goes on that communists don't have an opinion about. [laughter] But it is very important to know the difference between your opinion and what's well established, scientific fact, that has been determined and established from many different directions through a whole process to be the best approximation you can make of reality at a given time. You go into a movie, you have an opinion coming out. But your opinion is just that. And it's very important, especially for communists, and especially for leaders of a communist movement and a communist party, to know the difference between their impressions and opinions and what is scientifically grounded fact that is established through many different pathways, has been deeply and all-sidedly confirmed to be true.
So this is another contradiction we have to deal with. You are trying to change reality, and you are trying to grasp reality in its changingness, so to speak -- because it doesn't stand still and wait for you to understand it, it's moving, changing --and you are trying to mobilize people to grasp and to change reality. And you have to all pull together to do that. In a real vanguard party you can't have people all going off in different directions, all implementing their own lines, and still mobilize masses of people to change reality. But by definition when you do that -- when you all pull together to mobilize masses of people -- there is a danger and a tendency to impose thinking from the top. It would be simple if it were just a bureaucratic problem, but there is a necessity to mobilize people behind what you understand to be true, and that does require leadership and, many times, mobilizing people "from the top."
How do you handle that contradiction -- between mobilizing people around what you understand to be true, while at the same time having a critical attitude and being open to the understanding that you may not be right about this or that particular, or even about big questions? That's a very difficult contradiction to handle correctly. It's something we have to sum up and learn how to do better on as well. And it's not easy. But we do have to do better.
The essence of the problem is not, as people sometimes say, learning to think for yourself. In something I wrote a number of years ago, I pointed out that, on the one hand, this is kind of a truism, thinking for yourself. It's impossible to think with anybody else's brain. [laughter] So, in one way or another you are always thinking for yourself. You are always using your own mind to think. The question more essentially is, are you thinking according to one outlook and methodology or another. That's the fundamental question that's involved. It's not "free thinking" in the abstract, or as some principle raised above everything else, but thinking in accordance with and by applying the outlook and methodology of communism in order to arrive, in the most comprehensive and systematic way, at an understanding of reality. Not all of reality -- that's never possible -- but the essential things that you can identify at a given time that you need to deeply go into, understand and transform, while having an open mind about both those things you're not paying attention to, and even those things you are. And you have to do this even while you are moving forward to change these things.
So the essence is not free thinking, but what outlook and methodology you are thinking with. But there is an element of free thinking that has to be involved. And this should certainly be no less true for communists than for other people. It should be more true. And that's where you do run into contradiction and tension. Because free thinking in a communist party -- a disciplined, democratic centralist party -- doesn't come automatically and spontaneously either. Or if it does, it often goes off in directions that are harmful. How to get that right, how to handle that contradiction correctly, is something we need to do more work on.
All that I have been speaking to so far has a lot to do with a principle that Mao emphasized -- that Marxism embraces but does not replace all these different spheres of society and human endeavor. Each of them has their own, as Mao put it, particularity of contradiction. Each of them has its own particular features. Each of them has things that have to be dug into deeply and wrestled with and wrangled with in an all-sided and deep-going way. That was the point of that Ardea Skybreak article. And whether it's music, or physics, or biology, or any sphere that you can think of, there are particularities to these things that people who are in these fields are grappling with all the time.
In the history of the Chinese revolution, and in particular through the Cultural Revolution, they brought forward the principle of red and expert, with red leading expert. In other words, the communists and communist line should lead experts in various fields. Which is an important principle because otherwise other ideologies are in command, and they are leading away from the ability to actually synthesize correctly all that people are engaging and learning about, even to arrive most deeply at the truth about a particular sphere.
So this is an important principle -- combining red and expert, and red leading expert -- but if you are going to lead in a sphere, the first thing you have to do is be good at learning. And you have to be good at drawing forward those people who are in that field who are also advanced ideologically and politically. People like that are a very important lever and link. Now, as Mao said, if you go to the opera -- which is a popular form in China -- if you go to the opera long enough you can become an expert, even if you can't sing or compose at all. But to be able to comprehensively understand something requires really being immersed in it.
This relates to one of the big divisions in society that we have: the "mental/manual contradiction," as we call it for short. Masses of people are locked out not only of particular fields of knowledge, but are locked out of the chance to grapple with the whole sphere of working with ideas. Now, there are exceptions. Everybody knows exceptions. People who go to prison, in the most horrific conditions, who become very developed intellectuals. Some of them become revolutionary intellectuals and even communists. But those are the exceptions, because the conditions are working overwhelmingly against that. Just think about the masses of people and the conditions that people have to work in and the conditions that kids grow up in. Where do they develop the ability to work with ideas? It's suffocated out of them, it's squeezed out of them, from a very early age.
This is one of the big contradictions that we have to overcome through the whole transition to communism. Because, as long as this contradiction exists, there is always the basis for it to turn into a relationship of oppression and exploitation. To run a society, you have to work with ideas, you have to think. There's no way around it. You can't just do it by taking revenge on the people who used to rule it. That may bring very momentary satisfaction for some. But it's not what this is about, and it doesn't lead to the kind of transformations we need. You have to think. You have to work with ideas. But on the other hand, you have to do it without reinforcing, and in fact overcoming, this great divide, between a small number of people, relatively speaking, in the world who have been able to really get into this whole sphere of "working with ideas," and on the other hand the masses of people who have been essentially locked out of this.
Remember that movie Contact, I think it was called. It was based on the Carl Sagan thing about contact with people from outer space, and Jodie Foster was in it. And there is this character played by Matthew McConaughey who at one point says to her, basically: "What makes you such a smart-ass? 95% of the people of the world believe in religion. And you don't. What makes you think you know something that they don't?" Well that's the contradiction. Because, the "5%" of the people (it's actually more than that) who don't believe in religion are right. But the masses of people don't have the ability to come to the conclusions that this minority of people has come to, because the masses are not only locked out of certain knowledge, they're locked out of learning how to work with ideas and wrangle in this whole realm.
So this is one of the big things we have to overcome, and we can't do it by crude methods. We have to do it by applying some of the principles that Mao emphasized, including the principle of "embraces but does not replace." We have to do it by learning how to work with and learn from and synthesize what people in these spheres are bringing forward, and then win them over, particularly the advanced, to that synthesis, and unite with them to win and influence the broader ranks of people, while continuing to learn from them.
This is one of those tricky things. There is a lot of resentment among masses against the intellectuals. In China, for example, the Mandarins, the people who were the educated classes, really lorded it over the masses of people. They grew long fingernails just to make the point that they didn't have to do manual labor. This was a sign of distinction. "I'm not in that class. You carry my luggage. I don't do that kind of thing." Well, in this society you don't have that. But you do have great gaps. And there is, on the one hand looking down on people, and on the other hand a lot of resentment. And we have to overcome that from both sides. People have to understand the role and the importance of theory and working with ideas. We have to bring forward those among the masses who have more ability to do that at any given time, not because they are superior to the others, but just because through a lot of accident and particular circumstances they've been able to develop some ability to do that. And we have to use them as levers and links -- I don't mean use them in a narrow, utilitarian sense of using people -- I mean unleash them to be levers and links to bring forward broader masses of people.
When people come forward from among the masses who develop the ability to work with ideas and to take up theory, it's important that they work in that sphere in its own right on the one hand, but also that they be a lever and link to broader masses of people, to help break some of this down for the masses of people and show them that it's not a mystery, and help them begin to take up some of these questions themselves.
And that's not easy. We've had experience which has driven home that it is not so easy. We used to think, when we first started out, well you bring forward people who come from among the masses, and naturally they will be able to go talk to other people about all these questions. But there's another leap involved there. You are not the same as you were. You are not the same anymore and you are not the same as the other masses, and they don't see things the way you do. So it's not so easy. It requires leadership and work to take another leap to where you really grasp it deeply enough that you can break it back down to people and open the door to them to begin to grapple with these ideas.
We won't be able to do this on a massive scale until we have state power. This mental/manual division cannot be broken down in this society, but we can make advances toward it. And we should never accept it in principle, or bow down to it in any kind of strategic sense. But it's another reason why we need revolution. We cannot overcome this within the confines of this society. This society will continue to reinforce these divisions, even as we are working against them. All of this has to be part of a revolutionary movement to overthrow this system and to bring into being anew society where then we can really go after these contradictions and overcome them in the correct way. Not in a narrow philistine way, where we denigrate and downgrade and look down upon work in the realm of ideas, but where we appreciate it fully and yet bring the masses into it fully in the correct way. It's a very complex and arduous, long-term struggle to achieve that. And it's one of the most important aspects of advancing ultimately to communism.
So that's by way of background to the main points I want to get into.
And I want to say that, in light of all this, it is crucial that we ourselves develop and deepen our own grasp of first of all the importance of working with ideas and the struggle in this whole realm, and of the correct orientation and method for approaching work in relation to this, which has to do with for whom and for what this is all for, and has to do with what outlook and methodology you bring in working and struggling in the realm of ideas.
Now, certainly not the only, but one of the most important focuses of this at this time is the struggle to confront and combat the constant attacks on the experience of socialist countries, and in particular of the dictatorship of the proletariat, and especially the whole concept of totalitarianism; and at the same time, while doing that, to confront and critically examine the actual experience of socialist countries and the dictatorship of the proletariat, drawing the fullest lessons from this experience -- mainly and overwhelmingly the positive lessons, but also facing squarely and digging deeply into the very real shortcomings and errors.
I was reading an interesting comment from someone -- it was actually someone in the international movement -- and they made the point, "I uphold very firmly the experience of the socialist revolution so far, but I don't want to live in those countries" [laughter]. In other words, we have a lot of work to do, to do better the next time around. That's a very dialectical attitude. And a materialist attitude: we should uphold these things historically, there are great achievements; but we also have to build on it and go farther and do better in certain areas, or else people won't want to live in these societies -- and probably we won't either.
So we do have to confront and combat these attacks, while at the same time squarely confronting and digging deeply into the very real shortcomings and errors. There is a real and very urgent and pressing need to refute the attacks on socialism and the dictatorship of the proletariat, in a thoroughgoing, deep and living way -- not a dogmatic way or stereotypical way. This is a crucial focus of the class struggle right now in the ideological realm. And how well we carry out this struggle has profound implications for work that's guided and inspired by the strategic objectives of revolution, socialism, and ultimately a communist world.
This applies broadly, and it has important application among the proletariat and basic masses. First of all, it's a real mistake to think that these questions don't find their way among the masses. You know, the people have heard this, they've heard that. It doesn't mean they've read long dissertations or analyses, but they've heard this and they've heard that, and it has seeped down into the popular consciousness, and it's pumped at them all the time in various ways. These summations that are blared out, and sometimes elaborated on in intellectual theses, are also very simply boiled down and blasted at the masses all the time. Plus, they have some real questions that they come up against when thinking about whether the world could be different. There is not just propaganda from the bourgeoisie that raises questions in their mind, but real contradictions in life that they are wrangling with and legitimately want answers to. And we have to not only give them answers, but again, we have to draw them into the process of finding the answers. But there is work to be done by people who do have a more advanced understanding and a developed ability, or developing ability, to work with ideas, to grapple in this realm.
There is importance to combating these attacks on communism and to digging into these questions deeply among the proletariat, among the basic masses of people in society. But there also is particular and particularly important application of this in relation to the intelligentsia. And this goes back to what I was saying at the beginning.
So let's dig into some of the key questions bound up with this.
First, I want to refer to a short statement -- actually it was three previously unpublished sentences on democracy that are part of some unpublished correspondence from me which was then recently published in the RW. I don't have it before me, but I think I can remember the essence of it. First, the point was made that in a world marked by profound class divisions and social inequalities, to talk about "democracy" -- without talking about the class content of democracy and whom this democracy serves -- is meaningless at best, meaningless, or worse. Second, in a society that is divided in this way, with profound relations of exploitation and oppression, there cannot be any such thing as "democracy for all," or "pure democracy": there will always be the rule of one class or another, and whichever class rules will not only enforce that rule, but will apply, uphold and promote whatever kind of democracy serves its rule and its interests. And given this, the third point is that the essential question is: which class rules and in what way, and whether its rule serves to maintain and foster relations, deep-going relations of exploitation and oppression, or whether it serves the struggle to uproot and eventually completely abolish these relations.
Now, the first question that arises in relation to this -- and these are things that, in the popular culture and so on, are commonly misrepresented and distorted, so it's important to speak directly to them -- the question is: What is democracy? Well "cracy" refers to a form of rule and "demos" is the people. So it technically means rule by the people. And if we look at history from Greek society up to the present time, democracy has basically been applied among the ranks of the people who actually ruled. There may have been, as there are in this society, formal procedures and structures which seem to apply certain aspects of this democracy to the population in general. But, in essence, the democracy that has been applied -- the right to rule the society, and the right to really be involved in determining the direction of society -- belongs essentially to the ranks of the ruling class and those who serve it.
That was true in ancient Greece and Rome, for example, as I pointed out in the book Democracy: Can't We Do Better Than That?These were societies founded on slavery. Most of the people -- when they refer to democracy, most of the people were excluded from this democracy. They were slaves or they were non-citizens, and they didn't have any part to play in the determination of the direction of society. And that's still true in modern bourgeois-democratic society, where in reality the political decision-making process is removed from and stands over the masses of people, and their role is reduced to a charade of a kind, in which at most they are allowed to play a secondary role in relation to struggles within the ranks of the elite ruling classes in society.
We have seen illustrations of this in recent times, for example, with the selection of the Democratic Party nominee. This is written about in the RW , both in articles on Kerry himself, but also in the examination of what happened to Howard Dean (laughs] -- which is an interesting experience to sum up. We did it in one important article in the RW , but we need to keep going into this more deeply and from different angles.
What did happen to Dean? Here's a guy who came forward and made some noises -- he did two things -- he made some noises about opposing the whole Bush direction, and he said I'm going to go raise some funds a different way, I'm going to go on the internet and get a bunch of people all to pledge $100 instead of a small number to pledge $100,000 or a million dollars.
Of course, he represented the same system. If you examined his positions, as we did in the RW , you'll see that he represented the same system. But these particular things he did were not even what the party bosses, if you want to put it that way, the real determining figures in the Democratic Party, wanted in terms of running against the Bush crew. So, all of a sudden -- Dean is the front runner and all of a sudden we come to the Iowa caucuses, which are really just meetings of Democratic Party hacks, and they vote for Kerry, put Kerry in first place and Dean's down. And all of a sudden the entire media is proclaiming that Dean is finished, and Kerry is the virtual nominee already. Dean got up and gave a speech, and he was a little too "glowing," or whatever. They just blasted it all over. He might have been up for 24 hours or whatever.
But look, you can take a Bush speech and really go to town with it. Even David Letterman had a 40 second segment where he had Bush saying "uh" every third word. The media, if they so wished, could just take that and run with it, and by the time they were through, Bush would look like -- you know -- what he is . But they have no interest in doing that. It is the same class of people who run the media who generally run this society, and who generally are the ones to whom the political representatives are beholden, without getting mechanical about that and thinking they just pay them money. There are a lot of dynamics involved. These people, the politicians, do have their own interests, they do have their own programs, they even have their own philosophies and views of the world, and they fight for them. So it's not as simple as some committee of the ruling class sits down and decides this one or that will be the nominee, and gives them more money while others get less money. That's an element of what goes on. Different people giving money to both parties, or more to one or another, depending on what they like. But there is a lot of dynamics and tension and struggle. It's a very living process. When we use the term "the ruling class" it's a real term, it has real meaning, but it's full of contradiction. It refers to something real, it's a real phenomenon. But it's a phenomenon that is full of contradiction and struggle. We shouldn't oversimplify it.
But the fact is, there was a consensus among the people who own the media that they didn't want Dean, and that the Democratic Party leaders didn't want Dean as the candidate. It wasn't that he really had a program that would be fundamentally opposed to what they wanted to do, or that they couldn't bring him into the fold. But some of what was being unleashed around this was not what they wanted. And they didn't want a candidacy that ran on the idea that Bush is fucking up America. The debate had to be on different terms than that. And we can see how Kerry is conducting it: "I can do better in the war on terrorism." "We need more troops in Iraq." "Yes, I voted for that war in Iraq, but in any case, maybe I have some criticisms, we should have done it more multilaterally -- but now that we are there.." And it is a good question to ask a lot of people: Why does John Kerry say: "Now that we're there, we can't pull out, we have to have more troops"? It's a good question to ponder and to ask people. Why is that? What does that reflect about what interests he's serving?
What would happen if the U.S. actually pulled out of Iraq? Well, it's true there would be a lot of chaos in that part of the world, and a lot of people who hate the U.S. coming from all kinds of directions, including the reactionary religious fundamentalists, but others as well, would take heart from that and jump out more and do more things. So, if you are someone who thinks that this system has got to be maintained and fortified at whatever cost, even if you think there are certain things about it that should be improved, then there is a certain logic that says, "Well, once we are in there, we have to stay the course." We heard this all the time about Vietnam, too: "We can't get out of Vietnam because there is a credibility question." Well, what is the credibility question? You know, it's just the godfather principle. You are ruling over people by force. Recently I was reading in the newspaper the text of one of the leaflets the U.S. military dropped over Falluja in Iraq recently. It was just a straight gangster leaflet: We're coming to pulverize you, you had better give up now. It wasn't any appeal to any lofty thing, let me tell you. Just straight-up on-the-ground gangsterism. We're coming, we are going to pulverize you, and those of you who are determined to oppose us, your last day was yesterday. All that kind of shit.
But if you accept the logic of this system, as Kerry does, as the Democratic Party does, then you have to go along with this, because the credibility of the U.S. will be hurt if it pulls out of Iraq. More people will do more things to oppose it. And so, when you come to this question of what should we do now that "we" are in Iraq -- maybe "we" didn't go into Iraq the right way, or maybe "we" shouldn't have even gone in at all, but what position you take about the fact that "we" are in there now has everything to do with how you look at the whole nature of this system, and whether you think it ought to maintain its credibility and ought to be fortified, or whether you understand that it's an oppressive system that lives by eating the flesh of people all over the world, literally. Using up and destroying people. Either employing them in these most horrendous conditions that are almost unimaginable. Little children working 12 hours a day, sleeping under machines in Turkey or Iran or in Latin America, or many other places you can name. Or else they are just cast onto the garbage heap as far as the imperialists are concerned. They can't even be profitably exploited, so they are cast off and allowed and encouraged to slaughter each other, whether it's in the ghettos and barrios of the U.S. or Rwanda or other places.
If you understand that, then the idea that we ought to maintain the credibility of this system and the force that's behind that credibility, looks very different to you. But if you basically think this system should be doing what it's doing around the world, even if there should be some adjustments and minor reforms and tweaking and tinkering, then you have a very different outlook on it. And if you think you want to run this system, or be the chief executive of it, then you definitely have a certain view that's very different than that of the masses of people. You have very different interests, shall we say. Sometimes the masses' views are shaped and influenced by the ruling class. That happens to a significant degree. But the interests of the masses of people do not lie in working small children to death in factories all over the world, or uprooting peasants from the countryside in their tens of millions every year and casting them into shantytown slums ringing the cities. The interests of the masses of people don't lie in bludgeoning and pulverizing people who don't want to go along with that, or have a different idea about how the world ought to be and could be.
So, we can see that, in terms of the question of democracy and the "democratic process," in particular the electoral process, as is pointed out in the book Democracy: Can't We Do Better Than That?,",by the time it gets to you, the voter, the citizen, even if you are allowed to vote and take part in some way in this struggle within the ranks of the ruling class, the terms have already been set. The candidates have been chosen by somebody else, and what issues and debates are "legitimate" issues and debates has already been determined. And then you come in -- and you get to play around in that. You get to have the illusion that, by so doing, you are determining something essential about the direction of this society, when really all of the choices have been predetermined, any choice that you get to be involved in has already been shaped and predetermined by the ruling class and by the workings of the system even more fundamentally.
It's a game they like to play. They like to get people thinking that they have a stake in this. You hear people talking, ordinary people, masses of people: "We ought to do this and that." What the fuck are you talking about? [laughter] We aren't doing shit. Somebody told me about how they were working among some Black people who were talking about,"We got to do this and that in Iraq." I told him, why don't you go say: "What do you mean we,white man?" That was an old joke back in the days of the '60s. The Lone Ranger and Tonto were surrounded by Indians, they were in a really bad way, and the Lone Ranger turns to Tonto and says, "Man, we're in a lot of trouble, what are we going to do, Tonto?" And Tonto says: "What do you mean `we,' white man?" [laughter] Not applying this in just nationalistic terms, but in terms of fundamental divisions in society, "we" aren't deciding these things, and these aren't "our" interests being decided here. What we ought to do in Iraq is force the U.S. to get the fuck out. That's what we ought to do. But we are not deciding what the U.S. imperialists are doing in Iraq. They are deciding that. But they not only like to make you think that you have a choice by voting, but also to get you in a mentality like you are sitting in a seat of power, like you are really deciding and determining things when you vote. You're not sitting in a seat of power -- they're sitting in the seats of power -- but they love it for you to think like they do. And to even play act as if you somehow are sitting there making these decisions. "We ought to do." Bullshit! "We" ought to do something radically different, is what "we" ought to do.
And this has to do with the nature of this democracy. This democracy is in effect a dictatorship, in essence a dictatorship. And that's another concept we have to clear up. Because dictatorship -- you think of how Khrushchev got up in the U.N., and, in a statement that has been completely misrepresented and distorted, said: "We will bury you" -- and banged his shoe on the podium at the U.N. This was back in the '50s. And that was the classic image. Or you know, like Charlie Chaplin -- it was a good movie, making a good point about Hitler-- but he is dancing around with the globe in that movie. "Modern Times" is that the movie? [Response: Great Dictator]. "The Great Dictator," that's right. He was dancing around with this globe. That's the image you have of a dictator -- or this sort of dark, obscure figure, the tyrant who is demented, and in his dementia just arbitrarily decides to murder millions of people.
You can point to certain superficial aspects like that, but even if you are talking about a Hitler, that is not the essence of what was going on. Hitler was an extreme representative of German imperialism, in extreme conditions, and was acting fundamentally to try to strengthen the position of German imperialism in the world, ultimately unsuccessfully. That didn't mean he didn't have a particular ideology that was different than most of the rest of the German ruling class, and that he didn't take particular extreme measures that do stand out in history, like the mass genocide against the Jews. Those are real things. They are not just "normal workings of imperialism", although its normal workings are plenty horrendous, and millions of people are killed every year, tens of millions, by the normal workings of imperialism. This is imperialism carried to an extreme, and to grotesque forms. But it is still the same fundamental system. It's not just one guy acting out of his dementia. Actually Hitler was rather clever, in coming to power and in seeking to carry out his aims. Maybe there was an element in which he was demented, but that's not the essence of the matter, and dictatorship is not a matter of somebody getting up and pounding his shoe on a podium in the U.N., or just being demented.
Actually, just as an aside, the reason I said that whole thing with Khrushchev was distorted is that it was always presented in the media in America as if Khrushchev were threatening a military attack on the U.S. What this was actually part of was his revisionist program where he started promoting what were called the "three peacefuls": peaceful coexistence between capitalist and imperialist states; peaceful competition between socialism and capitalism; and the illusion (which the other two were as well) of peaceful transition to socialism.
Khrushchev was promoting the line that, "We will prove the superiority of socialism just by producing more consumer goods and having more production in general." That was the irony. When he got up and said, "We will bury you," that was what he was actually saying. But, of course, in the U.S. propaganda machinery it got converted into the notion that he was threatening a military attack on the U.S.
But whatever the particulars of that, returning to the more general point, that is not what a dictatorship is -- banging your shoe, or one-man rule, or the idea of an infallible leader, or so on and so forth. Dictatorship in its essence is the rule over society by one group and in particular one class. It means that that class has a monopoly, not only over the economics of this society -- not only over the economic base of society, in Marxist terms -- but also over the superstructure that arises on the basis of that economic base. In other words, the politics, the ideology and the culture. It has a monopoly in particular of political power, and most especially, and in a most concentrated way, it has a monopoly of armed force -- and specifically, a monopoly of "legitimate" armed force.
In other words, if you look at this society -- and I'm not advocating this, I'm just giving an example -- if someone were to go out and take a gun and shoot a cop on the basis that the cop is brutalizing somebody, they would be up for murder. There is no question about it. But time after time after time, when the police murder someone, even if there are many, many witnesses, and there is no doubt about what happened, first of all there is almost never an instance where the cop is arrested and charged in the first place. But if that is forced by mass outrage and mass upsurge, it is almost always the case that they end up being vindicated on the basis of "justifiable homicide." Why? Because the police, along with the armed forces, represent the monopoly of armed force of the ruling class, whose interests they serve and protect -- and in particular, a monopoly of "legitimate" armed force.
Their violence and force, which is carried out every day, sometimes in the most brutal and grotesque ways, is legitimated by the whole workings of society and by the political power and by all the educational system and all the ways in which people are indoctrinated and trained to look at the world in a certain way. That's "legitimate." That's "justifiable" violence, "justifiable homicide." Whereas, any violence that is not carried out by the state, or at least not carried out in the interests of the ruling class, is by definition, and by the force of all the propaganda and the functioning of all of the machinery of society, illegitimate violence, "non-justifiable."
That is a reflection of rule over society which is in fact a dictatorship. You don't have to have a single leader who is promoted as an infallible person. It's rule by a class . It may be disguised. In the case of the kind of society we live in, it is valuable, often, to disguise this. But nonetheless, if you examine it concretely, and really dig into it, you will see that the political power is monopolized by the same class of people who dominate the economy, who monopolize the economy, who are the ones that have the great share not only of income, but of wealth in property and wealth in means of production, who own factories, who own banks, who own insurance companies. The people who dominate those things also dominate the political process and the political power -- and, in a concentrated way, armed force that is exercised to maintain a certain form and function of society. It is exercised ultimately in their interests. And if it isn't, they'll move to get rid of the people who are exercising political authority, and get other people who will do that.
It is impossible to go into such a system and do anything but end up serving it. You cannot change the way in which the underlying economic system functions, and you cannot change the way in which the political institutions and structures function in accordance with that underlying functioning of the economy. If you tried to do that, you would bring total chaos to society.
Just think about it. Suppose you passed a law that people had a right to eat regardless of whether they had a job or not [laughter], and you just said to people: "You have a right to eat. If you cannot get food by earning an income, then go take it." [laughter] Well, if you stand back it makes perfect sense that people should have a right to eat. If the fucking system can't give them a job, why should they suffer for that. But you can't implement that principle. They can do certain things -- welfare and unemployment insurance -- but you cannot implement the principle, you cannot operate on the principle in this society that people have a right to eat regardless.
So if you try to do things in the superstructure of politics and ideology that run counter in a fundamental way to the economic base and functioning of the economy, you will create chaos. And if you try to do that, the workings of the system will bury you, if they don't win you over immediately. This has happened time and time again. It's more fundamental than that "you have to go along to get along" when you get into the political structure. That is true. You go into Congress, it's all set up with committees and everything. If you want to get anything done you have to make compromises. That's all true. But more fundamental is that there is a way this system works, and if you don't act in accordance with that, you will be chewed up and spit out by that system. Or else you will learn to go along with it very quickly.
So this is in essence a dictatorship. It's a dictatorship, and the political rule reflects and serves the underlying functioning and relations of the economy. And this is a very important point to understand. I think it was in the book Phony Communism Is Dead, Long Live Real Communism that I made the point that there is no such thing as an economy in the abstract, or just people working to make an economy go. Any economy is made up of a system of relations of production that reflect one kind of process of accumulation -- one kind of production and accumulation of wealth -- or another. Look at this society. People enter into very definite relations of production. They don't get to choose them, but they have to conform to them.
If you have certain knowledge, if you have been able to acquire certain knowledge and skills, you can get jobs of certain kinds. If you have not been able to acquire that knowledge or skill, or been prevented from doing so, you may be able to get a job of another kind, or you may not be able to get a job at all, and you enter into whatever you enter into in order to live. You learn to hustle, you learn to gangster, you learn to do whatever to try to live. Maybe you make a way of life out of it, and mimic the bourgeoisie while you are at it. This is a lot of what goes on among the people. But why? Because the way in which they enter into the economy is such that their relation to production is one of either being exploited to make wealth for somebody else, or else not being able to live within the confines of the normal functioning of the economy. And if their unemployment runs out, or they can't live on it, or whatever, they will find some other way of trying to live, or they will die. They will go on the street and become homeless and get sick and die, and their kids will suffer for it and maybe get sick and die as well.
Why? Because in this society there are people who own the means of production, and on that basis if you want to live, you work for them in one capacity or other, and in one part of the overall functioning of that economic process or another. As I said, if you have certain education and skills and kinds of training, you can get certain kind of positions -- although those are not so secure these days either, with all the continuing globalization and "outsourcing," with all of that, your ass can be out -- you can work 15 years and your ass can be out tomorrow. But still, you are entering into a certain position -- within this overall functioning of the economy, you are entering into a certain relationship to production. Or you are not -- you are excluded from that -- because they can't find a way to profitably exploit you. And if they exploit you for 20 years -- you can work in an auto factory in South Central L.A. for 25 years and be out of a job tomorrow, because they have brought in new technology, and/or they have shipped production to Mexico or Brazil or somewhere else.
So there is no such thing as an economy in the abstract. Every economy is a set of social relations, of relations of production, in which people who come to confront that economy in order to live do not get to choose those things. These are historically evolved systems of production. No one gets to choose them. Even the bourgeoisie doesn't get to choose them. If they are lucky, and they are born into wealth, or they were able to maneuver, gangster their way, or whatever, into wealth, then they can run the economy, and they can benefit from the exploitation of everybody else, but even they don't get to choose how the economy functions and what the relations are that people enter into in the overall functioning of the economy.
And, of course, this is all hidden from us. It appears -- there are actually youth from the middle classes who grow up and think that clothes just appear in the mall. [laughter] Or many people who just assume that food will always be in the grocery store. And how that actually happens through not only a system of production in the U.S. itself, but a whole international system of production and exchange, which enmeshes millions and hundreds of millions of people, even billions of people ultimately, in its relations and functioning -- that is hidden from people. You have to dig to find that. You have to go to Marx to learn how this actually works.
Marx made a statement in a letter, a long time ago now, I guess in the 1850s -- I think it was in a letter he wrote to this guy named Joseph Weydemeyer, where he said "no credit is due to me for discovering the existence of classes or analyzing the anatomy of the different classes, or even the struggle between classes. What I did that was new, was to show that the existence of classes is only bound up with certain historical phases in the development of society's production, and that the class struggle that emerges from the antagonistic class relations will eventually lead to a proletarian revolution and the rule of the proletariat, the dictatorship of the proletariat, and that this dictatorship of the proletariat is only a transition to an ultimately classless society."
That's a very interesting and important statement, because what he is saying is that these systems of production are historically evolved, and that at a certain point in the development of people's technology, and the way they organized themselves to make use of whatever they had at hand -- at a certain point classes emerged. In other words, at a certain point, through a lot of complex processes, a group of people emerged who dominated the intellectual life of society, and who dominated the control of the essential means of producing and distributing the necessities of life. And from that point on, they were able, through various successive forms as the economy developed and changed, to force everyone else to work for them, while they maintained a monopoly of not only control over the essential means of life, but also everything that grew up on the basis of that. At a certain point, when society produces enough, some people can be freed, or can get themselves into a position where they are freed, from having to carry out the struggle for the daily necessities of life, and can pay attention to political affairs, to working with ideas, to culture, to all the things that intellectuals take up in a broad sense. And generally speaking, it will be that class that dominates the economy that will also be freed, and will have representatives serving it who are freed, to engage in these other spheres besides the daily struggle to produce and distribute the basic requirements of life.
This was what Marx was pointing to. And then he went on to point out that eventually, through all the complex and diverse developments this process involves -- he was boiling it down to its essence, but it is not something you can oversimplify, it isn't like the ancient feudal minuet, where there is one step and then another, all neatly choreographed, it's a very complex, diverse process going on in different forms throughout the world -- but at a certain point society and human development reached a stage where a system emerged and a class emerged which carried out production in a highly socialized way. In other words, a system of production in which it is not just a bunch of people all carrying out isolated activities. Nor a bunch of people working as slaves on a large plantation, chained to that plantation. Or, as in the South in the U.S., for nearly 100 years after the Civil War, before the changes that occurred in the 1950s and ’60s that are generally associated with the civil rights movement - - there was a whole period in which the masses of Black people but also many poor whites were virtually chained to agricultural plantations by a combination of debt that they could never escape from, and a whole superstructure of laws and terror that forced them to remain there. But, finally, through all this, a different kind of system emerged in which people were not literally chained to one place, nor working all separately on their own with their own small means of production. (That still goes on, you still find artisans and others doing this -- for example, a sculptor works with a small amount of machinery and materials to produce sculpture -- that still goes on, and many things, even necessities of life, are still produced by people in this way, especially in the Third World). But overwhelmingly what happens is the mass production of the necessities of life (and luxuries), with thousands of people working together producing this, all in combination, and with no one really producing the whole product.
This is a really profound change in human social development, and in particular in the nature of the economy. You have this production, and exchange, that is highly socialized. And all the more so now. Now they do it with computers, and their "just in time" production. They have all kinds of things that are produced in different parts of the world, and then they are assembled in a different place. This is all highly socialized. You don't have one person making a car and then at the end of it saying, "Okay, I can drive that away because it's mine and I made it." Instead you are working for someone else, and not just a person but also a corporation and the combined capital of billions in wealth.
So you have this highly socialized production but, as Marx pointed out, very acutely in contradiction to that, you have private appropriation of what is socially produced. In other words, let's say you are working as a farmworker. Your family is hungry, living in a shack -- and this is not any exaggeration. Or maybe your family is in Mexico and you are living in a shack with fourteen other people -- and, again, I am not exaggerating -- working, picking vegetables or fruits in the San Joaquin Valley of California, a rich, fertile, agricultural area. But you are working for corporations, or you are working for farmers who are beholden to corporations, who are in debt to corporations for all the equipment and everything else, and ultimately you are working for that corporation in a real sense. You can be hungry or thirsty, but you can't take that fruit and eat it, or drink the juice out of it, squeeze the juice out of it and drink it. No, that doesn't belong to you. You are working with others to pick all this fruit, others have planted it, and others are using machinery to prepare the ground for it, and then perhaps others use machinery to pick it -- that's also an innovation of the last few decades -- and it goes to someplace else and then you have to get whatever little meager wage you get and go over to some other place owned by some other capitalist to buy the food that you might have literally picked. But it doesn't matter whether you picked it or somebody else did. It all goes into the wealth that is accumulated by a small class of capitalists.
I remember when I was a kid, my father was a lawyer. And he had this client who owned this packaging plant down in central California. So one day we went there and we were being taken on a tour of the plant. That day they were doing lima beans. So the lima beans were coming down the conveyor belt, and all these workers were furiously getting them and putting them in boxes. Then they would take these gigantic rolls of paper and put them at a certain spot in the machine, and then the paper would roll off and that would be the wrapping on the box. So I'm sitting there watching this, and first of all they put on Libby's -- that was a brand of fruits and vegetables. So all these things go down the assembly line and are stuffed up in boxes and here comes the paper that they are wrapped up in -- Libby's. Then after about an hour, they changed the roll of paper and it's Del Monte. [laughter] And I'm sitting there thinking, "well, wait a minute" -- I've been watching television now for a while, and I see these ads saying "we have absolutely only the best lima beans, ours are much better than the competition." Well, it's all the same fucking lima beans, I discovered -- owned by different large aggregates of capital. All these people are working, they can't eat the lima beans or take them home. People do sometimes, but if they get caught they get fired.
So this is what Marx discovered: You have highly socialized production, but very privatized appropriation by a small class of people called capitalists. But in that contradiction lies the basis for the overthrow of the system, as that class that carries out socialized production becomes conscious of this contradiction and of all of its consequences, and rises up and rallies its allies, as it is led by a vanguard party that brings it the consciousness to do this, and it eventually overthrows the system and resolves this contradiction through a whole long complex process whereby, step by step, it socializes the appropriation of what is socially produced and distributes it increasingly according to the needs of the people, not according to the dictates of the accumulation of private capital.
This is our ultimate aim. But you can see that when you have a society like this one, a capitalist society, how can you have a political process that actually gives power to everybody equally? Just think of all the ways in which that's impossible. How could all the people make decisions about this economy and not have that come into conflict with the basic way in which all this wealth is produced and accumulated? Even if they were "politically allowed to do so," how could people who have to spend their lives working in this way be able to make informed decisions about all this?
I was just reading this book by Barbara Ehrenreich, Nickel and Dimed . She is an intellectual who decided to go work in basic manual labor for several months. She worked as a waitress, and then she worked in one of these "maids for hire" companies where you clean people's houses, and then she worked at Walmart. And she describes how, on the wages that she made, she had to live in her car part of the time, or in motel rooms you would never want to live in. She is an intellectual and normally reads all of the time, but she found herself too exhausted to read when she came home from work. This goes back to the point I was making at the beginning.
How are people in that position going to equally take part in the process of political decision making, even if you remove all of the restrictions politically that are imposed on them. It's impossible. This is what I was getting at in the first of the three sentences I paraphrased a little while ago -- that in a society marked by profound class divisions and social inequalities, to talk about democracy without examining the class content of that democracy and whom it serves, is meaningless and worse.
How can you have a democracy in which everybody takes part on an equal basis, when some people have all kinds of leisure time and sit at the top of this whole process -- a process that doesn't just involve one country but is worldwide -- people who, to use a certain metaphor, are sitting at the top of the food chain eating what is produced by everybody else along the way? How can the other people take part equally with them? It's impossible. So naturally, these people are going to dominate political affairs and the decision-making over the direction of society, and they are going to enforce that rule in order to perpetuate the system that has put them in that position in the first place.
So you have a dictatorship. A dictatorship is the rule of one class or another over society, backed and enforced by political structures and institutions and ultimately armed force, a monopoly of armed force and of "legitimate" armed force. That's what a dictatorship is.
Once you understand that, you can see that what we have in this society is in fact a dictatorship -- a dictatorship disguised as and operating through the form of a democracy; in other words, a bourgeois dictatorship in which it appears that formally everyone is equal, but in reality that's far from the case. Everyone is supposedly equal before the law: you go into court, if you are rich or poor, you have the same rights supposedly. Well in reality you don't. Who can afford a lawyer and who can't? The real lesson of the OJ Simpson trial, leaving aside the question of guilt or innocence, was not what all those people were suggesting when they talked about his "dream team" of lawyers. He spent a couple million dollars. The state spent more then he did on this, by the way. The real lesson is not that somehow he got an unfair advantage. The real lesson is that masses of people have no chance in that situation, because they can't go up against all the money and resources of the state -- and they are up against the whole authority and "aura" of the state.
That's the real lesson. So even there, you are not really equal before the law. Plus your social status counts when you go into court. How you are dressed, how you look, how you speak, whether all your teeth are aligned or not. All those kinds of things count when you go into court. You stand before the judge, who is likely a former prosecutor, and associates with a certain class of people, and he or she looks at different people differently, very differently. So even on that level you are not equal coming into the courtroom. Leaving aside the tremendous racism in this society and all of the rest that goes on within this kind of society. And of course we can't leave that aside, but even besides that there are all these other divisions in society that get reflected in every sphere of society, everything you do. Plus, as has been pointed out in literature for a long time, everybody doesn't have the same needs. Wealthy people don't have to steal food. They aren't in a situation where they're out of a job and have to go stick up somebody to be able to live. And they don't learn to make a way of life out of crime because they don't have to, because the whole system operates to bring them what they need.
So, you are not equal before the law in all those kinds of ways either. This is a dictatorship: even more fundamentally, the laws reflect, once again, the economic system and the political rule that serves it and that corresponds to it. That's why I said you couldn't pass a law that says, "Everybody has a right to eat -- now go to it if you're hungry, take what you need."
I often think of this when I hear all this stuff about how these basically fascistic elements in the ruling class want to build up Ronald Reagan as their patron saint and icon. We are always told about what a kindly old guy he was. I remember back in the '70s when the Symbionese Liberation Army kidnapped Patty Hearst. Now, their political and ideological line was all screwed up. There was a lot of bad shit they did. But nonetheless, here they took Patty Hearst, and one of the demands they made was that the Hearst family fund food distribution to the poor in California. And the Hearst family agreed. Right away, look what this shows you about this society. Why do you have to have a demand that a rich family fund food for the poor? Think about what that reflects about the nature and divisions in this society right there. But the interesting thing, the revealing thing about this was, when the Hearst family agreed, and they set up these distribution points where food would be distributed to poor people, Ronald Reagan came out and said that he hoped there would be an outbreak of food botulism -- deadly food poisoning.
Now nobody can talk to me about Ronald Reagan the kindly gentleman. Besides all of the people he was responsible for slaughtering in the most unimaginable ways in places like Guatemala -- you know, I wrote about this in the Democracy book and nothing I said there was exaggeration. In fact I don't even think I fully captured the horror of it -- where, under the direction ultimately of the U.S., these regimes one after another in Guatemala, including that of the born-again evangelical butcher, Rios Montt -- the army would be dispatched, they would go into a village and they would literally line up everyone in the village, execute all of the men of fighting age, rape all of the women and then kill many of them, and take the little children down by the river and bash their heads in. Time and time again. All ultimately presided over by the kindly, avuncular character Ronald Reagan.
Besides all that, what possible reason could you have for saying that you hope there is a mass outbreak of food poisoning when poor people are getting food? What possible reason could you have for thinking that is a funny joke? What kind of outlook does that reflect? What kind of position in society does that reflect? What kind of rule over society is being given expression to in something like that?
So this is a dictatorship. And the fact is that all democracies are ultimately part of and an expression of a dictatorship in the fundamental sense of what a dictatorship is, that is, the rule by one class or another. Even the democracy that develops for the masses of people under socialism -- and we have to learn how to give this even better and more full expression -- but even the democracy that develops for the masses of people under socialism is part of and could not exist without the dictatorship of the proletariat, the rule by the proletariat over society. Without that state power, without that political rule, the masses of people would have the same rights they have now. In other words, essentially none, when it comes down to the fundamental issues.
Many examples of this could be cited. One historical analogy that I think is helpful and that I have used a number of times -- I read something where William Hinton, who wrote the book Fanshen,brought out this example -- is the South in the U.S. after the Civil War. The Civil War involved the deaths of something like 600,000 people on both sides, which was a significant percentage of the population of the U.S. at that time. At the end of the Civil War, they had what was called Reconstruction. You see the Spike Lee movies, where it has this logo that refers to Forty Acres and a Mule -- that was supposed to be the implementation of that promise made by the Freedman's Bureau, that they would give the former slaves forty acres and a mule. In other words, they would have land and rights to go with it.
There were some attempts, backed up by the federal troops who remained in the South for ten years after the Civil War, to implement programs like this. And this also benefited a number of poor white people who got land and rights that they had never had either. But in particular this was geared to meeting the needs of the former slaves.
But in 1877 this was reversed. The key thing was that the federal troops were withdrawn from the South, and the masses of people there, in particular the masses of Black people, were left to the tender mercies of the former plantation owners, the Ku Klux Klan, and the rest of the wealthy and oppressive classes, and also the northern bankers and others who were moving in to take advantage of the triumph of the North in the Civil War and to profit from the operation of the economy in the South more fully than they had before. A lot of the cotton from the South used to go to England before the Civil War. That was one of the big disputes, one of the big conflicts that led to the Civil War. Ultimately it was a question of slavery, but one of the expressions of this was a lot of the cotton that got produced in the South, or picked in the South, was sent to England instead of New England. After the Civil War that changed. The Northern interests, the developing capitalist interests centered in the North, became much more not only politically dominant, but economically invested in and increasingly dominant in the South.
And then of course another aspect of the Civil War was the battle over the opening to the West, or the expansion to the West. The whole Texas thing was a focal point of that. They've got this movie out now, "The Alamo," which I haven't seen yet but I've seen the trailers, so I know what they are doing with it. But Texas was a big focal point -- there were people like Jim Bowie and others who fought for the slave system, who were either slave owners or slave traders or overseers and things like this. And there were a lot of places where this struggle was being played out. Texas was one place.
Another place this got battled out was Kansas. That's where people like John Brown went, for example. Because Kansas was a state that was part of the Missouri compromise. Missouri would be a slave state, Kansas would be decided by who got there. So a lot of people were racing to move in. Slave owners and people who wanted to have a "free" economy. And John Brown moved into that and was part of that whole struggle. I don't have time to go into all that, but it is a very interesting story about how they freed slaves and went and actually assassinated some of the leading slave owners who were coming into the state. It's a whole interesting story, but it's beyond what I can get into today. But it is worth reading about. Dubois, for example, wrote a biography of John Brown which gets into some of these things.
In any case -- I'm getting a little bit far afield here -- but the point is that Reconstruction, to get back to that, Reconstruction was abandoned in 1877. And it is very interesting that the federal troops that were withdrawn were used in two ways immediately. One, they were used to crush some strikes that were carried on by a largely or essentially white labor movement on the railroads and in other industries, and they were used to carry out the final defeat and slaughter of the Native Americans. In other words, this was around the time of the whole Custer thing, and although that was a victory for the Sioux and a debacle for the cavalry and all the interests it represented, this whole juggernaut was coming behind it. And it was reinforced by these federal troops that were pulled out of the South.
So the reversal of Reconstruction put an end to any kind of democratic upsurge in the South -- in other words, something that would have still been within the framework of bourgeois society but would have led to something different than the sharecropping system, virtually a feudal kind of exploitation that the former slaves in their masses were subjected to, where they were always in debt, all but literally chained to the land in various ways, and subject to the tender mercies of the KKK and all that. Instead of that, you could have had a system where at least large numbers owned small parcels of land. But that was not really in the interests of the bourgeoisie. They were interested in monopolizing that land and buying their way into this new plantation system, and profiting from it. And politically they were not interested in it either.
When you talk about a dictatorship, one way to get at this is to pose the question: what would it have taken to enforce that policy of forty acres and a mule? To be blunt, a lot of people would have had to die. I'm sorry. There were a lot of former slave owners and Ku Klux Klansmen and so on -- I'm not saying that you would have just gone out and assassinated, or executed, a bunch of people -- I'm saying there would have been armed resistance by the KKK and the rest of them to this system. They were already carrying out the armed terrorizing of the masses of Black people. Well, imagine if this program had actually been implemented in a thoroughgoing way. The former slave owners, who wanted to re-establish themselves as plantation owners in this now sort of feudal form of exploitation through sharecropping, would have fought this, and they would have organized forces to fight it. And they would have funded and mobilized the Ku Klux Klan. They would have gotten all their own confederate associations back together. It would have been bloody. And a lot of people would have died. It would have been necessary for a lot of people to die in order to not have the former slaves re-enslaved in all but literal terms.
It would have taken a dictatorship and that dictatorship would have had to exert violence. And the question is: which would have been better? It depends on where you sit. If you were one of those former slaves, or even among the class of poor whites in the area, it would have been objectively much better, even with the violence, to have that system. But if you are sitting where the bourgeoisie is sitting, that is something to be avoided -- that turmoil, that violence -- because it doesn't run in accord with your interests of re-establishing in slightly different form a system of exploitation. And it doesn't conform with your needs for a stable form of rule, then, which is not involved in a virtual continuation of the civil war, even if under new conditions where now you are dominating the South.
If you were a former slave, or someone who sympathizes with the former slaves, and thinks these kinds of horrendous oppression and terror and exploitation should be abolished, you look at this very differently. To you, to say "well, it's unfortunate that we had to go through this hundred years, essentially, of this literal terror, after the Civil War, but that was necessary in order to unify and stabilize the country" -- to you that is an outrage, an abomination. Most of you have probably seen on video, or heard about this speech I gave last year. I quoted a psychologist who studied Black people in the South during this historical period we are talking about, from basically the end of Reconstruction in the 1870s until the 1960s. In that period, during the early 1900s actually, he studied Black people, and made the statement that every Black person in the South lived under a death sentence. It might never be carried out, but it always could be. And it could be carried out not only through the more formal structures of the society, but in a totally arbitrary way in the middle of the night. And you never knew what you might do that would bring this horrendous kind of death down upon you. You could be -- this is captured by Richard Wright in his novels and writings -- you could be a young Black boy who stumbled upon a white woman alone by herself, and be lynched for nothing more than that. And you can just go on and on.
I think we have not really come to terms with what this means. It will only be when we have a new society that we are really going to fully come to terms with what it means that a whole people have lived through this experience. And now, instead of the KKK you have the police. You have changed conditions. People don't live in rural areas, isolated. They live crowded in urban slums. And you don't have the night-riding KKK by and large, you have the police -- you had them then, too, but the police now represent the concentrated form for exercising this terror.
I told a story in a speech last year about when we were doing work in the projects and meeting many young Black mothers, who would become very upset once they saw that their children, especially the boys, would grow to be physically large, because they knew that was going to be a "provocation" to the police. For no other reason than being a large Black male.
And we have not really come to terms yet, and we never will until we get to a whole new society, with what this has meant, and all the different effects this has had. The terror people have lived with -- you talk about terror. I can remember stories, and reading books about lynchings and so on -- like the Emmett Till case for example, a famous case of lynching in the '50s. When the night-riders came to take him away, his uncle begged them to allow him to beat Emmett Till so that they wouldn't take him off and do what they did to him. Now, imagine being in that position. Multiple that by millions of people living this, generation after generation.
Would it have been worth it to enforce a different kind of rule, even with the violence that would have been necessary to put down the armed resistance to this, in order to abolish that whole experience? Well, where you sit is going to determine how you answer that. To the bourgeoisie, the answer was no. But to those people who want a whole different kind of society, without these horrendous forms of exploitation and oppression, and all the terror and torment, psychological as well as physical that goes with it, we have a profoundly different answer. It's not that we relish violence, or want to maintain a society where one part has to dictate over another even if that "another" is a minority of former exploiters. We want to get beyond all that. But you can't get beyond all that without going through it. And whether you think that is worth it or not, or justified or not, depends on where you sit and what you think is important.
Is this sort of incidental to you, an unfortunate by-product of history that people had to go through all this, leaving aside everything else the rulers of the U.S. were doing in the world. We could talk about that all day and next week. But is it an unfortunate by-product of history, or is it something that is completely unacceptable and intolerable? Well, that depends on where you sit in the overall structure of this society, in the overall relations of production, in the overall process of the functioning of society. Not that people automatically come to an understanding of the essence of this, but once you see the essence of it then you are going to look at that differently depending on what you think is important, with what class of people you identify or sympathize with and support. You don't have to literally be among that class to side with them. Here again comes in the role of intellectuals, most of whom don't come from among the most exploited and oppressed, but nevertheless can come to understand the role of the exploited and oppressed in changing society, and can come to identify with them and even play a role in bringing them forward to achieve these things.
So, there isn't a form of democracy which isn't part of a dictatorship. The question is what kind of dictatorship, what kind of rule, by which class, for what objectives, to accomplish what ends, to bring about what kind of society and what kind of world? And no, we don't believe -- despite the constant charges and distortions, we don't believe -- that "the ends justify the means." We don't believe that you can -- this is part of the negative aspect of the experience of our class in ruling society that we have to sum up more deeply -- you can't fall into the pragmatic argument, or the instrumentalist argument, that whatever works toward the attainment of your goals is justified. Because if you use means and methods that are fundamentally in conflict with your objectives, then they are going to undermine what you are actually working toward, and you will end up working for something else, which is going to be the same old thing, even if it calls itself something else.
So, our means have to be consistent with our ends, and the methods we use have to be consistent with and flow from and serve our objectives in a fundamental sense. Now sometimes there are contradictions in this. Like Mao said, we are advocates of the abolition of war, but it is necessary to wage revolutionary war in order to finally put an end to war. Well, some people can't understand that. But it is understandable. Because, in order to eliminate something you have to eliminate the underlying causes of it. So, it is necessary to make revolution to abolish a system which lives by exploiting and oppressing people, and which enforces that rule through all kinds of reactionary destruction and violence, namely war.
There are lots of contradictions like this. We are for abolishing a situation in which there are dictatorships, in which one class rules over another. We want to get beyond that. But, in order to get beyond that, we have to go through it.
So, in short, if you don't want the masses of people to be forever subjected to these unspeakable forms of oppression and exploitation, you have to overthrow the state as it exists, the dictatorship that exists which reinforces the relations of exploitation and oppression, and establish a new form of rule which corresponds to the process and serves the process of abolishing those relations.
Now, returning to the principle that you can't use just any old means -- that any old means aren't justified by the ends -- the kind of dictatorship that would actually serve the process of uprooting these relations of exploitation and oppression has to be very different than any previous form of class rule, any previous kind of dictatorship. So, while it has in common with all these previous forms of class rule, or dictatorship, the fact that it does represent the rule of one class, and is enforced by the armed power representing that class, it has to at the same time be vastly different in what that means and what it does.
First of all, on a very basic level, the dictatorship of the proletariat, the rule that represents the interests of the proletariat, has to involve the broad masses of people in all the different aspects of ruling and transforming society, which is not a short-term thing but a long and very wrenching process of overcoming inequalities -- which even as they exist are working to undermine your advance toward a new form of society. They are constantly pulling things back and reasserting the old relations of inequality, oppression and exploitation. So this is a very acute contradiction that you have to deal with under the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Not only is there a question of extending formal rights and equality to the masses of people in a way that never can happen under any form of exploitative rule, but there is the question of the masses of people actually having the right to concern themselves with and to influence and to play a decisive role in affairs of state and the direction of society, as well as to organize themselves to carry out all kinds of political activity -- even political activity independent of, and in some ways even opposed to, the state (this is something I will come back to).
Even more fundamentally than that, the dictatorship of the proletariat, even as it is strengthening itself and carrying forward the struggle to achieve its objectives, has to be guided by the aim of eventually abolishing itself. And this is another acute contradiction, because when it is said you have to do this and you have to do that under the dictatorship of the proletariat, who is "you"? That's a very acute contradiction. Again, is "you" simply the political leadership of the proletariat as organized in the most concentrated way in its vanguard? Or does "you" have to change as you go through this process? Does "you" have to involve more and more of the masses? And does the role and relation between the party and the masses itself have to undergo changes, as you advance together with the whole revolutionary struggle throughout the world toward the abolition of classes and oppressive social divisions and inequalities?
These are very big questions and pose very acute contradictions at various stages, and, in an overall sense, these are profound contradictions all along the way. All the way through, you are trying to change the "you" who is ruling and transforming society and making the decisions about society. But you are living in a world, which constantly tends to reinforce the division between "you" who is actually making decisions and the broader masses who ultimately and fundamentally needed to be included in this "you."
So democracy is different under the dictatorship of the proletariat, it serves different interests and aims, just as that dictatorship itself is radically different and serves different interests and aims than bourgeois dictatorship. But so long as there is democracy among one part of society, that will inevitably be part of a dictatorship exercised by that part of society, even if "that part of society" represents and increasingly draws in the great majority of people. It still represents a division where some people are excluded from rule and excluded from democracy, or do not have the same rights as others. That will apply to the overthrown exploiters and active counter-revolutionaries who will be attempting to organize, to seek each other out, to form associations, etc. -- not just to criticize or to raise disagreements about the direction of society, but to activity seek to overthrow the rule of the proletariat.
So, to put it in very short, concentrated form, wherever there is democracy, there is also dictatorship. The question is what kind of democracy, what kind of dictatorship. If we wanted to be provocative and develop a provocative slogan with all the intoxication and infatuation with democracy in the world these days, we could say: "democracy -- it's just a form of dictatorship." But obviously the question is more complicated than that. I'm all in favor of saying that just to be provocative [laughter]. I generally like to be provocative anyway. But then you have to have some substance, to go into it deeply.
Of course, all this goes against everything we are taught in a society like this and through the whole machinery and process of indoctrination with bourgeois ideology. And there is in a society like this a powerful pull of spontaneity in favor of bourgeois democracy, particularly in a country like the U.S., which not only dominates and parasitically lives off much of the world, but also as a consequence, or in relation to that, has a very broad middle strata, who occupy a relatively privileged position in relation to the masses of exploited people in this country, and especially in relation to the masses of people in the world.
But this also exerts a powerful influence even among the proletariat itself. Notions of democracy in one form or another constantly reassert themselves. The idea that, for example, the highest objective and what we are really aiming for is simply equality. There is that Peter Tosh song, "Equal Rights" -- we've got to have equal rights. Well, there is something to that. But, as we have seen, formal equality masks and embodies inequality as well. It's not that we don't need to abolish institutional inequality -- we do. The ways in which people are overtly and directly in form treated as unequal -- we need to abolish those, that's part of our struggle. But that's not the be-all and end-all, or the final objective or the fundamental character of our struggle.
For example, take two people who work at the same job. As long as people are paid in the form of wages, on the one hand there is equality: You do the same job, you get the same wage and salary. But, on the other hand, there is inequality built into that. Not everybody does literally the same quality of work. So already there is inequality, because formally we are both equal and we are getting the same wage, but I am doing less quality work than you are. You are actually doing more than me, even though we are both in form doing the same job, because your work is better than mine. Furthermore, you have a family with three kids, and I have a family with no kids. Well, your wage doesn't go as far as mine does. I can buy things that you can't buy, as long as things are produced and distributed in the form of commodities to be bought and sold with money, I have an unequal position in relation to you, because I can buy things you can't buy, since you have to "feed more mouths" than I do with the same wage.
So, while ending social inequality is an objective of ours, it isn't the fundamental objective. We have to go deeper and further than that. We have to get beyond the system where things are produced and distributed as commodities. We have to get to where we can implement the slogan of communism: "from each according to their ability to each according to their needs," so that we move beyond the calibration, or calculation, of formal equality, even while we have abolished formal inequality.
Marx talked about how one of the objectives, ideologically and practically, of the communist revolution is to cross beyond "the narrow horizon of bourgeois right." Now, what did he mean by that? "Bourgeois right" refers to things like the right to an equal amount of pay for an equal amount of work. You put in a certain amount of work, then you have the right to get paid back in a certain amount, and anyone who does the same job should get the same amount. Bourgeois right also includes things like formal equality before the law.
In order to uproot all relations of exploitation, we have to get beyond the point where those kind of rights have to be calculated and entered into the equation. We have to get beyond the horizon where we are merely concerned about or implementing formal equality. In the material basis of all this, in the underlying economic foundation of all this, we have to get beyond a society where things are produced and distributed as commodities to be bought and sold, or exchanged for other commodities. In order to get beyond these calculations of "I did this much work so I should get that much income," and everything that is bound up with that, we have to remove the fetters that are placed on an economy and on a society by having it organized around the production and distribution of things as commodities. As long as things are produced and distributed as commodities, then we can't get beyond the inequalities that are masked -- and are even embodied -- in formal equality. You can't give people according to their needs in capitalist society. You can only give people according to how much they earn, to put it simply.
And, in a larger sense, in how you approach the development of the economy you can't proceed from the larger needs of society and of the people who make it up, so long as the principle of producing and distributing things as commodities is in command. Now, this is another thing that takes a while to move beyond. Even in the early stages and for quite a while in socialist society (and in socialism as it has actually existed) things still get produced in the form of commodities to a very large degree. But there is a constant struggle to remove things from the realm of commodities.
For example, health care that is provided free removes that from the sphere of production and exchange of commodities. To the degree that it can actually be provided free, it no longer is something that you take the income you earn from your job and pay for. Or, if you remove things like food from the realm of commodities, by having public distribution of food, or public cafeterias, or whatever, where you are no longer selling things, but giving food to people according to their needs. To the degree you can do that, you are moving those things beyond the realm where they are produced and distributed as commodities. And eventually, not only do items of consumption have to be moved beyond that, but so do the means of production -- in other words, the things used to produce other things. The machinery, the land, the factory buildings, the computers -- all that eventually has to be produced and exchanged not through the use of money, but according to calculations based on what the society and the total labor of society is capable of producing and decisions, which have to be made by the people through various forms, about which things to produce in what quantity in order to accomplish which ends.
Right now that is decided by a small group of people, who are themselves the expression of the accumulation process of capital. They have minds and consciousness, but they cannot entirely or fundamentally step outside of the dynamics of capitalist accumulation itself. They cannot make decisions that, in a fundamental and essential way, run counter to those dynamics, or they will go out of business.
This is an extremely important point to understand, and also a focus of some struggle, even among communists -- to correctly and fully grasp that in the operation of the capitalist economy, while it rests in one sense on the exploitation of the proletariat, the propertyless wage workers, by the bourgeoisie, it is also driven, and in a most fundamental sense is driven, by the anarchy of production that inevitably results from production being carried out in the commodity form. Because, calculate as you will, you still can never know, when you throw things into the market, how much of them you are going to sell. You can calculate and you can attempt to make your best estimate, but once you throw your capital into the production of things and put them into the market -- in other words, once you enter into the overall process of production and exchange under capitalism -- what comes back to you goes through a whole process of competition between different capitalists, in which they are each intensifying their exploitation of the proletarians who are enslaved by them, in effect, in order to be able to more profitably sell and realize a profit on the things they produced.
Now, the wealth is not produced in the sale, but it is realized in the sale. The wealth is produced through the exploitation of people. The more intensely you can exploit them, the more work you can get out of them for the wage you pay them, the more potential wealth you can accumulate. But that's only potential wealth. And I don't care what scale you are on -- you could be Ted Turner or whatever -- you can get eaten up by a bigger shark. Because at any given time, even on the level that he was operating on, in order to further expand, you have to go out and either borrow (get credit), or you have to merge with some other capital. And for any capitalist, no matter what scale, the smallest scale or the largest scale, once they put things into production, whatever capital they had has been converted into a form that is no longer directly under their control. A lot of this is highly rarified and parasitic, so it is not literally money changing hands. It's just crediting and accounts and things like that. But nonetheless, there are days of reckoning [laughter]. And if your ship doesn't come out the way it is supposed to, you will go under. I don't care how big you are. Or you will get eaten up by someone else.
In this form of production and exchange of commodities, you invest your money, and in that sense you alienate it from yourself. You give it up and it then has to go through this whole process of exploitation through which wealth is produced, and then it has to be realized in the form ultimately of selling whatever it is you are producing. And if anywhere along the way something goes wrong, or someone else develops a more "efficient" way of doing that, you may not recoup what you have put into it.
And this is where the anarchy comes in. You have no choice, not only to compete with other capitalists, but to find ways to intensify the exploitation of the people that you are employing at the time.
The capitalists will actually tell you this, if people have ears to listen. Take, for example, the argument about raising the minimum wage. Many political representatives of the system -- especially the Republicans, but not only them -- will say, "If you raise the minimum wage you are just eliminating jobs." And there is a certain truth to that under the capitalist system, and it's not just that they are mean spirited. It's that the capitalists will export production to some other country, like Vietnam (what an irony that is), or Indonesia, paying people a much lower wage to produce the things. And if, as a capitalist, you are paying a higher wage here you are going to lose out. They may be as mean-spirited as they are, but that is not what is driving this. What is driving this is the fact that their money has entered into this commodity form. It represents a form of commodity itself, but it's invested in means of production. Things like the raw materials you use in production have to be paid for. The factory building is usually bought over time and has to be paid for. The means of transportation and communication have to be paid for. The internet is not free either. All of these things have to be paid for. You have to invest in these things, and if you can't, as they say, "recoup your investment," you go under.
So even the capitalists are not free to act outside of the dynamics of this, in a fundamental sense. That's why they need political representatives, or one of the reasons. They have representatives who stand above the interests of particular capitalists, and try to exercise some wisdom on behalf of the capitalist class as a whole. For example, Roosevelt in the 1930s came in at a time when the economy was completely in the dumpster. The unemployment rate was 25% or higher for the society as whole. The whole thing was grinding to a halt and going in reverse gear. And the laws of the free market were not getting them out of this. So what did they do? They intervened with the state. They had all these programs to intervene with the state, to spend money and reallocate certain capital through taxation and other means, in order to employ people. Or they put in certain regulations limiting what particular capitalists could do, in the interests of the capitalist class in the larger sense, the capitalist class as a whole, to keep this system going.
Ultimately none of these things really succeeded. It was the war, World War 2, that pulled them out of it. But, to use an analogy to Rome, Roosevelt acted like a patrician senator, who looked beyond the narrow interests of the competing capitalists, and brought forward programs to save the system as a whole. Of course, he had a lot of help from the Communist Party, which wasn't acting as a real communist party and didn't implement a revolutionary program, didn't seize on this crisis to try to make a revolution or move toward one.
In any case, what Roosevelt did was very important from the point of view of the ruling class. He intervened to make certain changes that the capitalists on their own would not have made, and weren't able even to see in a full sense, even while Roosevelt did get backing from certain sections of capitalists who recognized the need to do this. But with all that, it's still not possible for either politicians or the capitalists themselves to stand completely outside of -- or to be entirely or essentially independent of -- this accumulation process of capitalism itself.
So as long as this kind of a process is going on, or as long as there are significant remnants of it even under socialism, you can't get completely beyond the horizon of bourgeois right. You can't move completely beyond the relations and the corresponding ideas that are characteristic of this system.
And so we see constantly, over and over again, especially while we are living under this system, the pull of the illusions of democracy -- that somehow if everybody could have democracy we would get rid of the ills of society. That pull will constantly assert itself, because it is reinforced by the whole functioning of the system, not only what you are propagandized with, but the way in which people have to live.
People have to compete with each other for jobs, for housing, for all kinds of things. And they have to somehow find a way to fit into the overall functioning of the system in order to be able to survive, let alone to try to "improve their position." So because of these material necessities, as well as the whole ideological offensive and the educational system and everything else, people are constantly pulled back within the narrow horizon of bourgeois right. They are constantly conditioned to think of things only in terms that ultimately amount to, or correspond to, the exchange of commodities. This is true even if the exchange of those commodities takes the form of the circulation of ideas. This is a very strong current among the intellectuals -- "the free marketplace of ideas" is a phrase you hear very commonly. Well, that, right in itself, reflects the whole capitalist system of production and exchange, in which things are produced and circulate in the form of commodities.
It's not that we don't want a lot of free exchange of ideas, but the idea of the free marketplace of ideas is as much an illusion as the free market is itself an illusion. The free market, in the literal sense of the functioning of the economy, is not really free. It is actually a system based on the exploitation of wage labor. So there is not freedom in that sense. There is not equality between those who are in a position of exploiting others, and those who are exploited. Those who own or control the major means of production, and those who own or control little or none, are not in an equal position. And the free market does not work out so that the interests of all are best served. It works out in the realm of ideas the same way it works out in the practical realm of the economy. It works out with some dominating others. Because we are not starting in this society from an equal place. So all ideas don't get equal promotion.
In fact, to be honest, it is never possible in any society, even in a communist society, for all ideas to get equal promotion. To think that is possible is an illusion. If you think about it there are only so many trees. And even if they develop other ways of making books and disseminating information than we now have, it still takes material things to do that. Computers are made out of real things, not out of air. So, the dissemination of information always will have limits on it, no matter what stage of the society you are in, or what kind of world you live in. You cannot literally disseminate, on an equal basis, every idea that anyone comes up with. So there will always have to be decisions made about which ideas will be given more priority to be disseminated at a given time in any society, even in a communist society. Then, the people, through various mechanisms they will work out, will make these decisions. And even then, there will be a lot of struggle. These things will get resolved through struggle, not through some magical process of some mythical society where there is no contradiction and struggle.
Even under communism there will be tremendous contradiction and struggle about all kinds of things. And probably groups and even "factions" will form. The "park faction" will form -- groups of people who want more parks will form and fight it out with the people who want to have more hospitals, let's say. How do you resolve that contradiction? People will struggle over that. It's just taking place in a completely different context where one part of society is not dominating and essentially shutting out the rest of society from taking part in the struggle and decision-making over that.
But there will always be this struggle over those kinds of things. How can you not have struggle? You are always dealing with necessity. You are always dealing with material conditions that are confronting you. You are always dealing with nature and how you interact with nature. And there will always be different ideas about how to do that. But as long as you have a society divided into classes, then one class or another will dominate in that process and in the decisions that are made. This is true even in a society where the proletariat dominates, and it does things in a radically and vastly different ways than exploiting classes that have dominated society.
It is never possible for "the free marketplace of ideas" to really be free and equal. Because, even if all ideas got equal funding, let us imagine, some ideas are more in line with the prejudices that exist already, and some have to go up against all that. Lenin once said it takes ten pages of truth to answer one sentence of falsehood. That's because you are not starting out with everything equal. Right now, for example, when somebody says something about communism which fits in with all the popular misconceptions, you have to start way back at the beginning and go through all this shit before you get back to their question.
So even if somehow all different ideas were equally circulating and funded, they are not equal. They are not existing in a vacuum. So even in that sense "the free marketplace of ideas" is an illusion.
And of course, all ideas don't get equal funding and backing. Some get much more. You want to write a book denouncing communism, you can find a publisher. You want to write a book upholding it, good luck! These are the realities.
So, "the free marketplace of ideas" is an illusion, just as the free marketplace itself is an illusion in the way it is presented. The free marketplace in the economy does not lead to everyone being equal, or to the greatest interests of the greatest number being served. It leads to polarization in society, where some control and monopolize wealth and power, and exploit and dominate the great majority who do not. That's what the free market leads to. Just look at the world. That's what is operating in terms of what is dominating economically and politically in the world. It's the "free market" of the capitalist system that is operating.
What does it lead to? It leads to exactly what Marx said. And if you look on a world scale you can see that very clearly: the accumulation of wealth among a small number at one pole, and the accumulation of agony of toil and exploitation and suffering among the great majority at the other pole. That's what the world looks like. Investigate it if you don't think so. That's what you will find. Half of the population of the world is living on $2 a day. You don't really need to know much more than that. There's a lot more to be learned and struggled over, but that captures something very fundamental about the nature of the world. This is what the "free market system" leads to and will always lead to.
Nevertheless, these illusions, which correspond in one way or another to the limitations of the horizon of the bourgeois system and bourgeois right, will continually reassert themselves, so long as there is a base in the underlying economy and in the corresponding social relations, and in the corresponding form of political rule, and consequently in the ideology and culture that dominates in the society.
People are constantly pulled back to these ideas: "If we could just limit the corporations, then we wouldn't have the problems we have." "The problem is that corporations have too much power." You can listen to Ralph Nader, for example. The problem is not, according to him, the very nature of the capitalist system, it's just that corporations have too much power. Washington is "corporate-occupied territory," he says. Well, there is a certain element of truth to that. But why is that? What is the fundamental reason for that? And what is it all part of?
One challenge I would say to people like that is: name a time in the history of this country when it wasn't dominated politically and every other way by a small minority of wealthy landowners and other wealthy owners of means of production. Name a single time. When is that time? The founding of the country? I don't think so! The time when all the big trusts were forming at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century? I don't think so! There's not a single time -- that's always been the way it is.
So this is not a new phenomena that the corporations have too much power or influence. This is the nature of the system, and in fact it has grown to where there is more and more wealth controlled by a smaller number of capitalists. We don't have literal slaveowners any more. Most of the land is now owned in the form of capital, not in the form of slave plantations or even in some feudal form, like sharecropping. But it is still monopolized by a small number, and in fact that monopoly is more accentuated, more pronounced than ever.
But you can see how all these illusions continually reassert themselves. If we could just somehow limit the power of the corporations, or if we could somehow just have real democracy, where for example, we didn't have private corporate wealth funding the campaigns. If all the campaigns were financed, for example, out of public funds. Well, first of all, who controls the public funds? [laughter] Then you get back to the same thing. Second of all, even if you could have all campaigns financed by public funding, you would still have all the reality that I have been talking about operating. You would still get the same polarization in society -- or the society would grind to a halt -- or would have to be overthrown. And therefore you would confront the question of whether you wanted this society or a completely different one. So these same things are going to reassert themselves, no matter what changes of that kind you would make.
And there is something very relevant to all this that I quoted in a polemic I wrote against K. Venu, who was an Indian Maoist who deserted Maoism and retreated into bourgeois democracy. He literally ended up running for office as part of some bourgeois party. But before that he presented his retreat into bourgeois democracy in a communist guise. What he was arguing for was basically adopting bourgeois-democratic forms under the dictatorship of the proletariat because, according to him, the experience of the dictatorship of the proletariat has been one disaster after another, where the people have been actually oppressed by the party. It's not really a new argument. It's an old argument, but he presented it in a slightly new form.
And one of the things I quoted in that polemic was a statement from Marx in his Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte , which was examining what was happening in France in the second half of the 19th century. He made a very insightful comment where he said that one must not think that the democratic intellectuals, whom we have an abundance of in this society -- you can listen to Amy Goodman, or, some very progressive people even, but they are still within the narrow confines of bourgeois right -- one must not assume, Marx cautioned, that people like this, the democratic intelligentsia, are, in their everyday life, similar to the shopkeepers. However, the essential point is that the democratic intellectuals do not get beyond the bounds in their thinking that the shopkeepers do not get beyond in everyday life.
That is actually a very complex but very profound point. What he is saying is that you take a stratum like the shopkeepers, who are completely caught up in the daily operation of commodity production and exchange, and in the position where they are not the great accumulators of capital, but neither are they the people who are exploited to produce that capital, that wealth. They are in between, squeezed, but constantly trying to improve their position within the confines of the operation of this commodity system, and being thwarted in doing so at just about every turn. So in practical life they are completely caught up in this commodity competition, and all the vicissitudes, the ups and downs, of this; they are always scrambling to improve their position, and their horizons are very narrowed and constricted by this operation of the actual commodity production and exchange. And Marx's point is that the democratic intellectuals, those people who try to perfect democracy, ultimately end up in the same place as the shopkeepers -- even though they live in a very different world, and if you went to someone like Amy Goodman and said "you know you are just like a shopkeeper," she would justifiably be very outraged, and would say "I'm nothing like a petty shopkeeper."
That would be true on one level. But Marx's point is that ultimately, until you break out of the confines of seeing the question as being essentially one of democracy, in a "classless" sense -- until you break out of the confines of not recognizing that within the very workings of the system that takes this democratic form, there are inevitably not only profound inequalities, but fundamental relations of exploitation -- until you break out of those confines, you will end up getting drawn back into the same world, in how you are conceiving of how society ought to be, that the shopkeeper gets drawn into in everyday life. You are still thinking in terms that are objectively limited by the material reality of the production and exchange of the necessities of life and of all of the things of life in the form of commodities. You are still thinking in terms of equality, in terms of eliminating only the formal political distinction between the rich and poor, and this will leave intact the relations and the functioning of the economy, which inevitably produce tremendous polarization between rich and poor, and powerful and powerless.
Until you get beyond seeing things in terms of improving or perfecting democracy within the confines of this system, you will inevitably be driven back in your thinking to the confines of commodity production and exchange. You will not be able to escape them. Your thinking will not be able to rupture beyond them.
This is a profound point that Marx was making. I know from my own experience, you can keep going back to it and getting more and more out of it, the more that you actually look at experience and think about this statement in relation to experience.
But these illusions and these limitations are like a magnet that constantly pulls people back. And this is not only true in a society like this. In the struggle internationally, and among people in many different countries who are trying to get out from under oppressive rule, the lure of bourgeois democracy, of the ideal but unrealistic and unrealizable goal of a society where inequalities are eliminated but it is still operating on the basis of capitalism, ultimately -- this pull continually reasserts itself.
For example, look at Iran. I was just reading this book Reading Lolita in Tehran,which is written by this woman who was a professor. Now, in my opinion, the novel Lolita (by Nabokov) is not a good book. I don't know how many of you have read it, but I don't think it's a good book. She tries to make something better out of it than it is. But the significant fact is that it is a subversive act in Iran, under the rule of what our comrades in the Communist Party of Iran (Marxist-Leninist-Maoist) call the "filthy Mullahs." Under the rule of the filthy Mullahs in Iran, the religious fundamentalists, to read a book like Lolita is a subversive act. As is reflected in Reading Lolita in Tehran there is a very strong pull to this "anti- totalitarianism" among people who have lived under the theocratic, religious rule of these religious fundamentalist authorities, and have been terrorized, in really horrendous ways, for stepping out of any of the confines of that. You can just see the outlook coming through that "we don't want anyone telling us what to think." Or, more than that, they don't want anyone ruling in the name of an official ideology -- whether it's religious fundamentalism, or Marxism-Leninism-Maoism. They don't want communism, or theocracy. They don't want anyone telling them that they know the truth. And among people with this outlook there is a tendency not to draw any distinctions between people who uphold different ideologies. There is a world of difference between life under the "filthy Mullahs." and life in a revolutionary, vibrant, socialist society. But two things have to be said about that. Spontaneously, people don't see that. And second of all, we have to do better at making that a reality even more fully than has been the case in the past. And I will come back to that later.
So it is very important to bring forward a scientific understanding of these questions, grounded in materialism and dialectics, understanding the decisive role of the actual economic base -- the functioning of the process through which things are produced and distributed, and wealth is accumulated and distributed, and the relations that people enter into in that process -- and understanding the social relations that develop and the political relations and political power that develops on that basis, and the ideology and culture that arises on that basis, understanding that in a dialectical and not a mechanical way.
Is it true that every movie that is made in this society is sort of a crude commercial for capitalism? No. There are oppositional things that come through in the culture. There are things that promote resistance and criticism of the established order. But that doesn't change the fact that, overwhelmingly, what gets generated and what gets selected out to be promoted is that which reinforces and serves the system.
If you want to look at something right around us, look at rap. When it first came forward it had a lot of nonsense in it, with groups like the Sugar Hill Gang, although even before that it had some better stuff. But mixed in from the beginning was contention. You had people talking about the conditions of the masses and promoting resistance to that right alongside of a lot of macho bullshit and just a lot of nonsense. And then you had people like Melle Mel come forward at a certain time. I don't know if any of you ever heard his song "World War 3," but it's a really interesting song. It was done in the mid or late '80s, I think. And it's really got a good line, that's very relevant today, talking about these people who go fight wars for the system. Then, he says, when you come back, what are you fighting for? -- a silly ass medal, a stupid parade. It's very timely. And then you had Public Enemy and things like that, which had their limitations but also had a lot of rebellion involved. What got promoted? Is it all equal? Were all the things circulated equally? No! You had NWA and they did "Fuck tha Police," but that's not what gets selected out to be promoted. You listen to the rest of that album and it's got a lot of bad shit on it. [laughs]
And through all this process, what got considered to be commercially viable? All this "bitches and ho's" and big cars and money and all the rest of it. All that shit is what got promoted. And overwhelmingly that's what it's about now, in terms of what's "commercially viable" rap. Not because, abstracted from the system that exists, things putting forward a very different message wouldn't have found an "audience." They did! But that's not what the people who run things, including those who run the big companies that produce and promote this shit, got behind. For ideological reasons, even beyond mere economic concerns, they got behind other shit and made it "commercially viable."
This is the way things actually work in this society. Now it is a dynamic process, it's not a narrow, mechanical process, whereby what gets promoted in the culture gets selected out. But through all this process there are definite interests that come to dominate and get served. And the prevailing relations of exploitation, the prevailing social relations of inequality of all kinds -- between men and women, between nationalities and so on -- get reinforced through the culture, as well as through the political rule. We have to understand this, and we have to bring this understanding to other people.
One of the things that I also quoted in this polemic against K. Venu was a statement by Mao in the course of the Cultural Revolution. In the city of Shanghai, which was a stronghold of the Cultural Revolution, there was a mass uprising of more than a million people. Different factions or groups among the Red Guards united to overthrow the existing municipal committee that ran the city -- which was following the revisionist line in all the different fields and was a powerful force within the overall government and Communist Party. Education was to train a new elite, health care was for a small elite, not for the masses, right down to the policies that prevailed in the factories which basically chained the workers to their machines and made them once again just cogs in the machinery of producing wealth. All this was ultimately going to be producing a new capitalist system with party members presiding over it.
So they had this mass upheaval in Shanghai, and in the initial stages, after they overthrew the old ruling committee in the city, they established for a brief time what was called the Shanghai Commune. This was modeled after the Paris Commune, which in 1871 arose and briefly held power for about 2 months in the city of Paris, the capital of France, and then was drowned in blood by the counter-revolution. Marx had written about this, summing up some of the important lessons of the Paris Commune, emphasizing that this is what the dictatorship of the proletariat looks like in reality. And one of the things they did in the Paris Commune was that all officials were elected by direct popular vote, and could be recalled by direct expression of the masses in a popular referendum. And so they implemented policies of this kind in the Shanghai Commune, modeling themselves after the Paris Commune.
But, after observing and studying this for a short period of time, Mao came forward with a statement that, under the circumstances, the Shanghai Commune was not the appropriate form in which to exercise the dictatorship of the proletariat. And he made criticisms of this form in his typically "Maoesque" way. He said: "I'm afraid that this commune form is not strong enough to suppress counter-revolutionaries." I'll come back to that in a minute. And he also said, "What are we going to do about international relations -- what about all the mi