DSA has come of age. Recent electoral contests have transitioned the organization from a growing left opposition within the constellation of structures that constitute the apparatus of the Democratic Party into a king maker. With this transition the question of how to relate to the organization, a question that has been crucial for partisans of communist politics in the US since at least 2016, becomes even more so. For those who seek to perpetuate the ninety year abdication of independent class politics, premised off the reduction of socialism to democracy, which found its highest expression to date in the US with the New Deal coalition, the answer is simple. Stream into the organization to nudge the liberal-socialist bloc further left. For those of this orientation the furthest strategic horizon is the constitution of a bourgeois labor party devoted exclusively to the mediation of the class contradiction and its facilitation of a redundant democratization of the already democratic US imperialist state.

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David Camfield’s Red Flags is worthy of note as perhaps the most recent attempt to restate the third camp position which, during the bipolar confrontation between imperialism and socialism that traversed the 20^th century, equated the two. This position, much like the now often associated view that sees plantation slavery as a form of capitalism despite the clear absence of constitutive structural features of the latter in the former, occludes the history of the modern revolutionary process as a history of the progressive transformation of production relations in indissoluble organic unity with their organically associated juridical expression. We are instead left with an illegible panorama in which modernity appears as an arbitrary series of shifts among various vaguely defined forms of domination confronted only by a resistance from “below” that is diffuse, molecular and without any lasting victories in empirical history.

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From Lazerus’s perspective, Marx and Lenin are “disrupters”, in the best Silicon Valley fashion, who simply “separate” from “philosophy” and “history” in order to offer exciting new products on the intellectual marketplace. If he were to admit that Marx’s system is simply a synthesis of Hegel’s dialectic, classical political economy and Restoration era historiography (to which Marx, after all, gave credit for discovering the principle of the class struggle) and that Lenin’s main “innovation” is the application of this system to zemstvo statistics, he would have to put his own license for conceptual vandalism in question. If, for Hegel, the true was the whole, for Lazerus, the true is a fragment arbitrarily sundered from the whole and thereby assigned magical powers as a kind of fetish object which compensates for the overwhelming disappointment of reality.

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Liberal intellectuals and statesmen once knew how to think historically. The architects of the post-1945 order understood that they were operating in a period of systemic transformation. They studied how orders collapse and reconstitute. They thought in terms of decades, not news cycles.

What happened? Why do the professionals staffing contemporary liberal institutions seem incapable of the same kind of thinking? Why do they respond to obvious systemic crisis with denial, nostalgia, and procedural hand-wringing?

The conventional answer points to post-Cold War triumphalism. Fukuyama’s “End of History” gave permission to stop thinking historically. If liberal-democratic capitalism is the terminus of human development, the task becomes technical management, not understanding how orders rise and fall.

This is true but incomplete. Liberals roused themselves from interwar complacency to fight fascism, and from postwar exhaustion to contain communism. Why can’t they rouse themselves again?

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Although capitalist development in Europe and European colonial exploitation are incidentally entwined, and, as Lauesen correctly observes, the latter “boosts” the former, they can only be understood as separable phenomena. Not only was colonial exploitation distinctly non-capitalist in character, relying upon forms of surplus extraction characteristic of the feudal and slave modes of production, but the mere absorption of surplus from this exploitation was in no way sufficient to secure the development of capitalist production. The clearest proof of this is immediately referenced in his own exposition when he details the role of the Spanish colonies in drastically increasing the means of exchange available to European economies. Spain, despite the immense wealth it extracted from colonial exploitation, itself remained a largely semi-feudal economy and failed to develop a predominance of capitalist production relations along the trajectory exemplified by England and the Netherlands. We can see from this simple fact alone that colonial exploitation is in no way sufficient to explain capitalist development in Europe and the qualitative transformation of productive forces this entailed, which (rather colonial exploitation) formed the main foundation for the unprecedented wealth of early capitalist societies.

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Engels wrote the phrase in The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1845. The book is a structural diagnosis of industrial capitalism, written by a young man who would spend the rest of his life funding and building organized political work. “Social murder” names the arrangement under which premature death follows predictably from the conditions a society maintains with full knowledge of the result. The diagnosis is the foundation for organized response: labor organization, labor party formation, structural reform of the conditions themselves. It is not a license for individual violence and Engels never deployed it as one. He spent decades arguing against the comrades who did deploy it this way to license anarchist individualist violence.

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Today, much of the radical left considers a defense, however qualified, of Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, and of the political line of the organizations which carried it out, as a kind of litmus test separating the authentic advocates of a nebulously defined “resistance” from state-compatible careerists grouped under the shameful banner of controlled opposition. In societies where, due to a complex of historical contingencies, reason of state has become practically synonymous with Zionist reason, this has a certain empirical logic which has nothing to do with the disingenuous accusations of “antisemitism” emanating from the paid mouthpieces of a barbaric racist regime. However, as Marx observed, in a world where appearance corresponded with essence there would be no need for science.

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The actions allowing one to overcome war and the system of capitalist imperialism which always generates war anew, is shown by the proletarian revolution in Russia in October 1917. Since the victory of the proletariat in one country, since the construction of the first socialist state, the world has been fundamentally transformed. At the same time the existence of a socialist state amid bourgeois states means a new cause for war.

Translated from: LINKSKURVE
WARUM SIND WIR KEINE PAZIFISTEN Josef Lenz

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