Reactionary Tendencies in Communist Organizations: Problems and Solutions

In Tsarist Russia at the end of the 19th century, there existed a vast amount of worker energy. The proletarian class was consolidating itself with strength, developing its political identity.

“Social-Democracy represents the working class not only in its relation to a specific group of employers, but in its relations with all the classes of contemporary society, with the state as an organized political force (…) We must actively take up the work of the political education of the working class, of the development of its political consciousness.” (Lenin, 2004, p. 154)

In other words, the strategy is to capture the energy of the economic struggle and direct it toward the political struggle, using the newspaper to unify dispersed struggles. In Where to Begin Lenin says the following:

“We have taken the first step; we have awakened in the working class the passion to denounce factory arbitrariness—the arbitrariness of an ‘economic’ kind. Now we must take the next step: to awaken in all the moderately conscious popular strata the passion to denounce arbitrariness of a political kind.”

Now, in the Mexican context, the amount of proletarian struggle-energy is comparatively low. We know unionization rates in the country hover around 12%. Added to this, we know that a majority of unions are charros, allied with the bosses and not with the workers. So: what is to be done?

My proposal is simple: let us use the energy of the political struggle to rekindle the economic struggle. Let us turn this small fire back into a monstrous blaze. Let us capture the energy present in political struggle, in the contradictions of the masses, and direct it toward the economic sphere.

Let us focus on “the moderately conscious popular strata.” To do this, I want to quote from “Why Communists Should Care About Landback (and LGBT+ liberation, ending white supremacy, disability rights, etc. etc.)” by Luna Oi, a Vietnamese communist known for translating the university curriculum Basic Principles of Marxism-Leninism and for creating educational content on communist theory. Here she gives a brief overview of the working class through the lens of dialectical materialism:

“…because nothing in our reality exists as a monolith in monistic unity. Dialectical materialism upholds that every thing, phenomenon, and idea in our universe exists as a collection of internal and external relations. The working class, therefore, exists as an assemblage of internal and external relations. We are defined by our external relation with the capitalist class, yes, but we are also defined by the internal relations between the real human beings who make up the working class, including all the contradictions of bias, prejudice, social tension, false consciousness, etc.”

Thus, we start from the premise that the working class exists as a collection of multiple components and relations. We must push toward resolving the contradictions within the proletarian class, because only then can it be unified into the fist that will deliver the final blow to capitalism. Failing to do so would reduce the likelihood of success in a socialist revolution and, at minimum, delay its development.

The movements associated with what we might call “progressive politics” (anti-patriarchal, anti-racist, anti-colonial struggles, etc.) have a fundamentally progressive essence in the historical sense. To illustrate this point, I will give two examples.

The struggle against patriarchy has transformed the mode of existence of the woman-subject from a set of reactionary relations. Woman as the property of the patriarch and her confinement to the domestic sphere belongs to the oldest archaic states. Advances in the struggle against patriarchy have transformed this mode of existence into a more modern one: a proletarian exploited as a worker, as a woman, and as a woman worker.

Similarly, the struggle against white supremacy has transformed the condition of exploitation from the most archaic and brutal (simple slavery) to that of an exploited proletarian who also receives the brunt of racial violence from the state.

Thus, the struggles for the liberation of oppressed peoples represent a developmental movement, a forward-moving tendency that must be incorporated into communism—for the simple and obvious reason that the most important forward-moving tendency is the surpassing of capitalism through socialist revolution.

It is obvious that these struggles—whose core has advanced the liberation of peoples—find themselves in an extremely visible contradiction. Because women, racialized people, queer people, Indigenous peoples, and neurodivergent people can only be free outside capitalism. Adopting these struggles within the class struggle resolves contradictions both among the masses and within communist parties.

They resolve the reactionary tendencies that inhabit communist parties, and we know that reactionary tendencies—movements backward—are destructive. They can contribute to the rupture of organizational cohesion. They also resolve contradictions within many political struggles that find themselves in a dead end when confronting capitalism.

Lastly, but equally relevant: this is how politics is done today. It is widely evident that social-democratic parties, bourgeois parties that present themselves as the developmental and progressive tendency, use a toothless version—stripped of any class perspective—of these liberation struggles to gain legitimacy in an extremely successful way.

Selling themselves as the most feminist party, the greatest allies of Indigenous peoples, racialized populations, and queer communities is simply the political reality of the 21st century. We are allowing distorted versions of liberation struggles to be used to perpetuate capitalism and the bourgeois state that upholds it, instead of using them ourselves for our true and main objective: the complete liberation of all peoples of the world and the dissolution of class society.

No more. It is our duty as Marxist-Leninists, as an organization in struggle, as a revolutionary party, to correct these errors with absolute efficiency.