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In some cases they learn from experiences or from second-hand some of the basic teachings and practices of MARXISM without having read a single Marxist text or listened to a speech by a knowledgeable MARXIST.

While experience, intuitive knowledge and elementary struggles over immediate demands are important for workers in solving some problems, some of the time and in some circumstances, the absence of a deeper understanding of the larger political and economic system and its historical and materialist roots - the class nature of the state and the operation of the capitalist economy - can lead to strategic defeats, political manipulation and the reversal of short-term reforms.

What MARXISM Teaches Workers

What are the major contributions of MARXISM to the workers struggle’ Marxism provides workers with:

a) Method for understanding and transforming the structures of power, exploitation and oppression. Marxism provides a historical-materialist analysis of the conditions under which capital exploits labor, and the fundamental contradictions which define the capital-labor relation: the growing social production of commodities and services and the increasingly narrow private ownership of the social product. Marxism moves from the general theoretical to the concrete, empirical conditions of workers in different national settings.

b) Perspective: Marxism provides a historical perspective, which sees changes in class-relations as a constant. Capitalists and their ideologues constantly claim that their system is the ‘end of history’, the ‘only alternative’. Marxism demonstrates that every class system in history, including the present capitalist system and empire, leads to class conflicts and national liberation struggles which to a greater or lesser extent can potentially overthrow and replace that system. The MARXIST perspective allows workers to understand the ‘chaos’ and ‘crises’ of capitalist over-production and speculative activity and to provide the political strategies for replacing that system through a workers and peasants state.

c) Alternatives: Capitalism and its direct offspring, imperialism, are based on wars (colonial, inter-imperialist) in order to establish its domination. Imperialist capitalism is destroying the environment, dividing families, exploiting labor and paying poverty wages, and enslaving hundreds of millions of displaced and unemployed workers. Marxism provides an alternative based on the taking of state power, the expropriation of capitalist owners and the creation of an economy directed by the direct producers in association and advised by engineers, accountants, economists, ecologist and information system analysts, among other specialists. Marxism provided a logical resolution to the contradiction between the social production and private ownership: the social ownership, the redistribution of wealth and government spending for the working class and peasantry.

d) Identity: Marxism provides workers with an understanding of their central role in the capitalist system of production and distribution and in the transformation of that system into a new egalitarian and democratic socialist society. The workers’ recognition and understanding of their central role leads to greater self-esteem, pride and solidarity, and usually leads to workers playing an active role in fighting for the immediate and strategic interests of the working class. Equally important Marxism provides workers with a strategic vision which links immediate reforms to a ‘transitional program’ that accumulates forces for the taking of state power and the establishment of a workers and peasants state. Workers’ identity - best understood as class-consciousness - is both the product of MARXIST study and the impact of class action on MARXIST principles, a dialectical process of learning and experience.

e) The Battle of Ideas: The objective conditions of workers (poverty, unemployment and oppression) are necessary but not sufficient for developing a struggle against capitalism and imperialism. The elite mass media, consumer propaganda and reactionary clergy all act to divert workers from class solidarity and collective mobilization toward individual illusions and individual mobility at the expense of their class. MARXISM is an essential tool in unmasking the lies, illusions and manipulation of the mass media and gaining the battle of ideas: providing logical and clear refutation of the ideas justifying elite and imperial rule and informing workers of alternative understanding of the benefits of collective ownership and their true class interests.

Further Elaboration - Ten Reasons for Spreading Marxism among Workers

1) Marxism provides a strategic perspective for winning the class struggle, achieving national independence and establishing international working class solidarity. Marxism incorporates three essential elements to deepening revolutionary understanding for engaging in the class struggle:

a) Historical-comparative experiences of struggles in different countries as well as experiences at different times within the same country.

b) Marxism is based on a materialist conception of history that gives primacy to the dialectical relation between the economic organization, class structure, class struggle, the state and political ideology and organization in determining the direction of history. Marxism rejects the mechanical view of history as determined by ‘ideas’ or ‘elites’.

c) Marxism provides a rich class analysis of the social forces and struggles, which determine large-scale, long-term changes. It rejects bourgeois interpretation of history, which focuses on ‘individualistic’ (Great Men) or ‘elite theories’ of history. Marxists do no reject the importance of leadership, however they point out that ‘leadership’ is a product of social movements and knowledge emerging from class experiences.

2) Marxism provides the key to understanding the bases of all production, distribution and value - labor. On the basis of the centrality of labor Marxism provides a theoretical and practical basis for understanding why workers’ struggle is the motor force of historical progress.

3) Marxism provides the most comprehensive and thorough critique of neo-liberalism and the most coherent and clearest political and economic alternative. Marxists have provided the clearest critiques of privatizations and defense of public ownership, of foreign debt payment and defense of investment in the local market, of the class nature of structural adjustment programs and the alternatives of socializing the strategic sectors of the economy (energy, electricity, finance, foreign trade etc).

4) Marxism affirms the practical and moral advantages of class solidarity against individualistic ’solutions’ to structural problems such as wage, health and job security. While there are rare exceptions, most historical gains by the working class have occurred through collective organization.

5) Marxism provides a materialist basis for constructing international solidarity and exposing the historical failures of class collaboration between US trade unions and the imperialist state and multinationals. Marxists point to the internationalization of capital as forming the material basis and necessity for workers to organize across national boundaries on the basis of a program of equality and anti-imperialism.

6) Marxism provides the clearest understanding of the relationship between class, gender, ecology and nation. Marxism recognizes the inequalities within classes (between races and gender) and the inequalities and class differences within gender, ethnic and racial groups. Marxists combine the working class struggle against capital and empire with a social struggle within the working class for gender, race and ethnic equality.

7) Marxism has provided the only clear and comprehensive understanding of imperialism: how it operates, what it demands and its catastrophic consequences for the exploited countries. Marxist theories of imperialism are decisive in rejecting foreign investment, free trade and neo-colonialism in the form of NAFTA, ALCA and Plan Colombia by exposing the central role of imperialist states in concentrating profits and market control.

8) Marxists explain why workers play a central role in the struggle against capitalist exploitation by pointing to their central role in production and distribution. If workers shut down the factories, banks, transport, energy and electrical systems, the economy cannot function; capitalist profits would turn to losses.

9) Marxist perspective on the future alternative, socialist society is based on the practical experience of social production, collective struggle and transitional victories, which enlarge the decision-making powers of workers. Marxists do not ‘dream’ of a future society nor do they conceive of socialism as a ‘utopia’. To Marxists socialism is demonstrated in everyday solidarity, sharing of experiences collective victories and the advancement of socialized social services. Socialism, collective ownership is not an ‘end in itself’ but a means to greater individual freedom, social security and greater leisure time to study, play and enrich personal experience. The ultimate goal of socialism is the ‘New Man’ who both enjoys personal freedom and practices social responsibility.

10) MARXISM has both a positive and negative history. The negative side of ‘Marxism’ is found in its abstract ‘Hegelian’ metaphysical expression, which ‘never touches earth’ - that is devoid of concrete analysis and divorced from the class struggle. True Marxism is historical and empirical, it relates theory to understanding concrete historical and contemporary experiences.

Negative Marxism is dogmatic, imitative, and academic and relies on ‘exotic language’. It is closed to new ideas, experience and realities. All the answers are found in a closed book spoken by leaders or regimes whose experiences are copied without regard to the historical, cultural, political and class specificities. Academic Marxists speak to themselves in a very technical jargon divorced from the practical struggles of the workers and peasants and are long on critiques and short on practical solutions and alternatives.

Positive Marxists are open to new concepts, examining new phenomena (problems of bureaucracy, intellectuals, ecological destruction, Non-Governmental Organizations, etc) and introducing new concepts extending Marxist analysis to new areas. Marxists creatively apply basic concepts to specific and particular historical and cultural, class structures. They reject mechanical ‘copying’ of other ‘models’ of revolution or political strategy. They recognize changes in time, place, class structure and correlation of forces. Positive Marxism not only ’studies’ problems but is action-oriented. In order to relate its analysis to practice it employs a language comprehensible to the workers. For all these reasons, the progress of the workers movement, the development and diffusion of Marxist ideas among the working class and the class struggle are inextricably linked together.

March 25, 2005