What is to be done?

There can be a temptation to sit back and cheerlead for this or that state or militant group and say they’re going to bring the empire to its knees, but really it isn’t their responsibility to end the western empire. It’s ours … It’s not fair for us to shirk off the responsibility of ending the western empire onto struggling nations with a lot more problems than we do. It is fully within our capability to awaken a revolutionary zeitgeist within our society so  we can use the power of our vast numbers to take down this machine and create a better world. Caitlin Johnstone, January 12 2025

This is one of those rare moments when I take issue with Caitlin. But before I do, bear with me as I set the scene – beginning with an earlier scourge of western empire.

Sometime between late 1902 and early 1903 Vladimir Lenin beat me to this post’s title with his best known polemical essay, What is to be done?  It advanced the then novel thesis that Marx had missed something important in his three volume magnus opus, Capital. It could no longer be argued, said Lenin, that capitalism would by its internal contradictions bring about its own negation. The workers of the world had not spontaneously led humanity into the socialism for which industrial capitalism, and industrial capitalism alone, prepares the ground.

They could only do so, he argued, under disciplined and informed revolutionary guidance. Thus was born the idea of a Vanguard Party which some fifteen years later, in ten days that shook the world, would lead Russia’s tiny proletariat and vast peasantry to seize state power and found a fledgling workers’ state.

It never occurred to Lenin that, in an imperialist world whose workings he had so exposed, ¹ the USSR – a new born babe with wild wolves all around it  ² – could go it alone. His additions to Marx and Engels were not so radical as to break with their insistence that only by seizing state power in an advanced capitalism (which Russia assuredly was not) could a workers’ dictatorship (as opposed to a bourgeois one, whether authoritarian or quasi-democratic) lay the foundations for socialism. Axiomatic for Russia’s Bolsheviks was that October 1917 was a holding operation, pending revolution in the West. When that didn’t happen – when the two capitalisms in which they had invested most hope turned instead to fascism – Stalin shifted the goal post to a pipe-dream of “socialism in one country”. ³ In the final decade of that same tumultuous century it fell to Mikhail Gorbachev to dismantle the USSR. While the knee-jerk end of socialism applauded – yippee: no more tiresome arguments over ‘communist tyranny’! – those less easily swayed by the tides of political fashion saw the demise of that extrinsically distorted state for the seismic defeat for humanity it truly was. ⁴

But we are where we are, and where we are is asking the question Lenin asked a dozen decades ago. What is to be done?

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In a post of September 2021 – An open letter: isn’t China “just as bad”? – I summarised the state we’re in:

• Our world is capitalist in its advanced stage of imperialism – the export of monopoly capital from global north to south, and the south to north repatriation of profits.

• The prime beneficiaries of this world order are rentier elites in the most successful imperialisms: i.e. most of the former colonial powers (including the USA) but also the Antipodes, Canada, Scandinavia and an EU led by Germany. ⁵

• In its initial progressive phase capitalism freed humanity, albeit at terrible cost, from feudal ties and slavery while hugely advancing human productivity. Now its structures (means of wealth creation in ever fewer hands) and laws of motion (prioritising above all else of private profits and insatiable accumulation) demand unsustainable levels of narrowly defined and grossly distorted ‘growth’, condemning the world to:

  • environmental degradation

  • ceaseless wars, normalised and monetised, and sold to us in tissues of lies;

  • levels of  inequality as dysfunctional as they are obscene, and a mortal threat to meaningful democracy.
    

Re that last, men like Musk and Zuckerberg – “worth” more than many nations’ GDP – are the tip of the iceberg. On less visible aspects of the incompatibility of current levels of inequality with “meaningful democracy” I’m with the Reverend Chris Hedges, and would add only that his assessment of America’s oligarchy masquerading as a democracy applies with greater or lesser blatancy to the collective West at large:

Those who wrote trade deals to profit from underemployment of U.S. workers and sweatshop labor overseas are omnipotent. The insurance and pharmaceutical industries that run healthcare for profit are omnipotent. The intelligence agencies that spy on the public are omnipotent. The courts that reinterpret laws to excuse corporate crimes are omnipotent.

Politics is a tawdry carnival act where a constant jockeying by the ruling class dominates the news. The real business of ruling is hidden, carried out by corporate lobbyists who write the legislation, banks that loot the Treasury, the war industry and an oligarchy that determines who gets elected and who does not. It is impossible to vote against the interests of Goldman Sachs, the fossil fuel industry or Raytheon, no matter which party is in office.

Let’s stop pretending America is a functioning democracy

Having bullet-listed the direness of our straits I went on to speak of the lack, in the West at any rate, of credible currents of resistance …

… social democracy .. ‘vanguard’ revolutionary sects .. grass roots activism pace Occupy, XR etc – all have useful features but, each for its own reasons, zero chance of success of the kind and magnitude needed. My evidence for saying so is widely distributed across this site. For this reason, and the uncontroversial nature of the claim, I see no cause to labour the point …

… and from that assessment to the conclusion that China offers humankind’s only ray of hope:

I’ve long welcomed the rise of China not because of its intrinsic features – of which, like most Westerners across the political spectrum, I knew little – but because I saw as A Good Thing any check to US Exceptionalism’s pursuit of full spectrum dominance.

(A simple ‘market discipline’ analogy may help. Under capitalism a town with only one food store is worse for its people than a town with two. Provided they aren’t in cahoots, this holds even if the second owner is just as venal as his rival.)

Lately though I’ve been taking a closer look at China, and liking what I see. 

This conclusion, aided by the work of anti-imperialist economists ably epitomised by Michael Hudson, puts me – potentially at least – at odds with Caitlin Johnstone. In the January 12 post cited at the beginning – It’s Not The Responsibility Of The Global South To Bring Down The Empire. It’s Ours – she tells us that:

… we can’t expect the resistance fighters of the global south to fight our battles … it isn’t their responsibility to end the western empire. It’s ours.

Hamas, Hezbollah, Ansar Allah … are small groups with limited resources. Iran, Russia and China have their own concerns and are focused on surviving empire’s aggressions with their own national sovereignty intact. It is very possible the rise of China will end up dissolving the US empire’s stranglehold on our planet, but this could take a long time.

Empires always fall, but [this] could take a century or more if we don’t nuke ourselves in the meantime, and if the environmental disasters on the horizon don’t destroy human civilization first.

All true, and the hour is indeed late. But without a credible plan for taking up the burden – of a duty Caitlin seems to be saying defenders of the axis of resistance are shirking – knowing that we have little time doesn’t really get us very far …

… and what she offers falls well short of a credible plan:

It is fully within our capability to awaken a revolutionary zeitgeist within our society so that we can use the power of our vast numbers to take down this machine and create a better world.

Maybe that’s true too, and if it isn’t we do well to act as if it were. But is Caitlin suggesting that we who lend moral support (unable as we are to offer any other kind) to the axis of resistance – all the while articulating to the best of our abilities our reasoning – is somehow antithetical to doing our bit “to awaken a revolutionary zeitgeist”?

I see the two as inextricably interwoven. As she herself says:

We can begin working toward this awakening today. Doing all we can to help people see the unacceptable nature of the empire and its abuses, not just with their minds but with their hearts as well.

But arguments in defence of an axis of resistance vilified in Western mainstream discourse make no sense – let alone convincing sense – unless we who platform them are in the same breath pointing out “the unacceptable nature of the empire and its abuses”. 

Is the false opposition she implies a solution in search of a problem? To give this truth-warrior her considerable due, that call – reminiscent of the great Rosa Luxemburg ⁶ – to engage heart as well as mind is one of the two qualities I most admire in Caitlin. ⁷ But we’re about to get to the one aspect of her worldview I don’t share:

We vastly outnumber our rulers. They rule solely by our consent. The empire requires not only our docility and obedience but our labor and our continued purchasing behavior as well. If enough of us refuse to consent to giving them any of these things, we can force the end of our corrupt, murderous governments and systems, and replace them with something far healthier.

It is a defining feature of all ruling classes that they are outnumbered by those they rule. What, otherwise, would be the point? Being outnumbered enables the few to live in such opulence on the surplus wealth created by the many. But of itself this disparity in numbers no more contains the key to their downfall than a comparable disparity enables the rabbits of the warren to unite and overthrow the weasel. So atomised and unorganised are the many – so bereft of effective and principled leadership – that the likeliest beneficiaries of empire collapsing under the weight of its own lunacy will not be some rainbow alliance of the enlightened. They will be humanity’s darkest elements.

That’s why Marxism needed its Lenin; a truth which holds irrespective of my conclusion that in today’s world the Vanguard Party is a ship that sailed long ago. In another defence of China, in this case not from liberal naivete but an ultra-Leftism of which Lenin was scathing, I wrote:

The far left’s refusal to distinguish on the one hand China’s state-monitored industrial capitalism, its big banks firmly outside the private sector; on the other the usurping of state control by the West’s oligarchs, leads it to dismiss China as a progressive force. Rather, crying plague on China and the West both, it embraces (or pays lip service to) a fantasy of violently overthrowing capitalisms armed to the teeth, versed in all the dark arts, and wielding tools of surveillance beyond the wildest dreams of the 20th century totalitarianisms. This, moreover, in a West whose export of industry has eroded the very socialising conditions – an exploitation experienced en masse in the huge dark Satanic mills of Marx’s day – which led him to see the proletariat as the only force with both the means and the motive to take humanity into socialism.

On my travel bucket list: North Korea

To be clear, Caitlin is not one of those who damn China, from liberal or ultra-leftist perspective, for the road it has taken. (Nor does she pour venom on those other nations, most prominently the Russian Federation, which together constitute this axis of resistance.) But on the question of what is to be done, I need her to show me the plan. Alas, “awakening a revolutionary zeitgeist within our society so that we can use the power of our vast numbers to take down this machine and create a better world”  just doesn’t cut it for me. The awakening she speaks of may (or may not) be a necessary condition for averting catastrophe. It is emphatically not a sufficient one.

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1. See Imperialism: the highest stage of capitalism, written amidst imperialism’s first globally internecine war and on the eve of the Russian Revolution.
2. I don’t say Bob Dylan had the USSR in mind with that line in Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall, but it’s apt. Do those who make the obtusely complacent judgment, that what befell the world’s first workers’ state proves “socialism doesn’t work”, truly believe a vastly more powerful West sat back with dispassionate curiosity to let this interesting experiment play out unimpeded? They need to brush up on their history – from the fourteen nations whose armies fought alongside Cossacks in the appallingly savage “civil war” of 1918-21, to Team Reagan’s successful project of forcing an arms race which bled dry the Soviet economy.
3. One indicator of the oxymoronic nature of “socialism in one country” can be found in Castro’s remonstrations with the USSR for trading with Cuba on the basis of a law of value Marxist economists know to be inherently exploitative. Another was Stalin’s unpreparedness for Hitler tearing up the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact and launching his epoch-shaping gamble, Operation Barbarossa.
4. The rise of welfarism in the most successful European imperialisms was an unabashed response to the USSR, calculated to forestall workers seeking revolutionary answers to impoverishment. In similar vein both FDR’s New Deal, and LBJ’s opposition to deep south segregation, were sold to the die-hards on the basis of US capitalism needing to clean its act on pain of ceding to Moscow the moral high ground. History seldom repeats exactly, and the racism once needed to justify first a free and then a cheap labour pool at home, and plunder overseas, is past its sell-by date for the elites of today’s hyper-financialised West. Reining in welfarism and calling it austerity on the other hand …

   The point being that the fall of the USSR, and with it – since China had yet to show its full hand – the end of history any credible alternative to free markets unfettered, held out the promise of capitalism on steroids. Bear this in mind as you meditate on the West’s rotting inner cities and permanent precariat, its welfare systems on life support, and a heap of other blights whose fixing should be the alpha and omega of economics but which stay stubbornly unfixed. Do these things not attest to a capitalism whose business case for Being Nice vaporised in 1991? Reductive? if you say so. But to deny any link between the demise of the USSR and worsening of labour conditions and state provision both in the West and (with China excepted) the global south is to ignore the blindingly obvious.

5. The outdatedness of my reference, forty months ago, to “an EU led by Germany” bears its own witness to the rapidity of a Western decline accelerated by Europe’s failed gamble in the Ukraine.
6. It was Rosa who set the context assumed by discussions like this one, through the clarity of her formulation that humanity even then faced a stark choice: the socialising of wealth creation to prioritise human (hence planetary) need over private profit – else barbarism. Her fate was to end up face down in a Berlin canal, courtesy that barbarism. Ours hangs in the balance but the omens aren’t good.
7. For the other quality I admire in Caitlin see my previous post.