To understand why myself and many other Marxists have decided to combat the KKE, one must consider the generational divide that’s coming to define our era. This is a confrontation not necessarily between younger people and older people—as there are plenty among the old who fall on the right side in this fight—but rather a conflict between two opposing mentalities. One is the mentality of clinging to the past, and not believing we should transition into something new because the past was what supposedly worked. The other mindset is focused on forging new paths, because those who embrace this mindset have been pushed into seeking out an alternative; the circumstances have left them with no choice but to leave behind the old, and face the present reality as it is.
In the context of the Marxist movement, the stagnant mentality manifests in the form of doctrinaire ideas that hold the workers back from meaningfully advancing their struggle. The KKE draws its ideas from the crude economism that was propagated by the sectarian anti-“Stalinist” faction within the Soviet leadership, the one that weakened the dictatorship of the proletariat and thereby produced the USSR’s downfall.
Today, such crude economism looks like the KKE attacking Venezuela’s Bolivarian government as anti-worker, based on lies from Venezuela’s Trotskyist wreckers; it looks like the KKE depicting China as capitalist, or calling Ukraine an “inter-imperialist” conflict, or saying that the “Israeli” workers are victims too. It also looks like the KKE forming relationships with members of other parties to create splits within their countries’ communist movements, causing tangible and material harm to the workers struggle. (The KKE’s interference in Venezuela is the biggest example of this.)
When we struggle against these positions and actions, we are carrying on the perpetual mission of renewal within Marxism, the one that Lenin described:
It is precisely because Marxism is not a lifeless dogma, not a completed, ready-made, immutable doctrine, but a living guide to action, that it was bound to reflect the astonishingly abrupt change in the conditions of social life. That change was reflected in profound disintegration and disunity, in every manner of vacillation, in short, in a very serious internal crisis of Marxism. Resolute resistance to this disintegration, a resolute and persistent struggle to uphold the fundamentals of Marxism, was again placed on the order of the day. In the preceding period, extremely wide sections of the classes that cannot avoid Marxism in formulating their aims had assimilated that doctrine in an extremely one-sided and mutilated fashion.
They had learnt by rote certain “slogans”, certain answers to tactical questions, without having understood the Marxist criteria for these answers. The “revaluation of all values” in the various spheres of social life led to a “revision” of the most abstract and general philosophical fundamentals of Marxism. The influence of bourgeois philosophy in its diverse idealist shades found expression in the Machist epidemic that broke out among the Marxists. The repetition of “slogans” learnt by rote but not understood and not thought out led to the widespread prevalence of empty phrase-mongering.
Since the fall of the Soviet Union, Marxism has experienced a new internal crisis, one that’s blunted communism’s recovery. The communist parties that are already in power have learnt the lessons from the USSR’s fall, with China’s ruling party (for one example) having repudiated the historical nihilism which led the USSR to ruin. For many of the communist formations that lack state power, though, there’s been a tendency to learn exactly the wrong lessons from the demise of Soviet socialism.
Parties like the KKE have responded to the USSR’s demise by clinging to the crude economist doctrines, treating these doctrines as historical traditions that we must safeguard. Or at least this is the rationale they use for taking these harmful stances; the root of the problem is opportunism, which overlaps with the retrograde mindset of the “old” side in our societal conflict.
This battle to retake Marxism from complacent and unprincipled actors is a microcosm of the greater battle which is being waged by those who’ve gotten left behind; the battle to escape our outmoded superstructure, and bring our civilization to the next stage. Our core problem is that we still haven’t been allowed to shed the old mode of production, even though it outlived its usefulness many generations ago. We are so far along within the deterioration of capitalism that in practical terms, the capitalist class has had to adopt the socialist model in order to survive; the monopolist-run economy of today functions in essentially the same framework that it will after the workers have seized power.
Our class enemies have been forced to follow Marxism, regardless of how hard they’ve tried to fight against Marxism. This is because Marxism cannot truly be “fought against,” as Marxism does not force society to change into something else; all it does is reveal evolutionary processes that were already at play. This means that when we struggle against the “old,” whether that means combating the monopolists themselves or combating the opportunists within Marxism, what we’re really doing is catalyzing the historical tests that were already going to take place. Inevitably, the social practices that don’t work will be discarded; how exactly they’ll be discarded and what comes after them can’t be determined until afterward, but it’s a certainty that the untenable models will meet up against their counter-forces.
No force in life can exist without its opposite, and our enemies can never get rid of their negation. Anti-communism cannot exist without communism, which is why after the USSR fell, communism soon underwent a new rise in a different form. The problem with the KKE’s camp is that it refuses to recognize this new form as being an authentic revolutionary force. It stands against the largest worker projects that exist today, those being the Bolivarian revolution, the effort by Russia’s workers to ensure their country resists imperialism, and the world’s biggest workers state (the PRC). As a consequence of the crude economism that’s behind these positions, the KKE has also aligned itself with labor Zionism (as evidenced by its stated sympathy for Jewish colonizers).
If we understand the condition of the class struggle as it exists today, we will be able to guide the proletarians within the KKE towards our positions, as well as bring in the broader working class. One important aspect of this condition is the fact that among the KKE’s ranks, there are a great many members who are also part of the World Federation of Trade Unions. This is significant because though the KKE has taken on a harmful role in the struggle compared to its World War II partisan resistance, the WFTU maintains its historical character as the union formation which advances the interests of workers throughout the Third World. And one of the ways in which the WFTU maintains this revolutionary status is by consistently struggling against Zionism, in contrast to its reactionary counterpart the International Confederation of Trade Unions.
The ICTU was what the reactionary, pro-imperialist unions formed after the imperial labor leaders orchestrated a split from the WFTU in 1949. And one of the ways that the ICTU continues to harm national liberation struggles is by consistently siding with Histadrut, the labor Zionist union that operates within occupied Palestine. When the KKE depicts the “Israeli” workers as victims, it is taking the side of Histadrut and the ICTU. If we expose this contradiction, we will be able to show the workers—both inside and outside the KKE or its affiliated parties—why exactly the KKE’s leadership plays a harmful role. This is a way that we can productively and constructively critique the KKE, going beyond simply pointing out the ways that it’s incorrect.
It’s important that we wage this struggle with such consideration for nuance, because the KKE does not play a bad role in all areas; its worker organizing efforts are a good example of political practice, and I do not begrudge admitting this. This struggle is not a personal thing; we don’t seek to reactively discard every part of what’s been established. We in fact seek to sublate the old, incorporating the progressive aspects of it into the next things we build. This goes for all areas of the revolutionary struggle, and of the generational conflict which connects to it. The logical conclusion of this conflict is to end the conflict, making it so that whether in Marxism or in the wider culture, dialectical materialism has come to be the defining force.
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