We're still drafting this. This is a why we are doing this and what we are thinking about doing and how you can help. Run on sentences ahead.
Marx is intimidating.
Years ago, in college, I was missing a math requisite and had to take a summer course to graduate. A handful of people in my boat and a bunch of incoming freshmen who were eager to get it out of the way. The teacher was nice enough, but one day, out of the blue, she went off on this weird anti-communist diatribe. She started telling everybody that math was important because you could prove things in math and that there wasn't a word of math in Karl Marx, just conjecture. Another kid in the class and I had hit it off over some shared political interests and we just started laughing at her. No math in Das Capital? At the time, I was having trouble with it because of the math. Her wisdom challenged in front of my fellow moldable minds, she doubled down. We asked her what Marx had she read. Whatever she stammered out, it seemed pretty clear that she hadn't read a word. Or seen a figure.
I couldn't entirely blame her, I was having trouble reading Das Kapital myself, but I trudged along. Volume One, and the books it inspired, contained a helpful set of tools to understand the world around us. Capitalism. Imperialism. Exploitation. Labor. Labor Value. Use Value. Read a little more and it began to get a little complicated. Hegemony. Commodity Fetishism. Alienation. If you kept reading, you'd find yourself in the world of Reification and the Ideological State Apparatus. Then there were the arguments. And party lines. Disagreements over the Spanish Civil War. What was happening in China. What IS happening in China. It could be incredibly intimidating.
But the tools themselves remain useful. In a confusing world, nothing can provide all the answers, but they can illuminate: where to inquire, what to look for, how to critically understand what is going on, why is it being framed in such a way and in whose interest?
There's a surplus of food but famine and hunger worldwide. There are more than enough houses but people sleep on the streets. Despite regular economic downturns that can close factories and destabilize countries, there's always a wealthy elite seems to float along just fine. How? Why? Who? Who's going to do anything about any of this?
If there is one constant in my life, it is that capitalism is the system of our time, predicated on exploitation, and it is destroying us. All of us. Individually. As groups. As a planet.
People are politically active today in a way that is refreshing. The comfortable are discomforted constantly in a panic about people being "woke," cancel culture, this idea that there is this mob of "social justice warriors" out ready at a moment's notice to go fight. It's comforting to know we're not alone in our frustration at a rigged system doling out tiered justice and diminishing returns.
But the protests are having diminishing returns as well. George W. Bush called the largest peace march in world history a "focus group," and went on to commit the crime of the Iraq war. We say Black Lives Matter, but the police are just getting more impunity, more weapons, more thin blue line punisher Iphone cases. Even when we get "progressives" elected, nothing seems to change for the better.
Since the Communist Manifesto was written over 170 years ago, the one constant has been that capitalists fear the threat of Communism. A hundred years ago, we had the Palmer raids where the U.S. government deported suspected socialists, anarchists, and communists. We had the Red scare of the 1950s with congressional hearings and "blacklists." We had COINTELPRO where the FBI spied on, sabotaged, and assassinated communists and suspected sympathizers (among others). And that's just domestically.
Internationally, the U.S. has been killing communists for a long time. We invaded Russia in 1918, fought China and Korea in the 1950s, overthrew the left-leaning government in Guatemala in 1954, organized an invasion of Cuba in 1961, invaded Vietnam in 1964, overthrew Chile's socialist government in 1973, organized and armed death squads across Latin America for decades, and threatened the entire world with "Mutual assured destruction" from the end of the Cold War to the fall of the Soviet Union.
Why?
People will talk with conviction about authoritarianism and political dogma. References to dictators, bread lines, and poverty abut heartfelt declarations about the sad state of human nature and sadly there is just no alternative to what we have now.
It's fantastic, really. Listening to working people, people who've worked their whole lives, some with only a glimmer of hope of retirement at the end, taught to fear themselves. Preaching now that working people should never be in charge. That if we are to read merely a word of Marx or Engels or Rosa Luxemburg or Lenin or Mao or Castro or Ho Chi Minh or Angela Davis or Mike Davis or Mark Fisher, well, then before you know it, we're all going to end up in Stalin's gulag before lunch. Prisoners of ourselves.
That is fear. Fear that was taught. Fear that was reinforced. Capitalist fear. In our minds. Sometimes coming out of our mouths. Fear of what we can do together, if we get organized and use revolutionary theory and practice to re-make this world for ourselves, with our hands. We are taught this for the simple reason that Communism is how we forcibly break apart the organized power of the capitalist class.
Marx is intimidating that way. But reading Left Theory doesn't have to be.
We're going to host a reading a day, 15 minutes or less, for a year. Something to get you thinking. You don't have to agree or pay or swear allegiance to anything. But there's a lot of work to be done. And as someone once said, forgive the paraphrase, "Thought without work is empty, work without thought is blind." Let's see what we can do.
Enjoy The Red Letter.