Chapter 7: The Dialectic, History, and Climate Change

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All of history cannot be neatly summed up. There are too many strands; but what we can do is look at the strands. We do this through the dialectic, our understanding of the fusion and re-fusion of opposites.

Look at the rise of fascism and the counter-rise of socialism throughout the world in the modern day, and you will witness what we Marxists call a historical force. The decay of the liberal order throughout the world has taken the old parties and scrambled them. At its simplest, the dialectical process could be described as follows: The left was once people advocating progressive ideas for selfish reasons (liberals) while the right was once people advocating regressive ideas for selfless reasons (conservatives). Now the left is people advocating progressive ideas for selfless reasons (socialists) and the right is people advocating regressive ideas for selfish reasons (fascists).

This dialectical change occurred as we progressed towards late capitalism. The decay of morality that accompanies capitalist decay erodes the founts of conservative ideology, the church and respect for the constitution. The collapse of selfless dupes as an organized force forces the right to edge closer and closer to fascism to win elections: to keep the regressive ideology, but start deploying it cynically and disingenuously, in the manner of a soulless liberal bougie like Karl Rove or Chuck Colson pre-Jesus. Meanwhile on the left, the nice liberal talk about new government programs while caving easily to proposals to do nothing breeds a more radical vision, of building power for the working class and not the rich, and thus a local socialist movement is born, from the lefties who really do mean well.

Look around any late capitalist society, and that dialectical process describes the change, the result, and the underlying ethical reasons why. This particular dialectical analysis avoids class directly, but by analyzing the ethics it analyzes class by proxy. Doing it this way isn't necessary in this case, but sometimes it is in others. Grand historical sweeps can be analyzed on a single dialectical strand like this, and those grand sweeps of history aren't always analyzed on class alone. In this case, we looked at ethics. But even so, it gave us a class-conscious result, because the dialectic is how history operates.

I prefaced with all of that because the idea I'm about to explain is both maddeningly complex and maddeningly simple, to the point that I fear it may not be taken seriously enough. Without an understanding of dialectical reasoning, it'll sound like gibberish. But with that understanding, it abbreviates the past in a way that points our strategy for the future. That abbreviation is the nature of a dialectical strand; we see one or two aspects of a thing at a time. What I'm about to explain does not, therefore, pretend to be some grand unified theory of history. Dialectical materialism as a whole is that; I offer only an elaboration on an important fragment.

I do this because Marxism-Leninism is a science, and it is currently a science with faulty and Eurocentric foundations. Marx and Lenin are heroes, not gods, and Marx made and Lenin failed to address an error. It was a tiny error at the time, tinier than the ones I regularly make, yet over 150 years these things compound. Marx analyzed European history in depth to derive his communist ideas. He didn't necessarily believe European history to be universalizable, but he did write phrases like "the Asiatic mode of production" that demonstrate the utter lack of seriousness with which he took the issue of non-European production. Lenin devoted more study to the issue of colonialism, but did not try to understand non-European economic history before it very much. This lack of seriousness around the "Asiatic mode of production" led to a lack of seriousness in vetting who got to lead Asian Communist parties and why in 1920s Moscow, which led to the "Maoist mode of communism," which led to the "Chinese characteristics mode of socialism."

In less snarky analysis, this Eurocentric framing led both Marx and Lenin to believe that feudalism was a universally necessary historical process, instead of one of several possible outcomes of a bourgeois state of any era, ranging from abject slavery (ancient Rome, the Confederate States) to free labor (the modern West). While it is true that public relations forces states to shun their most brutal forms over the millennia, that public relations exercise shouldn't be mistaken for a fundamental change in the nature of the state, just a loosening of the workers' chains so they think they're free. Being that Marx and Lenin addressed the bulk of their analysis to Europe, this error did not substantially lessen their analyses of the European societies around them. But it did make it that much harder to broaden Marxism-Leninism out of Europe, by letting ideological errors compound from the very top, with dozens of petty opportunists hiding their careers behind every error.

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