The chapter from What Is To Be Undone that this last article addressing Marxism Leninism offers, like other chapters I have excerpted for the series, began with an offset quote, this time from the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty. “Nevertheless there comes a time when a detour ceases to be a detour, when the dialectic is no longer a dialectic…” 1

Then the chapter offered a summation of sorts beginning with these words: At this point we shall do a summary review of the past three chapters in an order that is more conducive to seeing causal relations than to slowly working out an analysis.

I interject: Please keep in mind, the issue at stake is what concepts, connections among them, aims, and methods should we utilize when we think about current society in order to change it?

Classical Marxism is a powerful social theory that presented a compelling understanding of some of history’s dynamics and that uncovered a great many of its hidden but important attributes. Nonetheless it had and has numerous weaknesses which are highly consequential precisely because of the ways they affect Classical Marxist practitioners’ abilities to fully understand their surroundings and to consciously change them for the better.

Classical Marxism is based on a dialectical approach that is somewhat unbalanced and quite narrow and that thereby causes excessive dichotomizing and fixating.

I interject: I have to set things a bit straight as of 2026. Beyond what I have already offered, from the early 1970s, I now have to admit that I doubt there is such a thing as a general dialectical approach that anyone would reject or even not recommend. That whole books about dialectics eludes my comprehension. After all, what does a general dialectical approach really say? 

I think it says, pay attention to the inter nature of things and systems and also to the external pressures on those things and systems. Who disagrees with that? 

I think it also says: When looking at things and systems, notice if within them there are aspects that are contradictory to one another, meaning aspects that pursue mutually incompatible ends, and then note that the resolution of such contradictions may be especially important to what emerges in the thing or system over time. Again, does anyone say otherwise? 

So I admit that to my ears referring to “the dialectic” and the dialectical method as something really pivotal, special, and even uniquely important to one theory but not to others makes little sense to me. More, why use an academic word whose meaning is obscure?

Beyond that, I think Classical Marxism’s Dialectics adds to an agreeable, general, almost universally shared common sense attitude about looking at things and systems, an apriori universally binding instruction that the social thing’s or systems we-look-at have paramount internal features, and that contradictions of an economic sort will always be present and should always be our primary focus. And to me, that instruction is where Classical Marxist Dialectic’s problems seem to me to reside. 

Maybe the reason for retaining the vague academic word “Dialectics” is precisely to make it appear that Classical Marxism’s additions to common sense attitudes are so indisputably part of the whole approach called Marxist Dialectics that we can’t dispense with Marxist Dialectics without also dispensing with the effective, common sense part of the approach. 

In any case, the chapter from the early seventies continued: Classical Marxism is also based on a theory of knowledge that is narrow, that does not understand the full dynamics of thought processes, that overemphasizes the dominating importance of material needs, that does not understand the dynamics of defensiveness and sectarianism, and that therefore postulates no powerful methods for dealing with either.

Similarly and derivatively, Classical Marxism is also based on an unenlightened understanding of human behavior that largely ignores the importance of many human needs, tendencies, and desires, and as a result has almost no understanding of the full complexity of human motivation. Worse, it tends to assert all such issues in any case to be secondary, ‘unmaterial’, and therefore not worth much of our time. As a result Classical Marxism is not well suited to analyzing tactics with regard to their likely effects on real concrete in-the-world people. 

I interject: I am not suggesting that someone seeking to help change the world must know what in fact no one knows, and perhaps no one could even know, which is precisely how thought emerges and proceeds, or even all factors that can affect thought. We all have no choice but to operate with less than comprehensive and infallible knowledge of human consciousness formation and use. But we don’t have to operate with so little knowledge and even with such a dismissive attitude toward such knowledge that we repeatedly and consistently overlook or even intentionally ignore centrally important aspects of how people arrive at and utilize views. We need to have sufficient understanding to formulate effective strategy and to help us avoid destructive defensiveness, sectarianism, and simplistic explanations of motivation. 

The chapter continues: Further, Classical Marxism develops a theory of history, called Classical Historical Materialismthat is also lacking. It is based on an unbalanced view of historical forces that underestimates and misunderstands the relevance and dynamics of racism, sexism, authoritarianism, and even classism. It is based on a non-psychological highly abstracted conceptual foundation, and so it does not understand the dynamics of short run events and day to day occurrences, all of which it most often dismisses as simply accidents or as irrelevant to history.

It is based on a view of people that stresses scarcity almost entirely and that therefore creates a theory that overemphasizes the importance of class and underestimates the importance of other groups, and of ‘ideas’.

It is based on a theory of contradictions that makes classes dominant but ignores the reality of ‘revolutionaries’ who are no longer explicable as solely class motivated people. It is not self-critical and protestations aside it does not promote self-criticism among the people it selects for creating change.

It doesn’t really understand oppressive dynamics in their totality and it gives no very powerful understanding of why oppression is and has heretofore always been so prevalent. It abstracts away much that has been important to history’s outcomes and then protects itself against understanding its own resulting deficiencies.

It doesn’t provide any means for postulating goals because it doesn’t really talk about human fulfillment. It does not really say where the ‘good’ will come from or what it will look like, merely that it will arrive.

Perhaps most important of all, because of the peculiar dynamics of its weaknesses and because of the ways it affects its practitioners and the ways they affect it, Classical Marxism does not significantly change over time. It becomes a kind of religion whose defining features its advocates develop an on-going interest to preserve that causes them to worship rather than to try to critically understand and advance those core features. Classical Marxism gives believers a vested interest in ideological stability rather than Innovative change and it creates a strategy that reflects all these weaknesses in a variety of ways.

I interject: Once again, this is Classical Historical Materialism and Classical Marxism, it is not everything every Marxist thinks or does. In fact, that is inevitably the case because to abide the Classical concepts that obscure or even rule out everything beyond them would be, well, so mechanical and narrow that of course lots and lots of practitioners try to do better. But, and this has been a critical point throughout our assessment, in the practice that results from Classical Marxism the ills appear and collectively tend to dominate, so you get what we saw in Bolshevik practice. 

The chapter continues: Classical Leninism exaggerates the importance of immiseration and underestimates the importance of a knowledge of viable future alternatives. It has little capacity to understand the dynamics of tactics as they affect practitioners or ‘recipients’ and so its decisions about such issues are highly problematic, and quite often wrong. It doesn’t arm people to effectively compose or evaluate their own programmatic efforts.

I interject: As seen through Marxist Leninist filters Leninism considers how possible choices appear likely to impact some large-scale aims like the party’s power, but it rarely considers how possible choices would likely impact the mindsets, morale, personalities, and commitments of those who undertake them, like party members and wider populations, and, in turn, how those human effects would abet, undermine, or even corrupt large-scale aims. 

The chapter continues: Leninism makes a fetish of discipline and hierarchy to the absolute detriment of real revolutionary potentials in the people who use it and the people they encounter. It overemphasizes the importance of class conflict and underemphasizes the importance of struggles around race, sex, power, dignity, freedom, and alienation.

It compels people to be “protestantly workerlike” at exactly that moment in history when they are struggling to be free of old identities and definitions in order to adopt newer better ones. It pushes people to submit to new authorities at exactly that moment when it is most critical that they confront all authority.

It makes a fetish of whatever it first finds important and hardly ever flexibly adapts to changing conditions. It is sectarian to an extreme that increases as its practitioners have more and more power.

Leninism is a poor blueprint for a contemporary power take-over and says almost nothing important about the dynamics of an all-sided revolution that would successfully eliminate exploitation much less all other modern forms of oppression.

I interject: That was arguably too strong. Leninism does say some things that are important but they are things which virtually everyone already knows. What it adds to people’s conceptual commitments beyond what virtually every activist already knows—such as that economy matters, workers matter, owners matter, tactics matter, working together matters, and so on—is where Leninism’s problems arise. 

The chapter continues: And Leninism leads to practice that reflects all these weaknesses often in their most brutal imaginable forms. Practice that ignores most human needs, tramples opposition, learns almost nothing from experience, and becomes progressively more and more despotic as its practitioners gain power, or more and more irrelevant as its practitioners encounter insurmountable difficulties they can’t really understand.

I interject: Is that perhaps too strong? Well, consider Bolshevism. Consider what Leninism wins when it wins. Consider how often it fails to win, and why. Don’t start your assessment by taking as a given that to critique and reject Leninism means you will accept oppression, exploitation, and injustice—so that to favor fundamental change you must accept Marxism Leninism and then just do better than, say, Lenin and Trotsky did, even while you think their same thoughts and cleave to their same system.

The chapter continues: Classical Marxist Leninists don’t grasp what revolution really is—they limit themselves to a less than full picture of the society they wish to change, they have only a minimal sense of the people they expect to do the changing, and they have almost no serious institutional vision of what the new society should be like.

They don’t perceive the importance of a clearly outlined goal. They don’t really understand that revolution doesn’t come because a situation is totally intolerable but because of a clash between what is, and what people want and realize could be. They don’t see that misery alone usually produces only demoralization and competition, while political understanding of viable alternatives produces action. 

They don’t know the dynamics of oppression. They refuse to even acknowledge the oppressive behavioral baggage they have been given by their capitalist backgrounds much less jettison it.

Modern movements must open up new potentials for their practitioners much less whole populations through their practice and their demeanor. Marxist Leninists don’t see that revolutionizing all people’s thoughts is the priority, while revolutionizing just the thoughts of a few leaders is impossibly counter-productive. And they don’t realize these things not because they are stupid but because the weaknesses of Marxism Leninism steer their consciousnesses away from understanding—and because the dynamics of Marxist Leninist revolutionary practice plus their own bad traits give them vested interests in their ignorance.

Marxist Leninists cannot see that a revolution to a classless society can’t arise from traditional class conflict over only property, but only from the dissolution of all oppressed sectors and the emergence of a revolutionary collectivity. A modern revolution will be carried out against the ruling class, not solely by oppressed classes, but by masses of democratically organized revolutionaries no longer primarily identifiable as just class people. Marxist Leninist understanding is based on a revolution wherein people are concerned with power transfers at the top (out with the old bosses in with the new bosses); but not with an all-sided revolution that deals with every aspect of the social question.

Workers and others develop effective revolutionary awareness and desire precisely to the extent they throw off their old traditional patterns of thinking and acting. Marxist Leninists don’t realize that the assembly worker must become less (capitalistically) workerlike and more revolutionary, that the doctor must become less (capitalistically) doctor-like and more revolutionary, each may develops new skills and responsibilities, and both become in the first place, revolutionaries. 

And Marxist Leninists don’t understand that the same is true for women, service employees, youths, Blacks, etc. Marxist Leninists have yet to realize that work under capitalism inculcates more bad habits and more bad ways of thinking and acting than good—and that that is a large part of why it is so oppressive and persistent. They have yet to sense that it is necessary for people to step outside the dictates of their present roles so as to construct new participatory ways of being that better serve their own needs and the needs of people around them. Though people must preserve what is good in their old ways, they must also jettison what is bad; and make fetishes of nothing.

Marxist Leninists don’t realize that when they cynically exploit the nature of the hierarchical factory’s effects to bring people into hierarchical parties they are doing more harm than good. They don’t have any idea of what it takes to create an environment that will allow people to escape from reactionary world views into revolutionary ones. They don’t even address many of the major forms of oppression workers and others feel.

I interject: I was on a roll in those paragraphs and you may feel that to maintain the overall textual momentum I was being unfair. After all, Marxist Leninists aren’t one thing. They aren’t all alike the way my words made them sound. But my point was despite their individual differences in practice the characteristics I have listed dominate the leaders and the outcomes they attain. Remember Bolshevik practice led by Lenin himself and by Trotsky too. And by “led,” I mean overwhelmingly decided by them. So did the leader’s decisions and commands and not what they sometimes may have said say or writes to appeal to some constituency show what it means to be Leninist, or did some rebellious but totally dominated and even exiled dissidents show what it means to be Leninist? What Leninist strategy  produced? And what Classical Marxist theory abetted and certainly didn’t prevent?

The chapter continued: Marxism Leninism’s contemporary problem isn’t even that it would lead an abortive American revolution but that it would lead no American revolution at all. Americans won’t risk comparative comfort and security because a central committee so orders them. Those Americans who are at the point where they might move spontaneously and then be co-opted as happened in Russia, know that they are too few and too weak alone. No one is too interested in taking risks for a central committee that is part racist, part sexist, largely,authoritarian, and even bourgeois; it looks more promising and less dangerous to take lesser risks for fascists or capitalists who offer substantially the same rewards and have the same attributes. But there are exceptions. 

I interject: I can’t stop myself from asking, doesn’t that claim foreshadow rather than ignore the possibility of and therefore not develop awareness and means to thwart key fascistic trends in history?

Some people do rapidly feel their injustices and further recognize that socialism of some kind is the only possible remedy. They then try to function in existing Leninist movements but more often than not they are unable to grow there. Their movement’s dynamics foster the movement members’ own worst tendencies—people become slaves of their movements, or they become immobile and despondent and drop out, or they rise in its hierarchy and make other members miserable. Classical Leninist parties, Classical Leninist centralism, and Classical Leninist narrownesses just can’t sustain revolutionary activism over long periods in people who are struggling for freedom, integrity, and an end to illegitimate authority.

I interject: That is what I saw looking around in the early Seventies. I watched fine, caring, committed people go down Leninist rabbit holes. To expect fundamentally different trajectories for people now, while comrades don shirts with Lenin’s or Trotsky’s picture on them to become human billboards for Bolshevism, or even when they are more restrained and stylish than that, seems profoundly unwise to me.

The chapter continued: Modern western revolutionaries are confronted by a situation that Marxist Leninists have yet to fully appreciate. As Bookchin wrote: “…the process of the disintegration (of old forms) now becomes generalized and cuts across virtually all the traditional classes, values, and institutions. It creates entirely new issues, modes of struggle, forms of organization, and calls for an entirely new approach to theory and praxis.” 2

The Marxist Leninists rely on economic crisis even though it doesn’t appear likely for the U.S. and isn’t essential to revolutionary success. They aim at only workers even though many strata are in motion. They focus entirely on poverty when the distribution of centralized wealth is a major problem. They have a negative approach that attacks existing conditions when what is needed is a positive approach that aims at new conditions. They centralize and demand obedience when decentralization and anti-authoritarianism are critical. They prove incapable of understanding racism and sexism and of relating honestly to anti-racist and anti-sexist struggles even though these are growing more and more important. They cling to old tactics, old thoughts, and even old culture, and they do it because their identities, their interests, and their ideology demand that they do it. And though the best Marxist Leninists quite obviously often get beyond many of these weaknesses, a little study usually shows that they are simultaneously and to the same extent getting beyond Marxist Leninist dogma.

Classical Marxism is supposedly a philosophy of change and yet Classical Marxist Leninists do almost nothing to overcome the most pressing reactionary philosophic belief of our times: the belief that most if not all people are essentially lazy, dumb, evil, and greedy and the belief that no one can ever form a societal organization that is significantly better than that now existing in the United States. Classical Marxist Leninists damn just about anything and everything but they do almost nothing to constructively suggest new possibilities. There is very little in Classical Marxist ideology that can convince people things can get better and there is almost nothing in their practice that can convince people of the same thing. In fact their practice usually does more to prove the reverse. 

Perhaps Maurice Brinton did not go too far when he wrote: “In the struggle for these (truly humanitarian) objectives Bolshevism will eventually be seen to have been a monstrous aberration, the last garb donned by a bourgeois ideology as it was being subverted at the roots. Bolshevism’s emphasis on the incapacity of the masses to achieve a socialist consciousness through their own experiences of life under capitalism, its presumption of a hierarchically structured ‘vanguard’ party and of ‘centralization to fight the centralized state power of the bourgeoisie’, its proclamation of the historical birthright of those who have accepted a particular vision of society (and of its future) and the decreed right to dictate the vision of others—if necessary at the point of a gun—all these will be recognized for what they are: the last attempt of bourgeois society to reassert its ordained division into leaders and led, and to maintain authoritarian social relations in all aspects of life.” 3

Or Svetozar Stojanovic when he suggested: “It would seem that the theory of the unconscious should be applied more broadly than it has been to include revolutionary groups as well. The phenomenon of the inversion of ends and means leads one to suspect that from the very first there were subconscious goals underlying the conscious ones, and that great differences existed between them. The conscious goals, centered upon a society without classes or a state, in circumstances like these only serve to conceal the movement’s subconscious desire to absolutize itself once it reaches power. Individual Marxists have also contributed to this tendency, albeit unintentionally, by giving simplified and ultimately vague definitions of the goal of socialist revolution, which in their view is the seizure of power.” 4

In any case, Classical Marxism Leninism does not provide a suitable basis for truly revolutionary activity. It rules out too much that is important, emphasizes things that aren’t as crucial as they might have been, makes a fetish of organizational and behavioral forms that are destructive and totally unappealing, and creates a dynamic which leads seemingly inexorably to dogmatism. It is not a growth ideology. The relations between theory, strategy, practice, and practitioners, are not such as to lead to constant improvements. Marxism Leninism’s weaknesses have been made worse over time if they have changed at all. Its latest practitioners have no real choice: they bend reality to suit their conceptions, rather than bending their conceptions to suit reality. They are not very self-conscious. They bend revolutionary impulses and movements to fit their desires rather than vice versa or some middle course.

The Russian revolution has given us a lesson in what is not to be done. It killed the soviets, it bombarded the Kronstadters, it destroyed the Makhnovites, it trampled opposition and reestablished capitalistic authoritarian dynamics, and then later and quite consistently it unleashed Stalin upon the peoples of the Soviet Union and the world.

There is a tremendous amount we can learn from Marx and those who followed, but a great deal of care should be taken lest we turn out as the Bolsheviks did. Being part right and cocksure is at least as bad as being all wrong but humble about it.

Kurt Vonnegut has a passage in a book essentially about Fascism’s roots in human capacities for self-deception, that with some literary license, provides a fitting close to our present somewhat similar discussion: “I have never seen a more sublime demonstration of the totalitarian mind, a mind which might be likened unto a system of gears whose teeth have been filed at random. Such a snaggle toothed thought machine, driven by a standard or even substandard libido whirls with the jerky, gaudy, pointlessness, of a cuckoo clock in Hell. Jones wasn’t completely crazy. The dismaying thing about the classic totalitarian mind is that any given gear, though mutilated, will have at its circumference unbroken sequences of teeth that are immaculately maintained, that are exquisitely machined.

“Hence the cuckoo clock in Hell—keeping perfect time for eight minutes and thirty three seconds, jumping ahead fourteen minutes, keeping perfect time for six seconds, jumping ahead two seconds, keeping perfect time for two hours and one second, then jumping ahead a year.

“The missing teeth of course are simple, obvious truths, truths available and comprehensible even to ten year olds, in most cases.

“The willful filing off of gear teeth, the willful doing without certain obvious pieces of information—That was how a household as conspicuous as one composed of Jones, Father Keely, Vice-Bundesfuehrer Krapptauer, and the Black Fuehrer, could all exist in relative harmony—That was how my father-in-law could contain in one mind an indifference toward slave women and a love for a blue vase—That was how Rudolf Hoess, Commandant of Auschwitz, could alternate over the loudspeakers of Auschwitz great music and calls for corpse carriers—That was how Germany could see no important differences between civilization and hydrophobia.” 5

And perhaps that was also how the Russian Bolsheviks could simultaneously proclaim revolution and repress all worker and peasant initiatives toward real self-managed freedom.

So ended the summary chapter excerpted here. Not with a whimper but with a slashing bang. Looking back, the material interests me for being very aggressive when I was 25 writing as a New Leftest in the New Left’s waning years. I don’t now agree with every sentence I relayed from then in these essays but I do agree with nearly all of them and with way more than enough to feel that to return to, or to double down on, or to in any way now adopt and advocate Marxism Leninism would in no way to prepare ourselves, guide ourselves, sustain ourselves, much less improve ourselves to pursue fundamental social, political, cultural, and economic change in coming years.

I believe Trotsky when he told us Bolshevik practice wasn’t derailed in his eyes. When he instead argued that it won what it sought. And I agree with my young self that what it sought removed capitalists but installed what I call a coordinator class to rule the economy. It retained misogyny and racism. It resurrected political dictatorship. Leninism’s core lessons that differentiate it from common sense are a strategic dead-end or worse for feminism, anti racism, and anti authoritarianism, and ironically even for classlessness. And classical Marxism didn’t prevent but actually abetted all that. Lenin wasn’t a poor student of Classical Marxist concepts. He went where, in real use, in real conflicted and complicated struggle as undertaken by real people born and brought up in oppressive societies, the framework lead. 

And so ends our sequence of articles addressing Marxism Leninism. I wonder if anyone who advocates Leninism will respond. I admit that I do not understand how one can see the words and choices of Lenin and Trotsky and the derivative practice of Bolshevism and still want to claim the label Leninist or Trotskyist. I also don’t understand how revolutionary activists can, on thinking about these matters, not want to develop and share new underlying concepts to compose a new ideology better suited to the aims of worthy, sustainable revolution in out times. I can’t see it, that is, other than in perhaps one of three ways. 

1 – Such contemporary advocates of Marxism Leninism like what they see in Marxism Leninism’s historical practice, and thus also in its strategy and its underlying conceptual framework. And yet, I think few of contemporary Marxism Leninism’s advocates would say that they like all that unless they then also claim to literally “see” in Leninist history not what is there but instead what is in fact not there, and is not only not there but what is overwhelmingly denied by what is there.

2 – Such leftist advocates of or even just non critics of Marxist Leninist ideology believe that Classical Marxism’s conceptual commitments, Leninism’s strategic commitments, and Bolshevik practice are literally beside the point. They take the ideology to be instead whatever these advocates each say it is, or each believe it to be, and not what it has been in its actual practice and what history shows it overwhelmingly likely to be in future practice. 

Or 3 – Well, I guess what Vonnegut said, albeit he said it about Fascists. 

So, I am left with some questions. I have offered five essays on Marxism Leninism with two scene setters on the New Left in this series. One presented Classical Marxism and then one presented Leninism, each as possible systems to now advocate to pursue fundamental change in our times. The third presented Bolshevik practice as evidence to consider in thinking about the wisdom of turning to Classical Marxism and Leninism for guidance. The fourth critiqued Leninism in light of Lenin and Trotsky’s own words and choices. And finally the fifth critiqued Classical Marxism, also in light of its words and practice. No one has, as yet, or at least that I have seen, taken issue with any of those essays. No one has written even a comment or a tweet or whatever else to publicly defend what I have rejected, nor to publicly reject what I have asserted.

Why is that? I ask in a sincere hope to hear answers. What did I get wrong? Why are my rejections invalid? This would seem like a good opportunity for serious advocates of looking toward Marxist Leninist ideology for future guidance to make their case or at the very least to reject denials of their case. Such people are, in my experience, rarely reticent about flaying opponents or even just people who appear to maybe be opponents. Certainly Lenin and Trotsky never ignored criticism. They responded. As did Marx and Engels. 

So honestly, dear Marxist Leninist, why not dismantle what I have offered, lest it impact anyone at all? I get that you may feel that my arguments are trivial, idiotic, unsound, and unsupportable. But someone might be moved by them. Don’t you want to prevent that? 

You need not hesitate because you don’t want to be hurtful or you worry public disagreement will impact others adversely. If any of that is a concern, I get it, in that case, just reject my rejection of Marxism Leninism with evidence and argument, not with ad hominem rhetoric. I don’t think evidence and argument offered in pursuit of progress will put anyone off. I, for one, would certainly welcome it.

But as the series so far almost demands, and assuming nothing utterly cataclysmic and largely unaddressed intervenes, I hope to continue but reorient the current sequence to present potential new ideology beyond Marxism Leninism. For that purpose I will convey what I and five other co-authors offered in 1986, about forty years ago and twelve years after What Is To Be Undone in a book titled Liberating Theory. In it, we sought to present components of what might become new revolutionary ideology. The collective that worked together to co-author each chapter I will excerpt for you from Liberating Theory was myself, Leslie Cagan, Noam Chomsky, Robin Hahnel, Mel King, Lydia Sargent, and Holly Sklar.

FOOTNOTES

1. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Humanism and Terror, Beacon Press, Boston, Mass. 150.

2. Murray Bookchin, Post-Scarcity Anarchism, Ramparts Books, San Francisco.

3. Maurice Brinton, The Bolsheviks and Workers’ Control, Solidarity, London. 85.

4. Svetozar Stojanovic, Between Ideas and Reality, Oxford University Press, London. 185.

5. Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Mother Night, used with permission of Seymour Lawrence/Delacorte Press.

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