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In a small cemetery nestled in the Apennine valleys of Italys Emilia-Romagna region, about a hundred people of all ages gather. The persistent rain leaves four unmarked red flags drenched. A visibly moved man lovingly places a fifth flag on the coffin: it is the red and black banner of the Confederacin Nacional del Trabajo, the anarchist union that waged the resistance to Francoism from 1936 to 1939. From under the umbrellas rises the hymn of the Internationale, then someone selects a song from Spotify on a smartphone and turns the volume up to the max. I seem to recognize Sepultura, a Brazilian death metal band.

On April 18, Valerio Evangelisti, author of more than thirty novels translated in more than twenty countries, as well as an infinite number of short stories, essays, articles, and prefaces, died at age seventy. On the day of his funeral, the trade unions had called a demonstration in Rome with the slogan: Lower your weapons, raise your wages. A banner carried by dozens of workers reads: From the factories to the ports, we shall be all! Ciao Valerio! The slogan We shall be all belongs to the Industrial Workers of the World and gives the title to one of the novels that this writer from Bologna dedicated to the heroic struggle of the American revolutionary union.

This was not the first time that social movements had taken up Evangelistis books as their own: a decade ago, the Book Block students took to the streets with large book-shaped shields to defend themselves from police charges. Their message was clear: our imagination defends us from your violence. The titles that came out of this writers pen were also present on their covers. Id much rather see myself on these shields than win the Strega award, Evangelisti commented. Ive never been so proud as when I saw myself up there. Strega, in addition to being a saffron-colored herbal liqueur, is Italys most prestigious mainstream literature award. But there was very little mainstream about Evangelistis life.

He began to serve in the revolutionary left-wing parties in 1969, earning the nickname So Long (as he was called, in English) on account of his height: In those days we were essentially referred to by first names or nicknames, he said. Last names were for the police. Nobody else asked for them. When in 1977 those political groups headed into crisis, becoming institutionalized or dissolving into the workers autonomy movement, Evangelisti continued his militant activity by participating in dozens of committees and then, in the 1980s, in the nascent social centers.

These territorially based organizations were the spontaneous response to the fragmentation of what had hitherto been the subjects of social revolt, with the end of the Fordist cycle of accumulation. Occupying disused buildings to turn them into meeting places, where music was made and film forums were organized, made it possible to resist even if only partially repression, political reversals, and the rampant plague of heroin. Through them, the heritage of the struggles of the previous decade was passed on to younger generations.

Evangelisti, however, had a second, a third, and even a fourth life. After graduating in political science in 1976, he continued to pursue academic research, publishing volumes and essays on history concerning the Jacobin plebs of Bologna, early Italian socialism, the anarchist band Bonnot, and punk cultures. He had also won a contest to be admitted to the Superior School of Public Administration, in 1981 becoming an executive civil servant at the Finance Ministry.

This new occupation did not change his political attitude in the slightest: as he recounted on more than one occasion, he passed information to the grassroots unions as best he could, so that they would have as much ammunition as possible in their negotiations with the other side. But this revolutionary researcher who infiltrated behind enemy lines had also begun writing fantastical stories and novels, which he circulated for fun among friends and comrades.

This was soon met with success. In 1993, his Nicolas Eymerich, inquisitore won the Urania Award, a contest for unpublished works of science fiction, organized by Italys biggest publishing firm, Mondadori. The following year, the book became a bestseller in this field, and in 1995, a sequel was published in instalments in the weekly magazine of Repubblica, Italys second most read newspaper. Radio adaptations, comics, and video games followed.

Nicolas Eymerich was a Catalan inquisitor who really existed in the medieval era, but his literary transposition by Evangelisti makes him an educated, cunning, cruel, misogynistic, insectophobe, and especially schizoid character, in whose person elements of paraliterature, gothic, horror, space opera, cyberpunk, detective, Western, historical novels, and Bildungsroman converge. If Italian science fiction had hitherto been considered substantially foreign to the national tradition, it was born in its own right with this Dominican priest.

The style of the novels of the Eymerich cycle is clear, fluent, and without linguistic experimentation. The plot is articulated around various temporal planes: the fourteenth century in which the inquisitor lives, the later settings where we meet the scientist Marcus Frullifer, the psitronic spaceships, the three US states with a single army, and the Nazicommunists of the Rache in eternal conflict with Euroforce, the political front for the Eurobank. In this literary metaverse, Eymerich solves an enigma at each conjuncture and restores the Churchs reactionary order wherever heresy and subversion might risk taking root.

But why does the revolutionary Evangelisti encourage the reader to identify with a hero who, in the course of his inner journey, instead of redeeming himself, turns into a completely evil monster? According to Alberto Sebastiani editor of a monumental work that collects the thirteen novels dedicated to the Dominican his psychopathology, his coldness, his hostility to the Other, is in embryo the same as contemporary capitalisms own: Eymerich is a form of evil, a shadow. And it must be recognized. Thats why the reader, in his heros journey, must investigate the character, understand how he works and defeat him.

After all, not only the Eymerich cycle, but the Bologna writers entire oeuvre is configured as one enormous novel in which the forces of reaction and of rebellion eternally clash. However totalizing and desperate the scenarios evoked may be, the possibility of resistance is never completely silenced. Worthy of note is the final dialogue of Black Flag in which Carl, standing in front of the tanks reimposing domination by the powerful, cries out:

Its useless! Theyve already won anyway! The world is theirs! The future is theirs!

Sheryl answered: Maybe. The important thing is that they know that there are those who resist.

She advanced towards the wagons firing all six shots of the drum, in succession. Six silver bullets pierced the screaming metal.

Resistance is never futile: If the cause is just, the battles lost are the most beautiful, says an Irish teenager in the Western novel Antracite. Here the protagonist is Pantera, another serial character created by Evangelisti. A Mexican gunslinger, he is a quite different figure from the inquisitor, although they do share some common traits. While Eymerich is ready to eliminate anyone who questions power, Pantera is the hireling of his paymasters but, out of an irrepressible sense of justice, he rebels against those who commit abuses against the weakest.

In Evangelistis poetics, if the principle of rebellion is resilient in the face of power, it has the same weapon at its disposal as reaction does: the imagination, in this case serving to conceive a different future. Narratives, and especially those of popular literature, evoke archetypes, allow readers to make a journey together, and recreate the social bond destroyed by capitalism.

Evangelistis imaginary included fantastical figures (vampires, the living dead, ghosts, werewolves), but was not limited to this. His output also included many works of historical fiction without supernatural elements. Among these we should mention the three novels of the Il Sole dellAvvenire (Sun of the Future) cycle. This saga of a family from Emilia-Romagna tells the story of Italian socialism from 1870 to the early years of World War II, passing through the biennio rosso of factory and land occupations in 191920, Fascism and the years of the Resistance.

The writer weaves into these new adventures a phenomenology of class consciousness, dramatic, articulate, and not without humorous elements. Family separations, stories of emigration, unemployment, and poverty intersect with popular myths and the forms of an alternative sociality, produced by the class composition of time and place. Very interesting is the case of the cameracce (bad rooms) that allowed workers to cheaply drink and eat, to have places to meet and play cards after work. It is no coincidence that a character in the book sees therein an embryo of the future society. The authors role in the social-centers movement of the 1980s is strongly evoked here.

Evangelistis last novel was entitled Gli anni del coltello (The Years of the Knife). The revolution has been defeated and the patriots who fought for the Roman Republic in 1849 are dispersed throughout the Italian peninsula. They try again to attack the Habsburg-Austrian authorities in a plethora of farcical micro-insurrections, they delude themselves that the Savoy monarchy will aid the national cause, they quarrel among themselves, end up in prison, suffer tortures, and betray one another.

This is the narrative world in which a dark protagonist again operates: an ethical terrorist who kills in the name of the republic and the word of Giuseppe Mazzini. Dressed in a cloak and a wide-brimmed hat, Gabariol is a fierce folk hero who, through his long and bloody odyssey, never has a real change of consciousness. He always remains true to himself, even as events force him to confront the contradictions of the revolution. For this is a revolution that does not address the social question and continually pushes patriots into the bloodbath, to fulfill the calls for armed struggle coming from a republican party now transformed into the Company of Death.

Again in this work, the peculiar elements of Evangelistis sociological poetics recur: the taverns as fortresses of the antagonistic social fabric with their related popular food and wine culture, their songs and their imaginary; womens agency, with a surprising mixture of subversive radicalism and pragmatism; and the historical novel as a multilayered device, whose fluid and entertaining narration harbors a deep analysis of the human experiences that result from social conflict.

Reading this last bequest of the Bologna writer, our thoughts immediately turn to Italy in the early 1980s. We think of the expectations for a better world which lasted for a decade and vanished within a few months; to the militarization of the political confrontation; to the special laws; to the five thousand political prisoners; to the enforced disappearances; and to the rapes and tortures which were identified during trials but never followed by punishments for the guilty. Millions of men and women, after having tasted the thrill of an authentic life, turned back into the private sphere, into withdrawal, depression, heroin, clandestinity, self-referentiality, and then, in many cases, even into reporting on their former comrades.

Valerio Evangelisti had a past as a historian, and mastered the tools of scholarship. To these he added the imaginary models drawn from literature to push research further, and above all to forge weapons of rebellion. Despite becoming a successful writer, he never abandoned his political commitment, supporting the Sandinista revolution, anti-imperialist struggles in Latin America, and the movement against the unnecessary and costly environmental destruction caused by the project for a high-speed train line through the Val di Susa. His last battle was against the current military escalation: in video conferences he appeared in front of his vast library making the case calmly and with many historical examples against rearmament. We must not give up an inch, he insisted.

One of his creatures that he particularly cared for is still among us: Carmilla, a political-literary magazine that takes its name from the vampire that sprung from Sheridan Le Fanus pen. Evangelisti was its editor in chief until his last day of life. Born in a paper version in 1995, it turned into a webzine after a few years. It hosts reviews, serialized novels, humorous pieces, reportages, articles on political, sociological and philosophical theory; interventions by dissident writers, activists, researchers and other supporters of the imaginary way to communism.

A fitting expression of the importance of the imaginary to political struggle comes from Evangelistis preface to Jack Londons The Iron Heel. Here, he recalled how partisan commanders never failed to mention this book of social science fiction among the works to be read between actions. Im sure that in the backpacks and smartphones of the partisans of the future, there will always be a book by Valerio Evangelisti.

Link:
Valerio Evangelisti Used Literature to Point the Way to Communism - Jacobin magazine

PRAGUE The specter of communism is haunting Pragues art scene. The citys first private museum, Kunsthalle Praha, opened in February, marks a move away from the state-funded culture industry that once thrived but has struggled in recent years.

For almost a century, Pragues artists and curators have relied on the Czech government to fund exhibitions and residencies. Under communism, the state was the sole provider of cultural funds. After communisms fall in 1989, the city clung to this communist-era relic even as other European art hubs embraced private funding. Pragues National Gallery is still entirely funded by the state, as are several of the citys numerous residency programs.

That support structure has made the city particularly appealing to younger artists from elsewhere in Europe. Prague is centrally located near other major art hubs like Vienna and Berlin, so it is an ideal crossroads for Central and Eastern European artists. Czech artists and collectors tend to have close relationships with counterparts in the art communities of nearby cities, such as Dresden and Katowice. Artists from all over Europe come to Prague. This kind of exchange is the best way of making an arts scene more dynamic, notes Christelle Havranek, chief curator at Kunsthalle Praha.

Prague is often the first stop for recent art school graduates in France and Germany. State funding also means that there is ample funding for upstarts looking to relocate, and the citys relatively small arts scene is easier to break into than larger ones in London or Paris. Theyll come here for two, three, or four years, says Piotr Sikora, who curates artist residencies at MeetFactory. The scene is quite welcoming and there are structures in place to help them live here.

Unlike most other European cities, which have several major museums that share cultural significance, Pragues museum scene remains concentrated in a single institution. In addition to serving as a steward of the countrys national art collection, the National Gallery is also responsible for championing younger Czech artists and hosting traveling exhibitions.

However, funding cuts have stretched the already overworked institution to the brink. During the pandemic, the Czech Republic implemented an austerity plan that resulted in sharp cuts to its cultural budget. Artists have complained of poor pay and less than luxurious treatment, as well as a significantly reduced acquisitions budget.

Part of Kunsthalle Prahas proposition for the city is to introduce a private funding model as a means of assuaging the financial woes of the publicly run National Gallery. The museums founders and primary donors are Petr and Pavlina Pudil, one of the Czech Republics most prominent art-collecting families. Through their family foundation, the Pudils funded the museums construction and donated their entire collection to the Kunsthalle on permanent loan.

This approach has allowed the Pudils to bypass many of the constraints publicly funded institutions encounter, including funding limitations and the climate of the political environment. Public institutions tend to be vulnerable to political influences, which is something weve seen here and in nearby countries like Poland and Hungary, says Ivan Goossen, Kunsthalle Prahas director. In contrast, Goossen notes, private institutions are only limited by the desires of their members and donors, which allows them to develop a more robust program. Indeed, in 2020, the annual budget for the National Gallery was around $20 million, half of what it cost to build the Kunsthalle Praha.

Like the German kunsthalles, temporary exhibition spaces that lack permanent collections, Kunsthalle Praha is focused primarily on rotating exhibitions featuring works from a variety of collections. Unlike the National Gallery, which mostly centers on Czech art and building out its own collection, Kunsthalle Praha has a lean collection and focuses its efforts internationally.

Kunsthalle Prahas inaugural show, Kinetismus: 100 Years of Electricity in Art, does just that. Curated by Christelle Havranek and Peter Weibel, the director of the Zentrum fr Kunst und Medien in Karlsruhe, Germany, the exhibition traces the history of electricity in art over the past century. Kinetismus pairs works from art history textbook stalwarts like Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray with internationally recognized contemporary names like William Kentridge and Olafur Eliasson to explore how electricity has transformed artistic practices. Drawn from collections around the world, the chosen works lean heavily on live spectacle (lights, sound, physical magnitude) and interactive participation a clear sign that the museums inaugural exhibition is meant to be remembered.

In addition to its global aspirations, Kinetismus seeks to magnify the work of Zdenk Penek, a little-known Czech artist who was a key figure in the countrys early 20th-century avant-garde scene. In 1932, Penek was also selected to design a series of sculptures intended to adorn the facade of the Zenger electrical substation, which now houses Kunsthalle Praha. As part of the exhibition, the museum recreated the neon and plastic works, which mysteriously disappeared in the 1930s after being displayed at an exhibition in Paris.

Despite being privately run, artifacts of the communist state are deeply ingrained in Kunsthalle Praha. In the past, the Zenger substation was a crucial element in the citys electrical grid, powering parts of Pragues legendary tram system. And like many aristocrats in the former Eastern bloc, the Pudils profited from the wave of privatization that occurred in the 1990s. In Petr Pudils case, he acquired the countrys state-owned coal-mining operations.

When plans to launch the museum were first announced in 2019, Pudils role in post-1989 privatization came to the fore. After a local art outlet published an investigation into the familys finances, some artists and curators began to oppose the new institution. Their concerns were rooted in both Pudils libertarian ideology, which they saw as detrimental to the local arts community, and his involvement in an environmentally destructive industry. For their part, the Pudil family maintains they have long since divested from coal and now focus on solar and other more environmentally friendly energy sources.

I think the 90s really left a bad taste in some peoples mouths. A lot of people really see that period as the core of our troubles today, explains Tereza Stejskalov, the program director of the Czech branch of Tranzit, a pan-European arts organization. Those troubles which extend to other art hubs, such as Warsaw, Bratislava, and Berlin include increasingly unaffordable housing and decreasing funding for the arts.

In Berlin, a city whose rapidly developing art scene has served as a model and a warning for many in Prague, another private kunsthalle project has attracted unwelcome attention. The debate around the Kunsthalle Berlin has similarly focused on the privatization of arts institutions and its effects on the city. Earlier this month, more than 650 artists, critics, and curators signed an open letter denouncing the new exhibition hall.

The shadow of late communism has also affected the priorities of artists in Eastern Europe. A younger generation of artists and curators have grown up in a post-communist landscape that was far wealthier than that of their parents. Greater resources for travel and better funding opportunities have pushed them to foster connections with other art scenes in former Eastern bloc countries. Curator Sikora and others have been instrumental in refocusing attention inward, while organizations like the East Europe Biennial Foundation have formed regional alliances.

Theres a movement that says: Maybe we dont need the West as much anymore. Maybe we can connect with other Eastern European countries instead, states Stejskalov. By offering an internationally focused program that emphasizes Czech artists, Kunsthalle Praha seems determined to walk the line between East and West, as well as past and present.

Read more here:
Prague's First Private Museum Is Haunted by the Specter of Communism - Hyperallergic

Almost all of Europe (and many other nations outside the continent) celebrates Labor Day, the origin of which goes back to the history of the USA. On May 1, 1886, trade and labor unions organized a large general strike. It was triggered by poor working conditions and the underpayment of industrial workers. It is a day off from work for the vast majority of Hungarian workers. In the past, in communist Hungary, it was celebrated with many events and huge parades where the political leadership could further spread communist propaganda. How is it possible that a western celebration was adopted by communist countries?

This article was originallypublishedon our sister-site, Ungarn Heute.

Despite its U.S. origin (a general strike on May 1, 1886), this day is celebrated in the U.S. and Canada not on May 1, but on September 1. Originally, the strike was aimed at reducing daily working hours, which were then 10-13 hours, to eight hours. At that time, it was decided to start the campaign on May 1, because in many American companies the new fiscal year began on that day, which also meant that many labor contracts would have gone into effect on May 1.

Around 340,000 people participated in the strike. A major center of the demonstrations was Chicago, where some companies went on strike for several days. On May 3, three striking workers at the McCormick Harvester factory were killed in a demonstration. The next day, a protest march took place, and in the evening, as the march was breaking up, the Haymarket riot broke out. Someone threw a fragmented bomb at police officers. The police responded by firing on the workers. Seven police officers and at least four civilians were killed. Because of this event, there is a tradition of May Day marches. Although we date the origin to 1886, there were earlier labor movements fighting for the establishment of the 8-hour workday, such as April 21, 1856 in Australia.

Related article

The pictures of the first official May Day in Hungary perfectly capture the spread of the communist dictatorship's ideology among the members of the society.Continue reading

How can it be that a Western event became a communist tradition? It is perhaps a mitigating circumstance that the Briton, Robert Owen, who as early as 1817 wanted to improve the situation of workers with the slogan Eight hours labour, Eight hours recreation, Eight hours rest, was one of the founders of utopian socialism. He was a socialist who had the interests of workers at heart. The fact that he came from a capitalist country was dwarfed by his socialist virtues.

Fact The communist regimes, whose ideology centered on working people, treated May Day as a special holiday. After the communist takeover, the day, originally called Workers Holiday, was politically transformed into a holiday of workers, peasants, and intellectuals, known as Labor Day, in the countries of the Eastern bloc. In Hungary, May 1 has been a national holiday since 1946. After the fall of communism, the name of the day of workers solidarity was retained as Labor Day. As in most countries of the world, it is now an official holiday in Hungary. /source: Wikipedia/

Although the holiday did not become an official state holiday in Hungary until 1946, it already existed in 1919, when the Hungarian Soviet Republic was created. The day was celebrated even though the country was practically in ruins after World War I, the situation was chaotic, the Czechoslovakians in the north, and the Serbs and Romanians in the south were invading the Hungarian territories.

Long live the proletarian dictatorship painting by Albert Baky (18681944). Source: wikipedia.org

Andrssy Street on May 1 in front of the building of the Hungarian State Opera. Photo: Fortepan / SK

In the Kdr era (1956-1989) the day also had a special meaning. In the ideology of communism, the concept of the working man, the working people, played a very important role, and people were obliged to have a job. People took to the streets all over the country. Parades were held all over Hungary, and people paraded through the capital with banners, flags and signs. Participation in the celebrations was mandatory and the various factories, companies and offices had to take part in groups.

There are typical delicacies that people still like to eat nowadays even on this day, such as various sausages, beer, or cotton candy.

Jzsef Boulevard on May 1, 1946. Photo: Fortepan / Pl Berk

Stalin Square (today tvenhatosok tere) on May 1, 1955. Photo: Fortepan

May 1, 1964, From left: Istvn Dobi, immediately next to him Soviet cosmonaut Adrian Nikolayev and Jnos Kdr, Photo: Fortepan / Gyula Nagy

The parade was so important for the socialist countries that it was even held during the worlds biggest nuclear disaster: On April 26, 1986, Chernobyl reactor unit 4 in Ukraine exploded without the knowledge of the Atomic Energy Commission, enveloping the area in a cloud of nuclear dust. Forty times more radioactive material was released into the atmosphere than in the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Three million people in Ukraine and two million in Belarus were exposed. The mass media in the socialist countries first denied the disaster and then tried to minimize it. On Gorbachevs orders, artificial rain clouds were created in Moscow on May 1 and the radioactive cloud was directed at Belarus so that a parade could be held in the Russian capital. In Hungary, hundreds of thousands celebrated Labor Day in the streets without knowing that they were actually in danger.

Fact It is important to mention that in 1955 the Roman Catholic Church, led by Pope Pius XII, decided to declare May 1 the feast of St. Joseph the Worker. Since then, May 1 has been the holiday of workers in the Catholic church as well.

Featured photo via Fortepan

Read more:
Labor Day: A Celebration by Communists Adopted from the West - Hungary Today

Mao Zedong.

In our study of the three laws of dialectics presented by Engels, weve examined the law of contradiction and the law of the transformation of quantity into quality. Finally, Engels says that the third law of dialectics is the law of the negation of the negation.

We have seen that Mao Zedong has argued that the law of contradiction is the primary law of dialectics. In our last article we looked at how the transformation of quantity into quality was, in fact, an instance of the law of contradiction. Here, we will examine Maos argument against the negation of the negation as a dialectical law.

First, what does the negation of the negation mean, and why have Marxists thought of it as a worthwhile way to explain dialectical progress? The concept comes from the most advanced philosophy of the time in which Marx and Engels were working: Hegels dialectical idealism. It describes a process in a sequence of steps, starting with an affirmation, followed by a negation that arises as a result of that affirmation, and then followed by a negation of that negation. Hegel was talking about ideas, and so talked about this in terms of thesis, antithesis and synthesis.

Engels makes use of this Hegelian language in referring to the negation of the negation as a dialectical law, but this has the potential to create some confusion among Marxists that we would benefit from sorting out.

Materialist dialectics is concerned with material reality, not just ideas. So to illustrate this sequence, lets consider capitalism as our first affirmation. Marx says the bourgeoisie creates its own gravediggers. In other words, bourgeois society creates its own negation, the proletariat, a class born out of capitalism itself. Capitalism itself gives rise to the necessity of socialist revolution. The proletariat, through socialist revolution, therefore negates the bourgeoisie, capitalist relations, and so on, step by step. But in doing so, the proletariat also eliminates the conditions for its own existence as a class. This is what Lenin describes in The State and Revolution as socialisms withering away, which allows for a stateless and classless society - communism - to come forth. This is the second negation, the negation of the negation, by this way of looking at it.

Taken step by step we see that first we have the original affirmation, the thesis. This is capitalism in our illustration. This is followed by an antithesis, which arises from and negates the original thesis. This is the first negation: socialism. Finally we have the synthesis, which negates the antithesis that had negated the original thesis: communism. Thus the final synthesis is the negation of the negation. Essentially, in this progression of thesis - antithesis - synthesis, the final synthesis serves to negate the antithesis that itself negated the original thesis, while also preserving elements of both in a new unity or identity.

In this process, the law of the negation of the negation is what accounts for the spiral development that makes progress, rather than mere repetition, possible. This synthesis carries forward something from both the original affirmation and the first negation, synthesizing them, that is uniting them, into something qualitatively new. This new unity becomes a new thesis, or a new affirmation, and the sequence begins again, but at a higher level than before.

This conception of the dialectic accounts for progress by describing how this step-by-step process leads from one thing to the next, based on resolving the contradictions that arise from the process. Of course this isnt entirely incorrect, but it is inaccurate. This inaccuracy can lead to some confusion as to what is really taking place, dialectically. The law of the negation of the negation is helpful to a point, but we have to go further. Revolutionary science cant rest with simple explanations.

The thinking behind the law of the negation of the negation confuses the issue in two interrelated ways. First, it gives us too linear an understanding of dialectics, which doesnt account for the complex processes where multiple contradictions are at work at the same time, which weve described in our articles on contradiction. And second, by starting and ending with identity, it enshrines identity, or unity, as primary over contradiction, or struggle.

To truly put the dialectic on a materialist basis also means, as Mao says in his Talk on Questions of Philosophy, to understand that every link in the chain of events is both affirmation and negation. In other words, thesis, antithesis and synthesis arent separated from each other in a metaphysical way. Affirmation and negation are present at every moment of any given process.

In his essay On Contradiction, Mao made a great contribution to the Marxist-Leninist philosophy of dialectical materialism by clearly explaining that the materialist dialectic cannot be understood as a simple, linear sequence, but as a complex structural matrix of many unevenly developed contradictions all at work simultaneously. It is important to note that if we ignore the complexity of contradiction in favor of a simple, linear sequence, we risk taking a mechanical approach to solving problems by failing to recognize the significance of secondary contradictions in the situation. People who claim that everything that isnt pure class struggle is a distraction are guilty of this error.

Furthermore, the law of the negation of the negation preserves a Hegelian metaphysical framework. The Hegelian dialectic begins and ends with identity, mediated by struggle. This first identity is the thesis of Hegels triad, the original affirmation, and the Hegelian synthesis (the negation of the negation) is a new identity, with struggle (antithesis) acting merely as a bridge between them. This is an important point: in the Hegelian sequence contradiction exists primarily between identities rather than within them. Here identity is absolute and struggle is relative. In reality, on the contrary, contradiction is present within and essential to every moment of the process. Bourgeois society contains a multitude of contradictions (affirmations and negations), as does socialism, and so will communism. Struggle is inherent in every part of the process. Every identity is teeming with contradictions. If we dont grasp this point we will think that external contradictions should be the focus of our attention, rather than internal contradictions that tend to drive things forward.

The law of contradiction, as Marxism-Leninism understands it, means that the main thing in dialectics is division, rather than identity. To sum this up, the Chinese revolutionaries put forward the slogan one divides Into two, against the Hegelian two fuse into one, emphasizing the primary place of contradiction. Struggle isnt just a bridge between the old identity and the new. No, in fact, identity without contradiction cannot exist: everything divides into two.

This may seem like an overly philosophical point, but it is important for revolutionaries to grasp to avoid errors based in metaphysical thinking. The law of the negation of the negation would have it that dialectics is a continuous movement towards unity, or synthesis. Mao Zedong argues, on the contrary, that the life of dialectics is the continuous movement towards opposites. The Hegelian sequence leaves us with a dialectic that sees unity as absolute, and contradiction as relative, temporary, and conditional. On the contrary, affirmation and negation exist within every moment of every process. Contradictions exist within the very essence of things, not just between them, and it is those internal contradictions that are the primary motivators of change.

Qualitative change doesnt result from a drive towards synthesis, but from the transformation of the principal and secondary aspects of a contradiction into their opposites. It isnt by uniting two contradictory things that we make historical progress, but by dividing them. We dont make socialist revolution by uniting with the bourgeoisie. It is true that socialism carries forward elements of capitalist relations of production in the transition to communism, but the main thing isnt to preserve those elements, but to destroy and uproot them piece by piece. Qualitative change results from the quantitative accumulation of force which changes the balance of power.

In privileging identity over struggle, the law of the negation of the negation can also put Marxists at risk of a kind of fatalism, where Communism exists as the final cause at the End of History, drawing everything towards it as the final identity where everything is ultimately resolved. Communism isnt a final identity without any contradictions. Contradictions will exist within communism as well. Change and progress will continue. History will never end.

Again, the law of the negation of the negation is useful to a point, but if we dont take it farther we are left open to metaphysical errors. It gives us too linear a description of the dialectical process, and it separates affirmation and negation in a metaphysical way that privileges identity. As Marxism-Leninism has advanced it has advanced the philosophy of dialectical materialism beyond the metaphysical, linear framework of Hegelianism. Mao accomplished this by theorizing the concepts of the principal contradiction, principal and secondary aspects of contradictions, and the uneven development of contradictions within a process. Maos writings on dialectical materialism give us a powerful weapon to analyze the forces at work in the complex processes we face.

Next in our series well look at how these processes shape history. In the following articles well look at the categories and concepts of the materialist conception of history, that is, historical materialism, and what they offer Marxist-Leninists as theoretical tools for changing the world.

Read more:
Red Theory: On the negation of the negation | Fight Back! - Fight Back! Newspaper

In 1947, a book by John Fischer of Harpers Magazine was published and titled Why They Behave Like Russians. The book was an insightful look into Soviet culture, but it was a disappointment that the book did not stress that the communists were Russians first and foremost.

The more recent 1983 book The New Diplomacy by the late Israeli scholar and diplomat Abba Eban makes the point that Soviet aggression was more a Russian trait than communist. My problem with Ebans point is he intended his observation to be assuring, implying we had little to fear from Russian communism.

As we have learned in recent months, it is hardly a comfort that the aggression has proven to be more Russian than communist. Though we have since celebrated the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, it is clear our enthusiasm was premature. Indeed, President Putin of Russia poses a greater threat to peace than had either Khrushchev or Brezhnev.

That is saying a lot, especially when considering that this was the same Nikita Khrushchev who launched a brutal invasion of Hungary in 1956 and pushed President Kennedy to the brink of nuclear war in the Cuban Crisis of 1961. It was also the same Leonid Brezhnev who had invaded Afghanistan in 1979.

Alas, Putin is worse.

Indeed, Putin is the most aggressive and authoritarian leader of Russia since Stalin (for whom Putin has on record expressed admiration).

Even were Putin able to completely subjugate Ukraine (which is his aim), his empire would not be as large as was the Soviet Unions. But Putins ambitions do not stop at Ukraine. The Russian despot envisions a return to the Cold War map with Russia incorporating Central and Eastern Europe. Indeed, it is Putin who proclaimed the fall of the Soviet Union was the worst catastrophe of the 20th century.

Sphere of Influence is a term we have heard often in reference to Vladimir Putins designs on Central and Eastern Europe. Putin has used the term as if it legitimizes his territorial ambitions. The term dates back to the Helsinki Accords in 1975 when Secretary of State Henry Kissinger led the West into conceding Central and Eastern Europe to the Soviet Union. Kissinger had reassured President Gerald Ford that the the Helsinki Accords did not have the sway of a treaty.

But that is not how the Soviets saw it. Brezhnev considered the Helsinki Accords his crowning achievement and very much viewed the accords to have validated Soviet domination of Central and East Europe.

Putin seeks to recover that domination and he believes he can do it. Unfortunately, the United States and the West lack a current strain of leadership to emphasize to Putin that his ambitions are unacceptable.

President Biden was right when he proclaimed in Poland that Putin cannot remain in power. But Biden has since backed off his legitimate call for a regime change in Russia. Biden has only made clear the circumstances in which he will not engage Russia, which includes most scenarios.

Back to the Russian trait, whereas communism in its pure form discourages nationalism, all of the communist movements of the 20th century contained a heavy strain of nationalism. Stalin claimed a Russian background and Trotsky also took pride in his self image as a Russian. The irony is that neither was Russian. Stalin was Georgian and Trotsky was Jewish.

But it is instructive to consider the history of nationalism within the ranks of communism to understand the modern specter of Putin. How far Putin is able to expand the empire of which he dreams remains to be seen. What also remains to be seen is to what degree Putin will carry out his agenda before Biden mounts serious resistance.

John ONeill is an Allen Park freelance writer. He has a degree in history from Wayne State University.

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As the war rages, Russia is still Russia - Southgate News Herald