Ecosocialization

(Source: ruleofthieves)

The Marx Engels Lenin Institute is, first and foremost, an educational institution committed to Marxism-Leninism and its contemporary application. We must make special emphasis on that word educational.

Our current objective lies in educating students in the science of Marxism-Leninism and arming them with the theoretical knowledge to begin operating cadres in their localities in the hopes of forming a future mass party. But we have so far neglected to give the proper attention, at least in writing, to the central question of the nature of the education we propose. We have not looked at the question, namely, of pedagogy.

It is always a positive thing to give context to our writings. No matter how inconsequential it may seem to share context, especially that from times of relatively low activity, it is with context that we best understand a text and avoid (or prevent) anyone from making hasty, broad generalizations about a complex problem when we only intended to write on a very particular question.

It is this view that compels us to make the state of the MELI at the current time clear, although by no means do we need or intend to make any thorough exploration: We have operated for a relatively short amount of time and thus have not gained vital experience needed for the full blossoming of our organization and to become closer to our ultimate goal. We have taught less than one semester of classes, not to lessen the significance of this first step in itself (in fact, those who are already teaching classes deserve recognition). We have not reached many students; we offer only a few classes. In short, we are still in the infancy of our organization. These are, of course, the simple facts of the thing.

With this basic background, though, we can pass back to the question of pedagogy with clearer intentions; that is, to the fact that we are not writing of pedagogy in general or educational theory in the broader sense but rather, that we are writing of pedagogy as it relates to our current situation and objectives as they are. We are writing, then, of a tactical pedagogy.

In Tasks of the Revolutionary Socialist Movement, we have laid out the fundamental tactic of the worker-community organizations for our cadres in their local work. To summarize the points made there, the worker-community organization is our immediate front in the class struggle; it is there where the first decisive battles will take place. We work in the worker-community organizations for a two-fold purpose: to fight for the welfare of working class people and to inspire the masses to organized struggle against the interests of capital.

This two-fold purpose is intertwined. How could we rouse the masses to action without first understanding their situation? How can we affect without first engaging?

We must make it known that our tactical pedagogy cannot be limited to our students who have already come to fight on the side of the working classes. More importantly, we must address those who have not yet achieved this consciousness. Our cadres must teach the masses of their role in the class struggle during all interactions; this is one of the main objectives of the local cadre at all times.

Currently in the United States the revolutionary socialist movement stands still, waiting and asking: “Where do we start; what is to be done?” While this or that socialist organization may find their niche and excel in their current way of organizing, they remain fragmented, broken up and scattered across the country; there exists no organized, national body of socialists capable of carrying out the revolution. The question of building a national organization — especially a Party — capable of being the vanguard of the revolutionary socialist movement is paramount. But in the face of our current conditions, we run into many obstacles — from bourgeois ideology to an ineffective ‘division of labor’ within the movement and so on. How do we combat these obstacles and find a way to organize on a national scale? Moreover, not to just organize in the nominal sense but to build a working organization of revolutionaries capable of carrying out concrete actions? All of these questions must be answered by a thorough investigation of the prevailing conditions and the whole history of working class movement.

America, it has been said, is the exception.  It is the only developed industrial nation where no mass socialist movement took root in the working class in the twentieth century.  To be sure there have been times of mass upheaval and even the growth of sizable left organizations with a significant working class membership.  In the years before World War One and in the 1930s, Socialist, Communist, Trotskyist, and anarcho-syndicalist organizations had some impact on the development of organized labor and even on U.S. politics.  But, then, unlike their European counterparts, they would shrink to be marginalized as political relics or sects.

Some scholars saw the problem as one of “American exceptionalism.” The United States, it was argued, had too much upward mobility, too much available farm land, too regular a turnover as old ethnic groups worked their way up into the “Great American Middle Class.” While these theories always had limited powers of explanation, much of the period of economic expansion that followed World War Two lent them credibility.  Not only did the so-called middle class grow and prosper, but even much of the traditional industrial working class achieved a living standard never before achieved by blue collar or even most white collar workers anywhere in the world.  African Americans, Latinos, and other people of color were largely excluded from this upward march to prosperity, which is one reason why the enormous movements of Black and Latino peoples exploded in the 1950s and 1960s.  For the majority of white working class people and those people of color lucky or forceful enough to break into the unionized blue collar workforce in those years, the “American Dream” seemed within reach.

Marx himself is ambivalent with regard to the conception of nature in his critique of political economy. On the one hand his theory is related to the traditional approaches of political economy and political theory; he does not leave the traditional “theoretical field” of arguing in terms of political economy in order to open a new one. He follows the signals of rational enlightenment and a “promethean” and logic that takes nature and its limits not into account. The main argument is the following one: Men make their history by means of transforming society, nature and the individual self, but limits of nature do not exist. Therefore nature is conceived as a bundle of resources that can be tapped. The framing of this perspective ranges from Bacon to John Locke’s derivation of property rights (from the capacity of human labour to appropriate the fruits of land) or to the Smithian concept of the division of labour as a source of an ever increasing productivity and thus of the wealth of nations. This theoretical field also includes the Ricardian conception of land as a limiting factor to capitalist accumulation because of the effects of land of lower quality and fertility on the reproduction costs of labour which lead to a declining rate of profit.