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    Imperialism and the National Question
    Imperialism and the National Question
    Imperialism and the National Question
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    Imperialism and the National Question

    By V. I. Lenin and Ruth Wilson Gilmore

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    Lenin’s texts breaking with Eurocentrism in the socialist movement

    Fired up by the outbreak of the First World War and outraged by the capitulation of most socialist parties to the demands of national bourgeoisies, Lenin sought to understand the deeper roots of the crisis of the world movement. The result was Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, which went on to become a core text for the international communist movement. But Lenin also sought to break with the Eurocentrism of the socialist movement, which tended to look down with disdain at or simply reject struggles for self-determination, especially among colonized peoples.

    This volume, with an introduction by the renowned abolitionist and anti-imperialist theorist Ruth Wilson Gilmore, brings together the texts on imperialism and those on the national question to provide a window into Lenin’s global vision of revolution.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherVerso
    Release dateJan 16, 2024
    ISBN9781804292730
    Imperialism and the National Question
    Author

    V. I. Lenin

    V.I. Lenin (1870-1924) was a pivotal figure in twentieth century radical politics. He was a theoretician and the leader of the Russian Bolshevik Party. He wrote widely, authoring books such as Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (Pluto, 1996). His selected writings were collected in the volume Revolution, Democracy, Socialism (Pluto, 2008).

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      Imperialism and the National Question - V. I. Lenin

      Introduction: The Soviets and Abolition

      Ruth Wilson Gilmore

      1. Looks Like Lenin

      Lenin was present in my early consciousness of politics and communism: the Soviets and ‘us’. In this instance, ‘us’ was some combination of Negro peoples – soon to become Black in the US – who were involved in the post–WWII round of emancipation. Universalist and internationalist in ambition, this movement linked up and shared inspiration and analysis with global anti-imperial liberation movements. The weapon of theory, as we understood it, was meant to both guide and to respond to action. We had to repeatedly assess our own resources. Was anything consistently reliable? We were constantly debating and acting on our insights about how to fight, which included making decisions about what we were fighting. In other words, the struggles, and the people who fought them, developed constantly – driven by the ongoing effort to know the dynamic objects of our antagonism. We wanted to win.

      In order to evade being absorbed – formally emancipated – into a social reality that would perpetuate the domination that generations had organised to undo, we had to not only ‘resist’ culturally and politically but also build our awareness of organised violence as an ensemble of activities impeding abolition in general. This ensemble of activities turns every ‘what’ into a ‘where’ because violence is always a spatial practice that produces and defines territories, peoples, mobility, possibility.

      If capitalism reached its highest stage at the beginning of the twentieth century, it surely hasn’t run out of energy. Capitalism saving capitalism from capitalism is a way to think about the mode of production’s necessary dynamic through which it realises its inherent imperative. Whatever problem production or accumulation runs up against, innovation appears to resolve. Technological and financial barriers to entry enable capitals that innovate with particular time-space felicity to dominate and eventually monopolise. What Lenin noticed in thinking about finance, monopoly, and imperialism is akin to what many kinds of intellectuals throughout modernity keep noticing too: tools for innovation comprise technologies of many kinds – productive but also political, military, murderous. There is no singular rationality of power, as Herman Bennett reminds us.

      When Rosie Warren asked me if I’d like to write something to recognise the centenary of Lenin’s death, I thought it would be a great opportunity to share what thinking with Lenin might help us see as we make our way in this unrolling present. This introduction offers a meditation on why we should read this collection of Lenin’s writing today. What do these writings show us about theory breaking into practice, and how might the politics explained or implied in these writings inform our analytical and practical grasp of what is to be done now? How are the two key concepts – imperialism and self-determination – explored here by Lenin relevant? The organised violence of imperialism continues to stalk the earth in the form of its fleshly and ghostly remnants – accumulated underdevelopment – and viscerally in contemporary unequal relations of power that rush value upward, by way of elites, to the ‘economic north’, wherever the owners might reside. But in its muscular liveliness, self-determination hasn’t disappeared from the earth’s surface, nor wholly been absorbed into the system of nation-states mostly disciplined by debt and developmentalism.

      We should read as though we are thinking with Lenin in his time while also thinking about the struggle at hand, so that Marxism’s contemporary practicality doesn’t get lost. This practicality cannot be overstated, even if the frenzy of many debates obscures underlying necessity. As an organiser active during the 1930s in New York City explained, ‘We went out every night after supper to knock on strangers’ doors. I’d say I am from the Communist Party and I am here to help you solve your problems.’

      In contrast to such theoretically guided practicality, a good deal of mainstream Western Marxism seems culturally shaped by a quest for truth revealed on the page. That might be because so many of its adherents are themselves born-again historical materialists. Their fundamentalism is barely Methodist (though method plays a big role in the confusion), but rather more Calvinist. The sober assessment of how the world works casts a shadow dividing the elect from the rest in austere dismissal of politically meaningful conditions of existence and analytically powerful categories of analysis. More than communism, it would seem, the specter of Weber haunts the West.

      There was always something about Lenin, to my youthfully vigorous mind, that was other than the West. This was due in part to reassuring if woeful presumptions about physique – eyelids, cheekbones, and other aftermaths of the racist ‘science’ of humanity that raged as Ulyanov came of age. But something else, too – less easy to confess but viscerally there – a peculiarly not-liberal universalism that offered theoretical muscle for the struggle at hand as something we all could and should exercise. One night in the late 1960s, during the point-counterpoint of assassinations and riots, I wandered through town looking for my father in hope of a ride home. He’d been invited to speak at a teach-in, one of those noisy aftermaths to the din of police and fire and sirens and bullets and protest, in which people try to craft sentences out of crisis and churn. He had street cred. Whatever he said, though most certainly in the style of harangue, would have tightly followed the locally fatal contours of power and difference. He would have insisted on how they at once originated from and radiated in dynamic connection to liberation struggle in general. Skipping that talk, I found my father’s car with the event flyer stuck under the windshield wiper – his name circled, annotated: ‘Looks like Lenin.’

      2. ‘That’s Life’

      What a fine thing our Congress is. Opportunities for open fighting and opinions expressed. Tendencies revealed. Groups defined. Hands raised. A decision taken. A stage passed through. That’s what I like. That’s life. It’s something different from the endless wearying intellectual discussions which finish not because people have solved the problem, but simply because they have got tired of talking.

      – Lenin 1903

      Two major themes unfold in these texts. In the Imperialism pamphlet, Lenin proposes a broad understanding of why and how capitalist competition, rather than developing the productive forces for humanity to flourish, degenerates into monopoly and war. The argument turns on a key phrase summarising the ongoing result: ‘partition and repartition’. In the various debates on self-determination, Lenin is at pains to specify how imperialism’s inbred contradiction – materialised in the form of oppressed nations themselves – might emerge and align as social forces capable of interrupting imperialism’s tendency towards war and extraction, and thereby set human history onto a different, though not final, path. Much has been made of the co-constitutive interdependencies – the fundamental contradiction, if you will – between ‘imperialism’ on the one hand and ‘self-determination’ on the other. In this introduction we’ll meditate on how Lenin’s analysis helps us reflect on specifically grounded examples, not as remnants of what might have been but as energetic possibilities arising from refreshed struggle today.

      The twentieth-century liberation movements remain unfinished although not thoroughly vanquished. Through organised intensity in the broader context of anti-colonial revolution, the Marxism of the Third World reconfigured a good deal of the planet’s social reality. These revolutionaries never lacked Lenin even as they frequently and deliberately reworked the thinking proposed from capitalism’s rapidly industrialising imperial periphery – Russia. They did so to address problems of how to make and sustain freedom elsewhere. The Third World’s emancipatory interregnum wasn’t peaceful, serially sliced open by assassinations and coups intended to turn even moderate attempts at socialism back towards a capitalist track.

      And yet with all the suffering, for a few decades, broadly speaking, humanity flourished. The planet’s human population has grown from about 1.4 billion in 1870, the year Lenin was born, to about 8 billion today. The most dramatic year-on-year increases were during the interregnum, tapering off since the counter-revolution cumulatively took hold. Are people tired of making more people? Some countries appear to have this issue. Are people lacking adequate nutrition again as they were before and during the two great imperial wars? Yes, although not everywhere. We see here basic features of today’s predicaments, elaborated through globalisation on the one hand and ecological disaster on the other.

      More than a century’s dust has settled since Lenin conceived and wrote these texts. The world as we find it has not resolved the contradictions that hold these writings together – domination confronts self-determination, while economic territory is key to our understanding of the social realities in and through which struggle occurs. A contemporary, spirited, frequently ill-tempered debate asks whether the concept of imperialism – Lenin’s or a fresher version of it – offers necessary insight into today’s dynamics of domination. I lean towards ‘yes’: the combination of institutional tools for transferring surplus from the ‘economic south’ (wherever it is) to the ‘north’ (whoever they are) has become more elaborate, yes, but is still tied together by the effective control of military, technology (productive and financial), money, property, and most people’s ability to move about or stay put. The ‘no’ side insists that contemporary firefights should be against national bourgeoisies that were never disempowered, either in a peaceful transition to socialism or by other means. Given how frequently such national bourgeoisies have depended on overt and covert support to interrupt redistribution, restricting interpretive energy to the nation-state scale obscures wider forces articulating through those bourgeoisies, whose agency is not in doubt even if their autonomy is, like all autonomy, only ever relative.

      But relative to what? Here is where Lenin’s impressive exploration of ‘self-determination’ helps us to think hard about what now contours economic territory as it stretches across borders and nestles within them. If self-determination a century ago appeared to communism’s most successful strategist as an urgent social energy confronting imperialism within and across regions, his care in specifying context strongly militates against the notion of any narrowly identitarian ‘nation’ as miraculously poised to do battle. Here many raise M. N. Roy’s 1920 Comintern debate with Lenin as transformative for Lenin’s understanding. And yet political analysis concerning the possible participants in revolutionary formation characterise Lenin’s pieces that predate that debate; the doubt that shaped those pieces helped make the Comintern debate possible. Consider a wider context: Lenin, Roy, and the toilers of the East (who actually hailed from many directions of the planet) were talking about self-determination while apologists and hacks, alongside the occasional serious scholar, were writing for organs like the Journal of Race Development and otherwise figuring out how to make the world safe for capitalism. Stated differently, the analytical preconditions for the 1920 revision were already present because the one abiding characteristic of Lenin’s thought was that it was open – in rehearsal rather than reprint. This is a brief for Roy and for Lenin, and a lesson for all of us now. The purpose here is not to hold Lenin up as immune to error – that would be plain stupid – but rather to ask ourselves how better to think systematically and strategically and collectively, in part by listening carefully, to accomplish what we came to do.

      If we can imagine that the struggle is over economic territory, including what happens to and on the land, our imaginative capacity demands we understand that it’s a beginning, not the end. We also know – whether thinking about self-determination or the exposition of consolidated, competing forces presented in the Imperialism pamphlet – that any territory has natural, cultural, political, and other interdependent characteristics. These characteristics, or ‘endowments’, include water and land and other tangible and intangible resources, as well as the presence of institutions through which people organise, derive meaning from, and improve their lives. This isn’t a romantic point. ‘Self-determination’ from the communist perspective is shorthand for imagining these endowments marshalled by history’s protagonists, and then finding that work as it actually happens to revise social reality. Therefore, part of the struggle is defining – becoming – history’s protagonists, repeatedly. Relations of power, accumulated and expressed through social processes, determine the possibility, scope, and urgency of emancipatory struggle.

      It is also the case that self-determination is vulnerable to capture by liberalism – especially liberalism’s paternalistic embrace of group individualism, which itself is partly motivated out of fear of fascism and the absurd but sturdy belief that fascism can be domesticated. Stated differently, self-determination compels us to confront analytically and practically the actual substantive and formal initiatives through which it can, but hardly must, move towards openness. We will explore some examples shortly. But for now what’s important is to contrast radical self-determination with liberalism’s seduction, because the latter at best promises to enlarge already-existing social reality to accommodate a slight variation of what already exists, with predictably brutal effects for everyone abandoned at the margin of that reality.

      Lenin proposed a century ago that the highest stage of capitalism took formal and substantive shape through imperialism, as competing polities, in the hunt to control economic territory, arrayed themselves for war on behalf of their domestic monopolies, with finance in the lead. The subsequent explosive backwash of Axis and Allied industrialised killing – colonialism’s long-suffered genocide and environmental destruction inundating the core – may have signalled the end of twentieth-century wars among late modernity’s last-standing imperialists. But this was by no means the end of imperialism or of powerful warmakers. Philosophers get cranky when concepts degenerate into metaphor, even if that’s where concepts originate in the first place as energising capacities to think relationally about the world. Imperialism here is not a metaphor. The partition and repartition of the earth never ground to a halt, even if the great pressures that are externally determined cooperate and conflict differently to produce territories ripe for exploitation. The national bourgeoisies act on their own institutional behalf – becoming fabulously wealthy in the process – and meet demands that drain resources. Militaries lurk around the planet poised to enforce or interrupt value transfer, which is another way of saying that claims on resources do not redound without friction to those who live with or work them.

      The expansive forces of organised violence, also perfected in public and private policing bodies, meet up alongside less apparently warlike yet still murderously destructive forces of international financial institutions, trade agreements, intellectual property, and NGOs. Together these forces insinuate the concertina wire of ‘civil society’ into fraying political fabric – ‘abetted decline’ – while pundits, as well as peoples who experience organised abandonment, decry failed or captured states. Such a constellation of forces appears to constitute ‘imperialism’ – neither more nor less naked than at the turn of the previous century, or the century before that or before that or before that. Monopolies matter, whether chartered or otherwise consolidated through protected competition. Monopolies have military and fiduciary seconds everywhere, even as extraction, appropriation, and the transfer of value to the coffers of the rich continue apace. They don’t always win, but they rarely lose.

      Who or what constitutes self-determination in these contexts? If the goal of creating or seizing a state is what ‘self-determination’ has meant, conceptually, what mediating movements headed in such a direction matter? In other words, does learning about discrete cases where the armature of sovereignty isn’t a near goal distract from or build towards the need for big things? Might such learning show us ways of seeing, as it were, what ‘the soviets plus electrification’ might mean, in practice, today? Lenin noticed during the St Petersburg general strike something that surprised him: that the St Petersburg soviet would keep society going. This surprise shows there wasn’t a set revolutionary blueprint. But something happened in the realm of becoming: profoundly social conviviality determined the political-subjective means for realising interim goals. This in turn showed how revolution is a fundamentally practical program even if the steps cannot all be plotted out in advance. ‘We are from the Communist Party and we are here to help you solve your problems.’ Let’s leap.

      The capacity to leap into an unknown that promises both terror and salvation is the foundation of Christian evangelical conversion. In the first decades of the twentieth century, while Lenin was writing these pieces and fomenting revolution, evangelism spread as it had a century earlier, and in the century before that. This indicates a general puzzle that interests me. Scholars of religion, historical-geographical materialists, and others who seek to grasp the complexities of subjectivity wonder what compels people to reinterpret abstract principles and reinvent themselves through that reinterpretation. Beyond the urgent need to assuage suffering (including Marx’s inactivity and loneliness), evangelical millenarianism (again, as an example) features news of certain change. Adherents devote great subjective effort to imagining and embodying change in preparation for change, while hurtling towards the brink of an objectively irresistible unknown.

      From time to time evangelical eruptions have, through organised activity and polemic, connected with various emancipatory movements that might fall under the aegis not narrowly of wage-worker class politics but also, expansively, abolitionism: they have worked towards embracing everybody in a territory of need. Now, it is true that throughout modernity the disciplining forces of religious hierarchy enabled capture, exploitation, subjugation, and transfer to realise value. And yet, the dialectics of moral value have also meant that even if explicitly faith-schooled to displace or pacify oppositional energy, people have socially fashioned something they could use for their own purpose from the symbolic and material resources at hand. And further, while this self-fashioning did not necessarily instigate capacities for creative aggression, it did, amidst immense spiritual diversity and syncretism, broaden and strengthen those capacities. Awareness brings examples to our attention. For instance, in 1906, when labor actions erupted across South Africa, Jehovah’s Witnesses appeared ready to proselytise alongside secular agitators, and those who took up their pamphlets had, among other things, literacy in their collective arsenal. In other words – perhaps a central lesson from Lenin – learning is never an indifferent antithesis even if the dominant pedagogy intends conformity not rebellion.

      And further, as we reflect on today’s evangelical enthusiasm for harvesting souls – especially across the wide swathe of tropical landmass on either side of the equator – we are reminded that these terrains form part of the economic territory besieged by domestic, international, and transnational monopolies and their political, nongovernmental, police, and militarised enablers. Social structures that enhance belonging make evangelism’s appeal sensible when converts do not otherwise feel they can fulfill their purpose. This is because conversion elegantly becomes its own purpose. I put my finger on evangelism here to make a point that evangelism illustrates but does not remotely exhaust: purpose, rather than characteristics or interest, initiates and determines so much of political and social life. While religion, through dense systems of signification, appeals abstractly as few other social forces do, its felt practicality in relation to subjectivity – to becoming – suggests clues one might look for in building formations that are this-worldly in their orientation to relieve suffering and produce joy. Such this-worldly-ness, perhaps, is what radical self-determination always was making its way through, with ‘nation’ sometimes ascriptively real but also, importantly, a loose stand-in for a wide range of collectivities combined in excess of oppression yet undeniably consolidated by it. ‘We are from the Communist Party and we are here to help you solve your problems.’

      3. Economic Territory

      Territory signifies political, social, cultural, and economic space in and through which activities comprising social reality unfold. Territories vary depending on what people do, as we shall see later. Extra-market as well as non-market activities are crucial. Anything in territories is vulnerable to becoming commodified, though not all relations are determined by commercial or labor processes. This vulnerability, potential or ongoing, makes territory ‘economic’ although it’s never only that. Political and other forms of action constantly assert and test the boundedness and the dynamic content of territories. We are all participants in multiple territories while at the same time we embody, whatever our philosophical understanding of ‘the individual’ might be, 8 billion territories of selves. Schools and faith communities and labor processes and households and governments and sporting clubs and so many other institutions offer narrative coherence – or the theoretical and practical wherewithal to de-cohere. When an IFI or a monopoly agribusiness or brand drops in to sell debt or grab land, to license seeds or establish an ‘offshore’ factory, or to buy or sell primary, producer, or consumer goods, its capacity to realise the value it is organised to accumulate isn’t a result of its monopoly-ness no matter how gargantuan its thirst for cash. Every capitalist relation has political and social characteristics. What forms do these take, and what capacities determine value’s flow or stickiness? One thing is for sure: there’s always got to be some mediating sovereign (somebody with the authority to dispense with life) somewhere to guarantee, for capitalism, private property as the primary value that shapes human activity. Stated differently, humans’ creative energy isn’t passively surrendered – not without the intervention of terror or love or some kind of ‘moral espionage that restrains the very enthusiasm that sets it in motion’. And the energy is never wholly depleted, though people do get very tired.

      Put this way, Lenin’s analyses encourage us to approach the multiplicity of co-constitutive interdependencies that enliven the dynamics of social reality. This is the takeaway lesson of all social reproduction theory, and what underlies abolition as an ideology, system, and outcome. If the struggle for domination under capitalism consists of the struggle over territory as economic territory, then self-determination is both in dialectical antagonism to control from outside or above and replete with its own internal struggles, none of which has an automatic outcome, anti-capitalist or otherwise.

      A century on, where does struggle to emancipate economic territory, by transforming it into something else, arise from or lead to? How might we recognise the social characteristics of such struggle today? There are still oppressed nations and national minorities; there are also the many lineaments of political-economic inequality that fall under the useful rubric of ‘racial capitalism’, although ‘race’ does not exhaust social differentiations so much as gesture emphatically in their absurdly heritable direction. We can all name efforts of old, new, and refreshed polities to establish self-governing states of their own – whether by seceding from former empires such as the UK or Spain or Turkey, or by carving pieces from already-existing postcolonial states from Bangladesh to Eritrea and beyond, plus the insistence by indigenous peoples throughout the Fourth World for Land Back, or Palestine’s one- or two-state solution. Pulses of self-determining counter-partition haven’t evaporated but rather continue to assert territorially-defined rights in the context of varied relative sovereignty. This is true whether the intention is to make value flow or stick, and the intention is heightened by symbolic no less than material determinations of authorised belonging.

      4. Partition and Repartition

      The three huge eruptions of capitalist modernity – colonialism, settler colonialism, and chattel slavery – threw people and places into motion characterised by intense friction that goes by different names: deindustrialisation, underdevelopment, genocide, racism. All these forces are part of imperialism rather than extra-imperial activities, because they are resolved through partition, repartition, war, and sorting and stacking people, places, and things.

      Like any other border, partitions can be invisible and depthless – even if they are fortified with soldiers, landmines, towers, walls, and floodlights, or visible from space because practices of tillage or irrigation leave evidence that shows up as though defined by a cartographer’s paintbox. Partition is definitive and transformative and can include (re)divisions of labor, changes in household regimes, gender relations and land use, conscriptions and expulsions, and movement of what is produced, how, and to what end. The workers in this story can be wage workers or direct producers or all the available labor that makes the productive labor possible. Local and regional power regimes, through inherited, seized, or comprador entailments, connect across space, enabling and disabling matter in motion. In other words, the division of people from control of the means of their own reproduction, and the division of space among capitals for the purpose of realising money, commodity, and productive good circulation, are aspects of partition and repartition.

      Partitions distort and sometimes obliterate social reality. Emplotment gives definition and meaning to partition as the geometrical and narrative ordering of space. As a result of the multiple complexities inhering in any social reality, forces of domination renovate and make critical already-existing activity from without and within in order to assert symbolic as well as material order through the exercise of power and difference. When the purpose is to drain resources, power and difference couple to define and enforce through partition legal, cultural, bureaucratic, and discursive regimes – notably including discourses that materialise through differentiating humanity in biological or cultural terms. The reality is held together by the direct or indirect threat of organised violence, which acts both on behalf of whichever elites are in command and on its own behalf insofar as organized violence produces self-realising and self-aggrandising relatively autonomous institutions.

      We can concentrate our attention on big things and global processes by considering two centuries of capital mobility and banking crises. They show a very peculiar thing: the few decades in which mobility and crises were low (around 1945–80) correspond to the decades during which, in fits and starts, people were making a decolonised future (the emancipatory interregnum we’ve already touched on). The brief period suggests, therefore, what incited counter-revolution, stated most generally as the thirst for cash. The assembled forces of counter-revolution – from outside and within the economic territories in question – figured out, through trial and error, how to use combinations of extra-economic as well as economic pressure to realise cash from property entitlements. The goal is always the same even if the means are organised differently – the capture of surplus as profit or interest, transfer, or rent. The unsteady process of capture, accumulated over time, sets the stage for where we are today: both how things are and how they might become different. The relations of power and difference have, over time, become more, not less, shadowed and herded by the forces of organised violence. A century on we cannot emphasise enough that the forces of austerity and its related enterprises of abandonment and depoliticisation have broadened and deepened inequality on a global scale.

      In such a context, surpluses that drip or gush from matter in motion require barriers – we can still call them partitions – that determine the speed and direction of those flows; not only guardrails but also armed guards keep people from changing those flows. Here we encounter sites for contemporary struggles over economic territory that also reveal themselves as the never settled production of scale. As we shall see in the next section, power and difference do not automatically signal exploitation, precisely because solidarity arises to repurpose relations. In the process they become radically interdependent and thereby change the social reality of territory, slicing through the economic to produce life in battle against, while at the same time in excess of, capitalism, rehearsing what becoming after will be like.

      The universal openness towards which Third World internationalism urged itself, in a contradiction that comes as no surprise, tended both to oppose and strengthen the power of partitions. In turn, partitions can be as likely to revive as to remedy the antagonisms history’s protagonists keep slugging away at. But to repeat, in the brief period following the end of the old imperial order – punctuated as it relentlessly was by assassination and coup, and the steady imposition of structural adjustment – relatively encalmed economies enabled small-d development, delinked or not, that resulted in (among other things) the greatest year-over-year increases in the number of human lives. This suggests but does not prove that struggles over the territorial entailments of hierarchical relationships – many predating colonialism, and others emerging from the profound social distortions of colonialism and slavery – usefully put into question what self-determination should become as a project of universalising emancipation.

      In other words, if the point of Marxism lies in anything it’s figuring out communist philanthropy – the antagonistic contradiction to all other forms of philanthropy. There’s no private allocation of the stolen social wage nor is there competitive application or status-restricted eligibility for public social wage reserves. Imagine abundance as an entitlement that binds us in radical interdependence. Mutual aid is a modest form of communist philanthropy, while the challenge is to imagine meeting needs and desires of strangers one can’t touch or of despised people one might prefer not to be around. Here’s where the otherworldly commitments of evangelism, as experiments in reinterpretation towards an inevitable future, come back to mind. The human capacity to imagine life otherwise inspired Marx and kept him pushing pen across paper as much as figuring out the mystifying contortions of capitalism. In fact, this imagining and analysis are one thing. And just as piecing together the globalising, shapeshifting forces of capitalism – of matter in motion – is important, so too is seeing how the concrete struggles, whether or not they actually recognise each other at any given time, articulate concrete points of possible solidarity. Think communist philanthropy as conviviality – a social goal as well as politically-subjective means to that goal. I’m thinking here of a story I read long ago about an eighteenth-century enslaved person who ran towards freedom. Her story reminds us that emancipation is more than a change of status, and that we frequently must try a different path even if it heightens the difficulty of arriving. The advertisement offering a bounty for her recovery noted that she knew river navigation. For that reason, and because she had friends in nearby farms or villages, her hunters warned she might ‘bend her route’ – not taking the shortest path across the partition between slavery and freedom, but rather following the route more likely to build her cadre.

      5. Communist Philanthropy, or Scenes from Abolition’s Soviets

      The struggle to build cadres is real. We’ve noted that all territories have endowments, which only become ‘economic’ through social processes. Lots of forces combine in creating any given economic territory, while the grind of capitalist competition and consolidation recombines in, for example, gargantuan firms. Big things have big needs, including juridical and discursive partitions, death-fences labeled ‘earned initiative’ that surround the power difference of private property. They send out their militaries, their diplomats, their salesforces, their guards, to transform territories into reliably economic fonts of value. Foundations and NGOs participate in abandonment, to lessen the sting or hasten resistance’s demise by shuttling energies off into ‘female empowerment’ or technical training – two examples of not bad things that become warped by organisations shielded from and sheltered by monopolies’ imperial force. Brutally creative, capitalism makes and unmakes realities. The differentiated presence of people – who grow, move, make, care for or guard or kill people and things – highlights multiple aspects of social reality foregone or set aside in the process: home, family, recreation, pleasure, beauty, belonging, conscription, exclusion, life. In other words, what Lenin outlined hasn’t gone away, but rather propagated through a variety of institutional types that, guaranteed by organised violence, continue in collaboration and conflict to govern the world.

      If the substantial features of the global economy have changed in order for capitalism to continue to flourish, what Lenin outlined in the debates on self-determination hasn’t disappeared either but rather both diversified and strengthened, relying in shifting configurations, ever hardened on the anvil of war. War, like other forms of organised abandonment, insists that territories are full of historical protagonists rather than victims who fill undifferentiated spaces of extraction. The social grind of valorisation produces consciousness for direct producers, wage workers, wageless workers, long-distance migrants; those who journey and those who wait. And, as embodied territories of selves, humans reconfigure space-time through practicalities of self-determination, interrupting partitions

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