Omar Dekhili: Against Dogmatism, Against Historical Fetishism

For any critique to be creative it must go beyond exposure and refutation and become an occasion for self-critical reflection. Elements in one’s thinking that identify with those being criticised must be searched out.¹

We have entered a new opening for revolutionary change. The imperialist system is in deep crisis and the working class is awakening from decades of slumber. In the imperialist countries this will be the first opening for reconstituting genuine vanguard parties since the last crisis of this kind, since the New Communist Movement from the 1960s–1980s. In order to make use of this chance, we have to learn the lessons of the last revolutionary sequence and overcome the subjective weaknesses that have hampered the revolutionary labor movement since the transformation of capitalism into capitalist-imperialism during the second half of the 19th century. Chief among those subjective weaknesses, which makes it difficult to derive the lessons of the class struggle, is dogmatism. In order to overcome this problem we have to locate its many social and ideological roots and thoroughly uproot them. This essay is an attempt at locating one such root and to suggest some means to overcome the problem. The phenomenon in question is historical fetishism—but before we can investigate it we need to briefly clarify some concepts: dogmatism and fetishism.
In his Prison Notebooks, where he was forced to use a coded language, Gramsci calls Marxism the philosophy of praxis. This name determines the heart of Marxism, the unity of theory and action of class forces substantial enough to qualitatively alter society. Theory emerges from practice and leads back into it, forming praxis, where it finds the test of its adequacy as well as the means to further advance the class struggle and thus get closer to social reality. When praxis falls apart, we get two alienated halves: empiricism, which is practice divorced from theory and dogmatism, which is theory divorced from practice. The latter is the inability to move from the realm of theory to concrete reality, to produce the concrete investigation of a concrete situation in order to foster proletarian praxis. Dogmatism can take two general forms: eclectic dogmatism and dogmatism proper. The former combines all kinds of theories and individual theorems without regard for coherency; this form is more characteristic for intellectuals. Dogmatism proper clings to one specific theory and treats all other theories as entirely incorrect. This form of dogmatism is more widespread and for which it is generally known. Both forms are united in being stuck in theoretical thought, even if they can be antagonistic to one another.
Fetishism is a phenomenon that comes in many forms—each one has to be concretely investigated in its particular movements and roots. What generally unifies the different particular forms is the following process: social relations—be they relations of production, class struggle, thought, etc.—can be objectified. We can produce a useful product, so therefore, we objectify social labor. We can write a book, so therefore, we objectify thought. Or we can create a song about a popular revolutionary leader, so therefore, we objectify the class struggle. This is a quality particular to human beings which allows us to develop our capabilities. The problem arises when these products become alienated, say, for example, through private property. Then the effect of fetishism can set in, where we lose sight of the fact that these objectifications are expressions and mediations of social relations, and we start to mistake them for qualities of the objects or relations between them. The objectifications, which would otherwise mediate social relations, are turned into reifications, which mislead us about their social origin.² Different forms of fetishism can interact and strengthen one another. Once we become aware of a form of fetishism, we have to trace its movements to their original roots and then remove the alienating social relations that create the fetishism. Ultimately most forms of fetishism are rooted in class society and can only be overcome through revolution, by erecting a classless and stateless communist social formation.
With these general conceptual clarifications we can move on to the matter at hand—the phenomenon of historical fetishism: how it relates to dogmatism and how both were historically produced and, at times, prevented.

The Phenomenon of Historical Fetishism

Hegel once noted that there comes a point in the history of philosophy where humanity has produced and accumulated so many philosophical systems that a curious effect, a leap from quantity to quality, emerges. Certain philosophers faced with this phenomenon are transformed into disinterested observers of these countless systems. No longer driven by an urge to grasp totality, they are only interested in collecting the curious expressions of these systems rather than their essence, the way in which the systems gave philosophical expression to their time.

In this way philosophy is transposed to the plane of information. Information is concerned with alien objects. In the philosophical knowledge that is only erudition, the inwards totality does not bestir itself, and neutrality retains its perfect freedom [from commitment]. . . . No philosophical system can escape the possibility of this sort of reception; every philosophical system can be treated historically. As every living form belongs at the same time to the realm of appearance, so too does philosophy. As appearance, philosophy surrenders to the power capable of transforming it into dead opinion and into something that belonged to the past from the very beginning.³

For Hegel, this was a crucial insight towards the development of his own system, in which we are not specifically interested. What is insightful about this in regards to our investigation of historical fetishism is: 1) the historically motivated qualitative leap that is described here; 2) the fetishistic effect it can produce; 3) the necessity to overcome this form of fetishism in order to get to the essence of the phenomenon and to find the causes of the fetishistic effect. Of course, we cannot be content with the idealist manner in which Hegel resolved his problem; only the abstract logical form and Hegel’s explication of the problem is important for us. By investigating the phenomenon, we will have to trace its concrete logical form, leaving Hegel’s abstractions behind.
Through the class struggles of the last two centuries, the working class has first transformed its struggle from one guided by utopian theories to one guided by the science of its own struggle—Marxism. With that transformation we have also transformed our conception of socialism and communism into increasingly concrete goals, which we no longer pluck from the realm of abstract thought, but from the concrete social and productive relations of bourgeois society, from the very contradictions of the bourgeois social formation.
The second transformation was for the working class to accumulate our own history. A brief enumeration of only the most salient points of the proletarian class struggle will illustrate the qualitative leap that took place through the accumulation of historical events: the success and defeat of the Paris Commune; the rise and betrayal of the German labor movement; the collapse of the Second International; the victory of the October Revolution and the socialist advancements of the USSR; the defeat of the European labor movement during the rise of fascism; the victory of the Chinese Revolution; the defeat of the red line in the USSR and the rise of modern revisionism; the national liberation movements; the ‘68 uprisings and the New Communist Movement and its ultimate defeat; the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution and its eventual defeat and the restoration of capitalism in China following it; the recent revolutions (both defeated and ongoing) in Peru, Nepal, India, and the Philippines. What has happened through this process is the creation of the same problem that Hegel recognized in the case of the history of philosophy: the proletariat has created its own history and with that comes the same danger of fetishism, that is, historical fetishism.
At each point of the class struggle the working class produces objectifications of this struggle: books, songs, documents, paintings, etc. These are transformations of real processes into objective forms, the respective objects—which in turn serve the purpose of allowing reflection—raising our theoretical level and class consciousness, celebrating our victories, reckoning with defeats, etc. The objectifications, being products of the class struggle, are also in service of this very struggle, leading back into it and advancing it. We can take the example of Lenin’s book What Is to Be Done?, which was written during a crucial point of the class struggle in Russia. Its purpose was to advance the theory of consciousness and the theory of the party form of Marxism, to draw lines of demarcation against economism, and to thus propel the class struggle. There was no doubt at the time regarding the purpose of this objectification; it was a product of the proletarian class struggle and entirely in its service. The book functioned as a mediation within the larger social process.
But there is a dual character to these objectifications. In being objective representations of otherwise not directly perceptible social relations, they form a unity of opposites. And this is a trickier dialectical phenomenon, since the objective form is precisely what is secondary, as it only serves as the medium of the represented class struggles. We, the working class, are not interested in a painting of a workers’ strike because we like it as an object, but because we relate to the struggles it represents, since we are still engaged in such struggles. Yet as proletarian history accumulates, the danger of mistaking the objectified side for an end in itself is heightened. The individual objectifications accumulate to such a degree that a larger history is formed—the history of the proletarian class struggle. This specifically proletarian history is then in danger of being dissolved into an abstract idea of History in general, in which case it loses its mediating quality. The social relations that are supposed to be mediated become reified. We lose sight of the class struggle and start seeing only its objectifications. People who get lost in this phenomenon can get lost in the realm of pure thought, and in the worst case scenario even unwittingly end up on the side of the bourgeoisie. Krupskaya reports the following illustrative example of what we are trying to analyze:

Lenin studied the experience of the international proletariat with particular fervor. It would be difficult to imagine a man who disliked museums more than Lenin. The motleyness and hodgepodge of museum exhibits depressed Vladimir Ilyich to such an extent that ten minutes in a museum were usually enough to make him look exhausted. But there is one exhibition that I remember particularly vividly—the 1848 Revolution exhibition held in two little rooms in the Parisian workers’ quarter famous for its revolutionary struggle. You should have seen how profoundly interested Vladimir Ilyich was, how he became absorbed in every little exhibit. For him it was a living part of the struggle. When I visited our Museum of the Revolution, I thought of Ilyich, of how he scrutinized every little exhibit that day in Paris.⁴

In this anecdote Lenin shows disinterest in the reified objectifications at display in a museum setting and only becomes intensely interested when he encounters historical traces of the first, great all-European uprising of the working class. He became captivated precisely because he recognized these objectifications as representations, as links within the very class struggle that he himself was a living and militant participant in: “For him it was a living part of the struggle.” Lenin knew that there are lessons transmitted through these objectifications that we need to extract, which help us advance our own part in the same struggle. In this way he resisted the attempt by the museum to submerge this specifically proletarian and living part of our struggle into the greater “motleyness and hodgepodge” of an abstract historiography.
For the proletariat, the social products of our class struggle have to be understood as crystallizations of that very struggle, the study of which must not be an end in itself but rather in service of the perpetuation of this struggle at a higher stage, enriched by the lessons of its previous stages, their victories and defeats. The communist movement has to grasp the objectified forms of its struggle as mediations, links within the class struggle that over time accumulate into the denser structure of the history of the communist movement—just as Lenin correctly grasped them in the above example. Thus, understood correctly, we can shape the resulting proletarian history in accordance with its actual character and content, putting it in the service of the class struggle. This way the working class can develop its own science, as well as raise its class consciousness, by becoming aware of not just the historicity of bourgeois society, but of its own struggle. What will become clear is that the working class not only has the ability to change the world, but has already done so and that, in doing so, has changed and developed itself as well as shown the historicity of bourgeois society. The concept of communism has been discovered within the contradictory tendencies of bourgeois society itself; these tendencies have been taken up and developed through the class struggle. The idealist conception of communism was thus turned into a materialist conception, one that is realized and increasingly concretized and enriched through the class struggle. This process of concretization is also the process of the development of the science of class struggle, of Marxism.
The fact that this qualitative leap was produced is a genuine scientific achievement. At the same time, the crystalline form this history takes introduces the dangers of historical fetishism and its strengthening through commodity fetishism. Once a specific battle within the continuous class struggle has transitioned into the next phase, what remains of it is its representation in the objects that have been produced as expressions of the process. The class struggle necessarily takes an objectified form—thus, the danger of historical fetishism is one of its organic products.
Let us return to the example of What Is to Be Done? Lenin wrote the book in the struggle for a qualitatively higher organizational form of the communist party and for a refined theory of class consciousness; he wrote it in the midst of intense class struggles in Russia at the time, entwined in complex and difficult ideological struggles. What we receive of this historically is the book itself, as well as history books contextualizing the book’s social and ideological milieu. What is important for us is the class struggle that is expressed by the book, the general lessons, as well as their limits, which are transmitted through it. What is not important to us is the book as an object, the book as a pretense for supposedly disinterested scholastic ruminations. And if we want to learn from the book, we cannot isolate it in its immediate socio-historical milieu either. We have to expand the historical view, investigate the struggles that influenced the book, as well as those which the book itself informed, and during which its theory was put to the test. Falling into historical fetishism would prevent us from doing this and have us only marvel at the object or reify its lessons uncritically.
As the working class is living within bourgeois society—subjected to bourgeois hegemony, constantly influenced by the reproduction and perpetuation of the ruling bourgeois ideas—it is naturally caught up within the phenomena of historical and commodity fetishism and has to actively free itself from them. What is supposed to be mediations can become reifications, even in the mind of the proletariat. Grasping the objectification as a mediation would mean we recognize it as a product of the class struggle, created for the perpetuation of the class struggle as one of the links in its chain. Reifying it, on the other hand, would lead us to a dead end; the form of the object is mistaken for its content, we become distracted by it, and it leads us away from the class struggle into the study chambers or, worse, into the enemy camp.
Before we analyze historical fetishism a bit deeper, we will look into its historical development. The analysis will be concentrated on the European struggle in particular, as that is what we are most familiar with and where the problem is arguably most acute, for reasons which these investigations ought to illuminate.

The Class Struggle and Historical Fetishism

During Marx and Engels’ lifetime, while some of the remaining utopian socialists could be quite dogmatic, overall there was little danger of dogmatism and historical fetishism. The working class in Europe was only just reaching the scientific level of the class struggle and Marx and Engels were clear that their theory was only the conscious theoretical expression of the class struggle of the proletariat. However two problems already emerged then that would later feed into dogmatism. First, some key texts where the creative methodological side of Marxism is particularly clear (German Ideology, Theories of Surplus Value, the Grundrisse) were published only long after Marx and Engels were already dead. In addition, the popularizations of Engels’ texts (Anti-Dühring and Feuerbach in particular) were not grasped as such by the labor movement. Rather, they were taken as exhaustive accounts of a closed theory, not the popularized foundations of a revolutionary, social-scientific research project.
The tradition of the Second International was already based on this dogmatic grasp of Marxist theory. They embarked on a great amount of organizational work, built parties, mass organizations, published books, and organized recreational and cultural activities. But they failed to keep their theoretical expressions of these qualitatively new organizational developments in line. Theory became alienated from practice by falling behind the real movement.⁵ In particular they lacked a proper grasp of the Marxist method. Rather, mechanical and metaphysical thought was widespread and stopped the leaders from qualitatively advancing their theory. Bernstein, as the systematizer of a revisionist trend that had long been growing within the larger European movement, then attacked Marx on two grounds: 1) he reduced Marx to a specific set of predictions; 2) he attacked Marx’s method, the dialectical aspect in particular. The error of simply not understanding the Marxist method was thus transformed into an outright rejection of it. Marx was turned into a historical fetish by reifying his work into a set of predictions.¹In her book Reform or Revolution? Luxemburg not only refuted Bernstein’s supposed disproof, she showed the superficiality of his method, the roots of which she located in his abandonment of the proletarian class relation. This then fed into another fetishism—that of the cult of personality. At that time there was both a Marx and a Lassalle personality cult in the German labor movement. In both cases the fetish replaced the real phenomenon, which allowed the fetishizers to fill their fetish with whatever content they liked. For Kautsky, Marx later became not much more than a common liberal, reflecting his own transformation. The worst part of this trend resulted in the bourgeois side beating down the revolutions following WWI, like the German social democrats destroying the November Revolution in 1918–19.
Against this general trend towards fetishistic forms of thought, there were primarily three leading figures in Europe escaping and combating it: Luxemburg, Lenin, and Gramsci. What unites all three is their grasp of the Marxist method, their rejection of dogmatism, and their creative advancements in Marxist theory. All of them had to look to the past in order to advance, be that back to Marx and primordial communism and accumulation, back to Hegel, or [in Gramsci’s case,] back to Lenin. None of them got lost in the fetishistic pull emerging from such a historical reflection.
Luxemburg was the first to unfold the struggle against dogmatism and revisionism. She specifically combated a form of historical fetishism in her theorization of primitive communism, where she pointed out the epistemological reasons, rooted in the class struggle, for why the bourgeoisie attacked the acknowledgment of this universal stage in human development. As she pointed out, the bourgeoisie turned reactionary after the revolution of 1848 and the rise of the labor movement produced its first climax in the Paris Commune. They felt, more than they could consciously recognize, the link between her theorization of primordial communism and post-capitalist communism, and the implication that it meant bourgeois society was just a historically transitory stage, and thus it has to be denied to the workers, lest they draw dangerous conclusions.⁶ These insights of Luxemburg are directly connected with her theorization of imperialism. It was her studies of the developments of capitalism, her engagement with Capital, Volume II, and the struggle against dogmatism that lead her along this path. The problems with her theory of imperialism have been hotly discussed, but the important aspect for us is its anti-dogmatic impulse and the way it eschews historical fetishization of both Marx and the class struggle.⁷
Lenin was the most thorough in his advancements of Marxism. He found the deepest roots of the transformation of the Second International from the vanguard of the proletariat into its direct opposite in the transformation of capitalism into its imperialist stage. Such an insight was the result of an advanced grasp on the Marxist method, accomplished through extensive studies of the developments of the global economy and a demystification of Hegel’s Logic. The danger of getting lost was particularly high, since Hegel was at that time seen as a dead dog, an old obfuscator long overcome—certainly not a contemporary of the class struggle. And yet Lenin was able to derive lessons from Hegel’s dialectics—not just by adapting it, but by restructuring it as a materialist, as Marx had done before him in his early works, most of which Lenin had no access to.⁸ For Lenin, Marx and Engels were no old fetishes, but living fellow fighters in the class struggle to be consulted not for some piece of dogma but for methodological guidance, for creative and further development along the demands of the class struggle of Lenin’s time.
Gramsci’s key struggle against historical fetishism was against the fetishization of Lenin and the October Revolution. He took Lenin’s intimations that the revolutions in the advanced imperialist countries would have to develop their own revolutionary strategy seriously. In doing so he refused the personality cult that developed around Lenin and which reified the class struggles his thought mediated. Gramsci saw that the revolution in the imperialist countries couldn’t be a quick event emerging from a moment of crisis, a war of maneuver, but that it would have to reckon with the strength of bourgeois society, the greater power of the state, and the more complex ideological and class structures of these countries—that the revolution would take the form of a war of position, a long process of fighting for hegemony in all spheres of society, including the illegal and military path but not reducing it to those aspects. As Lenin and Luxemburg related to Marx and Engels as compatriots in the struggle, so did Gramsci relate to Lenin.
Before we investigate the time of the New Communist Movement and our time, skipping over the betrayals and perversions that all three of these most advanced leaders of our class in Europe were subjected to, we will take a deeper look into the phenomenon of historical fetishism. This will help us better understand how it works and how it is possible that it can foster such complete transformations, as occurred in the case of the Second International parties and leaders.

The Logic of Historical Fetishism

Once the proletariat has produced the objectifications of its class struggle, these objects can be taken up not just by our class, but can be appropriated by the bourgeoisie. This is the first act of alienation. Bourgeois ideologues, however, view history through bourgeois eyes. When they take up proletarian objectifications and fashion a larger historiography from them—a paper or history book, a documentary or movie—they lend it a specific shape. They grasp the object from its merely objectified side, not the social relations it mediates, and align it with the ideas and objectifications of the bourgeoisie. The concrete proletarian character of the proletarian objectifications is thus extinguished within a general historical narrative that proceeds from the bourgeois perspective but presents itself as value neutral.⁹ This is, for the most part, not ill intent, but genuine ideology on the part of the ideologues.¹⁰ They may not be aware of what they’re doing and might even think they are secure from falling for ideology by simply rejecting any specific ideology. But ideology is not something that is consciously chosen; rather, it asserts itself as a result of the division of labor, definite social relations and practices, as well as class struggle. And the bourgeois ideologues happen to be married to the bourgeois mode of production by virtue of their comfortable lives within it; bourgeois ideology is the organic expression of this consciousness.¹¹
The forms in which bourgeois ideology will shape the objectifications will accord with their class interest. On a superficial level, the histories that are fashioned from the proletarian objectifications will naturally proceed from the bourgeois perspective; they will be shaped as narratives of a specific type with a beginning, middle, and end, the position of which is determined ideologically; they will give their stories a false resolution; they will declare the class struggle a fiction from the outset or proclaim it a thing of the past. While it was originally bourgeois historians like Guizot, Thierry, or Mignot who discovered class and class struggle, now the ideologues of that same class muddle the conception of class, denies the class struggle or even the existence of class at all.¹²
Since the epistemological (or intellectual) horizon of the bourgeoisie narrowed after the establishment of the last big European nation-states and the rise and destruction of the Paris Commune in 1871, this class can no longer grasp qualitative social change. So the history of the class struggle will not be, nor can it be, understood as a struggle for qualitative change, for the overcoming of bourgeois society, and for the construction of communist society. Within bourgeois consciousness these struggles must appear as either naively utopian or as struggles for reform; the degeneration of many of these struggles into reformism, and the dialectical relation between reform and revolution within one side of this dialectic is lost (that is revolution), which makes this mistake all the more easy.
On the methodological level this is expressed in teleology, the idea that development is always guided towards a goal from its very inception. Whatever social formations are investigated, they always already are perceived through this mode of thought; that is, bourgeois society is posited as the origin and eventual outcome of all social formations and struggles for qualitative change. According to this line of thought, when the communist movement is defeated in one of its battles, such defeat is understood as inevitable—doomed from the start—as if there was nothing qualitatively new beyond the horizon of bourgeois society. Bourgeois thought and its ideologues imply that, within the proletarian class struggle and unknown to itself, lies the always already internally given goal of bourgeois society. Capitalism has to be reborn out of every struggle each and every time.
The necessary premise of this ideological shaping is that the historical proletarian objectifications are already alienated and thus apprehended in a fetishistic manner where the real social relations are hidden behind their appearance.
Commodity fetishism powerfully reinforces historical fetishism as the second moment of alienation in two senses. For one, since the production of objectifications happens within the social milieu of bourgeois society, most of the products of the class struggle will also be commodities. The real social relations they express and the social forces that were necessary to produce them already appear as objects to us, since they are alienated from us through the private property relation. Lenin had to produce What Is to Be Done? as a commodity in order to reproduce the ideas it gives an expression to. We have to objectify not just the class struggle but alienated labor in order to produce these objectifications, so long as we have not overcome capitalism. That means that both social forces, labor and class struggle, are in danger of being mistaken for the commodity itself, or for the relations between the commodities. These concrete social forces can appear as natural properties of reality itself and, with that, these social relations themselves, which are historically transitory manifestations of bourgeois society, are naturalized. The meaning bourgeois ideologues have given to the objectifications of the proletarian class struggle is naturalized. We come to accept their method or even specific interpretations of our history and lose sight of the real meaning of our history within bourgeois historiography and its objectified appearance through commodities.¹³
The other sense in which commodity fetishism impacts historical fetishism relates to the mode of thought. Since commodity production is universalized within the bourgeois order, our mode of thought itself is shaped by it. The more organic social relations are commodified, the more they appear as relations between money and commodities. The organic social totality is thus cut into instances of exchange acts between money and commodities. As this becomes the universal way for us to relate to one another, our thought comes to express these relations.¹⁴ Dialectical thought is reduced to mechanical thought that moves in quantitative ways, without any organic universal relations or qualitative leaps. We thus tend to already approach our objectifications in this non-dialectical way so that the real dialectical processes that are mediated by the objects are hidden from us through the way bourgeois society forms our thought.
The working class is naturally drawn to the history of our class struggle; we seek out self-consciousness; we want to glean the potential universals that may lay latent in the history of this struggle in order to further the class struggle at its present stage. What we encounter is a history pre-formed by bourgeois ideologues that combines with the fetishistic tendencies that flow from bourgeois ideological hegemony and from the process of commodity production. The history of the communist movement thus has to be demystified; an ideological effort must be made to transform the reified objectifications back into mediations, which lead into the class struggle and advance it. The ensuing battle over ideas can then enter into a process of alienation from the class struggle, becoming an end in itself. A dynamic develops where the real struggle this effort to demystify is supposed to serve can turn into a perpetually reproduced ideological struggle over the correct interpretation of the events. The interpreters start to struggle among themselves without any reference to the present class struggle. The proletarian intellectual can get caught up in this quarrel, never finding their way back to the real class struggle, which only gets them more stuck, as they cannot put the universals and insights they intended to seek out to the test. Rather than demystifying the reified objectifications, they end up only deepening the reification, getting caught up in the pull of historical fetishism. In that case the struggle over the real history of the proletarian class struggle becomes a purely ideological struggle over the intellectual appropriation of different forms of fetishized history.
The danger of falling into historical fetishism is that the eventually idealist bourgeois method is taken over without those falling victim to the fetishistic effect being aware of it. The fetishistic forms of thought are translated into proletarian consciousness from the bourgeois historiography that the bourgeois ideologues produce. Already, in the struggle against the fetishized forms of proletarian history, lies the tendency to simply take up this form, to accept the method and structure the bourgeoisie has given it. And indeed we can see this quite often. What is supposed to be a Marxist analysis is turned into a struggle over the interpretation of this or that leader. In this way the great man theory of history is naively taken up from bourgeois consciousness while the class struggle, the real essence of history, falls to the wayside. A constant act to defend Stalin or Mao against the distortions of bourgeois historiography, for example, turns into an end in itself. The class forces and struggles these names represent are not just lost behind the name, but the name overrides these struggles. It appears as if these leaders of the working class truly were the all-powerful great men that bourgeois ideology portrays them as, rather than human beings determined by the class struggle like anyone else within class societies.
Similarly, quite often we encounter a reemergence of teleological thinking when it is proclaimed that the outcome of specific revolutions could only have been the one that actually occurred: the restoration of capitalism, the success of the counter-revolution, the defeat and murder of the revolutionaries. Here, too, the class struggle is extinguished and replaced by the always already posited internal fate: defeat and capitalist restoration. The class struggle vanishes behind its fetishized objectification. History can then no longer serve as a mediation for the real class struggle, no lessons other than those of defeat and the eternal nature of the bourgeois order can be drawn from it.
The flip side of this same teleological mode of thought is expressed in the quasi-religious talk about the inevitability of communism, where it is assumed that communism cannot be averted. The necessity of class struggle is effectively extinguished in that conception, too. Communism is a necessity, precisely in the sense that it is a way to resolve the contradictions of bourgeois society, but it is neither an automatic outcome of these contradictions nor is it the only outcome. Capitalism can just as well extinguish the human species through the environmental destruction it causes with its relentless overproduction. The proletariat has to realize the necessity of communism by asserting its freedom against the confines of bourgeois society. That is to say, we have to wage conscious proletarian class struggle, which understands that the proletariat can only liberate itself by liberating everyone through the dialectical negation of bourgeois society as the way in which communism is realized.
It is in this process of translation of the fetishistic forms of thought from bourgeois into proletarian consciousness that the general connection between historical fetishism and dogmatism becomes palpable. The dogmatists and the historical fetishists share certain methodological shortcomings: the alienation of theory and class struggle; the emphasis of form over content; mechanical and metaphysical modes of thought. In one way this is coincidental, as the dogmatists, losing or having lost the living connection to the real class struggle, already approach history through these fetishistic forms of thought. In another way the dogmatists can also be products of the outlined translation and transformation process. That is to say genuine proletarian revolutionaries can be turned into dogmatists through this process of historical fetishism. They set out to demystify bourgeois historiography of working class history, to construct an adequate historiography of our own history, to aid the advancement of proletarian class consciousness, but they get lost within historical fetishism. The ideological shaping of this history by the bourgeoisie ends up transforming the very mode of thought of the genuine revolutionaries, they become alienated from the class struggle. Potentially they can even find themselves in an antagonistic position against the working class without even realizing what is happening.
This mutual reinforcement of historical fetishism and dogmatism can be clarified further when we consider that among the historical products of the working class are its own theoretical expressions of these struggles. During these struggles we are often already reflecting on them as they happen, producing generalizations and searching for universals in the very moment of the events with texts like Lenin’s What Is to Be Done? The scientific self-consciousness of the proletariat, the class conscious part of the working class, acts as another pull towards the past. We investigate theory produced during past class struggles, seeking to understand ourselves better by learning from the lessons that can already be gleaned during the very events themselves. The theoretical expressions of the real movement become themselves objectifications and objects of retrospective reflection. If these phenomena are not correctly grasped as mediations of a real historical movement that have to be concretized within the new and developed conditions of the present, they can be turned into historical fetishes. The forms of thought that are expressed in historical fetishism are then translated into the consciousness of the dogmatists; the unsuspecting reader is transported into the realm of thought alienated from activity—that is, into dogma. In this way there’s a direct and mutual reinforcement of historical fetishism and dogmatism, both transforming into one another and deepening their errors. The theoretical expression of the real movement becomes itself a site of struggle among the interpreters seeking the real doctrine, the one true way to understand the theory in itself. Once again, the dogmatist gets lost within the realm of abstraction, just like the historical fetishist, incapable of putting their “real doctrine” to the test in the class struggle.
Since the dogmatist freezes their ideology in its historical moment, they turn it into a dead fetish, and by this process they become themselves ideologically stuck in the fetishized moment. We’ve all seen the Marxist of any given tendency who dresses like they’re Lenin, Mao, or Trotsky themselves. They take on the appearance of their fetish; even at the level of appearance a transformation into mummified personifications of their ideological idols can arise. They become moving time machines, and their texts also read like they’ve been transported into the present from another time and place, enveloped in the phraseology and specific problems that are alien to us.
The processes we’ve analyzed, the phenomenon of historical fetishism, draw us back into the confines of bourgeois thought. Without realizing it, the danger emerges, due to the accumulation of proletarian history, of translating bourgeois ideology and the metaphysical mode of thought back into proletarian consciousness at the very moment Marxism gives us the means to overcome them, both historically and methodologically. And it is dogmatism, where Marxist theory becomes alienated from the struggle of the working class, that builds the bridge between proletarian consciousness and historical fetishism, and thus bourgeois consciousness. In the analysis of the history of the working class, the fetishistic grasp of the categories of Marxism by the dogmatists organically leads into historical fetishism; it is a smooth transition from dogmatism into the fetishistic grasp of the proletarian objectifications. And with the unwitting transition to bourgeois consciousness, the dogmatic entrapment in the realm of theory or pure thought is reinforced. The alienation of the dogmatists from the class struggle deepens and can potentially even turn into the developed counterrevolutionary politics of the bourgeoisie. However, it is important to recognize that this is an unwitting process from which first a non-antagonistic contradiction emerges that can turn into an antagonistic one, while even the transition to the antagonistic class stand can remain hidden to those who have undergone it. After all, this is an ideological phenomenon that happens at an unconscious level. This has to be kept in mind when we consider the methods of dealing with the problem.

Historical Fetishism and the Class Struggle Today

After the defeat of the European revolutions following WWI and the wreckage left behind by WWII, in the immediate postwar years, revolution vanished from Europe as imperialism experienced its golden age, enabled by the destruction of capital by the war. During those years the European communist parties (CP) were able to build mass bases founded on the trust they had earned through their resistance to fascism. However, most of those parties became social democratic. The Italian CP, cofounded by Gramsci, was transformed by Gramsci’s former comrade Togliatti. The German CP underwent the same change and was outlawed in 1956 in West Germany. Already before that Luxemburg, also a cofounder of the party, was disparaged in a one-sided manner during Bolshevization in the 1920–30s so that a crucial link in its tradition was severed. And the French CP settled back into its old revisionism which it had partially overcome during the resistance. In general the revolutionary tradition was pacified.
With the events of 1968 a new phase of revolutionary potential, the New Communist Movement (NCM), began. The roots of this were many: from the international situation with the Vietnam War and the Cuban Revolution, to the national liberation movements in Africa, and the Cultural Revolution; from the structural crisis of capitalism as the deeper underlying cause, to the crisis in bourgeois culture and the educational systems. All this combined into a crisis era that lasted about a decade and opened the potential to reconstitute genuine vanguard parties in the imperialist countries. The NCM was precisely this attempt.
This movement faced a dual challenge: reconnecting with the revolutionary tradition from which the working class had been severed, and combating the revisionism of the established CPs without falling into dogmatism. Looking back it is clear that those involved in this period failed this task in both dimensions. The comprehensive social crisis enabled them to develop a praxis—that is, a unity of mass action and the theory that guides it—even despite their shortcomings. But eventually the lack of a concrete and creative development of their theory and practice caught up with them. Part of the movement splintered into countless sects, each defending its one true doctrine, none of which was able to serve as a basis for lasting proletarian praxis. Another part dissolved back into revisionist or outright bourgeois parties. Yet another part found ascendancy into the bourgeois ideological state apparatuses as harmless eclectic academics or functionaries.
They did not manage to develop a firm and creative grasp of the Marxist method to produce a concrete analysis of the concrete situation and through that process to advance the method itself. They did not manage to connect with their respective revolutionary history in a way that was informed by the necessities of the class struggle, which would have enabled them to separate the essential from the accidental and derive important lessons for the class at their stage of its struggle. Gramsci might have been able to alert them to the necessity to develop organizational forms that can endure a protracted war of position, thus building a revolutionary tradition stretching into our present. Luxemburg might have alerted them to the necessity to be critical of bourgeois historiography without getting lost in the critique itself—she might have taught them, as Mao did, to take the creativity of the masses seriously and, as Lenin did, to locate concretely the social roots of the revisionism of the parties surrounding them, developing their own theory and method through this process.

This did not happen. Instead the participants in the NCM became lost in historical fetishism and dogmatism. Those who ended up in increasingly tiny sects were victims of dogmatism proper. Those who ended up in the academy, some becoming postmodern ideologues, fell victim to eclectic dogmatism. Most were affected to some degree by historical fetishism. The first group fossilized history, built personality cults, and engaged in endless reinterpretations and defenses of the same set of historical events. The eclecticists transitioned unwittingly to bourgeois consciousness, some producing new histories divorced from the class struggle, even when intended as critiques of bourgeois historiography. A revolutionary continuum was not established.
We in the imperialist countries are now facing the same problem as the NCM. Without a living revolutionary tradition, we have to reexamine and reengage with our severed history. Although most revisionist parties are either dead or dying, we are facing a new problem: during the first stage of Marxism the movement was developed in the European core of free competition capitalism. The second stage, Marxism-Leninism, had already moved into the more peripheral countries of the imperialist system, and the necessity to concretize the theory within the imperialist context grew. Now the third stage, Marxism-Leninism-Maoism (MLM), reaches us from a context that is still part of the imperialist system, but very different from the concrete situation in the centers of imperialism. The danger of dogmatism is thus greater—namely to fail to grasp this qualitatively new situation—and the necessity to concretize the theory is even more pressing.
It is thus no accident that the first steps in the attempt to work with the new stage of Marxist science has produced dogmatic outcomes in the imperialist context. Hampered by the dual dangers of historical fetishism and dogmatism without the awareness of the particularity of this new situation and the new danger therein, we fell victim to them. In this situation, with the fact that movements in the imperialist countries have decisively fallen behind in the science of Marxism along with the real class struggle, it is crucial to combat any form of social chauvinism. The objective need to reconstitute genuine vanguard parties is becoming more apparent—a comprehensive crisis of not just the type of ‘68 seems to be developing. It is essential for us to overcome these subjective problems if we want to rise to the level of the objective situation.
This brief investigation of the phenomenon of historical fetishism should alert us to the problem. Sensitized to it, we are already subjectively strengthened if we take it seriously. The conclusions to draw from it are to deepen our understanding of the Marxist method, to learn from our history (not for its own sake but in order to raise the consciousness of our class), to further the class struggle, and to rise to the challenges presented by our situation.
Historically, the dangers of dogmatism and historical fetishism were at its weakest when there was a living revolutionary praxis. Such praxis kept the class struggle in our minds, resisting the forgetfulness generated by the abstractions of theory and bourgeois historiography. However, this weakness is not a given in the current moment of the imperialist countries. A praxis has yet to be achieved; this is a dialectical process where social and theoretical investigation should be linked in a mutually reinforcing unity. We need to overcome our alienation from our social milieu, an alienation that has grown substantially during the neoliberal interregnum¹⁵ of our tradition, grasping the real problems of the deepest layers of the working class. At the same time we need to develop concrete analyses of the class structure; the strength of the state; its ideological and repressive apparatuses; the organization of its imperialist structures; the means, forms, and paths of class struggle that can be deduced from that; the party form adequate to this situation, etc. And we need to do all of this guided by the highest form of the science of the working class: Marxism-Leninism-Maoism.
This is not a task than can simply be resolved in theory; it is a task that must be undertaken through collective efforts. Groups within the imperialist countries can aid each other in this and the lessons learned within this process must be shared to accelerate the process of revolution. The lessons from the ongoing peoples’ wars in the Philippines and India still have to be learned and investigated for their applicability in the imperialist situation. Similarly, the lessons we can develop within the imperialist countries can help the struggles in the oppressed and exploited countries. Most of these countries now have metropoles, outposts of the imperialists, with conditions similar but not identical to those in the imperialist countries. With the necessary adjustments, methods developed in the imperialist countries could potentially be reproduced within this context. Proletarian internationalism is thus a key link in combating our subjective problems and accelerating our development.

For a revolutionary class like the modern proletariat, which still has its greatest task ahead, days of historical remembrance aren’t an occasion to look upon its own past to triumphantly confirm: “isn’t it wonderful how far we’ve come!” rather they are an occasion for self-critique, to examine and come to terms with what has yet to be achieved.¹⁶

1. K. Murali, Critiquing Brahmanism (Paris: Foreign Languages Press, 2020), 1.
2. In the case of commodity fetishism, the commodities appear as if the social labor embodied within them, definite social relations alienated through private property, are their natural properties. This leads us to mistake bourgeois society for a natural and thus eternal mode of production rather than one that is our own product and which we can change.
3. Hegel, The Difference Between Fichte’s and Schelling’s System of Philosophy (Albany, New York: State University of New York Press, 1977), 85.
4. N. K. Krupskaya, On Education, Selected Articles & Speeches (Paris: Foreign Languages Press, 2022), 41.
5. The German labor movement, for example, unfolded broad cultural activities in order to raise the level of education and the cultural level of the German working class. These were effective undertakings, and while there was a line struggle regarding their relation to the party—whether or not the cultural projects should be politicized in order to raise class consciousness—ultimately there was no theoretical work done by the Germans that would be adequate to the level of these activities. It was only with Gramsci that Marxist theory was qualitatively developed in regards to culture and its relation to communist politics.
6. Luxemburg worked these points out in her Introduction to Political Economy.
7. A discussion of the problems with Luxemburg’s theory would be outside the bounds of this paper.
8. We are alluding to Lenin’s Philosophical Notebooks, which are more than just study notes on Hegel’s Science of Logic but rather a materialist reworking of Hegel’s dialectics. It was this study and critical overcoming Hegel’s dialectics that enabled Lenin to work out his theory of imperialism, a whole series of his later great works, as well as enabling him to navigate the complex, highly dynamic class struggles of early Soviet Russia and the early USSR.
9. Hilferding for example, says in the introduction to Finance Capital that he thinks Marxism is a science and thus, to his positivist conception, not connected to any class position. Here already we find the roots of the transition to the bourgeois position, with its illusion of being above class relations.
10. Throughout this text, the concept of ideology is employed in the sense of The German Ideology, which is necessarily false, truncated, and one-sided perceptions of reality. In this sense there is no positive ideology.

11. Take critical theorists: their intentions are genuine, they want to better society for the masses of their respective country. At the same time they are working within academia and have a comfortable, well-paid job doing mental labor. Pursuing their critique to its radical conclusion would lead to the very basis of social reproduction, the necessity of the proletarian class stance and revolution, thus endangering their own position within bourgeois society. They end up aiding the reproduction of bourgeois society, just in refined and indirect ideological forms; their critique is ultimately apologetic and reformist as it can’t show the deepest social roots of the object of their critique, let alone lead to a practical way to uproot them. And because they are reformist, they are allowed to work within bourgeois academia as a form of domesticated dissent. This tolerance in turn strengthens their belief in the reformability of bourgeois society. The common phenomenon that critical theorists share their historiography with the bourgeoisie is not accidental.

12. When Francis Fukuyama declared the end of history, he declared the end of class and the class struggle, since for him, with the collapse of the USSR, a history beyond the bourgeois order was foreclosed.
13. The historiography on the Cultural Revolution is an especially crass example as in this case the ideological distortions of both the imperialist bourgeoisie and that of the new Chinese bourgeoisie, which experienced its greatest threat during those years, strengthen each other to paint this horrible picture of the period. So strong is this ideology that even former Maoists of the ‘68 movement end up reproducing it, even though we have quality literature on that period both from the time and from more recent times.
14. For example, following the economic crisis of the mid 1970s and the dawn of the neoliberal period of imperialism, we have seen an explosion in care work. Social relations that in previous times were of an organic type, like caring for elders in your family or community, have increasingly been commodified. The social bonds that previously formed organically between us were thus severed, replaced with money-commodity relations. Not only does this alienate us from one another, it destroys a more organic insight into our common interrelations, which would point towards the greater social totality and its dialectical movements.
15. Interregnum, literally “between reigns,” as described by Antonio Gramsci in his Prison Notebooks, refers to a period of crisis where the old order is in decline, but the emergence of a new order is still struggling to take shape.
16. Rosa Luxemburg, “Nach 50 Jahren,” Gesammelte Werke Band 3, trans. Omar Dekhili (Berlin: Dietz, 1980).