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Colorful Classics #4
The Communist Necessity
There was a time when we proclaimed that we were part of a beautiful and fragmented chaos of affinity groups, conflicted organizations, disorganized rebels, all of whom were somehow part of the same social movement that was greater than the sum of its parts. We were more accurately a disorganized mob of enraged plebeians shaking our fists at a disciplined imperial army. Years ago we spoke of social movementism but now it only makes sense to drop the social since this phase of confusion was incapable of understanding the social terrain. Disparate, unfocused, and divided movements lack a unified intentionality; they have proved themselves incapable of pursuing the necessity of communism.
168 pages, Paperback
First published September 15, 2014
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Displaying 1 - 29 of 29 reviews
October 23, 2017
I read this at the very moment that the scandal broke out around Semiotexte's book reading scheduled to take place in an art gallery currently the target of a community boycott. The gallery in Boyle Heights is the target of an on-going effort to picket gentrifying businesses that threaten to serve as the entryway for speculative capital in a historically poor, public housing, and immigrant/POC community. Semiotexte's staff lashed out at the boycott with all sorts of invectives calling the community members "stalinist" and "anonymous." The publisher also claimed they couldn't cancel the event because the gallery owners were their personal friends, "our people" was the exact quote. Given that Semiotexte has for years published "radical" theory that has promoted an idea of struggle as devoid of conflict, targets, coherence, or protagonist -- let alone history -- it was especially ironic to see the publishers lash out at the community. "Radical" doesn't look so radical when confronted with poor people organized against capitalism. It's enormously refreshing to read political theory whose sense of revolutionary urgency is matched with a biting impatience with "radical" obscurantism. If I were to write a longer engagement with this and Moufawad-Paul's "Continuity and Rupture," I would raise the question of what does it mean to keep writing about the necessity for a theory of conditions and strategy but not to actually write a theory of conditions and strategy? This kind of deferral makes me wonder to what extent the author is himself in the discipline of struggle. The critique of movementism is valid - something that Amin and others have been arguing for years. However, the absolutist rejection ignores the often necessary way movements educate working people about the limits of bourgeois politics. In the zeal to reject the figure of a utopian horizon, the author tends to ignore the road we have to build in making the journey. I see this as a particular symptom of the very thing against which Moufawad-Paul is most impatient; Eurocentric abstraction. Fortunately, "Continuity and Rupture" does devote a fair amount of attention to popular revolutionary struggles in the global south. But even there, the question of organization and the material composition of structures, processes, and most critically, movement pedagogy, remain unaccounted for. All this to say, "The Communist Necessity" is a much needed course in ear-cleaning when thinking about revolution and its urgency. I wish more people would read this than all the utopian silliness peddled by publishers who hide their anti-communism and end-of-history commonsense behind claims of "radicality."
July 28, 2016
What I like about JMP's work is that he writes to be understood. He has a talent for structuring his polemics like short chapters in a novel, so you are propelled through the essays in this little tome in quick succession. I'm familiar with the author through the "MLM Mayhem!" blog, and if you would like a taste of JMP's fighting style, I suggest rummaging through the archives of the MLM Mayhem! website. Much of what the writer has published in online form (in the political arena) is circulated by communists left and right. Some revolutionary organizations now include his work in their suggested "syllabi".
So what of this particular book? JMP builds a strong case for taking seriously Marxism as a revolutionary science rather than an intellectual toy in the nimble hands of savvy intellectuals at the centers of global capitalism; these intellectuals will more than likely be known to the reader of the CN. JMP takes a cursory look at achievements and failures of anti-capitalist movements in the west, and argues for thinking about communism as a necessity rather than an inevitability, or of communism as a "horizon" or "event"-compelling but obscure concepts.
Returning to the serious business of revolutionary praxis, the clear language we need to use, and deficiencies in current discourse are just a few of the subjects taken up in the CN. I will ask and answer a more pointed question: why should you waste your time with another political book? There are a million good ones, let us be frank. I'm a full time student and I do not have much free time, so given my extremely limited opportunity for self edifying activities, I will suggest the strengths of the CN in light of my own context.
1) it's clear: the writer doesn't waste your time.
2) it's fresh: you haven't encountered these arguments before
3) it's enjoyable. Some times you have to trudge through the hard stuff to learn anything, just one of those brute truisms. The CN is not one of those books: it is a pleasure to read.
Favorite moment: when JMP admits revolutionary transformation may lower the privileges and affluence of some, but illustrates how this is a simultaneous "lifting up" of the masses from their drudgery. This is an honest, sober assessment of the challenges those fighting to realize communism in the first world must confront.
So what of this particular book? JMP builds a strong case for taking seriously Marxism as a revolutionary science rather than an intellectual toy in the nimble hands of savvy intellectuals at the centers of global capitalism; these intellectuals will more than likely be known to the reader of the CN. JMP takes a cursory look at achievements and failures of anti-capitalist movements in the west, and argues for thinking about communism as a necessity rather than an inevitability, or of communism as a "horizon" or "event"-compelling but obscure concepts.
Returning to the serious business of revolutionary praxis, the clear language we need to use, and deficiencies in current discourse are just a few of the subjects taken up in the CN. I will ask and answer a more pointed question: why should you waste your time with another political book? There are a million good ones, let us be frank. I'm a full time student and I do not have much free time, so given my extremely limited opportunity for self edifying activities, I will suggest the strengths of the CN in light of my own context.
1) it's clear: the writer doesn't waste your time.
2) it's fresh: you haven't encountered these arguments before
3) it's enjoyable. Some times you have to trudge through the hard stuff to learn anything, just one of those brute truisms. The CN is not one of those books: it is a pleasure to read.
Favorite moment: when JMP admits revolutionary transformation may lower the privileges and affluence of some, but illustrates how this is a simultaneous "lifting up" of the masses from their drudgery. This is an honest, sober assessment of the challenges those fighting to realize communism in the first world must confront.
December 28, 2014
I feel bad giving this only two stars, since I agree with almost everything Moufawad-Paul has to say, agree those things are important for the left to hear, and think highly of him as a writer. However, I'm not sure that anybody would really be convinced by this who wasn't already on board - it seems more successful as a pep talk than as an argument. This is a shame since JMP certainly can craft one - apparently one should not battle with punchy manifestos that take all the critical assumptions for granted lest one become a punchy manifesto that takes all the critical assumptions for granted.
August 6, 2021
Beautiful writing by JMP but I’m left wondering if this book isn’t redundant in most regards. Maybe I’m not the right audience for it. I think someone who was fetishizing sectarianism in leftist politics would get something more out of this. I like that the Invisible Committee gets a couple shout outs and I like the expansion and the dismissal of a first world trade union movement (Draperism?) on the grounds that economism gives the workers involved too much to lose turning into red unions. JMP has a lot of interesting thoughts here. I couldn’t recommend this book enough
May 25, 2016
I'm only adding a review to warn people how bad this is. You know writers get their friends to rate their books to fool people, don't fall for it, this is terrible.
April 9, 2024
This is, perhaps, the most pertinent text for political action in the 21st-century, especially for self-proclaimed “communists” or “socialists” (which still holds for other leftist groups, but they are likely to react poorly). The critique of ‘movementism,’ especially in North Amerika but also of the general Western-Imperialist empire is critical for understanding the landscape of political organizing in the current moment. JMP correctly traces the new emerging popularity of the word “communism” in the ‘centers of capital’ to both leftism and academic progressivism/“Marxism” after a dry spell but with a complete lack of recognizing real, historical struggles under the name of communism. From Trotskyites to post-structuralists (especially Deleuze & Guattari) to the New Left (Frankfurt School, Situationists, etc.), they all fall into this same failure in which they end up repeating history by calling for a utopian communism (that Marx and Engels criticized and wanted to make sure never came back!). One perfect example is Jean-Luc Nancy’s essay “Communism, the Word,” the prime example of JMP’s critical concept Langauge Idealism, because it shows that this ‘new communism’ doesn’t even understand the manifesto! The whole point of calling oneself communist in the Marxist sense is to differentiate oneself from utopian and idealist socialists! It is already more than apparent Marxist communists are not the 14th-century ones that Nancy refers to, but I’ll digress. In short, the Communist Necessity is not a claim of inevitability, rather it is the mere observation with a lens of revolutionary science that (Marxist) Communism is the most plausible and thus only means to achieve emancipation of the oppressed peoples of the world. The critical mistake of these new Western ‘communists’ are that they neglect this lens of revolutionary science but also the very history of class struggle that happened after the fall of actually-existing-socialism—they only focused on their struggles in the centers of capital that failed because of their movementist disorganization (2008 Occupy, 2016 Bernie campaign, 2020 COVID-19 and BLM riots). Thus, these Western leftists’ Utopianism for movementism (movement for movement’s sake) leads to the same backwardness of the Utopians Marx and Engels spent so much time combatting! Clearly the movementists do not read Marx but sloganeer him with their quirky postmodern leftists and thus, are not even close to the organizational fluency of the Maoist people’s wars across the so-called Third World. In a phrase, the global peripheries were and still are ignored. (Funnily enough, the opposite issue is culminated in Maoist-Third-Worldism, where Western ‘Marxists’ believe only the global peripheries can revolt, and thus they wait and do nothing ‘until the revolution comes’.) The mistake is the rejection of the Communist Necessity—that the historical materialist method theorized by Marx, and continued and practically applied by Lenin, Mao, and Gonzalo is neglected for the focus on unorganized intra-capitalist struggle. Thus, the upshot of this necessity is quite similar to the tongue-and-cheek rebuttal by MLs to anarchists—that they (movementists in general, too) never had a successful revolution (of course with very few exceptions, but nowhere close to the lasting effects of any revolution done for the name of Marxism). Time is running out for an upheaval of capitalism because of the climate crisis, the endless accumulation of neoliberal fiancialism, and the new fear of a WW3. Therefore, the actual apprehension and grasping of the real, Marxist communism as the real movement of history—that is simultaneously the ‘concrete analysis of the concrete conditions’ —is necessary.
January 31, 2021
TL;DR: Moufawad-Paul here offers some timely interventions into and against the growth of many tendencies in the Left, namely revisionism, movementism and reformism, but in so doing loses some of the nuance which pushed many leftists to pursue these tendencies in the first place.
--
I can understand and respect Moufawad-Paul's exhortations around anti-revisionism, because this is what has made Maoism so engaging in recent times. It is true, as Moufawad-Paul argues, that the word 'communism' is less scandalous today than it was some 30 years ago, but that this comes at the cost of our having revised its meaning and history. Hence, the necessity of communism is also a necessity of reminding militants of the meaning of this term, and not letting them off the hook after facile efforts have been made to distance communism from the USSR and China. It is important that we recognise the USSR, China, Shining Path etc. as real communist movements, and avoid treating 'communism' as a Platonic ideal, studying closely and seriously what went wrong and where (rather than, as do Trotskyists, attributing the failure of the USSR to something as contingent as choosing the wrong leader after Lenin's death).
This book also offers some profound reflections on the role of power and common sense in the communist political organisation which serve to protect the theory of the party-line against certain kinds of organisational collaborationism. For instance, within a pluralist organisation the tendencies therein which speak best the language of power will inevitably end up commanding the greater part of that organisation. Be that as it may, Moufawad-Paul mistakes the practical exercises of power which are necessary to coordinate a mass movement with an altogether dogmatic way of thinking about these movements. For example, he writes off the idea of 'changing the world without taking power' because taking power isn't the goal but the grounds of the revolution: power must be snatched from the state and accumulated by the organisation as it gains a following. Although a compelling vision, it also does an injustice to serious thinkers like John Holloway who argue that it is this way of thinking about power which has been so stultifying to our political practices to begin with.
The Communist Necessity is overall what you would expect from a Maoist, and especially from the 'official theorist' of a group like the PCR-RCP: anti-revisionism, third-worldism, and anti-reformism, at the great expense of losing contact with the specificities of the political world today, for example in the patchwork constitution of the working class and the international battle being waged against third-world communist organisations like the Naxalites.
--
I can understand and respect Moufawad-Paul's exhortations around anti-revisionism, because this is what has made Maoism so engaging in recent times. It is true, as Moufawad-Paul argues, that the word 'communism' is less scandalous today than it was some 30 years ago, but that this comes at the cost of our having revised its meaning and history. Hence, the necessity of communism is also a necessity of reminding militants of the meaning of this term, and not letting them off the hook after facile efforts have been made to distance communism from the USSR and China. It is important that we recognise the USSR, China, Shining Path etc. as real communist movements, and avoid treating 'communism' as a Platonic ideal, studying closely and seriously what went wrong and where (rather than, as do Trotskyists, attributing the failure of the USSR to something as contingent as choosing the wrong leader after Lenin's death).
This book also offers some profound reflections on the role of power and common sense in the communist political organisation which serve to protect the theory of the party-line against certain kinds of organisational collaborationism. For instance, within a pluralist organisation the tendencies therein which speak best the language of power will inevitably end up commanding the greater part of that organisation. Be that as it may, Moufawad-Paul mistakes the practical exercises of power which are necessary to coordinate a mass movement with an altogether dogmatic way of thinking about these movements. For example, he writes off the idea of 'changing the world without taking power' because taking power isn't the goal but the grounds of the revolution: power must be snatched from the state and accumulated by the organisation as it gains a following. Although a compelling vision, it also does an injustice to serious thinkers like John Holloway who argue that it is this way of thinking about power which has been so stultifying to our political practices to begin with.
The Communist Necessity is overall what you would expect from a Maoist, and especially from the 'official theorist' of a group like the PCR-RCP: anti-revisionism, third-worldism, and anti-reformism, at the great expense of losing contact with the specificities of the political world today, for example in the patchwork constitution of the working class and the international battle being waged against third-world communist organisations like the Naxalites.
January 12, 2021
Excellent arguments for viewing communism not as a utopian dream (i.e. something pre-ordained and will definitely come) but a necessity which requires a return to revolutionary principles of organization (vs its present state which is disorganized and unfocused, at least in the US) in order to topple down capitalism. I also appreciate how he listed down errors committed by ~leftists~ in centres of imperialism (i.e. US) such as movementism, reclaiming of communism without studying the successes and failures of the Soviet and the Chinese revolution, tailism, etc. As someone from the Philippines where contradictions are sharp and the people's war is a necessity, I commend his mentioning of going to the ~countryside~ and learning from the masses. That is definitely applicable to our context in the peripheries.
However, concrete revolutionary actions from comrades in the US are found wanting in the book. I wish the author explained more how comrades in the global centres could concretely organize beyond his repetitive emphasis on returning to the communist necessity. I mean, I get the need for a unified revolutionary theory based on studying past revolutions but how exactly can our Western comrades support anti-imperialist movements in the Global South? That was not very clear.
However, concrete revolutionary actions from comrades in the US are found wanting in the book. I wish the author explained more how comrades in the global centres could concretely organize beyond his repetitive emphasis on returning to the communist necessity. I mean, I get the need for a unified revolutionary theory based on studying past revolutions but how exactly can our Western comrades support anti-imperialist movements in the Global South? That was not very clear.
September 17, 2025
This book also changed my life. It was nice to read a living, breathing theorist with other people who almost exclusively read revolutionary theory in order to apply it and bridge the gap between theory and praxis. A professor of mine said that “the best philosophy is that which self-immolates into the world”. There are things to critique JMP’s work for, but I don’t think he’d be accomplishing what he set out to do if there wasn’t.
July 18, 2019
As seems to be pretty common for me, I've read JMP's work a bit back-to-front, starting with C&R and only now reading this one. That makes assessing this book - which really I think acts as a taster for the much more developed argument of C&R - on its own merits a little more difficult. I find JMP a relentlessly provocative writer, and even when I disagree (and I've had quite a while to think through the arguments of C&R, now) the reading is clarifying.
I find a lot of the arguments which JMP makes about 'movementism' - the central target of this book - quite convincing, certainly resonating with my own experiences, but I'm less convinced by the framework. I worry that 'movementism' is a seductive term for what's actually better considered (and has previously been considered) a whole array of errors - tailism, opportunism, reformism, etc - which might be better challenged without being argued into a single one. Although the errors which JMP groups under movementism are common ones, I feel like they're arrived at differently; there was quite a big gap between the 'movementism' of Occupy and the 'movementism' of (say) the People's Assembly (in Britain), even if they had/have similarities. Equally, by setting up 'movementism' as the central error, I worry that JMP runs the risk of indulging a sectarian, ultra-left approach to these movements; it's not at all clear to me that there's a path away from movementism which doesn't lead through something that could be accused of movementism. More generally, I'm not always confident about how JMP perceives himself - his criticisms of the tendency represented by Dean/Badiou/Zizek are astute, but I'm not sure that he has escaped it. It's hard to tell exactly who he is writing for.
As I've said before, I find JMP's arguments about the history of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism generally compelling, and quite exciting, but I'm not wholly convinced. A point I made about C&R was that JMP argues that MLM remains uncodified - that its lessons will only come to fruition in a successive world-historical revolution, just as (JMP argues) MLism was only completed in the Chinese revolution(s?) which initiated (but did not complete) MLM. That's a neat argument but not a hugely useful one - MLMs internationally seem torn between different lines propagated by different armed struggles (e.g. the Norwegian Gonzaloites, Tjen Folket, recently arguing with Jose Maria Sison over the universality of people's war). Presumably the answer would be found in whichever of the armed struggles that JMP points to was able to lead a world-historical revolution, but the circumstances that made the revolutions in Russia or China world-historical don't seem to hold in the more peripheral struggles (with the exception, perhaps, of India) that JMP emphasises. I think the problem here is that JMP's argument is neat without being correct. I'm supportive of the notion that theories are tested in struggles, but less convinced by claims to universality - JMP makes the analogy between a revolution and a laboratory, but a metal dropped in a test-tube of one liquid does not tell you that much about the same metal dropped in a test-tube filled with something else. I wish there was more time spent discussing the specific content of ML/MLM and which lessons should be seen as universal and why - I really struggle with the idea that we can deduce much about strategies within a metropolitan bourgeois democracy from struggles in peripheral (neo-)colonies, and claims to universality skate over differences which need to be investigated (and which JMP recognises when he says that participation in elections might actually be legitimate in the peripheries, but not in the imperialist centres). It's clear that JMP himself doesn't only look to the world-historical revolutions to establish universal truths, or even necessarily to theories tested in struggle (I'm reminded of the baffling claim in C&R that the RCLB was 'temporarily able to pull the masses into its orbit' as a justification for JMP's use of its critiques of Eurocentrism) - unlike a lot of other ML/MLM writers, JMP is refreshingly open to arguments made by feminists (and also the New Left) outside the MLM canon, but there's a bit of hand-waving about how these insights might be reconciled with JMP's wider argument about MLM. I don't know how JMP's notion of a 'new return' handles something like Lars Lih's return to a Leninism prior to its codification under Stalin (and Trotsky). Above all, I really struggle with JMP's dismissal of Bolivarianism which, for all its faults, has clearly done more to shake the world than the Shining Path - let alone the Communist (Maoist) Party of Afghanistan - has managed. Lamenting that communists have paid more attention to one than the other is one thing, but it's hardly because one is safe and the other is not. JMP's arguments often come back to claims about fear and bravery which strike me as extremely voluntarist, and unpersuasive (and a bit macho) - as if all that was missing was the right ideas, which is precisely one of the errors that he accuses e.g. Zizek of making. JMP bemoans that those 're-popularizations of communism contain no significant attempt to adequately theorize the steps necessary, in any particular context, for making communism.' But where is the theorization that JMP would like to popularise?
I find a lot of the arguments which JMP makes about 'movementism' - the central target of this book - quite convincing, certainly resonating with my own experiences, but I'm less convinced by the framework. I worry that 'movementism' is a seductive term for what's actually better considered (and has previously been considered) a whole array of errors - tailism, opportunism, reformism, etc - which might be better challenged without being argued into a single one. Although the errors which JMP groups under movementism are common ones, I feel like they're arrived at differently; there was quite a big gap between the 'movementism' of Occupy and the 'movementism' of (say) the People's Assembly (in Britain), even if they had/have similarities. Equally, by setting up 'movementism' as the central error, I worry that JMP runs the risk of indulging a sectarian, ultra-left approach to these movements; it's not at all clear to me that there's a path away from movementism which doesn't lead through something that could be accused of movementism. More generally, I'm not always confident about how JMP perceives himself - his criticisms of the tendency represented by Dean/Badiou/Zizek are astute, but I'm not sure that he has escaped it. It's hard to tell exactly who he is writing for.
As I've said before, I find JMP's arguments about the history of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism generally compelling, and quite exciting, but I'm not wholly convinced. A point I made about C&R was that JMP argues that MLM remains uncodified - that its lessons will only come to fruition in a successive world-historical revolution, just as (JMP argues) MLism was only completed in the Chinese revolution(s?) which initiated (but did not complete) MLM. That's a neat argument but not a hugely useful one - MLMs internationally seem torn between different lines propagated by different armed struggles (e.g. the Norwegian Gonzaloites, Tjen Folket, recently arguing with Jose Maria Sison over the universality of people's war). Presumably the answer would be found in whichever of the armed struggles that JMP points to was able to lead a world-historical revolution, but the circumstances that made the revolutions in Russia or China world-historical don't seem to hold in the more peripheral struggles (with the exception, perhaps, of India) that JMP emphasises. I think the problem here is that JMP's argument is neat without being correct. I'm supportive of the notion that theories are tested in struggles, but less convinced by claims to universality - JMP makes the analogy between a revolution and a laboratory, but a metal dropped in a test-tube of one liquid does not tell you that much about the same metal dropped in a test-tube filled with something else. I wish there was more time spent discussing the specific content of ML/MLM and which lessons should be seen as universal and why - I really struggle with the idea that we can deduce much about strategies within a metropolitan bourgeois democracy from struggles in peripheral (neo-)colonies, and claims to universality skate over differences which need to be investigated (and which JMP recognises when he says that participation in elections might actually be legitimate in the peripheries, but not in the imperialist centres). It's clear that JMP himself doesn't only look to the world-historical revolutions to establish universal truths, or even necessarily to theories tested in struggle (I'm reminded of the baffling claim in C&R that the RCLB was 'temporarily able to pull the masses into its orbit' as a justification for JMP's use of its critiques of Eurocentrism) - unlike a lot of other ML/MLM writers, JMP is refreshingly open to arguments made by feminists (and also the New Left) outside the MLM canon, but there's a bit of hand-waving about how these insights might be reconciled with JMP's wider argument about MLM. I don't know how JMP's notion of a 'new return' handles something like Lars Lih's return to a Leninism prior to its codification under Stalin (and Trotsky). Above all, I really struggle with JMP's dismissal of Bolivarianism which, for all its faults, has clearly done more to shake the world than the Shining Path - let alone the Communist (Maoist) Party of Afghanistan - has managed. Lamenting that communists have paid more attention to one than the other is one thing, but it's hardly because one is safe and the other is not. JMP's arguments often come back to claims about fear and bravery which strike me as extremely voluntarist, and unpersuasive (and a bit macho) - as if all that was missing was the right ideas, which is precisely one of the errors that he accuses e.g. Zizek of making. JMP bemoans that those 're-popularizations of communism contain no significant attempt to adequately theorize the steps necessary, in any particular context, for making communism.' But where is the theorization that JMP would like to popularise?
December 8, 2025
Boom we back fuck Nietzsche
Read
September 26, 2023didn't expect so much of the first half of the book to be comprised of internecine blather (against notable french theorists--who in my opinion have much more robust and persuasive analyses of what the third epoch of communism will look like). Moreover, Moufawad-Paul uses Badiouan terminology "new truths", "sequences", "fidelity" endlessly. He doesn't seem to appreciate the degree of confusion regarding what kind of order must follow the collapse of state socialism, how Maoist failure can be improved upon, and hence the epistemic utility of theorizing--in all kinds of ways. That said, his simple thesis that as long as there is capitalism, communism will be necessary, is strong. As is the debate between refoundationalism and 'new returns' to the established communist sequence
Some thought provoking quotes:
"What social struggles established new truths
due to marginal, but universalizable successes? What
successive social struggles learned from these past
establishments of truth and went a little further before
also meeting failure? How, then, do we apply what
has been scientifically proven in these social
experiments to our particular circumstances so as to
go even further?"
"Even worse is the fact that those who are attempting
to reclaim communism end up catching the same
plague that infects the movements they tail: the fear of
necessity. It is one thing for an activist involved in the
Occupy movement to reject all of the principles of
past communisms, to treat world historical
revolutions as a failure; it is quite another thing for
those who want to renew the tradition of communism
to act in the same manner and, in the midst of this
performance, worry about alienating themselves by
speaking of a concrete communism."
"The Maoist is not identical to the Trotskyist; the
marxist is not identical to the anarchist: their tools are
not the same, their grasp of the object with which
they are engaging is not precisely identical. To
pretend otherwise is about as useful as pretending that
Marx and Engels were the same as Proudhon and
Duhring, forgetting the ideological war waged against
these differences so as to define the terrain of
revolutionary theory"
"In this context, then, we must ask why the unfolding
theory, hard-won through world historical revolution,
is considered obtuse and alienating by the same people
who never tire of inventing “new” and impenetrable
concepts, whose writing seems intentionally opaque,
and whose radicalism appears to be little more than an
intellectual exercise."
": Nietzsche’s various and confused attacks on
socialism come mainly from his reading of Duhring
(there is no evidence that Nietzsche ever read Marx or
Engels)"
"We have been taught failure, we have been
educated to believe this failure was because of a
totalitarian communism, we were raised to think that
there were no successes but only failures––and that
these failures are precisely what a class ideology that is
concerned with preserving the current state of affairs
claims they were"
"At the same time, however, the politics produced due
to the rejection of a totalizing necessity was a politics
that could lead nowhere. Sites of identity-based
struggles could only and ever produce a praxis
incapable of solidarity. Theories of intersectionality
were always banal, merely a recognition of the fact
that multiple moments of oppression and
exploitation, including economic class, intersect." p. 79
"Engels claimed that the
scientific strength of communist theory was based on
the fact that there was a choice (and a choice is never
preordained) between a communist future and a
capitalist apocalypse––Rosa Luxemburg defined this
choice as one between socialism or barbarism. Marx
claimed that revolution was a necessity and once one
speaks of revolution one must also realize that,
according to Lenin, revolutions are not spontaneous
events and thus the very fact of organizing a
revolution undermines the concept of some
unavoidable communist destiny" p. 35
"Necessity means only that communism is
necessary to solve the problems produced by
capitalism, not that its emergence is destined: water is
a necessary requirement for human existence, after all,
but this does not mean that every human being will
have access to water simply because it is a necessity" p. 86
"But rebranding communism, aside from the
commercial logic inherent in such an approach, can
only fail if it is aimed solely at that class of people who
possess the privilege to wallow in the theoretical
obscurantism that is offered as a replacement
revolutionary theory. That is, a theory that can only
be appreciated by those petty-bourgeois intellectuals
who believe that conceptual opaqueness implies
radicalism" (93-94)
"The point, here, is not whether or not a theory is
difficult to understand; this is problem that can be
solved by making education accessible to the most
oppressed and exploited. Rather, whenever we
encounter a new theory that speaks of overthrowing
the existing social order, and claims to offer the
conceptual tools for doing so, we should ask whether
these tools are capable of providing a concrete analysis
of concrete conditions and reflect the lived experience
of the world’s most exploited and oppressed"
"an organized and militant mass
movement spear-headed by the grave-diggers of
capitalism."
"We need to recognize that being “dragged down” to
the level of the masses is at the same time a “dragging
up” of the masses to a level that, under the current
state of affairs, only some are privileged enough to
occupy. To reject this radical moment of equalization
is to reify class, to believe that even after a revolution
we are superior to those who were never given our
opportunities, to act as if the necessity of
revolutionary levelling is akin to oppression. Those
who maintain that going “down to the countryside” is
oppressive must also maintain, at the same time, that
it is not oppressive for the people of this
“countryside” to remain in ignorance and continue to
work so that we can benefit from their labour." 97-98
"That is, the failures of both the
Russian and Chinese Revolutions were catastrophic
because they fell from such great heights––they had
accomplished so much, unleashing the world-historical
potential of the masses only to collapse. Whereas
capitalism is a catastrophe because of its successes,
communism was a catastrophe because its successes
were overthrown by its eventual failures. It is not
tragic that capitalism is catastrophic because it is not a
failure on the part of capitalism: according to its
internal logic it does precisely what it is meant to
do––exploitation, commodification, overaccumulation, etc. Indeed, the problem is not that
“capitalism doesn’t work” (as some slogans would have
us think) but that it works very well"
"Hence the Bolsheviks under Lenin overcame
the failures of the Second International under Kautsky
and Bernstein. Hence the Communist Party of China
under Mao overcame the failures of the Third
International under Stalin and Khrushchev."
"we should even wonder why there are still communist
parties and marxist organizations that run in
elections, attempt to enter bourgeois parties, and base
their entire strategy on an a priori assumption that
there can be a peaceful co-existence with capitalism."
"To waste time and energy, then, in a struggle
that will not move us any closer to our distant
horizon is to participate in a convention we recognize
as fraudulent… It is a bit like an unemployed biologist
who pays the bills, and maintains some sort of
“influence” over her students, by teaching six-day
creationism at a private religious school."
on Refoundationalism: "The strategy is to gather
all the elements of moribund left grouplets into one
grouping and pray that something that is greater than
the sum of its parts will emerge from this process of
gathering."
"Being an old practice, long predating movementism and today’s reclaimed
communism, trade-union activism is often chosen out
of sheer laziness, in lieu of nothing better to do.
There is a tradition to unionism, an assumption that it
can be revolutionary based on its history and already
existent organization, that is compelling: we do not
have to think about what it means to pursue the larger
questions of necessity when we submerge ourselves in
the day-to-day economic struggles of unionized
workers, or even when we spend our energy fighting
to establish a union. All we need to think about is the
union, and the particular goals of the union, and not
what lurks beyond the limits of this logic." p. 132
"Every strike, no matter how radical, should remind us
of the economist limits. Right when our immediate
economic demands our met, regardless of those
demands that challenge the economic system as a
whole, we shut down the lines and go back to
work––sometimes we end the strike even earlier,
acceding to the strength of the employer in these times
of “austerity” and because, in any case, we must keep
the union alive!"
"it is tempting to speculate on whether or not Berardi is
being serious or lampooning other chic social theories.
After all, in the face of entire populations who are
even now being bombed and occupied––these
everyday massacres that are part of the normal
operation of finance-capital––to seriously suggest a
linguistic and poetic revolution that is neither violent
nor non-violent is tantamount to spitting in the face
of the wretched of the earth and telling them that they
should resist by writing poetry" p. 141
"Why selfproclaimed “communists” get annoyed when some of
us speak of these actual revolutionary movements,
complaining that they have heard enough about
people’s wars, and yet become excited with every
doomed uprising or moribund populism, should make
us wonder." p. 145
"Thus there can be no absolute “dustbin of history”,
not until communism emerges, because we will always
return, often in new ways, to the flawed ideas of
yesteryear just as our enemy also remobilizes and
rearticulates the reactionary ideologies of the past. As
Marx noted, just when we assume we are engaged in
revolutionizing ourselves, “in creating something that
has never yet existed, precisely in such periods of
revolutionary crisis [we] anxiously conjure up the
spirits of the past.”
"When the big NATO leaders
predicted… that ‘the first 30 years of the 21st century
will be the period of revolutionary uprisings,’ they
were confessing how much they still fear the spectre of
communism and of revolution from the oppressed
masses.”
"So let us fire more bullets, let us advance the struggle
for making communism a concrete reality, and let us
cease this prattle about some ideal communism that
exists outside of time and space and instead, with all of
the messiness this would imply, return to the
recognition that its necessity requires a new return to
the revolutionary communist theories and experiences
won from history."
Some thought provoking quotes:
"What social struggles established new truths
due to marginal, but universalizable successes? What
successive social struggles learned from these past
establishments of truth and went a little further before
also meeting failure? How, then, do we apply what
has been scientifically proven in these social
experiments to our particular circumstances so as to
go even further?"
"Even worse is the fact that those who are attempting
to reclaim communism end up catching the same
plague that infects the movements they tail: the fear of
necessity. It is one thing for an activist involved in the
Occupy movement to reject all of the principles of
past communisms, to treat world historical
revolutions as a failure; it is quite another thing for
those who want to renew the tradition of communism
to act in the same manner and, in the midst of this
performance, worry about alienating themselves by
speaking of a concrete communism."
"The Maoist is not identical to the Trotskyist; the
marxist is not identical to the anarchist: their tools are
not the same, their grasp of the object with which
they are engaging is not precisely identical. To
pretend otherwise is about as useful as pretending that
Marx and Engels were the same as Proudhon and
Duhring, forgetting the ideological war waged against
these differences so as to define the terrain of
revolutionary theory"
"In this context, then, we must ask why the unfolding
theory, hard-won through world historical revolution,
is considered obtuse and alienating by the same people
who never tire of inventing “new” and impenetrable
concepts, whose writing seems intentionally opaque,
and whose radicalism appears to be little more than an
intellectual exercise."
": Nietzsche’s various and confused attacks on
socialism come mainly from his reading of Duhring
(there is no evidence that Nietzsche ever read Marx or
Engels)"
"We have been taught failure, we have been
educated to believe this failure was because of a
totalitarian communism, we were raised to think that
there were no successes but only failures––and that
these failures are precisely what a class ideology that is
concerned with preserving the current state of affairs
claims they were"
"At the same time, however, the politics produced due
to the rejection of a totalizing necessity was a politics
that could lead nowhere. Sites of identity-based
struggles could only and ever produce a praxis
incapable of solidarity. Theories of intersectionality
were always banal, merely a recognition of the fact
that multiple moments of oppression and
exploitation, including economic class, intersect." p. 79
"Engels claimed that the
scientific strength of communist theory was based on
the fact that there was a choice (and a choice is never
preordained) between a communist future and a
capitalist apocalypse––Rosa Luxemburg defined this
choice as one between socialism or barbarism. Marx
claimed that revolution was a necessity and once one
speaks of revolution one must also realize that,
according to Lenin, revolutions are not spontaneous
events and thus the very fact of organizing a
revolution undermines the concept of some
unavoidable communist destiny" p. 35
"Necessity means only that communism is
necessary to solve the problems produced by
capitalism, not that its emergence is destined: water is
a necessary requirement for human existence, after all,
but this does not mean that every human being will
have access to water simply because it is a necessity" p. 86
"But rebranding communism, aside from the
commercial logic inherent in such an approach, can
only fail if it is aimed solely at that class of people who
possess the privilege to wallow in the theoretical
obscurantism that is offered as a replacement
revolutionary theory. That is, a theory that can only
be appreciated by those petty-bourgeois intellectuals
who believe that conceptual opaqueness implies
radicalism" (93-94)
"The point, here, is not whether or not a theory is
difficult to understand; this is problem that can be
solved by making education accessible to the most
oppressed and exploited. Rather, whenever we
encounter a new theory that speaks of overthrowing
the existing social order, and claims to offer the
conceptual tools for doing so, we should ask whether
these tools are capable of providing a concrete analysis
of concrete conditions and reflect the lived experience
of the world’s most exploited and oppressed"
"an organized and militant mass
movement spear-headed by the grave-diggers of
capitalism."
"We need to recognize that being “dragged down” to
the level of the masses is at the same time a “dragging
up” of the masses to a level that, under the current
state of affairs, only some are privileged enough to
occupy. To reject this radical moment of equalization
is to reify class, to believe that even after a revolution
we are superior to those who were never given our
opportunities, to act as if the necessity of
revolutionary levelling is akin to oppression. Those
who maintain that going “down to the countryside” is
oppressive must also maintain, at the same time, that
it is not oppressive for the people of this
“countryside” to remain in ignorance and continue to
work so that we can benefit from their labour." 97-98
"That is, the failures of both the
Russian and Chinese Revolutions were catastrophic
because they fell from such great heights––they had
accomplished so much, unleashing the world-historical
potential of the masses only to collapse. Whereas
capitalism is a catastrophe because of its successes,
communism was a catastrophe because its successes
were overthrown by its eventual failures. It is not
tragic that capitalism is catastrophic because it is not a
failure on the part of capitalism: according to its
internal logic it does precisely what it is meant to
do––exploitation, commodification, overaccumulation, etc. Indeed, the problem is not that
“capitalism doesn’t work” (as some slogans would have
us think) but that it works very well"
"Hence the Bolsheviks under Lenin overcame
the failures of the Second International under Kautsky
and Bernstein. Hence the Communist Party of China
under Mao overcame the failures of the Third
International under Stalin and Khrushchev."
"we should even wonder why there are still communist
parties and marxist organizations that run in
elections, attempt to enter bourgeois parties, and base
their entire strategy on an a priori assumption that
there can be a peaceful co-existence with capitalism."
"To waste time and energy, then, in a struggle
that will not move us any closer to our distant
horizon is to participate in a convention we recognize
as fraudulent… It is a bit like an unemployed biologist
who pays the bills, and maintains some sort of
“influence” over her students, by teaching six-day
creationism at a private religious school."
on Refoundationalism: "The strategy is to gather
all the elements of moribund left grouplets into one
grouping and pray that something that is greater than
the sum of its parts will emerge from this process of
gathering."
"Being an old practice, long predating movementism and today’s reclaimed
communism, trade-union activism is often chosen out
of sheer laziness, in lieu of nothing better to do.
There is a tradition to unionism, an assumption that it
can be revolutionary based on its history and already
existent organization, that is compelling: we do not
have to think about what it means to pursue the larger
questions of necessity when we submerge ourselves in
the day-to-day economic struggles of unionized
workers, or even when we spend our energy fighting
to establish a union. All we need to think about is the
union, and the particular goals of the union, and not
what lurks beyond the limits of this logic." p. 132
"Every strike, no matter how radical, should remind us
of the economist limits. Right when our immediate
economic demands our met, regardless of those
demands that challenge the economic system as a
whole, we shut down the lines and go back to
work––sometimes we end the strike even earlier,
acceding to the strength of the employer in these times
of “austerity” and because, in any case, we must keep
the union alive!"
"it is tempting to speculate on whether or not Berardi is
being serious or lampooning other chic social theories.
After all, in the face of entire populations who are
even now being bombed and occupied––these
everyday massacres that are part of the normal
operation of finance-capital––to seriously suggest a
linguistic and poetic revolution that is neither violent
nor non-violent is tantamount to spitting in the face
of the wretched of the earth and telling them that they
should resist by writing poetry" p. 141
"Why selfproclaimed “communists” get annoyed when some of
us speak of these actual revolutionary movements,
complaining that they have heard enough about
people’s wars, and yet become excited with every
doomed uprising or moribund populism, should make
us wonder." p. 145
"Thus there can be no absolute “dustbin of history”,
not until communism emerges, because we will always
return, often in new ways, to the flawed ideas of
yesteryear just as our enemy also remobilizes and
rearticulates the reactionary ideologies of the past. As
Marx noted, just when we assume we are engaged in
revolutionizing ourselves, “in creating something that
has never yet existed, precisely in such periods of
revolutionary crisis [we] anxiously conjure up the
spirits of the past.”
"When the big NATO leaders
predicted… that ‘the first 30 years of the 21st century
will be the period of revolutionary uprisings,’ they
were confessing how much they still fear the spectre of
communism and of revolution from the oppressed
masses.”
"So let us fire more bullets, let us advance the struggle
for making communism a concrete reality, and let us
cease this prattle about some ideal communism that
exists outside of time and space and instead, with all of
the messiness this would imply, return to the
recognition that its necessity requires a new return to
the revolutionary communist theories and experiences
won from history."
September 30, 2020
great book
June 4, 2020
Frankly, this book seems to have created a contradiction in itself. It launches a critique on social movementism, a reactionary movement he associates with First World radical groups (i.e. Occupy Movement) and First World leftist academics reclaiming the name ‘communism’ to further their career in the academia (e.g. Alain Badiou’s Communist Hypothesis; Jodi Dean’s Communist Horizon; Beradi; The Invisible Committee; Tiqqun). Moufawad-Paul characterizes these practical and theoretical efforts as anti-revolutionary, detached from concrete historical and social realities. He puts forward the communist necessity as a revolutionary alternative to movementism’s disorganized and ideologically disunified form. He does this in a quite a rhetorical fashion, often creating a strawman out of these figures of movementism, sometimes too much, that I wonder if he is even self-aware of his own academism in the book. And I remember again that this is the same thing that I felt when I read his Continuity & Rupture book prior to reading this.
Is Moufawad-Paul committing the same mistake of movementism in his critique of movementism? Is he aware of the large extent of class struggle in Third World academia and movements? Moufawad-Paul’s privileging of the field of science over the field of language is actually a misstep in his theorizing for a necessity of communism, for under communism, one field cannot be privileged over the other. Both language and science have to function conjointly and harmoniously under the revolutionary movement to further the proletarian struggle. It is interesting the Moufawad-Paul has not actually engaged nor has not endorsed Dialectical Materialism (and partially Historical Materialism) as the scientific framework for waging the proletarian struggle. He tried to skirt around it and I think this is because he will want to reconfigure it in his book Continuity & Rupture. What I’m looking for from Moufawad-Paul is a solid and rigorous basis for his critique of movementism, not just some polemic that creates and attacks a bunch of straw men.
Is Moufawad-Paul committing the same mistake of movementism in his critique of movementism? Is he aware of the large extent of class struggle in Third World academia and movements? Moufawad-Paul’s privileging of the field of science over the field of language is actually a misstep in his theorizing for a necessity of communism, for under communism, one field cannot be privileged over the other. Both language and science have to function conjointly and harmoniously under the revolutionary movement to further the proletarian struggle. It is interesting the Moufawad-Paul has not actually engaged nor has not endorsed Dialectical Materialism (and partially Historical Materialism) as the scientific framework for waging the proletarian struggle. He tried to skirt around it and I think this is because he will want to reconfigure it in his book Continuity & Rupture. What I’m looking for from Moufawad-Paul is a solid and rigorous basis for his critique of movementism, not just some polemic that creates and attacks a bunch of straw men.
March 26, 2021
While I agree with the polemical bent to this piece, I find its overall content less than convincing. Moufawad-Paul is absolutely right to suggest continuity between the ongoing people’s wars of the global south and the history of MLM struggle. And while he pays lip service to “critical theory,” suggesting that it may be of some use in revising a communist theory rooted in MLM, he comes off as overly dismissive. This is something I generally agree with: vanguardism is in dire need of a revival, and theories of particular identity need to be subsumed by a universal class category. But, as a piece of critical literature, this book does a poor job of engaging with the works it slams for being antithetical to good Marxist practice. I for one think that Moufawad-Paul is much closer to Badiou’s position than he would like to admit — in fact, the amount of praise he lavishes on Badiou throughout far outweigh his criticisms, which amount to trivial disputes over rhetoric. In fact, the whole problematic of “contingency” vs “neccesity” just feels unnecessary and lacking in rigor.
Lastly, if I had to provide someone an example of what virtue-signaling looked like, I might point to the passage of this where Moufawad-Paul emphasizes his eagerness to be sent to a re-education camp. I get the point you’re making, dude, but give me a fucking break.
Lastly, if I had to provide someone an example of what virtue-signaling looked like, I might point to the passage of this where Moufawad-Paul emphasizes his eagerness to be sent to a re-education camp. I get the point you’re making, dude, but give me a fucking break.
March 15, 2021
Absolutely fantastic book that should be a must-read for any modern communist. Although much broader (a necessary precursor) to his later and more theoretically dense works Continuity and Rupture and Critique of Maoist Reason, The Communist Necessity argues against the movementism of the modern day. Recognizing the limits of movementism and recent reclamations of the name (but not concept) of communism, JMP argues for a new return to communism that recognize it for what it is: a necessity.
May 28, 2017
Moufawad-Paul's diagnosis of our current theoretical/strategic quagmire is precise and damning. Revolutionaries of all stripes should give his recommendations for a way forward serious consideration. Not many people outside the mlm tradition will agree with its entirety, but everyone will find food for thought.
December 12, 2023
Well articulated critique of 'movementism' - a tendency that continues to persist in the left. The book is replete with theoretical insight as well as plenty of organising experiences. The call to bridge the gap between theory and practice is genuine, and is a major antidote to the fashionable theories and books being thrown around in the emergent left.
While making a powerful critique of the eclectic approaches to Marxism that seem to have been springing up across academia, and making a case for revolutionary Marxism (in the case of JMP, it is Maoism that is being espoused), he seems to be dismissive of various different tendencies that exist in this camp. For instance, the author tends to critique the entire tradition of Trotskyism, merely by providing instances of malpractice and dogmatism by the IMT (which, I would agree, can be quite a dogmatic and bureaucratic organisation), or by simply picking on Hal Draper (who albeit his problematic stances on many issues including Zionism, nonetheless provided helpful research into the historical context of Marx's work.)
While making a powerful critique of the eclectic approaches to Marxism that seem to have been springing up across academia, and making a case for revolutionary Marxism (in the case of JMP, it is Maoism that is being espoused), he seems to be dismissive of various different tendencies that exist in this camp. For instance, the author tends to critique the entire tradition of Trotskyism, merely by providing instances of malpractice and dogmatism by the IMT (which, I would agree, can be quite a dogmatic and bureaucratic organisation), or by simply picking on Hal Draper (who albeit his problematic stances on many issues including Zionism, nonetheless provided helpful research into the historical context of Marx's work.)
August 14, 2023
JMP analyzes trends in the western left and critiques them on the basis of lack of coherent theory of revolutionary change, refusing to learn from and build on historical revolution, rejecting the scientific basis for class struggle among other things. He goes into the historical antecedents of these tendencies and how they manifest in today’s movement. It’s hard to rate this book, because though it does provide clarity on many issues it’s a polemic and i already agree with the author on his points. I encourage those on the left to read this book with an open mind
January 2, 2025
I think it’s a good book for people who are on the cusp of embracing communism and who have been in rad lib organizing spaces and are butting their heads against the limitations of these tactics. Accessible to read and good criticism of how current protest tactics are not sufficient for the change we desire.
May 2, 2019
Un libro preciso que defiende la necesidad de un comunismo de características marxistas-leninistas-maoistas en contraposición a los “nuevos” comunismos y la nueva izquierda. El argumento principal es que los esfuerzos por alejarse de los proyectos revolucionarios del pasado hace que los movimientos contemporáneos carezcan de estrategias y metas definidas, vaciando el significado del concepto de comunismo. Rusia y China pueden haber hecho a un lado los fervores revolucionarios que les caracterizaron en el pasado, pero esas experiencias siguen siendo las únicas certezas de que cambiar el mundo es posible, y por esas razones los nuevos comunismos deben guiarse por sus logros y resolver sus fracasos en vez de intentar reinventar nuevas utopías indefinidas y abstractas.
November 9, 2019
Not sure how I want to evaluate this right now, but I will read it again...probably next year. Maoism is kinda cool tbh.
June 26, 2023
No bibliography or index. Simple read through. Relevant for activist in the first world. Enjoyed the emphasis on the people who are waging liberation struggles in the world in modern times.
August 16, 2023
Yup, we need it.
January 14, 2024
Extremely relevant
February 12, 2025
some dsa members need to recognize the NECESSITY of me beating them with a copy of this book
December 25, 2025
must read
November 12, 2014
An interesting, and convincing, little tract against today's leftist/left-leaning groups that exchanged practical revolutionary communism for pseudo-(self-proclaimed-)revolutionary intellectual obscurantism, political reformism, and social movementism. Highly recommended for left-leaning persons that are alienated not simply by capitalism but by the available, liberal 'alternatives' as well. You can also read more at his blog: http://moufawad-paul.blogspot.com/
April 17, 2016
Limited by its polemical tone and short length, but makes the most of these limitations and poses some fair challenges for all us Marxists to meet.
Full review here: https://oldalexius.wordpress.com/2014...
Full review here: https://oldalexius.wordpress.com/2014...
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