«What is the strength, brother?» asked the movie character Danila Bagrov. And received a vague answer.

If you ask this question to some leftist, the answers will be: «people», «workers», «working class» and so on. To the question «Why?» — it will be more likely either simply that «there are more proletarians», or that «there is nothing for them to lose except their own chains», but this will be, I’m not afraid of this word, stupidity. Firstly, by feeding and pitting the proletariat against each other, the bourgeoisie reliably puts restrictions on its political activity on it — hoping for the mass character of the proletariat is obliged at all costs to achieve a simple numerical advantage. Those who rely on «nothing to lose» are similarly constrained in their actions, because at the slightest handouts, this «power of the proletariat» immediately goes into the sand. Yes, it worked before and did not completely exhaust the resource, but nevertheless, it is not enough.

How would a Marxist answer this question?

First, it is necessary to determine the factor for which the bourgeoisie has a limitation and the communists have no restrictions.

Secondly, we need to understand how to use this power.

Not strength, but weakness

So, what can a communist take up that the bourgeoisie cannot grasp? Mass character? No, history knows a huge number of cases when the bourgeoisie gathered cheering crowds of the proletariat in the name of their interests, so overwhelming all and sundry, not that communists, but even frondying liberals, that to think that our strength is in the masses… naive. The bourgeoisie gathers the masses around it not only because of the insufficient quantity and quality of communist propaganda but also because in bourgeois society the masses are inherently bourgeois — this is the LAW.

That is, the Communists are faced with the task of not just «organizing and leading», they must first snatch the masses from the bourgeoisie. Mass character is not a bourgeois limitation, mass character, as strange as it sounds to a leftist ear, is our limitation. It is we who are limited in our ability to gain mass. The fact that out of 200 countries in the world, only in five communists have an overwhelming influence on the masses (and the quality of such influence, given the systematic anti-communist protests in Cuba, China, and Vietnam, I would question), and in other countries, they could not even portray anything similar to a mass party, suggests that that the capabilities of the bourgeoisie to mobilize the masses significantly exceed the capabilities of communist organizations (even very good from the point of view of ideology, like the ML Communist Party of Brazil, for example. Yes, what is there to go far — the Bolsheviks blew the elections to the Constituent Assembly, blew the elections to the Soviets in March 1917, and systematically fought with small forces during the Civil War with overwhelmingly numerically superior peasant masses).

And therefore it is very naive to think that the Communists will necessarily gain so many supporters that they will crush the bourgeoisie with the mass (since the bourgeoisie is always orders of magnitude smaller than the proletariat). On the contrary, if the Communists gain a majority, it will be a successful exception to the rule rather than a pattern. We need to build tactics primarily on the assumption that we will most likely not be able to gain overwhelming mass.

An even greater limitation is the humiliated and oppressed position of the proletarian, his absolute and relative impoverishment. The theories of workers-lovers say that communists are more successful in propaganda among the poor, and even more so that the proletarian, if he is helped to organize a strike and pull up the depreciating salary to the subsistence minimum, will follow the communist and make a revolution, are so miserable that for all 30 years since 1991, we have observed how the formed in 1992-93 the post-Soviet mass communist organizations, engaged in stirring up the economic struggle and appealing to the «humiliated and oppressed,» did nothing but collapse, degrade and come to naught. Because the capitalists have much more effective means to manipulate the financial situation of the poor than even to gather the broad masses of the people to protect their interests in the fields of Ukraine. And humiliated submission to the capitalist for the proletarian is purely in the short term much more profitable and easier than a hundred strikes — it does not carry any additional hardships, does not require organization, and is legally and actually safe. Dragging the proletarian into a conflict over small wage increase is an occupation for real masochists, however, the leftists who misunderstand the essence of the communist struggle have been doing this for more than one hundred years and do not understand what kind of barrier it is that they still cannot take. I personally observed how, having poked into this restriction, even the most active and militant lefties were blown away after a couple of years and moved on to combining «pleasant with useful» — for example, they went to the FNPR(1), to the bourgeois media, to legal consultations, and for most, the struggle was generally reduced to a duty appearance at rallies on November 7 and on May 1st and 9th.

But is there something that the bourgeoisie cannot buy? Yes, guys, there is. These are brains. That’s what the bourgeoisie obviously can’t buy for themselves. And the bourgeoisie usually has no brains. But let’s take it in order.

Does the anti-communist party need brains?

In moments of alcoholic abstinence, the idol of the liberal intelligentsia and a professional parasite, Dovlatov, periodically wrote “soulful” letters to his drinking buddies, filled with suffering for the fate of the anti-communist cause:

«SERGEY DOVLATOV TO IGOR SMIRNOV

July 6, 1983

The problem, it seems to me, is also that the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (for all its abomination) was somewhat selective in accepting new members to its ranks. If a person drank heavily, publicly tortured his wife, or stole music stands from the red corner, he was not accepted. Here in the «anti-communist party» they take everyone who declares their seething hatred of the KGB and the Politburo, they take thieves, swindlers, scoundrels, <…>, idiots, and <…>».

If we translate this whining into the language of Marxism, then the drunken “master” is dissatisfied with the fact that there is no selection in the bourgeois parties on the basis of the presence of not only intelligence and social science knowledge (he did not dare to dream about this), but at least minimally sufficient social discipline and in general at least minimal philistine socialization.

But it can be argued that all the scum that hangs out around the Navalny headquarters on the one hand and the Yunarmeytsy(2) on the other is not an indicator — the real owners of factories, newspapers, steamships are smarter because they manage a huge economic machine. They have an elite education, managerial experience, and so on.

Firstly, a significant part of capitalists in general were simply born into the right family with a golden spoon in their mouth and did not even pass the inside-capitalist selection for the grasping reflex. If we look at the statistics of American millionaires, we will see that 20% of them inherited a fortune, another 10% inherited sums from 1 to 10% of the current state (which is also quite a lot), and more than half of American millionaires are not actually of American origin, but simply moved to the USA already being millionaires from all over the world who have somewhat blurred the statistics on business dynasties. But even a third is already a lot. Forbes, for example, does not hide that all the largest industrial and financial giants belong to the same families for more than one generation. Occasionally, millionaires seem to «exchange» shares, which again blurs the fact that the real managers of the economy simply inherited their social role. That is, the larger the business, the less its owner has to do with its organization, and most of these «owners» have neither an ear nor a snout in the real economy and physical production, and decisions are made in comparison with stock reports, which is why the quality of such decisions is approximately the same as when reading Tarot cards.

Secondly, even if all capitalists would «get rich from scratch» (as propaganda drives into the consciousness of petty-bourgeois hamsters, they say, a capitalist is a business organizer), then all the same, real competence in solving social issues, and in general everything that does not concern increasing the bank accounts of themselves, is low, because NO SOCIAL SCIENCE KNOWLEDGE IS REQUIRED TO ENTER THE BOURGEOIS CLASS. In other words, a competent person can only get there by accident. History gives us wonderful examples of absolutely illiterate and blatantly ignorant business creators, rather the exception is a cultured and thoughtful entrepreneur. For example, Savva Morozov was the only one of the 30-something representatives of the Morozov business clan who scientifically approached public issues and thought about the optimal social structure. The rest of his relatives, who owned chains of factories, estates, and shops, were just banal ghouls with two reflexes in the head — sucking and swallowing (Savva Morozov’s grandson wrote about this wonderfully in a book about his grandfather). What’s there to go far — the Federation Council of the Russian Federation is staffed for the most part by managers, representatives, and direct business owners. What its members publicly say raises the question not just about their competence in managing society, but also about elementary mental sanity in general.

The low threshold of social science knowledge at the entrance to the bourgeois class creates a very specific environment within this class, in which the wildest misconceptions prevail. The bourgeois in the content of their brains, differs from the petty-bourgeois and proletarian masses who are being fooled by them, solely by the fact that not the vapors of cheap booze, but of good cognac are floating in their heads. And so everything is the same — fascism, nationalism, religion, commodity-money fetishism. Take, for example, Malofeev — his wildest social ideas were already of the second freshness in the XVII century, and by the XIX they were completely rotten, but this does not prevent him in the face of Tsargrad(3) and the mass of other media projects from carrying amazing nonsense. Moreover, the most unfortunate thing is that he is not pretending, he himself believes in all this in all seriousness. Even if an intelligent businessman who understands socio-economic issues gets into this environment, he will not only be in the minority (both in terms of the mass of capital and quantitatively), but the environment will inevitably lower him and bend him to its level. Soros, who decided to «teach capitalists to live» in a very unusual way, was actually sent away with his teachings as soon as the post-Soviet space was re-privatized, and it turned out that his «Mein Kampf» was simply tolerated as long as it helped to steal the resources of the former socialist camp. That is, despite the fact that the appearance of intelligent people is not illegal, the bourgeois class has strict limitations — even when someone above the average level appears there, the environment, which consists of hereditary bourgeois idlers and descendants from the proletariat and the petty bourgeoisie, eventually sucks them in.

The situation is no better with hired managers. The bourgeois has a very serious limitation here — if the hired manager is more intelligent than the bourgeois himself, then, as a rule, the property passes into his hands. That is why the bourgeoisie «exchanges shares» (so as not to put eggs in one basket), acquires clusters of mutually competing and checking and rechecking audit and consulting offices, recruits managers based on the principle of personal loyalty, and not on real competencies, lures an extensive clientele (that is, dependent people) from among managers in the form of analysts, consultants, lawyers, from which draws the personnel reserve. The competence of an employee is often the last thing that comes to mind. For example, I was told how one of the top managers of a large holding company demanded that all reports fit into the format of one A4 sheet — it was simply difficult for him to understand more. The task of another top manager in the company where I once worked was to give bribes to customs, the owners did not allow him to other processes, and attempts by that manager to steer real activities ended very badly.

The system of managerial education has degraded before it has even really begun — due to the large difference in the incomes of managers and the proletariat, it instantly became a form of extraction and redistribution of surplus value, into which all sorts of scammers from the education system gathered together. Therefore, the quality of real knowledge even among top managers is extremely low. HSE(4), for example, has long been a byword. Even in the 90s, when Soros and Chubais massively poured grants and funds into it, at the Institute of Philosophy, already having snow on their boots, they only laughed at the attempts of the HSE to portray philosophy. The bourgeois, due to his low training, on average cannot distinguish an ersatz science created to fool the masses, such as «Economics», from real scientific research in the socio-economic sphere. His offspring, sent to elite and expensive «business schools», as a rule, feed on the same propaganda shit as the rest of the population. Attempts by the bourgeois to study the economy «as it is» only increase the number of Marxists in the bourgeois environment and increase the depressive mood among the bourgeoisie. Since the formation of Chegevars within the walls of business colleges is not welcome, then, as you might guess, the truth is sacrificed. Although economics is studied «according to Marx» at Eton, Marx is smoothed and vulgarized there by well-groomed bourgeois teachers. Or, to put it more simply, the bourgeoisie is forced to use initially deceived or uneducated managers.

Commodity-money relations, mediating and underlying management accounting, actually falsify and obscure real physical production processes. For example, the profitability indicator for the factory does not show anything physical, we can easily observe how anything can stand behind the report that factory N has become 15% more profitable than last year: a price increase during a decline in physical production, sale of inventory, increase in quantity with loss of quality, sale of part of fixed assets, reduction of staff salaries, etc. Making physical production decisions based on financial data is similar to calculating the next card in poker. That is why management accounting in bourgeois organizations is very confusing and excessively inflated, it is for this that hundreds of office workers are sitting on the neck of hundreds of proletarians because the further into the forest, the less financial indicators reflect something physical in a more or less clear form.

As a result, we see how poorly trained and incompetent people try to push the buttons of the control panel of society, without having an accurate idea of what is happening. In a word, the bourgeois Icarus in matters of management can fly, but, like that behemoth, «very, very low.» And when he gets close to the truth, his wings quickly crumble and he helplessly falls into a tailspin. This is his objective limitation of the class due to heterogeneity, selfishness, and lack of selection by competence. The probability that all capitalists will read Marx and start doing something wisely is approximately equal to the probability that all the atoms of the chair will move up and the chair will jump.

How to use it?

The absence of restrictions on competence is the main and most important advantage of Marxists over the bourgeoisie. No one and nothing restricts the Marxist in terms of scientific search in contrast to bourgeois specialists, we can with free hands build our tactics and strategy based on objective social laws and put into practice qualitatively trained personnel. In response, the bourgeoisie will not be able to oppose anything sensible, except for stupid monkey managers randomly pressing the buttons of the universe, and an army of soldiers trained in social science even worse than just civilian managers. They can and will definitely be replayed.

To do this, first of all, it is necessary to understand that one must patiently and persistently cultivate a scientist in oneself. Read scientific literature, choose a certain specialization, and systematically publish works in the form of articles, books, and even leaflets, the main thing is that the latter are scientifically sound.

Secondly, we will be able to beat them, if we can physically intercept the management of production and society, and really cope with the management. Unfortunately, there is absolutely no desire among lefties to even think about how to manage the economy if they get their hands on it. I’m not even talking about the fact that each of us should choose a field in which, in addition to purely Marxist growth, he will grow as a specialist and manager (if there are no mechanisms for practical career growth, which in capitalist conditions does not always correlate with competence, then theoretically grow in that sphere). That is, a lawyer should be not only morally, but also practically ready to write a code corresponding to the realities of the revolution for the dictatorship of the working class; a philologist should reform the system of state languages, give suggestions on the organization of language education; a metallurgist should understand the prospects of certain technologies, have a specific project for the development of metallurgy. And all this is not just somewhere deep inside, but ready to be published in the form of articles, brochures, scientific papers. When the revolution happens, it will be too late to justify our point of view on the organization of the work of industry — we will rely on ready-made works, and if these are the works of our like-minded people verified by the diamatic method, then our policy will be generally more advantageous and more successful than that of the Bolsheviks, who lacked specialists almost everywhere and even more so politically loyal specialists, and even more so, there were not enough loyal ones from the point of view of the diamatic method. The spontaneous dialectic of Pavlov, for example, in the study of the physiology of nervous activity required a lot of additional work from many Soviet scientists (this is despite the fact that being a reactionary politically, Pavlov tried to refuse to teach «red graduate students»).

Thirdly, as a side effect of the qualitative professional and Marxist growth of our personnel, there will be an increase in the authority of Marxism, primarily among specialists, managers of lower and middle levels, workers, and employees. Some of them will accept our ideas, and some will implement them to the best of their abilities, but scientific ideas will certainly sprout authority. In such a situation, the organization of a party is a purely technical issue. Marx, whose teaching came to Russia as a science was accepted and studied by part of the educated circles, making it quite easy and simple to form a party; difficulties began only when it became clear that some accepted Marx only formally.

Having a certain number of cadres ready to really seize control from the bourgeoisie, the task of taking power turns into an almost routine procedure: the deployment of propaganda and the selection of social tools in the form of mass organizations, strikes at the weak points of the management of the capitalist system with a successful combination of circumstances. There are a lot of similar circumstances created almost every year, the whole problem is that the Communists in the current state are not ready to intercept anything and have neither authority nor implementation tools. For example, in Ukraine in the spring of 2022, there was a very convenient situation for taking power, the current situation is not much less convenient — a mass of volunteer and mercenary formations was being formed (for example, it would be possible to create your own Red Army in this form, no matter under what flag), the main forces of the FSB are diverted to fight Ukrainian and Western special services, the generals are discredited by the trampling on the spot and the defeats of last year. But no one used it all, because there are no people among the whole mass of leftists who are ready theoretically and practically to beat the bourgeoisie.

After all, the bourgeoisie does a lot of stupid things at every step, to catch it «with its pants down», to hit a sore spot, to trip up — these are all possibilities quite clearly visible, and only people are needed, there are not many of them — even a relatively small but competent minority will successfully play.

In a word, instead of chasing the masses or waiting for the apocalypse, when the proletarian begins to eat soles, Marxists need to take care of their own theoretical growth, improving the scientific quality and credibility of our expertise, searching for painful places of bourgeois management and increasing the force of impact on them — first in theoretical form, until we acquire «meat» for practical strikes. And may the force be with us!

I. Bortnik

---

1. Federation of Independent Trade Unions of Russia.
2. Members of All-Russia «Young Army» National Military Patriotic Social Movement Association.
3. Russian monarchist TV and social media channel.
4. HSE University — Higher School of Economics, a very liberal and pro-Western school in Russia.