Written history, as we know it, is the collation of class conflict, struggles between opposing economic forces. The aristocracy of antiquated society fought to retain their footholds on power against the bourgeoisie, but all inevitably failed, and so too shall the bourgeoisie fail against the proletariat, once the time comes. The conditions for revolution are rapidly and spontaneously coming into being around the world, both within the United States and beyond. In quick succession, we are seeing dominoes fall into place, where the contradictions of Liberal, Capitalistic society are becoming so glaringly obvious to enough of the proletariat, and it’s fearful grip tightening so hard, that something must inevitably break. States that beat their chest about leading the “free” world are subjecting their denizens to increasingly and extremely brutal punishments without reason and against the wishes of their citizens. On the international stage, we see their lackey states throwing away any pretense and openly embracing barbarism. The imperial cores of the world are becoming backwater societies in many areas and dystopian urban hellscapes in others. History has shown time and time again that this bourgeois mismanagement and oppression will lead to one thing: revolution.

But the forces must operate in the service of some form of change, whether backward or forward, else there would be no change, no revolutionary movement. Even holding to the status quo means pushing for some change to the forces of history. These movements are always in the name of some driving force, some strong belief about how things ought to be. But the material world that these forces operate within often leave peoples’ reality at odds with those ideological stances. It is the gap between “what ought to be” and “what is”, those people starving and beaten in the extremely wealthy “leader of the free world”, those dialectic contradictions within society, that cause revolutions to take place and drive the wheel of history.

There is an idea in Marx’s book, The German Ideology, of the substructure and the superstructure, or production methods and the ideas surrounding the distribution of production respectively. The substructure comprises the mode of production and how that production utilizes technology. It can be called the materialist realm of society, representing how things are made and what is used to make them. The superstructure, however, is the human attempt to understand and bring order to this material process, and the philosophical approach to how the fruits of that production are distributed within a society. Religion, ideology, and other philosophical schema all fall under the concept of the superstructure. It is important, however, to remember the material realities of the substructure will always serve as the basis for all superstructural views. Without the mode of production, there would be no way to even comprehend society, as society is, at its most basic, the structure of class and class interaction. The Ruling class, in control of the superstructures that loom over society, become detached from the realities of the world, and in turn, create imaginary conditions that are counter to the material reality

In the first chapter of the essay, 18^th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, Marx speaks of the mode by which France fell into despotism. This downfall was brought about by what Marx calls the specters of the past-idolized heroes and events which supposedly must be emulated to fully bring about a “new” form of society, one that, in reality, only mirrors the regimes of old. Marx’s 18th Brumaire itself compares the tragedy of Napoleon Bonaparte, the consul, then dictator of France, with the farce of his nephew’s rise to power in 1851. In the aftermath, the bourgeois class solidified its image as the saviors of the nation, which captivated the proletariat politically. However, in short order the bourgeoisie would fall to the same tactics of the older regimes in order to establish its own superstructure over the means of production. As Marx puts it, the new must look to the past specters that linger over France to provide comfort and guidance in a tumultuous act, the act of Revolution. First, the bourgeoisie would captivate the proletariat with the false promises of interdependence and cooperation, but, as the bourgeois revolution moved on, these promises bore no fruit, and the proletariat was forced to reconcile with itself the material substructure which they have been placed into. The leaders of the Proletarian parties were systematically executed, whether through the metaphorical, or in many cases, the literal. The ascension and subsequent fall of Blanqui and company, referred to by Marx as the true proletarian party members, corresponds with the ascension and subsequent rise of the dictatorial reign of Louis Napoleon. Blanqui was, considering his views on the power structure of France at the time, obviously not a Marxist. The Frenchman was a socialist and proletarian advocate, but his attempt at a secretive coup to enact the revolution despite the control of the bourgeoisie was against all forms of historical progress. Ultimately, the contradictions between the superstructure and substructure meant Blanqui’s efforts could not be sustained in the face of material realities, no matter what they believed about how things ought to be. Marx’s analysis of the rise and fall of the Revolutionary Republic of France, itself brought about as the end of the Paris Commune’s attempt at a truly proletarian project, outlines the forces of historical materialism in play.

In another instance, let’s look at the transition of the German Weimar Republic to the Nazi Third Reich. After World War One, the German people struggled not only with the humiliation of losing the First World War, but also with extreme poverty. There were points during the Weimar Republic that prices would inflate even hour-to-hour, showing the economic turbulence experienced by the workers. This material upheaval ,allowed for ideas such as the erroneous “Stab in the Back” myth blaming the German Jewish population for the defeat of Germany in the First World War. This, along with the utilization of the Freikorps to suppress the Spartakist uprising, or German Revolution as many know it, by the Social Democrat Friedrich Ebert, led to a neutered left wing of the country. These lies were pushed heavily by the German Bourgeoisie as a distraction from their own role in leading the country into a grossly destructive war they stood little chance of winning, and their continued material status above the German proletariat. Bourgeois leaders such as Julius Streicher helped publish antisemitic literature such as Ernst Hiemar’s Giftpilz, a children’s book filled with fabrications  such as the lie that the Talmud teaches Jewish people that the Non-Jewish population should be enslaved. This rhetoric, combined with other bourgeois propaganda about communism and socialism being movements led by Jews to control the world, left the proletariat of Weimar Germany with both a material substructure leading to unrest and a bourgeois-dominated superstructure aiming their dissatisfaction away from the capitalist elite responsible for their material conditions. The Nazis were able to quickly capitalize on this antisemitic and anti-left sentiment and rise to the preeminent power and establish the Third Reich in 1933. 

It is also worth looking at the Soviet Union, which, under unique historical circumstances, formed with the goal to deliver a better life for the proletariat of Eastern Europe and beyond the Urals. The material conditions of Tsarist Russia were that of abject misery, where the worker, both rural and urban, toiled for almost no pay; even outright famine was not uncommon, further straining the material conditions faced by both workers and peasants. Yet much like pre-revolutionary France, the superstructure of the slowly industrializing Russia was dominated by absolutist and aristocratic interests, letting socialist movements transform the liberal February Revolution of 1917 to the communist October Revolution. This new Soviet Russia made some efforts to improve the material conditions of both workers and peasants as well as improving the modes of production for peasants growing agricultural products. This effort, however, was short-lived. Stalin’s regime, according to Bordiga in his Essay Dialogue with Stalin, began to act on the global markets by producing what the Stalinists would call “Socialist Commodities”, becoming effectively another capitalist actor within the global market. With the return of commodified production came the return of famines brought about by Stalinist Russia’s need to sell its grain on the global market, leading to events such as the Holodomor in Ukraine.

Stalin came into power through the absence of clear direction within the Politburo after the death of Lenin, who acted as a kind of State Capitalist Napoleon. Through swift action and brutal measures, Stalin quickly solidified his reign and purged all dissenters real or imagined. While many within the Left admire the dictatorial manner in which this was done, it was by no sense organic. The Soviet Union was a young state, its developing institutions ripe to be taken advantage of. The first revolutionary to bring about socialism died without a clear path charted for the future, and Stalin was able to exploit that to direct the Soviet Union towards his ambition of an autocratic, totalitarian dictatorship. The first actions taken by Stalin, much like our dear French dictator, were to reverse the truly revolutionary policies put into place by the Old Bolsheviks. The rights gained by many minorities, ethnic, sexual, and otherwise, were tossed aside as examples of “Capitalist Decadence”. The economic sphere was also affected to the extreme. Workers, once in control of the means of production, and paid a fair day’s wage for it, were relegated to drones of the state. Politically, the elites of the bureaucracy were elevated to a level akin to the aristocracy of old. Stalin was, for all intents and purposes, a cruel joke to socialism, one that the Soviet Union never recovered from.

Even today, Russia is reeling from this. Stalinism, or at least the specter of Stalinism (the vozhd or great man), reigns in the minds of the modern Russian leadership. Due to the fall of the Soviet Union under Yeltsin and the privatization of state-run enterprises under emerging oligarchs, Russia was ravaged economically. The Chechen Wars too, where sections of Russia threatened to secede and humiliated the Russian military, shook the country to its core. Russia was looking in all directions for a new Stalin, one to create a strong nation, and they got their Faustian bargain with Putin. The ex-KGB agent would quickly take a hold of the New state and promise to stabilize it, but in truth, he only sought to take control. The Chechens were attacked, and, in time, brought to heel, but in the manner of all such strongmen, retained the power vested in him for decades. The material conditions which brought Russia to its knees are the substructure which enabled Putin to take power.

Vladimir Putin uses the image of Stalin to invoke a level of Russian Nationalism last seen during the State Capitalist Era of Stalin himself. The invasion of Ukraine is rife with the idea that Russia must expand to the borders of the old Soviet Union, or the Russian Empire from before them, by force in order to restore the material conditions of the Russian proletariat. Influenced by Aleksandr Dugin, the premiere madman of Russia now and the Soviet Union before, leads this charge, espousing an ideology which proposes that all forms of governance besides the Russian mode is inferior. Much like the Nazi scapegoating of the Jewish people, this woven superstructure of a “Great Russia” is propagated by the bourgeois of the modern Russian state, holding out the illusion of a return to glory to distract the proletariat from their material realities of exploitation and suppression from above.

Another contemporary event which shows how material conditions will lead to historical outcomes would be the reaction of Donald Trump, president of the United States, towards the recent upheaval in Los Angeles. In the pattern of what we have discussed before, the Latino and other immigrant communities have been scapegoated, held up by the bourgeois superstructure that is American politics as the supposed cause of the material conditions brought about by the exploitation of the proletariat. The people of Los Angeles, especially the Latino population, have been directly affected by the actions of ICE as the agency has been ruthlessly surveilling and abducting many within their community. It comes as no surprise that the community itself would voice its anger in both action and rhetoric. As the present Regime holds its animosity towards the Latino peoples in communities like Los Angeles, these communities return that animosity in kind. The protests that followed the uptick of ICE raids around the country, but more specifically in Los Angeles, have been targeted by the administration with extreme prejudice. Protesters have been beaten, shot at with multiple types of munitions, and overall brutalized. While not economic in nature, the contradiction between the United States’ superstructural claims of being “the land of the free” and the Latino community’s material realities of racist oppression and targeting has led to outcries for change and resistance. While there has been an overwhelming media focus on sporadic violence on the side of the protesters, the fact of the matter is that the vast majority of damage has been directly instigated by the agents of the state sent to quell rebellion, itself brought about by years, if not decades, of material oppression.

The sheer visibility of this contradiction between proclaimed freedom versus the actualized oppression faced by the Latino community, has forced the bourgeois state to reconcile this contradiction in its usual manner-with the outcries for freedom being met with extreme violence. In the age of video recording in the hands of almost every American, the world has seen the brutal treatment the protesters have faced by their so-called protectors, breaking through the cordons imposed by the bourgeois superstructure that claims the “non-lethal” round in their hand was in fact fired not from any police officer, but rather by the protesters themselves. These agents of the bourgeoisie are in a position where, to maintain the state’s claim to stability, as well as freedom for all, they must actively and visibly oppress an entire ethnic group, which comprises a large population within California, and America writ large. But of course, these claims to control are themselves superstructural: it is the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie that determines at present who the “real Americans” are, and to help maintain control they develop these jingling keys of racism and anti-immigrant violence to hide the consequences of their uncontrolled ravaging of the proletariat and the world. But those material conditions can only be distracted from for so long-and now we see history in the making as Reaper Drones fly high above the city and the Marine Corps are mobilized. With only a small handful of Americans actively protesting at a time, only some hundreds in a city of millions, thousands of the state’s attack dogs prepare for a domestic invasion-proving how terrified the current state is of losing control.

While this invasion of a homeland city is shocking to many, it was not the first time. In 1992, after the beating of Rodney King and the acquittal of his LAPD attackers, the city of Los Angeles rioted, much like now. As tragedy, George Bush senior mobilized the same number of National Guardsmen to put an end to the event. Donald Trump’s actions are mirroring this event as farce, down to the city and mobilization rate. The extreme reaction was not necessary then, and is not necessary now-merely a show of the force held by the bourgeois state. We see a new Napoleon, albeit a much more senile one, in Donald Trump. A tyrant who would rather see a military parade in his honor than the prosperity of his subjects. This senile Napoleon is willing to do whatever it takes to solidify his power and take the reins of the proverbial horse to force it to gallop towards oblivion. Our crazed dictator will stop at nothing to see his dynasty formed, but there will be little left once he has died for his heirs to rule. His children are ridiculed by the populace, along with other pathetic contenders to the fascist throne, and his cohorts are routinely likened to the National Socialists of old. It is only fitting that Elon Musk and him feuded for a short while, at least until Musk’s Contracts were threatened, that is. Napoleon is the tragedy that plagued France centuries ago, but Donald Trump is, most definitely, the farce.

The Zionist project which also occupies much of our current news also follows from the forces of Historical Materialism. The state of Israel, as is commonly understood, formed in part as a response to the long persecution of Jewish communities in Europe, primarily in the Holocaust, but the origins of Zionism go back well before the Nazi’s rise to power. Zionism, in the very basis of its ideological superstructure, reflects the material realities both of the Jewish population of Europe and of the states these Jewish communities lived in. Jewish people across Europe certainly had plenty of legitimate fear for their lives and safety, with centuries, if not millenia, of persecution as the diaspora in Europe. As we discussed with Weimar Germany, the cultural distinctiveness of Jews and their enforced status as a permanent out-group made it very easy for both absolutist and bourgeois rulers to use antisemitism as a distraction from their material exploitation of the lower classes; the possessions of these Jews was also something these states could use, whether via expulsion, pogrom, or confiscation, to ease the material contradictions brought about by that exploitation. This led to two Jewish movements which could both be described as nationalist: the Bundists and the Zionists. The Bundists, coming as they did from labor organizations, saw greater autonomy in their home countries as the solution to ending Jewish oppression; the Zionists, in comparison, sought to create a Jewish homeland outside of Europe (which was not always in Israel, or even the Middle East). During the 1800s, when these two movements vied for supremacy in Jewish politics, Europe was undergoing several transformations. The first was the development and strengthening of colonial projects and rule, often by sending out poor conscripts, undesirable communities, and second sons out en masse. The second was a growing sense of nationalism, particularly in those nations which were ruled by multi-ethnic empires, such as the Austrians and Ottomans. These nationalist movements advocated for what might be called the nation-state, or, less charitably, the ethnostate: a singular state which unified and protected the racially defined Nation. While the Bundists could be arguably associated with some of these trends in its material aims, they fit the Zionist movement to a T.

What we see now, then, in Israel and its politics, is the result of the superstructure and substructure which affected Jewish people in Europe becoming manifested in the Zionist colonial enterprise. Materially, it operates as any other colonial endeavor, subjecting other communities in its control to violence and expropriation-this is the substructure. However, as a result of the long history of persecution (and also in similar fashion to other ethnonationalist movements), Israeli politics portray the country as being constantly under existential threat of its Jewish population being exterminated, a scenario that has not had even a chance of taking shape in the last fifty years minimum. This superstructural, institutional paranoia has both provided the Israeli state with endless license to commit colonial violence in furtherance of its material desires and ready connection to portions of the Jewish communities in the United States (though they will claim the backing of the entire Jewish-American population) who will help defend support for Israel’s actions alongside the far more influential support of American evangelicals. The ongoing invasion and depopulation of Gaza by the occupying forces of Israel, much like the continuing racist attacks by the American government and its institutions, has helped make plain the material contradictions of proclaimed ideology. 

These contradictions form the basis of class conflict, as exploited classes and peoples are increasingly shown the truths behind the superstructural lies of the ruling class. This, Marx argues, is how societies progress along history towards communism, where the absence of an elevated ruling class will mean the end of such contradictions.

 This does not mean that there will no longer be progress, or that we will reach an endpoint in all advancement, it is instead the end of these contradictions, as they would be solved. Needs would be met according to the requirements of all in society. Labor will be done in the name of the greater human project, instead of in the name of some capitalist captain of industry or imperial overlord. And all of this human activity will be done to meet the material needs of the people, not illusions crafted by the ruling class to control the material gains of society. If there were no more contradictions, no more lies in society, we would have to be in a communist mode of production. However, the widespread social upheaval and ultimate revolutionary process due to these contradictions is required to reach this mode of production-there is no easy way to communism that does not involve the proletariat becoming aware of the chains laid upon them. The only way forward is the mass recognition of these contradictions and the active attempt to reconcile them in earnest. This is why, as Marx said in the 18^th Brumaire, that Proletarian movements are ruthless in their internal scrutiny, as opposed to other, bourgeois movements, who can gild their words and pat themselves on the back with half measures and failures. This is why, as Marx and Hegel state, that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. The first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.