Tag: Mao

Breaking Bad: Idol of Late Capitalism
To pursue the American Dream is not only futile but self-destructive because ultimately it destroys everything and everyone involved with it. By definition it must, because it nurtures everything except those things that are important: integrity, ethics, truth, our very heart and soul.¹

—Hubert Selby Jr.

One of the worst developments of contemporary storytelling is the extinguishing of tragedy from the lexicon of genres. The official “drama” label is slapped on almost any story without a punchline, effectively omitting the rich history of tragedy from which many present day masterpieces derive.

For the Greeks, tragedy followed protagonists who resisted divine prophecy or the will of the gods. Their resistance is always their downfall. In the early modern era, Shakespeare moved away from divine ordinance and focused on the character flaws and personal choices leading to the downfall of his characters. This emphasis on the individual over the celestial is one of the hallmarks of capitalist modernity. Shakespeare represented the dividing line between the feudal and capitalist eras and his protagonists are often nobles or wealthy merchants. Later bourgeois tragedy expelled the nobility and focused instead on everyday businessmen, apprentices or lawyers.

A Capitalist Tragedy

It must be a calling card of late capitalism that sees its tragic protagonists slip from the airs of respectability and into the depraved depths of criminal insanity and violence. Breaking Bad, Joker, The Sopranos and Requiem for a Dream are all tragedies where criminal enterprise is the principal narrative device elevating and destroying characters. In Žižekian terms, the reason for this is simple: capitalism has already become a system that is “effectively ready to put everything, including the survival of humanity at stake simply for the reproduction of the system as an end-in-itself…this is of course weird, if not downright evil.”²

Unlike previous decades and centuries, the liberal capitalist society is now disintegrating under the weight of heavy contradictions. Since we are daily confronted by a barren spiritual landscape populated with corrupt politicians, omnicidal Big Oil CEOs and avaricious tech bros, it has become increasingly difficult to portray ethical dilemmas on-screen. The last recognizable moral frontier of our age is the technical boundary of the law. This is why Breaking Bad resonates so strongly with audiences.

Breaking Bad builds off of a fantastical premise. Walter White is a brilliant chemist resigned to teaching in a high school after opting out of a potentially lucrative career at a chemical research company that he co-founded. His son has cerebral palsy, he has another baby on the way and he is diagnosed with Stage 3A lung cancer when the series opens. He has a Drug Enforcement Agency brother-in-law and becomes inspired to cook meth as a means to raise a cash stockpile for his family to spend after he passes.

As events unfold, we learn that Walter White is not exactly the innocent family man pulled in over his head by forces outside his control. He is deeply resentful of the success his former company had achieved after his departure. He takes on a second job at the car wash which subjects him to the humiliation of cleaning the cars of his high school students. His DEA brother-in-law Hank is full of machismo and routinely demeans Walt as something of a boring egghead. In early episodes Walter Jr. appears to hold his Uncle Hank in higher esteem than his father.

Every tragic protagonist has a character flaw leading to their unravelling. For Walter White it is his pride. He could be psychoanalyzed to reveal a latent narcissism and anti-social personality disorder. The origins of his neuroses are not explained and they pre-date the events of the series. For example, we learn that he walked out on his Gray Matter co-founders when he discovered that his ex-fiancee belonged to a wealthy family, diminishing his own sense of self-worth. There is certainly nothing wrong with a career in education, but for Walt it can be inferred that this job sheltered him from any challenges to his intellect—as did his complex partnership with Jesse Pinkman.

Getting Even

If there is one common thread among tragic characters, it is their clash with the prevailing social order. Because the ancient Greeks believed that the material world was governed by the gods of nature, defying their plans could only lead to demise. Likewise, in Romeo and Juliet, it is the passion of the young couple that breaks upon the immovable ancient feud between their families. In Hamlet, the understandable desire for vengeance is confronted by the royal authority of the Danish kingdom. And in Breaking Bad, Walter White’s pride clashes with the class relations he is enmeshed in.

While gifted, Walter White had never been able to productively channel his talents or receive monetary validation of his self-worth. Put another way:

Under capitalism, individuals become socially integrated in a manner that is at its core indifferent to their needs and aspirations; they are abstract, alienated individuals, subsumed under antagonistic class relations, the imperatives of competition, and an alienated division of labour, all of which thwart their self-realization as social beings.³

Walter White’s struggle for self-realization is undeniably relatable even if his solution is not. We share a world of monopolized capital, an alienated global division of labour, of constant, unexpected financial demands and unspoken competition between peers. In his own words, Walter sums up his situation thus: “I am an extremely overqualified high school chemistry teacher. When I can work, I make $43,700 per year. I have watched all of my colleagues and friends surpass me in every way imaginable. And within eighteen months, I will be dead.”

It is clear that Walter White had been deeply scarred by the hidden injuries of class. The agonizing reminders of his missed opportunity with Gray Matter Technologies only rubbed salt in his wounds. In On Contradiction, Mao Zedong wrote: “Before it explodes, a bomb is a single entity in which opposites coexist in given conditions. The explosion takes place only when a new condition, ignition, is present.”⁴

Walter White was the human embodiment of these conditions: an extraordinary chemist in sub-ordinary work at the high school and car wash, crippling financial pressure and a superiority complex lodged beneath a mountain of belittling relationships. His cancer diagnosis pushed him over a cliff, into impossible economic circumstances and certain death. This was the ignition.

Becoming a meth cook in response to his diagnosis verges on the extreme but it can be rationalized by the immense resentment that White had repressed for years. Here was his chance to transform his chemistry knowledge into monetary validation; to pull one over on his smug brother-in-law; to reclaim his masculinity in the eyes of his family; to feel alive before he died; to lash out at a society that had unjustly left him behind.⁵

Walter White was far too self-absorbed to be any kind of revolutionary. He retaliated against the authorities governing his life but he did not seek to overthrow them. He did not walk away from his teaching position, his marriage or his relationship with Hank. While he quit the car wash, he returned to purchase the business in order to launder money. Walter White did not want to rebel against the system so much as he wanted to conquer it—to collect his due—and by any means necessary. His descent into depravity escaped him so long as economic validation arrived in tidy bundles of cash.

Shortcut to the American Dream

The drug trade is too ubiquitous in capitalist societies to be any kind of scourge to the system—it is a function of the system. The drug trade nourishes the lumpenproletariat, reproducing a vast underclass that helps to discipline the productive classes overhead. Owing to the high risk of violence and arrest, stepping into this world obviously provokes feelings of defiance even though it is not rebellious in any systemic sense. Rather, it is a shortcut to all the extremities found on the capitalist menu.

Extreme drug-induced highs and crushing lows, extreme exploitation in a void of authority, extremely lucrative commodities sold into a market of grinding poverty. Walter White quickly adjusted to this world, of course, given the extreme circumstances of his life already in existence. The cancer diagnosis in a country of private health care was his final push from the ledge of productivity and into the realm of the lumpen.

Every tragedy ends with the re-assertion of the social order after a period of disturbance. Breaking Bad is no exception. By the end of the series, almost all of the drug traffickers and manufacturers are wiped out, including Walter White. Like most tragedies, social control is operational in the finale of Breaking Bad. The illicit drug trade is a hyper-capitalist endeavour but it circumvents institutional power and therefore, paradoxically, it must be both ostracized and tolerated. Its visibility is a visceral reminder to any disgruntled worker, struggling shop owner or frustrated civil servant struggling with bills and thinking that their situation cannot get worse. It can get worse. Just look at what happened to Walter White.

Thanks for reading!
1. From Requiem for a Dream (Da Capo Press, 2000): v. ↩︎
2. Slavoj Žižek, Living in the End Times (Verso, 2010): 335. ↩︎
3. Oscar A. Ralda, “The Ethics and Dialectics of Freedom and Universality: The Sources of Materialist Moral Judgements,” Monthly Review, Vol. 77, No. 5: 59. ↩︎
4. Mao Zedong, On Contradiction, On Practice (Midnight Press, 2023): 53. ↩︎
5. Byung Chul-Han echoes the Marxian notion of living for dead labour when he describes capitalism as producing undead existences—it “deprives life of life.” Capitalism and the Death Drive (Polity Press, 2019): 8. ↩︎
28 Jul 26
Understanding Chinese Socialism
China is one of the most misunderstood countries in the West for all of the predictable reasons: the far-away geography, the curious culture, the unfamiliar politics, the ferocious economy. It is either portrayed as a one-dimensional menace to democracies or, less often, as the last hope to save the biosphere or the Global South. China can be the rigid communist or the wild capitalist—it only depends on the point of view of the observer. Dan Wang is the latest to re-cast China, an engineering state in contrast to the lawyerly society of the United States. He hit the shore of this discovery when it occurred to him that many of America’s founding fathers were lawyers and Deng Xiaoping had promoted a lot of engineers in the 1980s. According to Wang, this is the reason why China builds a lot more stuff than the U.S. today. But he’s wrong.

What Wang discovered is only a basic difference between Marxist-Leninist societies and liberal capitalist ones. The Soviet Union was dominated by engineers, as China and Vietnam are today. Even Cuba has been described as “a society of engineers.” Conversely, western bourgeois revolutions were all dominated by those with legal backgrounds; Thomas Jefferson in the U.S., Oliver Cromwell in Britain, Maximilien Robespierre in France—to name only the most notorious. The first prime ministers of Canada, Australia and India were also lawyers. But if the American “lawyerly society” was able to out-build and outproduce the Soviet engineering state, why can’t it do the same against the Chinese?

The answer has little to do with lawyers or engineers and everything to do with economics and governing ideology. Whereas the American commitment to capitalist class power led it directly into a deindustrialized, cannibalistic financial economy, China’s commitment to building socialism led it to becoming the greatest workshop in human history, in command of entire supply chains and advanced technology. America had built a great industrial power by the early twentieth century and organized labour had won considerable political power throughout the New Deal and Cold War eras. But this unravelled almost the moment the Cold War wound down. The disciplining of the western workforce was inevitable in an economic system pursuing profit for the sake of profit, and it arrived in the form of offshore manufacturing, real estate speculation, vulture capitalism, super-exploited migrant labor and intensified corporate lobbying.

Marxism-Leninism in China

China, meanwhile, was an accident of epic proportions. Whereas other Marxist-Leninist states in the Soviet bloc were successfully marginalized from the global capitalist economy, the U.S. under Nixon and Kissinger embraced China in a successful effort to defeat Moscow by exploiting the Sino-Soviet split. Successive presidential administrations gambled that global capitalism would so thoroughly corrupt Chinese socialist aspirations that the country would abandon Marxist thought altogether. This has turned out to be a bad bet if the words of paramount leader Xi Jinping are any indication: “If we deviate from or abandon Marxism, our Party would lose its soul and direction. On the fundamental issue of upholding the guiding role of Marxism, we must maintain unswerving resolve, never wavering at any time or under any circumstances.”

Statements like this from Chinese leadership mystify western audiences, both left and right. Too many people view socialism through the narrow paradigm of the Soviet system or left wing politics at home and conclude that China has hopelessly deviated from Marxist theory. But what if it is the western left that is aimless and the Soviets who were forced to deviate? Western politics is so saturated with capital that even nominally “progressive” forces don’t understand the corporate interests being served by mass migration crises and obsessional identity politics. And the Soviet Union, facing multiple foreign invasions at the outset, rapidly nationalized most of its economy and placed it under a central command in order to first stave off European aggression and then counter American containment strategies. The Soviet Union was able to achieve incredibly high levels of human development and military superpower status, but balancing these two priorities against western counter-pressure proved unsustainable over the long haul.

China pursued somewhat similar policies to the Soviets until American rapprochement came in 1972, when Nixon visited Mao. Imperial pressure against China was lifted, culminating in large amounts of western commercial investment by 1979 and a U.S. State Department upgrade for China to “friendly, developing nation.” This is where the great misunderstanding of China began: for the left, China was seen as selling out the socialist movement to imperialists and for the right, China was increasingly seen as a nascent capitalist champion. Neither side was completely right or wrong.

China did embrace capitalist investment in a way that was not geopolitically possible for other Marxist-Leninist states. The private sector of China is notoriously wild and cutthroat. At the same time this does not represent a reversal of the Marxist course in China, as originally charted by Mao. Consider the Chinese flag: four small stars representing the national bourgeoisie, petit bourgeoisie, the working class and the peasantry. Mao, while fiercely antagonistic toward rent-extracting landlords, had a different understanding of China’s domestic capitalists:

The national bourgeoisie differs from the imperialists, the landlords and the bureaucrat-capitalists. The contradiction between the national bourgeoisie and the working class is one between exploiter and exploited, and is by nature antagonistic. But in the concrete conditions of China, this antagonistic contradiction between the two classes, if properly handled, can be transformed into a non-antagonistic one and be resolved by peaceful methods.¹

In Marxist theory, capitalism is seen as a major progressive advance over the feudal mode of production. When Mao came to power, China was largely a feudal state. For this reason Mao favoured China’s capitalist elements over the landlords of the feudal order. Mao proposed a five-tiered structure of ownership during China’s transition phase which has been applied throughout the country: state-owned enterprises, cooperative land ownership, individually owned businesses, private corporations and public-private partnerships. The Communist Party of China, while it bristles under imperialism, has always recognized this classical Marxist principle: capitalism is the mother of socialism, not its enemy. Karl Marx:

The bourgeois period of history has to create the material basis of the new world—on the one hand universal intercourse founded upon the mutual dependency of mankind, and the means of that intercourse; on the other hand, the development of the productive powers of man and the transformation of material production into a scientific domination of natural agencies. Bourgeois industry and commerce create these material conditions of a new world in the same way as geological revolutions have created the surface of the earth. When a great social revolution shall have mastered the results of the bourgeois epoch, the markets of the world and the modern powers of production and subjected them to the common control of the most advanced peoples, then only will human progress cease to resemble that hideous pagan idol who would not drink the nectar but from the skulls of the slain.²

Having built a mass-party of over 100 million members, the CPC believes that China has already completed its great social revolution and have set themselves the task of mastering “the results of the bourgeois epoch.” In Building Socialism with a Specifically Chinese Character, Deng Xiaoping describes foreign investment as “a major supplement in the building of socialism,” with the goal of “highly developed productive forces and an overwhelming abundance of material wealth.” This is a redux of Engels, who said that the forces of production “must be multiplied to the extent necessary for the creation of a communal society” before private property can be abolished.³

Whereas the advanced capitalist countries were able to develop their productive forces through a historical process involving colonial extraction, debt bondage, slavery and corporate-driven markets, China is doing the same with a combination of foreign capital investment, state owned enterprises, domestic start-ups and state-dominated markets operating under the umbrella of five year plans and consultative democracy.

The Limits to Capital

Since the dawn of civilization, Marx noted, the property relations of an economy eventually become barriers to the further advancement of technology and production.⁴ In feudalism, there was only so much progress that was possible in an economy dominated by illiterate subsistence farmers paying rent to lords. The limits inherent to the feudal order are what eventually provoked daring exploration missions leading to the discovery of the Americas, European mercantilism, the plantation economy and subsequent Industrial Revolution.

As industry has progressed, it has gradually given way to rent-seeking financial monopolies and Big Tech companies which are posing enormous barriers to production in western economies. Even our Gross Domestic Product (GDP) data can no longer be trusted, as the economist Michael Hudson explains: “Bank penalties and fees are now counted toward GDP rather than as an economic cost. GDP accounting is now a travesty that credits finance as producing a product rather than zero-sum transfer payments.”⁵ Our system cannot solve this problem because our system is the problem—and no quantity of Trumpian neofascist rebellions will change the fundamental contours of the western economy. Only a revolution can do that.

Post-revolutionary China, on the other hand, has seen enough to avoid these pitfalls. Financial capital currently plays an important role allocating resources toward innovation and productivity but, left to its own devices, it will devolve into debt predation, real estate speculation and inflating unproductive assets like stocks and cryptocurrencies. According to Marxian economics, money has a price but only production can create objective value. Banks in China are state owned and directed to fulfill the five year plans that build their country. Salaries and compensation for financial service managers have been reigned in and regulatory frameworks ensure that Chinese hedge funds invest in domestic products like DeepSeek rather than asset prices. It’s been said that the West can never produce like China and this is why.

Projects from state owned enterprises, clockwise from left: Raffles City, Huajiang Grand Canyon Bridge, China Energy Engineering Corporation. The public sector can build according to use rather than profit.

Marx and Engels supported free trade and industrial competition as a means of provoking technological revolution and working class development.⁶ China has used both instruments to build out world-leading high speed rail, renewable energy infrastructure, electric vehicles, high tech skyscrapers and record-setting bridges. Unlike capitalist countries that over-promise and under-deliver on almost everything, China’s public sector consistently beats its own targets. They have a working class of 772 million people, of which 500 million are considered middle class. But the contradictions created by technological change, fluctuations in value and financially ruinous competition often spur crises, and these crises promote changes to economic relations and political orientation.

Socialism with Chinese Characteristics

For China, crises precede expansion of the public sector. Banking, land and resources are already under socialized ownership. Further, there are 362,000 state owned enterprises in the country comprising 60% of total market capitalization. With many people forecasting future economic turbulence, economists Minqi Li and Lingyi Wei see a China that is well-positioned to:

Either take over the remaining capitalist enterprises or invest in new socially owned enterprises to replace the bankrupt capitalist enterprises. Eventually, this could pave the way for social control over economic surplus, to be used for the free development of all individuals in manners to be determined by democratic decisions.⁷

Throughout their work, Marx and Engels stressed the need to not simply oppose capitalism but to go beyond it.⁸ Neither the workers’ state of the Soviet Union nor the welfare states of western nations have actualized this concept.⁹ By prioritizing production over distribution, China is doing exactly what Marx outlined in his Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy and Engels in his Principles of Communism: driving the forces of capitalist production to their technological limit before crossing the barricade that capitalist relations inevitably impose.

The colossal solar plants, hydro dams and wind farms that China is constructing are not just for show. They are the building blocks of a fully-automated robotic economy powered by the Sun. Under social ownership, an advanced economy of this type makes class distinctions extinct. It makes economic democracy viable, free development of individuals possible and the Communist Party unnecessary—as Mao envisioned.¹⁰

In America, plantation slavery funded industrial capitalism and industrial capitalism, in turn, made slavery obsolete. In China, capitalism is funding a high-tech socialist economy and socialism, in turn, will make capitalism obsolete. Marx wrote in The Poverty of Philosophy: “The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill, society with the industrial capitalist.”¹¹ China finishes the thought: “And the socially-owned robot gives you society without class.”

Thanks for reading!

Footnotes:
1. Mao Zedong, On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People. ↩︎
2. Karl Marx, “The Future Results of British Rule in India,” Dispatches for the New York Tribune: Selected Journalism of Karl Marx (Penguin, 2007), 125. ↩︎
3. Friedrich Engels, The Principles of Communism. ↩︎
4. Karl Marx, “Preface” of A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy: “At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or—this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms—with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto.” ↩︎
5. Michael Hudson, “Finance Capitalism versus Industrial Capitalism: The Rentier Resurgence and Takeover,” in Review of Radical Political Economics, Vol. 53, No. 4: 12. ↩︎
6. Karl Marx, Capital Volume II (Penguin, 1992): 250. ↩︎
7. Minqi Li and Lingyi Wei, “Surplus Absorption, Secular Stagnation & the Transition to Socialism in China,” in Monthly Review Vol. 76, No. 5: 25. ↩︎
8. In particular, see Karl Marx’s Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 and Friedrich Engels’ The Principles of Communism. ↩︎
9. Erich Fromm, “Marx’s Concept of Socialism” in Marx’s Concept of Man: “Marx, the man who every year read all the works of Aeschylus and Shakespeare, who brought to life in himself the greatest works of human thought, would never have dreamt that his idea of socialism could be interpreted as having as its aim the well-fed and well-clad “welfare” or “workers’” state. ↩︎
10. Mao Zedong, On Contradiction and On Practice (Midnight Press, 2023): 47. “To build the Communist Party is in fact to prepare the conditions to eliminate the party and all parties.” ↩︎
11. Karl Marx, “The Metaphysics of Political Economy” in The Poverty of Philosophy. ↩︎
16 Sep 25
Siege Socialism
This article is part of a series on classical Marxism.

When Vladimir Lenin took power after a bloodless coup in November, 1917, shockwaves reverberated through imperial hallways the world over. The world’s first working class government was formed in Moscow and the response was swift. The world’s first working class government was formed in Russia and the response was swift. Intervening were 70,000 Japanese, 50,000 British, 15,000 French, 13,000 American and 4,700 Canadian soldiers ordered to throw back the socialist forces that had deposed the Tsar and aid the ultra-right Russian White Army in seizing Moscow. The Reds, of course, won this war with the support of peasants and workers. But it wouldn’t be long until the USSR was attacked yet again, as the largest invasion force ever assembled poured over Soviet borders under the command of Nazi Germany. In the years following World War II virtually every successful socialist movement—China, Cuba, Chile, North Korea, Afghanistan, Laos, Nicaragua and Vietnam—found itself enmeshed in bloody battles with the US army or CIA-funded guerrilla saboteurs. The 20th century is pockmarked by so much needless bloodshed between advanced Western countries and chronically-poor nations attempting to chart a sovereign path to modernity.

Under the unfortunate conditions of extreme foreign aggression and economic poverty, a heavy-handed, security-focused and state-oriented “siege socialism” developed—a term coined by Michael Parenti.¹ They were tasked with both warding off foreign invasion and simultaneously rapidly growing the industrial base and social development of their people. Like their capitalist counterparts in the first and third worlds, these second-world socialist countries had plenty of defects and sometimes-horrific blights on their record of governance. But Parenti pushes back on any judgement of pitiable failure on their part:

To say that “socialism doesn’t work” is to overlook the fact that it did. In Eastern Europe, Russia, China, Mongolia, North Korea and Cuba, revolutionary communism created a life that was far better than the wretched existence they had endured under feudal lords, military bosses, foreign colonizers and Western capitalists. The end result was a dramatic improvement in living conditions on a scale never before or since witnessed in history. State socialism transformed desperately poor countries into modernized societies in which everyone had enough food, clothing and shelter; where elderly people had secure pensions; and where all children (and many adults) went to school and nobody was denied medical attention. Some of us from poor families who carry around the hidden injuries of class are much impressed by these achievements and are unwilling to dismiss them.²

The siege socialism of Marxist-Leninist regimes locked in an objective rise of living standards and quality of life—impressive, considering the headwinds they faced. But the experience of these states marks a deviation from classical Marxist dictates, which state that the emancipatory revolution must find a home with advanced capitalist states that have negated Western liberal capitalism into a higher order:

Marx himself never imagined that socialism could be achieved in impoverished conditions. Such a project would require almost as bizarre a loop in time as inventing the internet in the Middle Ages. Nor did any Marxist thinker until Stalin imagine this was possible, including Lenin, Trotsky and the rest of the Bolshevik leadership.³

Karl Marx was aware of the cruelties that the bourgeois class and their armies were capable of raining down upon any threat to their economic power. Up to 20,000 people, including women and children, were massacred by the French National Army when they broke up the Paris Commune in 1871, events immortalized in Marx’s essay The Civil War in France. Only a nation that was economically advanced at the outset of revolution would be able to negate capitalist relations along humanistic lines while buttressing against foreign aggression.

Lacking this, 20th century Marxist-Leninist states came to resemble the “crude communism” of Marx’s Paris Manuscripts, where “the role of the worker is not abolished but extended to all men.”⁴ Like the working classes under capitalism, wage labour in siege socialist regimes became universalized, with alienation piqued by irrational bureaucratic decision-making. Individuals in these countries often fell “between two stools,” where,

Workers were told that the property of the means of production belonged to the whole society, including them, but they did not have a decisive role in determining how to employ the machinery or how to dispose of the product. For that reason, Soviet workers considered the “socialist means of production” to be not fully theirs, but someone else’s—or, most often, nobody’s!⁵

And so, there was barely a whimper when party bureaucrats sold out their countries under the tutelage of Western economic advisors. Millions in Eastern Europe lost their job, healthcare, pensions—and starved. Hyperinflation over scarce goods ensued. Life expectancy crashed. Hundreds of thousands of East European women and children disappeared into sex markets, only to resurface over the Internet’s seamiest corners naked, humiliated, exploited. All was right in the world again.

Further reading:

Karl Marx, The Civil War in France.

———–
1. Michael Parenti, Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism (City Lights Books, 1997), 49-52. ↩︎
2. Ibid, 85. ↩︎
3. Terry Eagleton, Why Marx Was Right (Yale University Press, 2011), 16. ↩︎
4. Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. ↩︎
5. Chris Gilbert, “Luisa Cáceres: Commune-Building in Urban Venezuela,” Monthly Review, Vol. 74, No. 7: 26. ↩︎
03 Apr 25