Radical Theory in Context: A Philosophy for Every System
Introduction
The common thread within radical political theory is the belief that the self-emancipation of the oppressed will lead to universal emancipation.
Radical ideology emerged in the context of nineteenth century Europe, but it started moving immediately. The rapid globalization spurred by the competitive culture of imperialism that reached its height in that century, followed by the subsequent domination of global capitalism, exported radical ideology worldwide and into populations that modified and applied it to their circumstances.
The twentieth and twenty first centuries have been a golden age of oppression, yielding a world of answers to the question of how the self-emancipation of the oppressed should be put into action.
Taking three authors, one from the old world at the beginning of the twentieth century, and two from new world states in which they represent different marginalized groups in the twentieth and twenty first century, the common threads of radical ideology can be seen shifting to accommodate new context; through revolutions, wars, occupations, and the rise and fall of regimes, radical theory has maintained its relevance as a school of thought that does not resist change, but rather implores it.
Background
Critical ideas in forming radical theory:
1. Labor theory of property, attributing ownership to labor
2. Utilitarian justification of government, its purpose being to provide the greatest good to the greatest number
3. Doctrine of popular sovereignty, tracing the legitimacy of the government back to the will of the people
Core of the ideology:
A mode of structured critique of political and structural organizations
Diagnosis of impersonal systemic domination or alienation and the desire of universal emancipation
Injustice of the system, we are not equally dominated, we are divided, defence of the dominated
Characterized by division — radicals disagree with one another
Critical concepts in the history of radical political theory
Communism: the ideology of a society in which all property is publicly owned and as such distributed through the state to equalize the population, was founded by Karl Marx.
He wrote the Communist Manifesto, and was active in the second half of the nineteenth century. After a pessimistic period following his exile from Germany, his belief in revolution was renewed by a peasant revolt, which turned his attention to the potential power of the proletariat. This focus on the proletariat was a terrific breakthrough and characterized radical ideology for a long time (it still does, in a way, but no longer specific to a majority).
Vladimir Lenin was a Russian Marxist, and similarly emphasized the power of the proletariat to change the system. His writing was critical to the formation of the USSR when the Russian revolution came to pass, and communism was successfully implemented, but the result of that was simply a new rash of radical thought to try and fix what went wrong there, as the Soviet Union ultimately did not meet the needs of the population as it had been expected to.
Capitalism: Developed under the industrialization in Britain and spread first to nearby European nations because of the competitive relationship between them, productivity was held as a cardinal value. The mode of production it inspired changed manufacturing and then expanded to other industries. Defined by competition between producers, the value of the labourers comes from quantity produced, and every human labourer can be trained to do the same simple task, making them expendable. This set the price of labor very low, which went hand in hand with the massive surge in quantity lowering prices of goods. Once production outgrows the market, there is new incentive to expand, one explanation of British colonialism.
Imperialism: Existed before capitalism was such a dominant force, but was very compatible with it. Colonies provided not just raw goods which could now be processed at a greater pace but also a labor force far more vulnerable to exploitation and an entire new market, because the population of the colony is not just producing goods or contributing to production, they also purchased manufactured items.
The global market: Product of capitalism driving imperialism, shifted when the overhanded colonialism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries eventually dwindled, in part thanks to radical thought itself, which spread to the exploited populations of the colonies and inspired liberation (Lenin!). Unfortunately, new states developing in the same market now not only had to succeed in a system defined by competition, they were expected to function on the same level as the states which had used their resources to get ahead in it.
Radical Theory in Context
Lenin:
Lenin was not proletarian, and his 1902 work What is to be done best expresses his position: Lenin was an educated member of the middle class who was ideologically opposed to the Tsarist regime in Russia, but his opposition intensified when his brother, an active revolutionary, was executed by the state. He was later exiled and settled in Switzerland, a popular decision for European Marxists and revolutionaries. Contrary to many of his contemporaries, who perceived their own involvement as intellectual, and the uprising of the proletariat as beyond their responsibility, Lenin argued that the proletariat were unlikely to incite revolution because the consuming work of being the exploited labor class of a society prevented them from being educated or having the free time to learn about Marxism.
Solution
In the prelude to the Russian revolution, Lenin argued that waiting for the consciousness of the proletariat to activate itself disregards the fact that working people are focused on their immediate world and lack the education or free time to implement a communist system without support. Lenin inflates his role, that of propagandists, in unifying and inspiring the proletarian class. The propagandist publications would prompt resistance that held the spontaneous power of a riot or an uprising, but with superior strategy and ideological motivation. Spontaneity, to Lenin, represented a powerful but unpredictable tool in revolution. Its challenge was in keeping the organic rhythm of the agitation of the masses while maximizing on the force of that agitation, fostering it without interrupting its power.
Time and Place
Lenin’s ideology was applied in Russia, not successfully, but effectively, because it was intended for Russia. The circumstances did call for reform, peasants were not afforded leisure time in which to consider how their circumstances were affected by systemic inequality. The state under the Tsar Nicholas II was in disarray, best exemplified by the Khodynka meadow massacre, where poor planning on the part of the state led to 1,389 people dying when a riot broke out during a poorly planned coronation event. The beginning of Nicholas II’s reign reflected his uncertainty and reliance on the extremely poor advice of his uncle, and the end was famously defined by the influence of Rasputin created by the monarchs’ anxiety about their hemophiliac son and heir, coupled with a complete breakdown of the state that ultimately ended in the royal family’s assassination.
The Russian Tsardom was deeply out of touch with the peasant class, which created the desire for a state in which the population was a priority, an issue that seemed like it would obviously be solved by a communist state.
The circumstances in Russia were specific to that place, and during the same period, in British South Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, a population of peasants resisted the exploitation of the colonial government having never been informed by propaganda. The colonial state treated the population as free labor, African people were relocated to 4 reserves while the best land was distributed to white settlers for plantations. Africans were then forced into agricultural labor, and independent farming was criminalized. In response to these circumstances, the peasant population of the Makoni District refused subjugation — they farmed for subsistence and retreated to inaccessible regions away from colonial forces. They often produced enough to sell and participate in the economy, and during famine they refused government aid and rationed their own resources, knowing that aid was produced by the labor of exploited people elsewhere in the colony.
Here, peasant consciousness activated without intervention, and the role of professional revolutionaries later on was to facilitate communication between villages and engage in hands-on resistance.
Davis
Angela Davis was a staunch defender of Black Americans, women, prisoners, and anybody marginalized by the US government. She was framed for murder because of her involvement in an armed courtroom takeover in 1970, and she avoided federal capture for a year before she was caught and held awaiting federal trial, a national controversy which eventually led to her release in 1972. After her liberation, she continued to campaign tirelessly for the oppressed population of the US.
Solution
Angela Davis was central in speaking against the unjust treatment that Black people, especially Black women, faced in the United States. Women, Race, and Class was her book in which she plans the self-emancipation of the oppressed in her world. In it, the oppressive history of Black women is laid out, from abduction to enslavement to their exclusion from not just the women’s suffrage movement in the 1920, but the reproductive rights movement and feminism in the 60s and 70s. Davis argues that Black women have been relegated to their own category of subaltern, being denied not just their humanity by racism, but also recognition as women as a tool in the culture of slavery. Since femininity was associated with gentleness and softness, Black women had to be excluded in order for society to continue to exploit them as labourers and as breeders. White women were excluded from participating in the public sphere because of how they were characterized as feminine, but Black women became masculine, and this treatment nurtured a character which made them ideal revolutionaries, had they not been so utterly disregarded by other social movements.
To eliminate the remaining obstacle to Black women’s liberation, and women’s liberation in general, Davis believed housework and women’s work ought to be industrialized. Integrating the private sphere into the economic system would force society to attribute the same value to it as any work, and the elimination of the shadowy domestic realm would unmask the injustice that had gone on for so long.
Time and Place
The way in which radical thought developed in the United States was affected by the systemic oppression of major portions of the population. Feminists were pulled towards Marxism the same as Black Americans and the remaining indigenous population. Socialism had some momentum until the 1950s, but the Cold War conflict demonized socialism and its strongest period afterwards wasn’t until the 1970s, with the national response to the Vietnam war.
As the most powerful enforcer of global capitalism, the United States maintains the systems which prompt reactionary responses across the world, but many schools of radical theory also developed in response to domestic policy, from within. Despite its global influence, the United States has been, and continues to be, a system plagued by dysfunction. Angela Davis fought against the systemic alienation of Black Americans and Black women that has been a constant presence in the US.
The 19th amendment in 1920 granted women the right to vote, but many Black women didn’t until the civil rights movement beginning in the 1950s, when Americans called for the dismantling of segregationist policy and Jim Crow laws. Segregation ended in 1963 — up until that point, Black Americans were kept physically separate and legally subordinated in many American states.
Around the same period there was the first wave of feminism and the campaign for reproductive rights, in which birth control was framed as a way for women to take back their bodies on the grounds of “voluntary motherhood”. This utterly ignored the history of contraceptives and its deep association with the premise of controlling the Black population by controlling Black women’s bodies. Davis cites the abortion rights movement’s ignorance to its own foundation as characteristic of the treatment of race in the United States.
Coulthard
Glen Coulthard is a Yellowknives Dene professor at the University of British Columbia. He wrote Red Skins, White Masks in 2014, reflecting radical ideology shaped by his identity as a first nations person in Canada in the twentieth century. Like Black Americans in the United States, aboriginal people whose societies existed before colonization did not have any interest in being a part of the Canadian state, let alone marginalized within it, giving reactionary ideology expansive ground in which to take root. Coulthard’s academic career has focused on indigenous governance and philosophy, and it is on this platform that he defends first nations peoples’ land and rights to the persistent threat of the Canadian state.
Solution
Coulthard’s vision for self-emancipation from systemic oppression is collective detachment of the aboriginal population from the institution that has shown no interest in improving their conditions. Not only are they confined to a system they did not ask for, but they actually asked to be excluded from it and were forcefully ignored. The acceptance of colonial domination in the hopes of better conditions has failed to yield positive results, leaving no incentive to engage anymore. Coulthard’s solution, in which he imagines a new system informed by Marxism and the agricultural and economic traditions that have nearly been lost under colonialism, functions as resistance through reclamation.
Time and Place
The Canadian government has a demonstrative relationship of goodwill with the indigenous population; land acknowledgements are issued reliably and aboriginal people with documentation are exempted from taxation. When representatives of the indigenous population point out the overall inadequacy of Canadian reconciliation, they are written off as ungrateful and accused of holding onto past negativity when they should be accepting the reality of their conditions and moving forward.
The reality of conditions is hard to accept, despite tax breaks and subheadings that spell out indigenous names underneath English on occasional signs and landmarks.
Reservations are inadequately served in infrastructure and social services, the rural expanses where populations have been relegated can see prices for food and other essentials that cost 10 times more than the average city. Alcoholism, drug abuse, and mental illness run rampant in the environment of hopelessness, and as Canada boasts programs to improve these issues, those programs are obviously not effective enough, if they can be considered effective at all.
Influence of Time
The rate of change between 1900 and the 2000 redefined progress, and that progress both nurtured reactionary theory and pushed back against it. Colonialism defined the periphery/core relationship between states, also defined as first world/second world/ third world or developed/developing, and it was in that context that capitalism and the global market bloomed with a competitive culture that brought a surge of technological advancement in any field that could be profitable. The entire world raced to be included in the competition, if they weren’t struggling to stay afloat in the wake of decolonization.
Radical theory has been made accessible by the major improvement in accessibility of education, giving the oppressed the tools to acquire information other than what is handed to them. The prospects of changing an oppressive system are greatly improved with the power to seek out resources that afford a greater perspective and a critical gaze.
Although literacy is disproportionately improved in the states that benefit from the system, the shift still reaches beyond “core countries”.
The internet is another force opening not only a world of information but also a community — although many marginalized populations, especially in post-colonial societies, do not have widely accessible internet, many do, and that has changed how people interact with their institutions, space and time are condensed by the internet in a way that allows new conversations to take place that could not have before.
Influence of Place
Colonized vs Colonist
In states that colonized others, the exploitation of the proletariat usually ended with the opportunity to subjugate people who were not included within national identity, and in the post-colonial era systemic oppression became marginalization of sections of the population differentiated from those in power by qualities like race, gender, or religion.
Coulthard’s perspective as a first nations person in Canada reflects a different history than the United States, which was also decimated by European disease, but more aggressively extinguished by American colonists. The indigenous population in the US is much smaller, there is little prospect of improvement on the modern reservation system, which mirror the conditions of Canadian reserves.
In countries that were defined by varying degrees of colonial involvement, independence brought the decision between reappropriating the colonial system or attempting to create an entirely new state. During this period, those who sided with radical thought pushed for an entirely new system, but they went against US backed governments with disproportionate means at their disposal.
In Latin America there was an explosion of revolutionary activity during the Cold War, when radical ideology found a solid foothold in response to the post-colonial governments which maintained the same power dynamics and European superiority that had been there before. The population was more integrated than the United States and Canada from the beginning, and often highly educated individuals of mixed descent encountered Marx and other radical propagandists and ignited revolutionary effort that united a subsection of the privileged with the broader population. Figures like Che Guevara, Fidel Castro, Salvador Allende, and Huge Chavez were all influenced by Marx and their efforts were intended to benefit the alienated rural poor, people whose lives were not the concern of the institutions of power in their countries, but whose land represented a trove of wealth for whoever controlled it. The indigenous populations of these countries were largely peasant farmers, represented prominently by Evo Morales, the socialist, indigenous President of Bolivia who overstayed his time in power but represented a positive shift in representation in the political culture of Latin America.
Compared to the new world, postcolonial states and reactionary ideology in Asia and Africa were similarly shaped by the exploitation and oppression that the populations endured under colonial administration, but the disparity in the size of the empowered population was profound. At their most balanced, 10% of the population subjugated the other 90%. As a result, radical theory developed differently than it did in Canada and the United States, and Australia, where institutions have shifted but not dramatically, and Latin America, where the population was more mixed but also more differentiated by the urban-rural divide. Often the organizations that represented socialist, anti-capitalist interests were supported by the USSR before it fell, and the powers that benefitted from the dominance of global capitalism used subversive tactics to weaken them.
Conclusion
Ultimately, what defines radical theory is not its unified approach, but its answer to a problem and set of values. The question of how the oppressed should emancipate themselves goes hand in hand with conditions in which a population experiences systemic domination, because that is what creates the need for universal emancipation, the unifying goal in radical theory. Everything else is determined by circumstance, and this has been the aspect of radical theory that preserved its relevance in a period of rapid advancement and monopolized power. As ideology goes, it is flexible and versatile, and it finds ground where monopolized power causes harm.
See Also / Sources
Global Literacy since 1800:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/literate-and-illiterate-world-population
Overview of the Khodynka tragedy at the beginning of Nicholas II reign:
https://www.rbth.com/history/332466-khodynka-tragedy-coronation
How suffrage came late to Black women:
https://time.com/5876456/black-women-right-to-vote/
BBC report on substance abuse among aboriginal Canadians:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-41192817
CTV report on food prices in aboriginal communities:
Background on Angela Davis:
https://time.com/5793638/angela-davis-100-women-of-the-year/
Coulthard, Glen. Red Skins, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014.
Davis, Angela. Women, Race, and Class. New York: Random House, 1981.
Lenin, Vladimir Il’ich, and Henry M. Christman. 1987. “What is to be done?” and other writings.
Ranger, Terence. Peasant Consciousness and War in Zimbabwe: A Comparative Study. Suffolk: James Currey, 1985.
Roberts, Will. POLI364 Radical Political Theory. McGill University, Montreal QC. Winter semester 2021.
