Delegates at the International Socialist Congress in Stuttgart, 1907, source: Wikipedia
On Revolution and New Forms of Anti-Capitalist Communal Living[1]
(1) The Charismatic Oedipal Revolutionaries
The spectre of Marxism-Leninism haunts the ranks of the global Left! Lithuania, in this regard, is no exception. Young people—mostly Gen Z, but also some of the younger Millennials—who never lived in the Soviet Union and never experienced how “cool” that system supposedly was, after listening to dubious American (and sometimes Russian) podcasts, dream of a Marxist-Leninist revolution. They regard other leftists—including those who read Marx but question Lenin’s interpretation of Marx and Lenin’s practice—as liberals. They yearn for the Soviet Union and want to bring back the hammer and sickle (as symbols) without any historical-cultural sensitivity to Eastern Europe. They—the charismatic Oedipal revolutionaries—do not speak with their parents and do not believe in their historical experience. They are for Palestine but against NATO countries providing military aid to Ukraine. The revolutionaries are for disarmament and against the militarization of society—even in the face of aggressive neo-fascist Russia. Moreover, some of them believe the nonsense that World War III is inevitable.
This newly reawakened revolutionary romanticism deserves deeper reflection. It matters not only because it is a symptom of our times. On the one hand, it is a grimace of neoliberal capitalism, which creates a cultural-social context of disgust, boredom, meaninglessness, and, of course, economic deprivation. The liberal-capitalist reality is indeed boring and meaningless: office work, careers, dubious-quality academic studies that, in Lithuania (especially by its employers), are treated as mere tools of the market; mortgages that many young people cannot obtain; consumption (pointless, environmentally damaging travel on budget airlines, food and other basic goods transported thousands of miles and sold in monopolistic shopping centres, etc.). It is a meaningless closed cycle of routine—an absurd Sisyphus-like existence in a context of growing inequality and deepening social injustice.
On the other hand, such revolutionary romanticism is not new. It characterized the entire 20th century—from György Lukács’ Leninism, which, as Alasdair MacIntyre argued, later forced him to renounce his own work during Stalin’s repressions, to the revolutionaries of 1968 in France, Germany, and Italy. In the 1990s, repeating the TINA (There Is No Alternative) mantra, revolutionary romanticism had subsided, but it has now been reborn in today’s world in its strange post-truth form. The Marxism-Leninism of today’s young revolutionaries is an example of one of Max Weber’s “gods” (in the negative, idolatrous sense—as “our subjective values and the desires and cravings associated with them”[2]). It is yet another subjective position that casts a handful of radicals into the trenches of self-alienation from the rest of the Left and their “righteous” zeal. They cannot climb out of these trenches because doing so would require solidarity and a historically reflective reason oriented toward practice.
The development of socialism and communism in Europe (and Americas) since the time of the First International is a history of splits and fragmentations, violence, and defeats. During the First International, Bakunin’s anarchists split from the international labour movement; the Second International collapsed with the onset of the First World War, which gave rise to the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, Lenin’s founding of the Third International, and the civil war across the former Russian Empire. Thanks to Trotsky’s enormous efforts, cunning, and cruelty, the Bolsheviks won the civil war—but their growing success also meant the Red Army’s aggression against the newly established Republic of Lithuania in 1919.
Lenin’s proclaimed anti-imperialism up to 1917 gradually morphed into revolutionary military aggression. This, combined with ideological quarrels between Karl Kautsky and Lenin, led to the great split within the Left (i.e., the Marx-informed social-democratic movement) in the early 20th century: between the European communist parties that joined the Third International and were, under Stalin, controlled and supported by Moscow’s Communist Party[3], and the European social-democratic parties. The Moscow “communist” party created a totalitarian one-party system of state capitalism[4] based on repression and violence, while the Western European social-democratic parties—never able to transform society by socializing the means of production—became reformist parties, which today differ little from other bourgeois parties. Neither the social-democratic parties of Europe, which built post-war welfare states, nor the totalitarian Soviet Union eliminated workers’ alienation or the “slavery” of wage labour. This split deepened further during the Cold War, when the militarization on both sides reached the madness of a nuclear arms race.
The restoration of Lithuanian independence coincided with the deepest crisis of Marxism as a political project. The neoliberal tale of “there is no alternative,” told for thirty years, along with economic globalization, froze wages (in Western Europe and the USA), unleashed speculative profits, and created massive inequality and exclusion. In Lithuania, this exclusion is somewhat mitigated by the social infrastructure coercively built during the Soviet era and the real estate privatized for free by our parents, as well as by a young economy fuelled by ambition and very hard work, and rising wages. Today Lithuania is prospering—even if that prosperity belongs to a relatively small part of society. Massive emigration (in 1990, there were 3.5 million inhabitants in Lithuania, while today there are only 2.83 million!) and demographic crisis are the consequences of the economic transformation in the first decades of independence. The skyrocketing prices of real estate and other essential goods will soon result in a housing affordability crisis, growing inequality, and poverty among ordinary working men and women.
The greatest challenges today are the threat of ecological catastrophe, geopolitical instability, and the crisis of political representation[5]. The reality of neo-imperialism fractures societies around the world, and the universal effort to reduce pollution is increasingly being sidelined. The Donald Trumps[6], Viktor Orbáns, Vladimir Putins, and other fascist-leaning politicians divide the world, carve it up, promote planet-destroying extractivism, and push a false 19th-century-style geopolitical-imperialist illusion that the world is ruled solely by the strong. So it’s no surprise that young charismatic revolutionaries seek radical alternatives and promote revolution.[7]
What could such a revolution mean—if we reject the irrationality of Marxism-Leninism?
(2) Marxist-Leninists – Weberians-Nietzscheans
Alasdair MacIntyre – a Scottish philosopher who matured intellectually in Britain and who until very recently lived in the U.S. before his recent death – argued in his famous book After Virtue (1981) that when Marxists come to power, they become the same kind of Weberians as the vast majority of our boring politicians. This idea is a pearl of wisdom whose content is not easy to grasp.
Until his emigration to the U.S. in the late 1960s, MacIntyre was a Marxist, actively involved in various radical left movements, including the Communist Party of Great Britain[8]. In his philosophical thought, always emphasizing the unity of theory and practice, he understood Marxism not only as the most ambitious tradition of modern thought – one that comprehensively explains human existence and can motivate people to act and change the world together – but also as a theory whose deepest meaning is revealed only when it informs political action.
Unlike today’s Marxists dominant in U.S. and European academia[9], who treat Marx’s thought solely as another object of academic study, MacIntyre understood and committed to Marxism as a political (and theoretical) project. In other words, MacIntyre never compartmentalized Marxism into theory and practice (as two separate registers), but always regarded it as a theory that informs practice – as the only modern intellectual tradition in which theoretical reflection and political action exist in unity and harmony.
It was precisely for this reason that MacIntyre distanced himself from Marxism[10] when he realized – around the beginning of the 1970s – that 1) Marxism could no longer explain the social and economic reality of the time, and 2) that as a political project, Marxism led to terrorist violence, where a small group of revolutionaries à la Lenin, who supposedly know better what people need, impose their ideology and political vision on the whole society through political coercion. In MacIntyre’s view, Marxism in this latter sense is a bankrupt political tradition.
In other words, when Marxists come to power, they become Weberians in the sense that they pursue power in a Weberian-Nietzschean way – the will to power – where ends are imposed from above by the Leninist-revolutionary elite and are thus not a matter of broader political debate. What remains is only the selection of appropriate means to achieve those ends (that is, instrumental-bureaucratic Weberian rationality). In this way, they become either „cool” Brezhnev-style bureaucrats or soulless apparatchiks and Dudėnai[11] of social-democratic parties.
Nevertheless, having renounced Marxism-Leninism, MacIntyre never rejected Marx or the critique of injustice under capitalism that flows from his theoretical analysis. At the same time, he never distanced himself from the claim that he is a communist in the broadest sense of the word. Of course, the essential question (or, as Americans would say, the billion-dollar question!) is how we are to understand communism today, and what its real (not utopian) practical possibilities and forms are.
(3) Revolution and Communism as New Forms of Communal Living
From what has already been said, it does not follow that the rejection of Marxism-Leninism means that socialism and communism (a truly terrifying word to the “educated” society of Lithuania!) have no future today. In the broadest sense, I understand communism as a society of communal living and sharing, in which wealth is understood and treated not in terms of exchange value (that is, in terms of the limitless accumulation of money), but as the sum of all use-values necessary for human existence, which is and can only be limited. These forms of sharing and communal living must emerge from below, from society itself, from communities, and not be imposed by a Leninist elite of revolutionaries. That is precisely why the historical experience of the failed and infamous totalitarian project of the Soviet Union (which we, the citizens of Lithuania, know all too well) is so important!
Not to mention the madness of claiming that communism will only be possible after a terrible catastrophe—say, a Third World War.
(By the way, the idea that the war in Ukraine will not end in Ukraine alone (as claimed by Spanish leftist Raúl Sánchez Cedillo), and that Europe’s militarization as a right response to Putin’s neo-fascist Russia will lead to a Third World War, is absurd for one reason. The dynamics of militarization in Europe and the war in Ukraine is a dialectic of mutual fear. Vladimir Putin is a coward who, when Yevgeny Prigozhin turned toward Moscow, rushed to evacuate and hide. As an autocratic dictator who kills his political opponents with impunity, Putin calculates every move of his adversaries and fears European unity—so he does everything to undermine it. I believe this is precisely how we should interpret recent US intelligence that Russia is massing forces at the Finnish border. The reason, I believe, is Putin’s fear and illusion that democratic Finland, now a NATO member and capable of mobilizing up to 280,000 troops, with a reserve of potentially up to 900,000 citizens trained in military exercises (!), will attack Russia to reclaim territories lost in the Finland-Soviet war. In other words, the man looting Ukraine assumes everyone else is a looter. Of course, this is speculation, and we, ordinary citizens, probably will not learn the real reasons, but basic psychology leads to just such a conclusion. Nevertheless, Putin—unlike Donald Trump—is not an egomaniacal idiot, nor is he insane. He is strategically pursuing his Great Russian chauvinist goals. But the main point is this: Russia, even with its militarized economy, whose capacity is roughly the size of Italy’s, and with 140 million people, has never matched and never will match the economy and military power of the EU and the UK, with their combined 500 million. And Putin understands this—he will never attack, say, Lithuania or other NATO members as he does Ukraine.)
You don’t have to be a follower of Thomas Hobbes to understand that war and catastrophe do not bring out the best in people—they bring out the worst. That’s precisely why the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia during the First World War (born in the context of poverty and violence) did not bring liberation, but another form of capitalist oppression (albeit very different from Western capitalism). War and experienced violence generate not freedom, but new forms of oppression and coercion[12]. (In this sense, I fundamentally disagree with my comrade Andrius Mažeika, who claims that Palestinians in Gaza are truly free[13].) That is why our first imperative as people of good will engaged in politics must be to preserve peace in the world—even if this capitalist world is deeply unjust and rotten. And this is because evil has no bottom: it is an abyss.
At the same time, I understand communism as feminism. For far too long, humanity has been ruled by patriarchal macho men ready to kill for honour, power, sex, and money. The time has come for wise women’s political leadership. This is precisely why KArtu (Lithuanian Left Alliance) and other left-wing parties in Europe and the world are so important. These leftist parties must commit to a grassroots communist—i.e., non-commodified forms of togetherness—nonviolent revolution. This requires not only democratically organized leftist political parties acting within the institutional framework of our currently very imperfect democracies but also a mass political movement of people of good will, whose aim is to create, nurture, and institutionalize non-commodified forms of social communal living.
What forms of communal living—of communist life—do I have in mind? Of course, I do not claim to answer this “billion-dollar” question here. Yet reflecting on it is the main goal of critical theory.
Let us start with this: such a transformation would require the rule of a political majority enjoying universal public support, which would, first, socialize the banking system in a society (say, in the EU) to make investment in socially oriented technologies (not in private profits) possible—including a socialized industry of AI fostering automation. The purpose of such a people-oriented monetary system would be to support meaningful practices[14] and activities (various art forms and genres, sciences, journalism, architecture, engineering, agriculture, medicine, sports disciplines, etc.). This system would treat money solely as a means to satisfy the diverse needs of human beings. Simultaneously, during the transitional period, the only justification for money in today’s market economy would be to proclaim and practice that money is a tool of love (in the Bergsonian sense of his The Two Sources of Morality and Religion) and sharing with others. Answering the key question of how this could work in practice would be the primary goal of the theoretical-political project of the political left—as both party and movement—i.e., in terms of public policy. Without political-state power, this goal is impossible (in this sense Marx, and not Bakunin or other anarchists, was and remains right).
Second, it would mean the rise of a universal political-social movement from below—from individual civic initiatives (but supported by state power) to collective attempts to create productive cooperatives —including a trade union movement as part of it. The aim would be to transform the modern capitalist profit-based economy into an economic system based on the socialization of the means of production. Aristotle, in his Nicomachean Ethics, convincingly (and irrefutably) showed that people who consider the accumulation of money to be happiness are the greatest fools. Everyone understands that happiness is not found in money and that money is a means, not an end. Yet capitalism as an economic system is based precisely on institutionalizing this stupidity. Publicly denouncing and repeating the absurdity of this ridiculous stupidity would be one of the aims of this anti-capitalist social movement. A flourishing human life means a life of meaningful activities and practices, in which we—as a society and as individuals—can enjoy our creativity and wisdom, where healthy human envy of another creator’s better work inspires competition not for egocentric Nietzschean power and money but for the standards of excellence inherent in practices and meaningful activities.
The goal of such a socio-political movement would be economic democracy, where productive-economic practices and other meaningful activities are organized based on two principles: the internal standards of excellence of these practices and the egalitarian self-organization of all its members. But this should not mean a crude formal democracy governed by the egocentric-irrational whim of fools (or postmodern hypersensitivity), i.e., the idiotic principle “who are you to tell me that—I know better,” a practice which, according to Plato, makes teachers fear their students and where the authority of rationality and wisdom ceases to exist.
On the philosophical-theoretical level, this would mean that (political) practice comes first, theory second—or more precisely, that theory must emerge from and be intimately connected to the political practice of creating—here and now!—such alternative new forms of communism and democracy. Are we, comrades of KArtu!, ready for this incredibly ambitious goal—for the true revolution, which is and can be above all (but not only!) a spiritual-intellectual revolution in the Socratic-Bergsonian sense?
Why Socrates? Because he never began with grand theories or claims, but ironically stated he knew nothing—and then launched his carousel of questions and answers that revealed his interlocutors did not know what they were talking about. Only once they admitted this could they move toward Socrates’ insight that aretē (virtue or excellence) is knowledge. Unlike Aristotle (and in this sense we should follow Socrates, not Aristotle), Socrates spoke of aretē in the singular—which does not mean he regarded aretai such as wisdom, courage, moderation, and justice as synonyms. They are different, but Socrates believed that lacking one means lacking them all—he believed in the unity of the virtues.
Why Henri Bergson? Because Bergson spoke of an open society and open morality, in which the common good is not achieved through autocratic coercion (which can create only a culturally impoverished closed society), but through a love for humanity (in the sense of love of one’s neighbour!) and a shared effort to live together. So, comrades, the future is bright—the future is feminist green communism!
Andrius Bielskis – philosopher, professor at Kaunas University of Technology (KTU) and Mykolas Romeris University (MRU), member of KArtu (Lithuanian Left Alliance), currently a visiting research scholar in New York at the CUNY Graduate Center.
[1] I dedicate this essay to all my comrades and friends around the world who consider themselves Marxist-Leninists. At the same time, I dedicate it to my philosophical teacher Alasdair MacIntyre (whom I have never had the privilege of being taught by in a classroom setting), who, after I sent him my article („Anti-Capitalist Politics and Labour for the Twenty-first Century: History and Future Challenges”, in Andrius Bielskis & Kelvin Knight (eds), Virtue and Economy: Essays on Morality and Markets, London: Routledge, 2015), replied: „you have said what most needs to be said here and now and that it could not have been said better. It is an excellent paper. The unsolved problem however is how to turn these thoughts into a real politics?” It has taken almost ten years to formulate a very preliminary and far too brief response to this question. Sadly, I sent this essay to Alasdair MacIntyre just two weeks before his passing on 21 May 2025, and I never received a reply. The printed version of this essay is also available in Lūžis, Vol. 11, June 2025. I sent this essay for publication to Jacobin (jacobin.com) and later to Anticapitalist Resistance (anticapitalistresistance.org), but both rejected it – ironically confirming the very claim made in the essay: that far too often, the international Left is, alas, more interested in clinging to its own views – its Weberian “idols of the tribe” – than confronting an inconvenient truth.
[2] Andrius Bielskis, 2023 „Politinė filosofija kaip pašaukimas“ (“Political Philosophy as Beruf”) Problemos, Vol. 104, p. 170.
[3] According to a childhood memory of a comrade of mine from Finland: the father returns from Moscow with a suitcase full of rubbles to support the struggling Finnish Communist Party.
[4] As for the claim that the Soviet Union was neither socialism nor communism, but established “state capitalism”, see Raya Dunayevskaya, 1941, “The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics is a Capitalist Society”, www.marxists.org [accessed: 2025-05-01].
[5] For a more detailed discussion of the crisis of political representation, see the Editorial of the 10th issue of Lūžis.
[6] One of Donald Trump’s official campaign slogans was “drill, baby, drill!”.
[7] „One solution — revolution!” — this is a slogan heard among street protesters. The problem, of course, is that no one knows either what the content of this revolution is or how to organize it. Unless one believes in the madness that a world war would bring the possibility of a true revolution. I will return to this madness later.
[8] Precisely for that reason, in the post-McCarthy witch-hunt climate, the U.S. initially did not want to allow MacIntyre into the country.
[9] Somewhat exaggerating it, I dare say that in the best U.S. universities, Marx’s analysis and the critical theory derived from it are one of the dominant academic discourses. This is one of the reasons why Donald Trump attacks American universities.
[10] MacIntyre’s break with Marxism does not have a single, definitive date, and his statements that Marxism has collapsed but that we must begin anew allow for an interpretation of him as a Marxist in the broadest sense of the term. His definitive departure from Marxism occurs after he relocates to the United States and begins his After Virtue philosophical project. MacIntyre’s distancing from Marxism is a distancing from Marxism-Leninism. It is a rejection of the belief that a revolutionary elite, by means of force, can seize power from above and transform society to create “communism”.
[11] Mr Arūnas Dudėnas is a Lithuanian Social Democrat MP (a man without qualities, to paraphrase Robert Musil) who has been charged with petty corruption, but the Lithuanian parliament, dominated by Social Democrats, acquitted him of legal prosecution.
[12] It is deeply tragic, but this is what we are witnessing in today’s Israel—a society that once endured the Holocaust, yet whose government is now carrying out a genocide in Gaza and encouraging settler-driven unlawful violence in the West Bank.
[13] See Andrius Mažeika, 2024. „Palestiniečiai laisvi. O mes?“ (“Palestinians Are Free. And Us?”), Lūžis, No. 10, pp. 41–49.
[14] Here I use the concept of ‘practice’ strictly in the sense defined by Alasdair MacIntyre.