Kenny Lake, Summer 2024

I wrote The Specter That Still Haunts in 2015, a year when the extreme low point the communist movement in the US had sunk to was most glaringly apparent. Rebellions against police brutality, by Black proletarians and others, were shaking society, but without any solid organized revolutionary forces to lead them, a coterie of opportunists went into a feeding frenzy, profiting (often literally) from the rebellions of the masses and misleading a new generation waking up to the horrors of capitalism. That new generation was bombarded with paltry political programs, rooted in postmodernism and varieties of Leftist dogmatism, that warped their brains and offered no revolutionary path forward. One objective of The Specter That Still Haunts was to intervene, in the struggle in the realm of theory, against postmodernism and Leftist dogmatism to argue for communist principles, and hopefully win a few people over to those principles.

Yet the larger aim of writing The Specter That Still Haunts had less to do with intervening in the specific moment and more to do with addressing longstanding theoretical weaknesses in the communist movement, in the US and internationally. Anyone seeking to make revolution must figure out the primary social forces on which revolution in their circumstances must be based and the antagonistic contradictions in society that can propel those social forces into motion. In the communist movement in general, a rather static notion of the proletariat as the industrial working-class has continued to hold considerable sway. While genuine communists understood the revolutionary potential of the peasantry in the oppressed countries and the need to go “lower and deeper” to the more exploited and oppressed sections of the proletariat in the imperialist countries, our theoretical understanding had not advanced much beyond those correct propositions while the workings of capitalism had given rise to radical social transformations and new class configurations.

Locating a revolutionary class within contemporary capitalism-imperialism required a rupture with dogmatic understandings of the proletariat as a class, and with mechanical conceptions of class in general. The latter fail to deal with the greater fluidity of class under capitalism in comparison with previous modes of production in which class was a more fixed, hereditary position from generation to generation. To make that rupture, Part 1 of The Specter That Still Haunts re-examines the ways that Marx, Engels, and Lenin theorized the forms of motion of capital and the development of the proletariat as a class and pushes back against erroneous conceptions that have supplanted them over the last century. Part 2 deals directly with what has changed under capitalism-imperialism in recent decades and how that has affected class formation on a global scale. Part 3 seeks to make up for a shortcoming in the international communist movement, namely a lack of summation of recent revolutionary experiences. It focuses specifically on how some communist parties managed to make advances in relation to changed conditions and new class configurations and what we might take as universal lessons from those experiences. Part 4 applies the theoretical concepts and analytical insights gained through this work to the contemporary US, with the aim of understanding their strategic implications for making revolution.

Since The Specter That Still Haunts was written nearly a decade ago, capital and class formation have continued to move, and undoubtedly the specific analyses I wrote in 2015 will need to be modified and developed. Just to cite one example: how has the immigrant proletariat in the US changed, with new waves of migrants, new kinds of proletarian jobs, and new political policies on the part of bourgeoisie? This question and many others will need to be taken up in the pages of the journal Going Against the Tide by the growing ranks of communist cadre in the US. The Specter That Still Haunts hopefully offers some useful analytical methods for taking up these questions, especially its emphasis on processes rather than static categories. One formulation in The Specter That Still Haunts that I would write differently today is the idea of capitalism becoming imperialism in the late-nineteenth century, a description that is “corrected” in Part 1 of With a Few Exceptions, Colonialism Is Over, published in the first issue of Going Against the Tide.

Not surprisingly, reception to The Specter That Still Haunts has been quite mixed. Those stuck in dogmatic and mechanical conceptions of class in general and the proletariat in particular, looking to relive the glory days of past class struggles and revolutions, are quite hostile to its core thesis. People beholden to postmodernism and the Left have largely ignored it. But a few young comrades have taken up its analysis and applied it to the task of changing the world, sinking roots among the masses and making small but significant advances organizing them in class struggle and developing their class-consciousness, revolutionary organization, and fighting capacity. While there are still too few of such comrades to thoroughly test out the core thesis of The Specter That Still Haunts, their refusal of dogmatism and rejection of mechanical thinking, love for the masses, and restlessness about making advances towards revolutionary objectives have been inspiring. To them, and to all those joining with them, I dedicate this 2024 edition of The Specter That Still Haunts.