I
What we talk about when we talk about Marxism
The most influential avatars of Marxism today are its gravediggers. The global left is saturated with tendencies that approach Marxism through a fog of preconceived dogmas that are in themselves liberal in essence and moralizing in form. Generations of activists are handed pre-digested quotation-bricks, stripped of their historical and theoretical context, curated to flatter the Party-line of the day. The neoliberal education system and the generalized laziness of intellectual commodity-consumption have produced a culture in which serious study of the revolutionary tradition is treated as a curious relic—an eccentricity at best, an infantile pathology of “armchairism” at worst. The result is a “Marxism” that serves every class’ interest in reforming, advancing, modernizing, and ultimately maintaining class society, but the proletariat’s need for its abolition.
Over half a century ago, Jean-Paul Sartre remarked that Marxism remains the philosophy of our time because we have not yet overcome the conditions that gave it birth. Today, as capital universalizes its crisis, the relevance of genuine Marxism, a classist school of thought and method of action, is more acute than ever. Yet in the parties and sects that claim his name, Marx survives only as a ceremonial effigy and not as a partisan of a class at war.
The Marxist Forum upholds the “orthodoxy” of Marxism, and thus speaks of Marxism, in one sense and one only: the ceaseless commitment to the critical and dialectical-materialist method of immanent critique.
Theory is the self-knowledge of reality. Self-knowledge because it is internal and practically reflexive, not knowledge which descends from God’s vantage or one attained through a bird’s eye-view. Thus it is because of this that even Marxism does not escape history. It is not a transcendental-universal philosophical worldview that, armed with abstract general presuppositions, one applies to all societies, indiscriminate of historical and social development, but a radically historicizing and self-historicizing theory of capitalist society: reality today can only be capitalist reality, and social being can only be capitalist-being. Marxism is not confined to one phase of capitalist development in one corner of the world at one particular period in time, but discovering and observing through immanent reasoning its internal laws, remains valid for the entire period of capitalist endurance—from its budding episodes to its glorious end. Marxism is thus the self-understanding of capitalist society.
We define Marxism not as the thought and philosophy of Karl Marx, or the “socialist” national-capitalist system-building attributed to him, but in strict accordance with the first thesis of the Milan Congress of 1952, the foundational statement on the historical invariance of Marxism produced by the Italian Left: Marxism is not a personal doctrine attached to the name of an individual universal reformer, however exceptional, but the theoretical consciousness that the proletariat acquires in the course of its world-historic struggle against capital. It is the general theory of the proletarian revolution, the expression of the real movement that abolishes the present state of things.
Thus, the Forum does not treat Marxism as a corpse to be dissected or a heritage to be managed. It understands Marxism as the class-centric doctrine that accompanies the world’s working class along the entire arc of its self-emancipation, from its first resistances to the final liquidation of classes, private property, and mercantile life.
II
Work, Rules, Principles
The Forum is not a physical place. It is not an office, a café, an apartment, a classroom, a Signal groupchat—it is a meeting of militants and partisans who have, for one reason or another, set themselves the task of abolishing class society. The Forum is a relationship among people, a practical activity—pagtitipon; bundling, in discourses theoretical and political. Its work consists in the collective, systematic, and self-critical study of classist revolutionary theory, above all those that constitute the theoretical and political arsenal of the proletariat, but also the critical examination of later deformations, counter-revolutionary recessions, and the concrete problems posed by capitalist crisis. The Forum’s activity is not an end to be sought in and for itself, but a means to the historical necessity of rearming the revolutionary movement with the clarity it has been stripped of.
The Marxist Forum consists of two groups: Group A and Group B.
Group A is the moderating body of the Forum, composed of volunteers, indiscriminate of their political tendency. This group does not fancy itself to be a Central Executive Committee or a Politburo. It prepares the study materials, organizes the meetings and general activities, maintains the rigor of discourse, and overall ensures that the Forum is a comradely space to ask, learn, discuss, and simply be in. It serves as the editorial body to the Forum’s journal organ, Agtipon.
Group B, or the Education Group, is the main membership body of the Forum, consisting of most tendencies within the Philippine Left (which includes non-Marxists and non-Communists). It partakes in and initiates group discussions, sets interest in topics and activities, gives feedback to the courses developed by Group A, and is generally the steam of the piston. Group B also submits theoretical, journalistic, reflective, and other relevant essays and articles to Agtipon.
These two groups are not independent from but constitutive of each other; A is from B and members of B may volunteer to their capacities to join A. Likewise, members of A may for reasons be incapable of moderator-work and join B, or simply request so. Group A is not the “core group” while Group B is the “orbit group”: A is merely an organ of B and B is the body of A.
General principles
- No party-line. The Forum identifies with no enduring tendency, current, or party within the historical Philippine Left or abroad. Its participants, be they moderators or otherwise, may hold and defend their own reasoned positions, including partisan commitments external to the Forum. Every willing person is welcome: what is mandatory inside the Forum is not adherence to a line, but submission of all positions to the tribunal of critique, evidence, and theoretical coherence. The Forum is an intersection point where the fractured Marxist Left, or what remains, can meet on the terrain of doctrine itself, testing every claim against the invariant principles of the class struggle.
- No authority ‘cept the argument. No text, no historical figure, no self-proclaimed vanguardship, no people’s war is immune from rigorous interrogation. The Forum recognizes no intellectual property in revolutionary theory. The “Party-line” carries zero weight here; only the strength of demonstration and fidelity to the communist project.
- Study is a moment of practical preparation. The Forum is not a political party, nor does it pretend that book study substitutes for the direct, insurrectionary action of the working masses. But the revolution demands that its conscious elements undertake the disciplined theoretical labor without which practice degenerates into blind activism or tailism. The Forum is one modest instrument in that preparatory work, a workshop of clarification, and not a general staff issuing orders.
- Commitment to proletarian self-abolition. Participation in the Forum presupposes a shared minimal orientation: the overcoming of wage-labor, classes, the State, and the whole complex of mercantile relations which today wholly engender social being. Those who seek a more humane management of capital or a radical-liberal exit from the current order will find no home here. The Forum is constituted by friends of the classless society, who abhor in their very being the architects of a better capitalism.
- Discipline of anonymity. Within the Forum, arguments carry no rank. A moderator’s position is merely the willingness to volunteer for the smooth operation of the Forum, ensuring that it is a space in which critical dialogue blossoms instead of rotting into sectarian shit-slinging. A participant’s length of organizational membership, theoretical reputation, or personal biography grants no presumptive authority over the conclusions of debate. The Forum institutionalizes, in however modest a form, what the communist program demands that the general interest be determinable only through collective, critical deliberation, and not through the accumulated prestige of individuals who wear their records of past correctness as a kind of private property.
- Be a Decent human being in general. No attitudes sexist, racist, misogynistic, ableistic, homophobic, transphobic &c are tolerated in the Forum. (For the record, “b*tch” is also a slur, so please refrain from calling anyone that and other similar words, especially if you are not a woman reclaiming the word—though this is still discouraged.) Sex pests, counting those who offend Forum members sexually and those who have previous record of sexual harassment outside the Forum, are barred and kicked out. As per tradition, one may deploy ad hominem arguments against one’s political opponents (“…for Man, the root is Man himself”) but strictly within the bounds of polemical reason. That is to say, you may call someone’s politics liberal-adjacent, Lassallean, capitalist-roading, revisionist, falsifying, modernizing, quietist, adventurist, heretic and so on, but do not call people fat or smelly. At the same time, if all of what you say simply boils down to calling people pejorativisms, you are not a polemicist, whose ad hominem contains actual substantial arguments, but an asshole plain and simple. Polemicize responsibly.
III
Agtipon
[about Agtipon]
IV
What the Forum Is is what the Forum is Not
Myth 1: The Marxist Forum is a factional rival to existing organizations.
It is not. The Forum refuses the logic of competition among sects that has converted Marxism into a kaleidoscopic landscape of leftist micro-confusions, each jealously guarding its brand. The Forum is an agitational-pedagogical instrument. It does not demand that participants renounce their organizational ties; it demands only that they bring their convictions into a common space of interrogation. Its purpose is to reorient attention to the roots of Marxism and not to erect yet another rootless faction.
Myth 2: The Marxist Forum is a Front organization.
The Forum is an independent community. To its capacity as an organization, it is open to collaborative activities and event-partnerships from anyone in the Left, but to the extent that its member-participants remain free and independent to express their own views, and not when other organizations demand conditions that may compromise what the Forum stands for. Groups, sects, or pre-formations may form within or through the Forum’s space, but these are ultimately to the discretion of its participants and has nothing to do with the Forum in any formal or informal “front-organization” sense. The Forum is not intended to be—and will not be—a transmission belt for any specific organization in the Left, and must stand on its own.
Myth 3: The Marxist Forum is a proto-party or aspires to become one.
The Forum is not a political party and has no ambition to become a political party. The Party-form is a historical necessity of the general revolutionary process, not an artefact God-machine that can be conjured out of study circles. The Forum is, for all essential purposes, a book club which treats theory as an indispensable weapon in the class war. The revolution is not made in the library, but a proletariat that does not understand the terrain on which it fights does not understand itself and its tasks, and thus has already lost.
Myth 4: The Marxist Forum purports a Line and claims to possess the Truth.
Communism is the real movement that abolishes the existing order, and theory is the intellectual self-expression of that movement, not a blueprint deposited from outside. The Forum does not pretend to deliver a ready-made “correct line” to the masses. If such a thing exists, the Forum certainly does not have it (otherwise, we would be a Party!). It acknowledges that theoretical clarification is a collective, accumulative, and unfinished process, one that the isolated efforts of a small circle can only modestly serve.
Myth 5: The Forum is an antiquarian cult of Marx.
The specter that today haunts the ostensible “Marxist” milieu is not communism but a Marx reduced to a dead ancestor, ritually invoked by tendencies that have liquidated every revolutionary element of his project, taken in its incompleteness and failing to extract what is a scientific invariant in the results of his investigations. Gramsci is exact in saying that Marxism cannot be superseded until the society of necessity is superseded by the society of freedom. The deeper capital plunges into its own terminal crises, the more objectively necessary the invariant core of Marxism becomes, and the more ferociously it is buried under the rubble of sophistry, fossilization, and moralism.
V
Mission and Purpose
The Marxist Forum exists because the proletarian movement must break through this burial. To return to Marx on his own terms is not an act of piety, but an attempt to break with the entire apparatus of mystification that presents itself as “Marxism” today.
In our context, this means the Forum is a space where the actual historical lessons of the Philippine Left, a matter of life and death, can be examined without the partisan enclosures that have, on all sides, made this necessary task difficult.
The Forum seeks to recover the revolutionary science whose systematic foundation Marx helped lay—a science that belongs to the proletariat alone and that must be wrested back from its falsifiers. Weapons are not to be abandoned but must be sharpened to cut through the fog of ideology.
The Forum’s ultimate goal then consists in its disappearance. For this to happen, Marxism must render itself superfluous. It must provide an education that returns its participants to their organizations, their workplaces, and their struggles with a sharpened capacity to see, to analyze, and to act without permission against class society, the tyranny of private property, and the moribund carcass of mercantile civilization. A study circle that has succeeded is one whose participants no longer need it. They, having ceased to be students of communist theory, will have become, in whatever partial and contingent form history permits, the communist program’s practitioners.