About Cosmonaut
The anarchist Mikhail Bakunin—both a political rival of Marx in the First International and translator of the first Russian edition of Capital, Vol. I—once mocked the intellectualism of his Marxist opponents by quipping “we have too many ideas and not enough action”.
Today the situation seems to be the opposite. Direct action after direct action, dedicated leftists put their bodies on the line without anything resembling a convincing vision of a better world. This is no one individual’s failure, but an inevitable result of the collapse of working-class power and socialist politics in the late 20th century. Communism—the vision of humanity emancipated from class society—is generally disregarded as a fantasy, or even as undesirable in principle. At best it is the silent God of a negative theology, a desperate mantra of abstract negation with no plausible hope to be found in the existing tendencies of capitalist society. Consigned by post-structuralism and marginalist economics to an obsolete micro-niche in humanities departments, academic marxism—even on the rare occasion it can genuinely help us understand the world—is as detached from the goal of classless society on paper as it is in reality. A leftist politics this disoriented is about as likely to achieve basic democratic reforms as it is to implement a world socialist republic.
Scientific socialism
To orient ourselves in a direction towards universal human emancipation, we must rebuild the approach of scientific socialism. While the term ‘scientific socialism’ has historically become synonymous with Soviet state ideology—and if the name Lysenko rings any bells, the most rankly opportunistic pseudoscience—we believe that it is a concept worth upholding. Peddling ideological snake oil to a desperate public does nothing to change the world and advance humanity. Abstract ideals about the way things ought to be do not suffice when the agents of capital—the capitalists, their state, their ideologues—use all scientific means at their disposal. Marx and Engels created scientific socialism to argue for a socialism based in reason—a socialism with a rigorous analysis of both existing material conditions and history, with an eye towards how to use the best of humanity’s capacities to transform the world. They developed their ideas through critique and deliberation with the socialists of their time who had internalized capitalist ideology or failed to make their visions politically possible. In this process, Marx and Engels developed not only a Marxist political strategy, but also a materialist conception of history that—if used properly—is a weapon for the proletariat in its struggle for communism.
Platform of debate
Therefore it is necessary for Marxists of all backgrounds and skills to develop intellectual institutions independent of academia, wherein communists can develop their vision, strategy, and overall critique of capitalist society. Cosmonaut aims to be one of (what should be) many different platforms of debate, where scientific socialists can develop an analysis of history, critique the prevailing ideological “common sense” of our time, and conceive a programmatic communist politics relevant to our circumstance.
Marxist polemics
Because no one genius will figure out all the answers to the questions facing revolutionaries, we must understand that knowledge is a collective process of debate and deliberation. So while we aim to stand as close as possible to the programmatic communist commitments of Marx and Engels, we reject an approach that divines the definitive ‘red thread’ tradition as an abstract set of principles to follow and evangelize. We seek to develop a Marxism for the 21st century which will be based on a scientific inquiry of history and present conditions through a process of collective discussion and debate, not dogma based on fidelity to what this or that Great Man said so many years ago. Our organizing principles are internationalism over all standing armies and borders; building class-independent, democratic institutions; and a vision of a future where the world is a classless community of humanity, finally free of exploitation and oppression—communism.
