​Reflections on Thomas Nagel's critique (of Michael Sandel's book “Public Philosophy: Essays on Morality in Politics”) “Progressive but Not Liberal," THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS, May 25, 2006.
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Thomas Nagel entitles his essay on the social philosophy of Michael J. Sandel "Progressive but Not Liberal." Non-liberal progressives are most often to be found in socialist and communist organizations but not Sandel who is a professor of government at Harvard and referred to as a "communitarian" by Nagel. Nagel is happy to be a liberal and takes Sandel to task for having "defective" views about "liberalism." Nagel in fact defends the liberal cause by his critique of Sandel. I intend to analyze Nagel's critique from a Marxist perspective.


Nagel points out that the political system in the US is more volatile and heterogeneous than what one would find in Western Europe. The US is, in fact, "radically divided over issues of war, taxes, race, religion, abortion, and sex." He maintains that these differences are deep rooted and about "ultimate values." Yet these divisions do not threaten the stability of our political system. He says that "the cohesion of American society is stronger than its divisions" can be seen by the fact that people with radically incompatible basic value systems cohabit in a common political system and strive to express those values legally through open political processes. And, he maintains, this can be done "only because of a general commitment to the principles of limited government embodied in the Constitution."


Well times have changed since Nagel penned this. American society is far from the stability outlined above: Après Trump le déluge. The election of Biden and the Republican response shows that the “general commitment” to the Constitution is under extreme duress.


Nagel goes on to divide the US political universe into two broad sections—based on how they respond to the problems listed above-- i.e., war, taxes, race,etc.


The conservatives, we are told, "are more interested in enforcing moral standards [and they think their standards are the only right ones--tr] on the community and protecting private property, and less interested in protecting personal liberty [libertarian conservatives would dispute this--tr] and reducing inequality." It is just the opposite with progressives, he says.


Progressives have to decide how to pursue their principles-- as "first" or "second" order principles. First order principles are those deeply held "fundamental beliefs" or core principles. The second order principles are those "concerning what kind of first order-principles may be used to justify the exercise of political and legal power". For example, should we try and have the state outlaw capital punishment based on the first order principle that all killing by the state is immoral [excluding the military], or should we use a different principle such as the corruption of the legal system or the racism in the sentencing procedures without calling into question the ultimate moral status of capital punishment itself.


Nagel allies himself with liberalism which he identifies more or less with the political philosophy of another Harvard professor, the late John Rawls, author of such books as "Political Liberalism" and "A Theory of Justice." According to Nagel liberalism tends to rely on second order principles and not confront the conservative positions with head on challenges of first order magnitude. Nagel says, for example that gay rights can be defended by liberals on the principle that the government should not be controlling "private sexual conduct" without getting into the issue of the moral status of homosexuality.


The target of Nagel's article, Sandel, represents another school of progressives which Nagel says is "not liberal." These progressives want to argue their positions on first order principles and duke it out with the conservatives on core values. Sandel wants to replace "liberalism" with what he thinks the "communal" republican spirit of the early US was, which he contrasts with the present day liberal concern with "individualism." What Sandel is interested in is (his words) "soul craft." Nagel explains this as "the cultivation of virtue in the citizenry by the design of political, social and economic institutions." 


Wait a minute! This sounds familiar. This sounds like a species of the program of social engineering embarked upon in the Soviet Union in the 1930s and subverted and fought with tooth and claw by the big capitalist powers, first with their rebellious cat's paw Hitler, then continued as the Cold War by Hitler's anti-communist successors. Nagel senses this as well, as we shall see.


More immediately, however, Nagel attacks Sandel for having a "defective" understanding of Liberalism and misinterpreting the social philosophy of John Rawls. Nagel tells us that there are many forms of "Liberalism" but he contrasts only two-- European and American. The former is characterized by "the libertarianism of economic laissez-faire" (which sounds to me suspiciously like current neocon thought) while the latter represents "the democratic egalitarianism of the welfare state" (the owl of Minerva really does take flight at dusk, someone should tell Nagel that the welfare state is history).


But, he tells us, "all liberal theories have this in common: they hold that the sovereign power of the state over the individual is bounded by a requirement that individuals remain inviolable in certain respects, and that they must be treated equally." Basically this means equality before the law and equal political status (one person one vote, unless you are Black or Hispanic and your votes are tossed) and in American Liberalism "equality of opportunity and fairness in the social and economic structure of the society." I don't know what planet Nagel is from, maybe a parallel universe where Sweden is the only superpower, but the US definitely does not fit this description. Well, maybe not, but those are the goals to be reached and John Rawls represents this kind of Liberalism which stresses "distributive justice that combats poverty and large inequalities perpetuated by inheritance and class." Yes, Liberalism wants to combat poverty and inequality based on the observation that "the poor ye shall always have with you" but Marxism, unlike Liberalism which wants to tinker with the bad consequences of Capitalism without ever questioning the system itself, wants to eliminate poverty , not just combat it, by getting rid of the economic system that breeds it, i.e., capitalism.


Sandel rejects Rawls "Liberalism." He has, as Nagel says "spent his career" opposing Rawls and Rawls’ form of "egalitarian liberalism." What he contests is "Rawls’ central claim that individual rights and principles of social justice should take precedence over the broad advancement of human welfare according to some standard of what constitutes the good life." This is wrongly framed from the Marxist perspective. We certainly are in favor of "broad advancement of human welfare" but not based on some bourgeois idealist concept of "the good life" but based on what we claim to be a scientific understanding of the motive force of the capitalist system, its directionality and the real possibility of restructuring of society in such a way that classes are abolished and all people will truly escape from the realm of necessity to that of freedom. This may sound utopian, but it is actually more realistic than the schemes of Rawls, Nagel or Sandel.


Meanwhile, while Rawls subordinates the "broad advancement of human welfare" to "individual rights", Sandel maintains that, in his own words, "Principles of justice depend for their justification on the moral worth or intrinsic good of the ends they serve." Nagel doesn't like this formulation. Sandel would ban Nazis from holding rallies but uphold the rights of people demonstrating for equality and against racism, for example. But, Nagel says, using Sandel's principle, people opposed to homosexuality ought to be opposed to gay people holding rallies. But it is the state that guarantees the rights of citizens and decides which ends are ultimately of "moral worth or intrinsic good." Nazis and KKK folk fail on both counts besides the fact that they would on principle end the rights of others to demonstrate if they could while gay people are not demanding the suppression of heterosexuals they are only asking for civil rights. So, I don't think the analogy a good one to use against Sandel.


What Nagel really objects too is that Sandel thinks "the priority of right as being intelligible only if it serves the good." Liberals would "bracket" the question about if abortion, for example, was "murder" and defend the right to it on the grounds that a woman's right to choose should not be denied because of the "religious convictions of the majority." Sandel thinks that in order to approve of or support abortion we must "first determine that the Catholic position is false." This is a requirement for bracketing the question of its mortal status. 'The more confident we are," Sandel writes, "that fetuses are, in the relevant moral sense, different from babies, the more confident we can be in affirming a political conception of justice that sets aside the controversy about the moral status of fetuses."


Nagel says this is begging the question not bracketing it but this is because of how he has set up the question in the first place. Being a Liberal he is looking for a Liberal answer, based on a second order principle, and Sandel, not being a Liberal, looks for first order principles. I think Marxists are more akin to Sandel than to Nagel. Surely we want to decide if abortion is murder or not before we support it. Do women have a right to commit murder? What are the Catholic reasons for thinking this is murder? When we find out that the reasons are not based on science or an intelligent open minded examination of the evidence but only upon superstition and close minded adherence to dogma this surely must be the basis for our rejection of the anti-abortion viewpoint. This way of thinking does not make Sandel's views of Liberalism "obtuse."


There are many behaviors that can be sanctioned by the state, Nagel says, that the state does not have to have an official position on with respect to their rightness or moral status. The state can be neutral in other words. But Sandel, says Nagel, "thinks justice and rights depend on what is actually good, and what rules and institutions serve those ends; he is not a relativist." This is also good Marxism. Marxists should, to the best standards available, try to determine the actual states of affairs they are dealing with and not bracket truth conditions. This would have prevented many of the catastrophes of the 20th century socialist project.


These different positions lead, as Nagel points out, to a "deep issue." Namely, "Do all moral standards derive from a single principle, or are there different principles for different kinds of entities?" Rawls and Sandel have very different views on this. Rawls does not hold that there is a common moral principle from which both personal rights and public rights derive. Rawls "thought that justice, which is the special virtue of social institutions like the state, depended on the distinctive moral character of the state itself, as an immensely powerful form of collective agency." In a Liberal democracy we are subject to majority rule. Actually, however, this has ceased to be the case in the US. The two elections won by George W. Bush were most likely won as a result of vote fraud consciously carried out in disregard for any moral commitment to democratic values and solely to attain state power for the personal enrichment of corporate class entities at the expense of the majority of the population. This looks like a trend that has further developed. The tactic was also attempted by Trump to stay in power but in his case failed because he had lost the support of the corporate ruling class. Even his legal first victory did not represent “majority rule” because the majority voted for Clinton.


Nevertheless, Rawls thinks in terms of a functioning bourgeois democracy with majority will "coercively enforced." But Rawls also believes in "fairness." This means that in addition to political and civil equalities the state must also "combat racial, sexual, and socioeconomic inequality." With regard to this duty of the state, Nagel says, "This is the fairness that Sandel derides." But I don't think that Sandel is for racial, sexual and socioeconomic inequality, nor do I think his social philosophy (or Marxism) entails any such consequences.


Nagel says that the state has no special moral status for Sandel. Sandel thinks once the people have decided on the ends to be sought (for Marxists this would be the abolition of property, classes and the state as well as the construction of socialism and communism) which for Sandel are ("seems to be" Nagel writes, which shows some confusion on this) "an unmaterialistic culture of closely knit communities and strong family ties" then the state will be used to construct this type of social reality (under socialism being eventually abolished or "withering away)."


But this kind of thinking will also lead, says Nagel, "to theocracy, fascism or communism for those who accept alternative conceptions of the human good." Nagel thinks this is a telling point against Sandel but it isn't. The same thing can happen under the limited constitutional state that Liberals like Rawls and Nagel think can be constructed or maybe is even exemplified by the US today. Constitutions and philosophical models are not what guarantee freedom and rights. Only an informed, educated and alert citizenry can do that, and that is what we currently lack, and lack by governmental and corporate design, in the US today.


Nagel concludes by saying that "A hunger that demands more from the state [than "constitutional patriotism"] will lead us where history has shown we should not want to go." I am afraid we are on that road already and we have got on this road not only by reading direction signs put up by non-Liberal progressives, but by following those posted by Rawls and his followers as well. To halt the current slide towards fascism ("the national security state") we will need the combined forces of the progressive left, the working class, the establishment union movement as well as those in the “center” of the political spectrum(always an unreliable section—i.e., the AFL-CIO leadership) who still believe in democracy and take the Bill of Rights seriously. Rawlsian Liberalism alone will not suffice.

​Since the horrific events of Sept. 11, much has been said about the desperate situation of the Afghani people now crushed under the heel of the theocratic, dictatorial Taliban, and about the role of the Northern Alliance and other Taliban opponents who now figure in Washington’s plans for the region.

​There has been talk, most of it distorted, about the role of the Soviet Union in the years from 1978 to 1989. There has been talk, most of it understated, about the role of the U.S. in building up the Mujahideen forces, including the Taliban.

But almost no one talks about the effort the Afghan people made in the late 1970s and ’80s to pull free of the legacy of incessantly warring tribes and feudal fiefdoms and start to build a modern democratic state. Or about the Soviet Union’s role long before 1978.
Some background helps shed light on the current crisis. Afghanistan was a geopolitical prize for 19th-century empire builders, contested by both czarist Russia and the British Empire. It was finally forced by the British into semi-dependency.

When he came to power in 1921, Amanullah Khan—sometimes referred to as Afghanistan’s Kemal Ataturk—sought to reassert his country’s sovereignty and move it toward the modern world. As part of this effort, he approached the new revolutionary government in Moscow, which responded by recognizing Afghanistan’s independence and concluding the first Afghan-Soviet friendship treaty.
From 1921 until 1929—when reactionary elements, aided by the British, forced Amanullah to abdicate—the Soviets helped launch the beginnings of economic infrastructure projects, such as power plants, water resources, transport, and communications. Thousands of Afghani students attended Soviet technical schools and universities.
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After Amanullah’s forced departure, the projects languished, but the relationship between the Soviets and the Afghans would later re-emerge.

In the 1960s, a resurgence of joint Afghan-Soviet projects included the Kabul Polytechnic Institute—the country’s prime educational resource for engineers, geologists, and other specialists.
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Nor was Afghanistan immune from the political and social ferment that characterized the developing world in the last century. From the 1920s on, many progressive currents of struggle took note of the experiences of the USSR, where a new, more equitable society was emerging on the lands of the former Russian empire. Afghanistan was no exception. By the mid-’60s, national democratic revolutionary currents had coalesced to form the People’s Democratic Party (PDP).

​In 1973, local bourgeois forces, aided by some PDP elements, overthrew the 40-year reign of Mohammad Zahir Shah—the man who now, at age 86, is being promoted by U.S. right-wing Republicans as the personage around which Afghanis can unite.
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When the PDP assumed power in 1978, they started to work for a more equitable distribution of economic and social resources. Among their goals were the continuing emancipation of women and girls from the age-old tribal bondage (a process begun under Zahir Shah), equal rights for minority nationalities, including the country’s most oppressed group, the Hazara, and increasing access for ordinary people to education, medical care, decent housing, and sanitation.

​During two visits in 1980-81, I saw the beginnings of progress: women working together in handicraft co-ops, where for the first time they could be paid decently for their work and control the money they earned. Adults, both women and men, learning to read. Women working as professionals and holding leading government positions, including Minister of Education. Poor working families able to afford a doctor, and to send their children—girls and boys—to school. The cancellation of peasant debt and the start of land reform. Fledgling peasant cooperatives. Price controls and price reductions on some key foods. Aid to nomads interested in a settled life.

I also saw the bitter results of Mujahideen attacks by the same groups that now make up the Northern Alliance—in those years aimed especially at schools and teachers in rural areas.

The post-1978 developments also included Soviet aid to economic and social projects on a much larger scale, with a new Afghan-Soviet Friendship Treaty and a variety of new projects, including infrastructure, resource prospecting, and mining, health services, education, and agricultural demonstration projects. After December 1978 that role also came to include the introduction of Soviet troops, at the request of a PDP government increasingly beset by the displaced feudal and tribal warlords who were aided and organized by the U.S. and Pakistan.
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The rest, as they say, is history. But it is significant that after Soviet troops were withdrawn in 1989, the PDP government continued to function, though increasingly beleaguered, for nearly three more years.
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Somewhere, beneath the ruins of today’s torn and bloodied Afghanistan, are the seeds that remain even in the direst times within the hearts of people who know there is a better future for humanity. In a world struggling for economic and social justice—not revenge—those seeds will sprout again.

The connection between the authoritarian personality and the working class began in earnest in the 1950s with cold war political sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset.  Lipset argued that since World War I, “working class groups have proved to be the most nationalistic and jingoistic sector of the population” [1959: 483.]  His concept of authoritarianism is a mash-up Adorno’s ideas mixed with support for “extremist” groups like the Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Communist Party.  Lipset argued that in the US, the working class authoritarianism poses a threat to democracy.

The question is: does the psychology of individuals in the working class explain Trump’s rise to power?  A Marxist perspective reveals the flaws in this and other individual-level psychological explanations:
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• first, the psychological argument obscures the real source of power in the capitalist society, namely social structures like corporations, property, media, and the state, that have been constructed over the years intentionally to serve the interests of the ruling class, namely the corporate elite that benefits the most from exploitation of the working class.
• second, it denies the established social science research that one’s position in such social structures, especially the economy, shapes one’s psychology far more profoundly than individuals’ psychological tendencies can influence enduring and evolving social structures.
• finally, it’s factually incorrect.  The Atlantic Magazine’s analysis of Trump support show that among voters with incomes less than $50,000, Hilary Clinton won 53 to 41.  Voters with incomes between $100 and $200,000 voted for Trump 56% to 39%.

​Despite its obvious flaws, the psychological argument has a special appeal for members of the privileged class, who want to hold themselves blameless for the social ills around them.  They believe they knew better, and they blame the working class to avoid facing up to their own culpability.  Scapegoating the working class is known as the “myth of upper class benevolence.”

One classic study in race and ethnicity shows the fallacies in the myth of upper class benevolence and zeroes in on the ways the working class is often portrayed, incorrectly, as the source of white supremacy.  In his book The Mississippi Chinese: Between black and white, the sociologist James Loewen interviewed hundreds of residents of the Mississippi Delta.  He found upper middle class whites routinely blamed poor working class whites for any and all oppression of both African Americans and Chinese Americans.  But looking closely at the facts gave Loewen a much different picture of culpability.   It was the privileged planter- and business-class whose members had the power to keep Chinese- and African-Americans out of their neighborhoods, schools, and workplaces.   Working class organizations like the American Legion, Veterans of Foreign Wars, and small Baptist churches were the first to welcome people of color, while upper class organizations like the Chamber of Commerce, the Rotary Club, and Episcopalians excluded them.  Financial institutions acted in the interests of the privileged class and served to limit opportunities for others.    Schools reserved for whites only were resource rich compared with schools that served people of color.   One county in Mississippi, Loewen discovered, actually spent $45 per white pupil for every $1 per African American pupil.
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Loewen rejects the widely held belief, echoed in the London Business School study mentioned earlier, that the working class, fearing economic competition, feels the most prejudice.  Instead, he turns to the pioneer Marxist sociologist of race, Oliver C. Cox, who argued that to analyze racial dynamics one needs to look first at “the economic policies of the ruling class.”  Cox continued, “Opposition [by the working class] to social equality has no meaning unless we can see its function in the service of the exploitative purpose of this [ruling] class.”

​A working class divided by race is easier to control and to keep unorganized than a united one, so concerted and deliberate efforts are made to encourage members of the working class to embrace authoritarian beliefs, especially white supremacy.  Using corporate-funded think tanks, right-wing radio and cable television, and presidential pronouncements, the ruling class frames current events in authoritarian terms, attempting to undermine the unity of the working class and therefore weaken it.   In Mississippi Loewen found that alliances between working class whites and blacks were viciously undermined and blocked by the powerful of the community.  Likewise, people who challenge class oppression and racial hierarchies are singled out for condemnation and retaliation.

Newer research on intolerance shows furthermore that authoritarian beliefs are not clearly associated with membership in the working class, defined by wage dependence, low income, and job insecurity.   Erasmus University sociologist Dick Houtman revisited Lipset’s theory of working class authoritarianism found that it is not class that is correlated with intolerance, but educational level and access to cultural opportunities like books, concerts, and art exhibitions.  Thus another way that the ruling class tries to divide the working class is by limiting their educational opportunities.  Donald Trump once famously intoned, “I love the poorly educated.”  Along with his secretary of education Betsy DeVos, Trump seems intent on increasing their ranks.  With working class pupils forced to attend substandard, unsafe and under-resourced schools year after year, with college costs putting post-secondary education out of reach of many, and with crippling student debt for those who do borrow for college, the ruling class aims to limit the critical thinking resources the working class needs to challenge ruling class propaganda.

For those who are in college, corporate forces have developed special interventions to encourage neoliberal and fascist accommodation.  The Charles Koch Foundation, established by the head of Koch Industries, has implemented a $50 million, 32-state strategy establishing institutes, holding conferences, and funding faculty and graduate students in a concerted effort to influence policy rightward: toward denial of climate science, undermining of labor rights, and revision of history in favor of business interests.  Hand in hand with these corporate forces are the white supremacist organizations that pay for speakers to visit campuses and foment hate, then cry “first amendment” when students object.  Other corporate-sponsored organizations encourage students to record, expose and protest faculty who do not espouse conservative views.
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In short, the psychological argument claims that authoritarian tendencies emerge from working people themselves.  It’s no surprise that researchers from a business school embraced that idea, because it is what Marx and Engels refer to as a “ruling idea.”  By pretending that authoritarian ideas arise organically from the working class itself, it hides the relationship between authoritarianism and the economic policies of the ruling class.  In contrast, a Marxist analysis recognizes the congruence between authoritarian ideas and the economic interests of the corporate ruling class, especially its efforts to divide the working class by race, gender, citizenship status, etc.   It recognizes the influence of powerful corporate forces which intentionally try to persuade workers to blame each other for their oppression, instead of the capitalists who profit from their lack of unity.

Citations

​Adorno, Theodor et al. 1950. The Authoritarian Personality. New York: Harper.
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Edsall, Thomas B. 2017. “The Trump Voter Paradox” The New York Times. 28 September.  https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/28/opinion/trump-republicans-authoritarian.html
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Ferris, Robert. 2017. “Why voters might be choosing dominant, authoritarian leaders around the world.” CNBC, 12 June. https://www.cnbc.com/2017/06/12/why-voters-might-be-choosing-dominant-authoritarian-leaders-around-the-world.html
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Jacobs, Tom. 2018.  “Inside the minds of hardcore Trump Supporters” Pacific Standard. February 15. https://psmag.com/news/inside-the-minds-of-hardcore-trump-supporters

Lipset, Seymour Martin. 1959. “Democracy and Working-Class Authoritarianism.” American Sociological Review 24 (4), 482-501.

Loewen, James. 1988. The Mississippi Chinese: Between black and white. 2e. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press.

Serwer, Adam. 2017. “The Nationalist’s Delusion.” The Atlantic. November 20.
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Image: Trump addresses the Conservative Political Action Conference in 2015.  Greg Skidmore/Creative Commons

​“Good morning Fred Are you ready to begin our discussion of Mozi?”
 
“I certainly am, but he is rather new to me. I mean, everyone has heard of Confucius and Laozi.”
 
“It's true. Mozi is not as well known as the other two. Mozi lived around 479 to 381 B.C.--somewhere in that range. We really don’t know too much about him. We have a 53-chapter book called the “Mozi” which is made up of his writings and those of some of his followers. He lived at the end of the feudal period of the Zhou Dynasty a little after the time of Confucius and was in the ‘warrior class.’  This class somewhat resembled and probably inspired what the Japanese developed as the class of the Samurai. Mo, (the “zi” is an honorific suffix meaning “master”—i.e., “teacher”) thought up a philosophy contrary to the Confucians and which he hoped would solve all the practical problems of humanity. He was the leader of a band of warriors--such bands were quite common in those days--but he would only go into action to try and prevent war or to protect the underdog who was being unjustly attacked. This was not common for those days or any days including our own (with the possible exception of the type of military aid given by the Cubans).”
 
“Well, Karl, I have my copy of Chan [W.T. Chan, A Sourcebook in Chinese Philosophy] which starts with Chapter 15 on ‘Universal Love’. It begins with a question ‘But what are the benefits and harm of the world?’ To which Mozi responds, “Take the present cases of mutual attacks among states, mutual usurpation among families, and mutual injuries among individuals, or the lack of kindness and loyalty between ruler and minister, of parental affection and filial piety between father and son, and of harmony and peace among brothers.’”
 
“OK Fred, that pretty much sums up the ‘harm of the world’ and it is as true of our times as it was in Ancient China even if Mo only makes male references due to his patriarchal culture. We will have to add ‘mothers and daughters’ as well as ‘sisters’ to the mix.”
 
“Mozi next explains why the world is in such sad shape, that is, where did all these problems come from. Mo says “They arise out of want of mutual love. At present feudal lords know only to love their own states and not those of others. Therefore they do not hesitate to mobilize their states to attack others. Heads of families know only to love their own families and not those of others. Therefore they do not hesitate to mobilize their families to usurp others. And individuals know only to love their own persons and not those of others. Therefore they do not hesitate to mobilize their own persons to injure others.’”
 
“So, ‘want of mutual love’ is the source of our woes!”
 
“Exactly, he says ‘Because of want of mutual love, all the calamities, usurpations, hatred, and animosity in the world have arisen. Therefore the man of humanity condemns it.’”
 
“And with what is he going to replace it?”
 
“'It should be replaced by the way of universal love and mutual benefit.’”
 
“Which is?”
 
"'It is to regard other people’s countries as one’s own. Regard other people’s families as one’s own. Regard other people’s person as one’s own. Consequently, when feudal lords love one another, they will not fight in the fields.... Because of universal love, all the calamities, usurpations, hatred, and animosity in the world may be prevented from arising. Therefore the man of humanity praises it.’” [“Universal love” is a traditional translation of the Chinese jiān'ài, 兼愛 which is also rendered “impartial care.”]
 
“You know, many great philosophers and some, but not all, religious leaders have said more or less the same thing. I think all the great humanist thinkers, West or East, would be in general agreement. But they will differ with Mo about the practicality of his proposal and if there should be some distinctions within his concept of ‘universal’. This will be the ‘battle line’. Mo will want absolute universality which he thinks is the only way peace and harmony will come about.”
 
“That is right, Karl, and Mo takes up the challenge as I will now read. Here is the objection: ‘But now gentlemen of the world would say: Yes, it will be good if love becomes universal. Nevertheless, it is something distant and difficult to practice.’ To which Mo responds, ‘This is simply because gentlemen of the world fail to recognize its benefit and understand its reason.’”
 
“I remember Chan’s comment on this passage. That Mo used ‘benefits’ or ‘results’ as the motivation for his doctrines. This is similar to our philosophy of pragmatism. C.S. Peirce had something called the ‘pragmatic maxim’ his own Prime Directive as it were: ‘Consider what effects, that might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object.’ Granted that this is a theory of meaning but we can see its relation to Mo. Mo is saying, the ‘Mohist Maxim’: ‘Consider what benefits we conceive our belief to have. Then, our conception of the benefits is the whole of our conception of the rightness of our belief.’ This is the theory of truth of Mohism.”
 
“I have the Chan comment right here Karl. He doesn’t make the point you do but does contrast the ‘Mohist Maxim’ of yours with Confucianism. The Confucian thinks the ‘inferior’ man is after ‘benefits’. The Confucian is interested in ‘righteousness.’ “
 
“Does he give references?”
 
“He cites the Analects 4:11,16; 15:17; 17:23”
 
“Let me see.” Karl took Chan’s book and looked through it. “The last two are not in here,” he said. He then pulled down a copy of the complete work (the “Analects”) and looked at it.
 
“Well, none of these references are quite on the mark. Confucius is really condemning material goodies and profit. I think the ‘Mohist Maxim’ goes way beyond this limited conception of ‘benefits.’ World peace would be a Mohist ‘benefit’ and that is not the same as ‘profit’. World peace would even be a motivation to action for a Confucianist who could interpret it as ‘righteousness’ to benefit humanity (ren).”
 
“I will continue with the Mo quote. In this passage he explains how universal love even though difficult can be brought about. ‘Formerly Duke Wen [ruled 636 to 628 B.C.] of Jin liked his officers to wear coarse clothing. Therefore all his ministers wore [simple] sheepskin garments, carried their swords in [unadorned] leather girdles, and put on hats of plain cloth. Thus attired, they appeared before the ruler inside and walked around the court outside. What was the reason for this? It was because the ruler liked it and therefore the ministers could do it. Formerly, King Ling of Chu [ruled 530 to 527 B.C.] wanted people to have slender waists. Therefore all his ministers limited themselves to one meal a day. They exhaled before they tied their belts.... What was the reason for this? It was because the ruler liked it and therefore the ministers could do it.”
 
“This looks like ‘revolution from above’!”
 
“Wait! There is more. ‘Therefore Master Mo said: Now to eat little, to wear coarse clothing and to sacrifice one’s life for fame are things all people in the world consider difficult. But if the ruler likes them, the multitude can do them.... What difficulty is there in this (universal love)? Only the ruler does not make it his governmental measure and officers do not make it their conduct.’”
 
“This is definitely ‘revolution from above’! The Ruler only has to desire that a policy be carried out and voilà! He also mixes up the ‘ministers’ with the ‘multitude’. It's one thing to order the ministers to implement a policy, it's really quite another to think that the people will just obey and carry out the directions because ‘the ruler liked it.’
 
“Chan has a comment about this too Karl. He says “Universal love is promoted by Mohism because of its beneficial results. There is no conviction that it is dictated by the inherently good nature of man or by the inherent goodness of the act. Although Confucianism teaches love with distinctions, it also teaches love for all, but it does so on the grounds of moral necessity and of the innate goodness of man.’”
 
“Well that’s interesting. There seems some confusion in what Chan says, however. I can agree that the Mohist Maxim is at work here and not a belief in the innate goodness of humans but I must demur concerning Chan’s comment about the ‘inherent goodness of the act.’ That comment makes no sense to a Mohist because the ‘inherent goodness’ of an act just is the ‘benefits’ that result from it. The real question revolves around the nature of man, which is the basis for the Confucian critique. 
 
“Mo thinks that there are historical examples of the practice of his philosophy. To the objection that his theory is impracticable, and that universal love and mutual benefit cannot be put into action he replies, “Ancient sage kings did practice them. How do we know this to be the case? In ancient times, when Yu [first ruler of the Xia Dynasty, he ruled c. 2183-2175 BC] was ruling the empire, he dug the West and the Yu-tou rivers in the west to release the water from the Chu-sun-huang River [he did similar works in the east, north and south]...in order to benefit the peoples of Ching, Chu, Kan, and Yueh and the barbarians of the south. This is the story of Yu’s accomplishments. This shows that my doctrine of universal love has been practiced.’” 
 
“Weak!”
 
“Chan finds another contrast with the Confucians here. ‘While Confucianists cited historical examples for inspiration and as models, Mozi cited them to show that his teachings had been demonstrated. The difference between the idealistic and practical approach is clear.’”
 
“For whatever reason it seems like a common practice to refer to tradition for authority even if your ideas are new. This is not a uniquely Chinese practice.”
 
“Here is another of Mo’s arguments: ‘In ancient times, when King Wen [first ruler of the Zhou Dynasty who ruled c. 1751-1739 BC] ruled the Western Land, he shone like the sun and the moon all over the four quarters as well as the Western Land. He did not permit a big state to oppress a small state, or the multitude to oppress the widow or widower, or the ruthless and powerful to rob people’s grains or livestock. Heaven recognized his deeds and visited him with blessings. Consequently, the old and childless were well adjusted and enjoyed their full life span, the lonely had opportunity to fulfill their work among mankind, and the orphaned had the support to grow up....It shows that my doctrine of universal love has been practiced.’”
 
“I need to make two comments here. ‘Heaven recognized his deeds, etc...’ seems too anthropomorphic for Chinese thought at least on the ‘sage’ level....”
 
“Wait up, Karl, the next section is all about ‘The Will of Heaven.”
 
“OK, then. My second comment is that it seems that universal love is just the construction of a welfare state. There is obviously more to it than that or the Confucians would not be so upset with Mo.”
 
“OK Karl, before turning to ‘The Will of Heaven”, Chapter 26 of the Mozi, I’ll let Mo have the last word on ‘Universal Love’: ‘If rulers of the world today really want the empire to be wealthy and hate to have it poor, want it to be orderly and hate to have it chaotic, they should practice universal love and mutual benefit. This is the way of the sage-kings and the principle of governing the empire, and it should not be neglected.’”
 
“Even today Mo’s words are worth listening to. The ‘rulers of the world today’ have no concern for these ideas. Instead, with their aggressive military plans, their failure to help the poor and starving throughout the world, their do nothing environmental and AIDS policies, they seem to be just like the rulers of Mo’s day, only out to aggrandize their own selfish interests (Cuba excepted since its history of extension of medical aid and moral support to oppressed people everywhere is well known).
 
“Here is what Mo has to say about ‘righteousness’ and ‘heaven’. ‘Now what does heaven want and what does heaven dislike? Heaven wants righteousness and dislikes unrighteousness. Therefore, in leading the people of the world to engage in practicing righteousness, I should be doing what heaven wants.’”
 
“We must, Fred, keep in mind that, ‘righteousness’, for Mo means his doctrine of Universal Love. This is not the same meaning that Confucius gave to the term. As Fung points out [Fung Yu-lan, A Short History of Chinese Philosophy], the term for Confucius was a ‘categorical imperative’ (although this is not the correct term). Confucius just meant there are unalterable moral duties which must be done out of duty regardless of consequences. Of course, other considerations, as long as they are moral, can override what may seem to be, at first glance, a particular duty. Notice also Mo’s appeal to ‘heaven’. This is similar to claims made by Western religious leaders, usually when reason is not on their side.”
 
“Mo continues: ‘I say: With righteousness the world lives and without righteousness the world dies, with it the world becomes orderly and without it the world becomes chaotic. Now, Heaven wants to have the world live and dislikes to have it die, wants to have it rich and dislikes to have it poor, wants to have it orderly and dislikes to have it chaotic. Therefore I know Heaven wants righteousness and dislikes unrighteousness.’”
 
“This expresses Mo’s view all right, but is not a very good argument despite the ‘therefore.’ How do you know Heaven wants righteousness? Because righteousness makes the world live and Heaven wants the world to live, ergo. This is R=L, H=L | H=R. Something like Nazis like their mothers, so do communists, therefore communists like Nazis. So, besides being a poor argument, even were it a good argument it just pushes the problem back a step--i.e., how do you know Heaven wants the world to live (as opposed to being indifferent). Because Heaven likes righteousness? And Heaven likes righteousness because it wants the world to live? He is running around in a circle here. His argument for Universal Love will have to stand on its own merits which right now means an appeal to the benefits it will bring the world. Despite Mo’s plans there is no ‘divine’ or ‘heavenly’ sanction for the Mohist Maxim.”

​“And Chan makes the following observation: ‘Even the will of Heaven and righteousness are explained in terms of practical results.’”
 
“Yes, but I think it important to look at the logic involved as well.”
 
“Now he says, ‘Moreover, righteousness is the standard. It is not to be given by the subordinate to the superior but be given from the superior to the subordinate. Therefore the common people should attend to their work with all their might, and should not forthwith set up the standard themselves.’”
 
“I am afraid we are about to discover the feudal limitations to Mo’s views.”
 
“Well Karl, he says, ‘Gentlemen of the world of course clearly understand that the emperor gives the standard to the three ministers, the several feudal lords, the minor officials, and the common people, but the common people of the world do not clearly understand that Heaven gives the standard to the emperor. Therefore the ancient sage-kings of the Three Dynasties [Xia, Shang, and Zhou]. Yu, Tang, and Wu, desiring to make it clear to the common people that Heaven gives the standard to the emperor, all fed oxen and sheep with grass and dogs and pigs with grain, and cleanly prepared pastry and wine to sacrifice to the Lord on High and spiritual beings and pray to Heaven for blessing. But I have not heard of Heaven praying to the emperor for blessing. I therefore know that Heaven gives the standard to the emperor. Thus the emperor is the most honorable in the world and the richest in the world. Therefore those who desire honor and wealth cannot but obey the will of Heaven.’”
 
“I don’t know about feeding grain to dogs, but this sounds like an accurate view of the feudal mentality at this time in China and even right up until a hundred or so years ago. At this time the Greeks already were experimenting with democracy and letting the common people [hoi polloi] have their say. The Chinese are thinking more along the lines of the Persians. I think this shows the advantages of the city state or polis over larger territorial entities. Meanwhile notice all this ‘Heaven’ and ‘spiritual beings’ talk. Unlike Confucius, Mo is trying to give an aura of popular religion, quite foreign to the sentiments of most educated Chinese, to his philosophy. This is a real violation of the Prime Directive of Philosophy [only use Reason].”
 
“The Mozi goes on: ‘Well, how did Yu, Tang, Wen, and Wu obtain rewards? Mozi said: On the highest level they honored Heaven, on the middle level they served spiritual beings, and on the lower level they loved the people. Therefore the will of Heaven proclaimed, “They love universally those whom I love. They benefit universally those whom I benefit. Such love of people is really universal and such benefit to people is really substantial.” Therefore Heaven caused them to have the honor of being Sons of Heaven and possess the wealth of the whole empire.’”
 
“More religious coloring.”
 
“Even more coming up because now we see what happens to bad rulers! ‘Well how did Jie [last of the Xia dynasty], Zhou, Yu [R. 781-771 BC], and Li [R. 878-842 BC] incur punishment? Mozi said: On the highest level they blasphemed against Heaven, on the middle level they blasphemed against spiritual beings, and on the lower level they injured the people. Therefore the will of Heaven proclaimed, “They set themselves apart from those whom I love and hated them. They injure all those whom I benefit. Such hatred of people is really universal and such injury to people is really substantial.” Therefore Heaven caused them not to live out their life-span or to survive their generation.’”
 
“And what conclusions can be drawn from all this?”
 
“It's as Mo says--the ruler must follow righteousness i.e., practice universal love. Not doing so means that one has to rule by means of violence against the people! This leads to your undoing. Therefore following Mo’s philosophy ‘is beneficial to Heaven on the highest level, beneficial to spiritual beings on the middle level, and beneficial to man on the lower level. Being beneficial to these three means being beneficial to all. Therefore the whole world gives them a good name and calls them sage-kings.’ As for those bad rulers that go against Heaven, spiritual beings, and the people, ‘Not being beneficial to these three means not being beneficial to all. Therefore the whole world gives them a bad name and calls them wicked kings.’”
 
“I can’t think of any other Chinese philosopher who made such a pitch to religion. Mo was obviously trying to spread his ideas to the common people, not the educated elite!”
 
“Chan would agree with you Karl. His comment on all this is as follows: ‘In teaching obedience to the will of Heaven, Mozi was the most religious of ancient Chinese philosophers’”
 
“Unless he was a hypocrite.”
 
“A hypocrite? Why would you say that?”
 
“Listen to what Fung says about this. ‘Mozi’s proof of the existence of spirits is done primarily in order that he may introduce a religious sanction for his doctrine of all-embracing love, rather than because of any real interest in supernatural matters.’ He then quotes a passage not found in Chan’s book. This is from Chapter 31 of the Mozi: ‘If now all the people of the world could be made to believe that the spirits can reward the good and punish the bad, would the world then be in chaos?’ On the basis of this Fung concludes that Mo’s ‘doctrine of the Will of God and the existence of spirits is only to induce people to believe that they will be rewarded if they practice all-embracing love, and punished if they do not. Such a belief among the people was something useful; hence Mozi wanted it.’”
 
“That is highly speculative. Fung can’t know what Mo really thought. Are we not bound to respect the text, everything else being equal?”
 
“Oh, I think so. The Prime Directive and the text are all we have to go on. But it would not be, if Fung is right anyway, the only instance of a philosopher, or religious leader, telling one thing to hoi polloi while having another doctrine--the ‘real’ doctrine--for his followers.”
 
“The next selection in Chan is from Chapter 35 and he calls it ‘Attack on Fatalism. Pt. 1’. “
 
“This is the Chinese word “ming” which we translate as fate. “
 
“Yes, and Mozi used it to describe people both he and we would call ‘fatalists.’ Why do anything since Fate has already determined everything that will happen?”
 
“Those people are like those who think that since God is all powerful everything that happens happens according to His will. Some Marxists are like that too. Since ‘socialism’ is inevitable all we have to do is sit back and wait for it to happen. Another word we could use is ‘determinism.’ Everything is determined by the laws of nature and the previous state of the universe so we really can’t do anything except what has been predestined or predetermined. That, Fred, pretty much catches what Mo means by ming.”
 
“Well Mo does not approve of them. He says, ‘With this doctrine they tried to persuade the kings, dukes, and great officials above and to prevent the common people from doing their work. Therefore the fatalists are not men of humanity. Their doctrine must be clearly examined.’”
 
“I remember this. Mo puts forth a scientific procedure for looking at knowledge claims. Very advanced for his time.”
 
“That it is. He says that in order to examine a doctrine or knowledge claim some ‘standard’ must be adopted. Actually, he will have three standards. ‘For any doctrine some standard must be adopted. To expound a doctrine without a standard is like determining the directions of sunrise and sunset on a revolving potter’s wheel. In this way the distinction of right and wrong and benefit and harm cannot be clearly known. Therefore for any doctrine there must be the three standards. What are the three standards? Mozi said: [1] There must be a basis or foundation. [2] There must be an examination. [3] And there must be practical application. [1] Where to find the basis? Find it in the [will of Heaven and the spirits] the experiences of the ancient sage-kings above. [2] How is it to be examined? It is to be examined by inquiring into the actual experience of the eyes and ears of the people below. [3] How to apply it? Put it into law and governmental measures and see if they bring about benefits to the state and the people. These are called the three standards.’”
 
“This is a very good passage Fred. It could be updated to apply to the Chinese government today .”
 
“How so?”
 
“Well, [1] would be replaced by the experiences of the international communist and worker’s movements as well as what happens when you join the World Bank and the IMF. [2] This means that there should be more democratic procedures by which the masses of the Chinese people can get their opinions taken into consideration. I’m not saying the Party has to back off, but that it should be more inclusive and democratic. [3] This can stand as it is!”
 
“Chan agrees with this procedure. I think he calls it ‘pragmatic’. You can see the Mohist Maxim at work in [3] and his religious views in [1]. I can see why the Chinese government of today would have to change that. Chan actually says this is a ‘surprisingly scientific procedure: basis, examination, and application.’”
 
“Does he say anything else about fatalism, Fred?”
 
“He ends the discussion by reiterating the dangers of the idea and that human action is not all that important. He really opposes the “que será,será” attitude. ‘If the doctrine of the fatalist is put into practice, the ruler above would not attend to government, and the people below would not attend to their work.’ He is also upset because he says the religious duties won’t be carried out either. Why bother if you are a fatalist? ‘Therefore on the higher level fatalism is not beneficial to heaven, on the middle level it is not beneficial to spiritual beings, and on the lower level it is not beneficial to men. The unreasoning adherence to this doctrine is the source of evil ideas and the way of the wicked man. Therefore Mozi said: If the gentlemen of the world today really want the world to be rich and dislike it to be poor, and want the world to be orderly and dislike it to be chaotic, they must condemn the doctrine of fatalism. It is a great harm to the world.’”
 
“I can tell you that if you were a contemporary Mohist you would think the gentlemen of today in our new century do not really want the world to be rich rather than poor, nor do they dislike its being chaotic.”
 
“How so, Karl?”
 
“Because our so-called leaders don’t apply the Mohist Maxim to the problems confronting mankind today. Take the position of universal love for example. We have to think of all peoples and nations the same way--try to show love and understanding to everyone. This would mean in our own country that Blacks and Hispanics as well as whites, Amerindians, and others would all be the same--really not in just theory. Yet our leaders are still playing games with affirmative action, equal access to jobs and education. This shows they prefer evil ideas to universal love. There would also have to be an end to all the nonsense about ‘illegal aliens’ and hunting poor people down on the borders and trying to deport them. That doesn’t show any kind of universal love. The leaders would have to provide medical care and medicines, and housing, and education, and decent food for everyone without worrying that this might conflict with the so-called ‘rights’ of certain people or corporations to make money at the expense of these services not being available to everyone on an ‘as needed’ basis. This is all demanded in the name of ‘universal love.’ The military would have to go too. We have to share all the world's goodies with all the people of the world--love demands nothing less. That means the Arabs and the Jews in the Middle East have to start loving each other--and it is up to the leaders to set the example for the people to follow. The land has to be shared and in fact, Jews, Muslims and Christians, as well as Buddhists and others have to get together on one religion for everyone.”
 
“Oh Boy!”
 
“What can I say. Anything that divides the people and causes hatred and violence contradicts universal love and must go. Different religions do just that. Remember the Mohist Maxim. ‘Consider what benefits we conceive our belief to have., etc.’ If the gentlemen of today really want a peaceful and caring world they have to get together and start practicing universal love. But I think you would agree that they really only care about their own nations and groups and within their own groups and the rich and powerful only want to perpetuate their own selfish interests. Therefore a contemporary Mohist would be most upset with the gentlemen of today.”
 
“Did you say ‘Mohist’ or ‘Maoist’?”
 
“I know. But I said ‘Mohist.’ We will discuss Mao some other time and see if your snide comment is justified.”
 
“Now there are six more points which Chan thinks are important for a good understanding of Mohism.”
 
“So let’s get on with it. What is the first?”
 
“We discussed his ‘utilitarianism’ or ‘pragmatism’ before, but we should note these additional quotes. ‘Mozi said: Any word or action that is beneficial to Heaven, spiritual beings, and the people is to be undertaken.... Any doctrine that can elevate conduct should be perpetuated....In issuing orders, promoting any undertaking, employing the people, or expending wealth, the sage-kings in their administration never do anything that is not useful. Therefore re- sources are not wasted and the people can be freed from being overworked, and many benefits will be promoted....’”
 
“Again, this shows the Chinese penchant of trying to justify the ideas of the present by an appeal to the way things were done in the past. This is not just a Chinese trait! I think this quote agrees with my views about contemporary Mohism expressed a little while ago. What is the second point?”
 
“The second point is his condemnation of war. Mo hated war even though he was in the professional mercenary class! He would only fight defensive wars. As far as war is concerned, He wrote: ‘The multitude are injured and oppressed and the people are scattered.... Does it mean to benefit the people? The benefit to the people from killing the people of Heaven is slight indeed! And calculate the cost! This is the root of destruction of life. It exhausts the people to an immeasurable degree. Thus... no benefit to the people can be attained.’”

“Mo may have been the most concerned for the welfare of the common people, at least in this respect, than any of the ancient philosophers--east or west! What is the third point?”
 
“This is his condemnation of music. He talks about music, but you could extend his critique to art as such, all forms of art. Again he sounds like Mao. That’s why I asked you ‘Mo or Mao’?”
 
“Ok, Ok! What’s the passage?”
 
“’The reason why Mozi condemns music is not because the sounds of the big bells, resounding drums, harps and pipes are not delightful.... But set against the past it is not in accord with the deeds of the sage-kings and checked with the present it is not in accord with the benefits of the people. Therefore Mozi said: To engage in music is wrong.... To levy heavy taxes on the people in order to produce the sounds of big bells, resounding drums, harps, and pipes does not help the promotion of benefits and the removal of harms in the world.... Now kings, dukes, and great officials engage in music. To strike musical instruments they loot the people’s resources for food and clothing to such an extent.... Now kings, dukes, and great officials love music and listen to it, they certainly cannot go to court early and retire late in order to listen to litigations and administer the government. Therefore the country is in chaos and the state in danger.... Therefore Mozi said: To engage in music is wrong.’”
 
“Well, Fred, the condemnation is not against music per se. I can see no objection to folk music or the music the peasants might be playing in the villages. He is attacking the exploitation of the people by the court in order to support the official music [and art] productions of the state. This even sounds a little Daoist. Under appropriate non-exploitative social arrangements, even Mo would approve of music as ‘delightful’. This is the Mohist Maxim again. If we could create a society where music was beneficial and not based on exploitation of the people, I can’t see why a modern Mohist would object. As far as your reference to Mao, this was the original intention of Mao, however it may have turned out.”
 
“The fourth point is the condemnation of elaborate funerals. ‘Now the gentlemen of the world still doubt whether elaborate funerals and extended mourning are right or wrong, beneficial or harmful. Therefore Mozi said: I have inquired into the matter.... So, much wealth is buried in elaborate funerals and long periods of work are suspended in extended mourning. Wealth that is already produced is carried to be buried and wealth yet to be produced is long delayed. To seek wealth in this way is like seeking a harvest by stopping farming....’”
 
“This is very much in tune with his condemnation of music. Archaeologists won’t like this point! What’s the fifth point?”
 
“This is a point about who should be getting government positions. ‘How do we know elevating the worthy is the foundation of government? The answer is: When the honorable and the wise run the government, the ignorant and the humble remain orderly, but when the ignorant and the humble run the government, the honorable and the wise become rebellious. Therefore we know that elevating the worthy is the foundation of government.’”
 
“Very good, Fred. But who are the ‘honorable and wise’?”
 
“Who? I’ll tell you. They are the practitioners of universal love. That is, they should be. They should be true sages and philosophers. So Mo is saying just what Plato said. Philosophers should be the ones running the show! And of course the Confucians would be in agreement with Mo. Only instead of Mohist sages, Confucian sages would be in charge.”
 
“But who would be the true sages?”
 
“I’ll let you decide. We have covered some Confucians: Kongzi (Confucius) himself, Mengzi (Mencius) and he attacked Mo’s views on universal love, and we have discussed Xunzi to see whose arguments appear the better.”
 
“Well, Karl, here is our sixth and last point. Chan calls it ‘Agreement with the Superior.’ I’m not sure Mo looks too good in this section.”
 
“Let’s get with it!”
 
“He says: ‘Now, the frequent arrival of hurricanes and torrents are the punishment from Heaven upon the people for their failure to agree with Heaven....’”
 
“Yes, that is very bad, very superstitious. Like blaming God for the Lisbon earthquake in Voltaire’s day. This is retrograde compared to Confucius and Xunzi. This really calls in question Fung’s apologetics concerning Mo’s belief in the supernatural.”
 
“Now we get an answer to the question ‘How do we know that the principle of agreement with the superior can be used to govern the empire?’ This principle is important to Mo who after all was the supremo of a band of warriors and who definitely thought in terms of military obedience to the ‘superior.’ We get this answer from a consideration of Mo’s theory of the beginning of government.”
 
“This should be interesting!”
 
“Mo thinks that originally people did not have rulers. Everybody had their own way of doing things and their own moral and ethical system. ‘All of them considered their own concepts of right as correct and other people’s concepts as wrong. And there was strife among the strong and quarrels among the weak. Thereupon Heaven wished to unify all concepts of right in the world. The worthy were therefore selected and made emperor.’ The emperor then selected the ministers who then divided up the land and created the feudal lords all in the furtherance of better government since the emperor could not do everything by himself.”
 
“This sounds like the ‘Divine Right of Kings’ in so far as it appears that ‘Heaven’ somehow chose the emperor and while all other authority is delegated from him, his rests on that original choice. The ‘Mandate of Heaven’ is due to the desire of ‘Heaven’--Mo’s anthropomorphic god concept-- to have only one universal standard of ‘right’ prevail. Just like the Christians and others following Augustine’s views that there is a universal standard ‘God’s Will’.
 
“Muslims and Jews too, Karl.”
 
“Everybody gets into the act. At least Mo appeals to his utilitarian principles of benefit so that the sages have to figure out Heaven’s will. He doesn’t maintain that ‘Heaven” or its representatives came down and told him what its will was.”
 
“Yes, but if the sage gets it wrong there is Zeus with his thunderbolt!”
 
“Finish the passage.”
 
“’The feudal lords, realizing their inadequate wisdom and ability to govern the lands within the four borders by themselves, selected the next best in virtue.... Therefore, in appointing the three ministers, the feudal lords, the great officers, the prime minister, the village elders, and the heads of households, the emperor of old did not select them because of their wealth, high position, or leisure, but employed them to assist in bringing political order and administering the government.... When order prevails in the empire, the emperor further unifies all concepts of right as one in the empire and makes it agree with [the will of] Heaven. Therefore the principle of agreement with the superior can be applied by the emperor to govern the empire, by the feudal lords to govern the state, and the heads of households to govern the family....’”
 
“I remember Chan’s saying that many thought this smacked of absolutism. It reminds me of the Führerprinzip in a way, only it’s Heaven rather than a plebiscite that determines the ruler--but then vox populi, vox dei.”
 
“I thought you liked Mo’s views.”
 
“I like some of them. This Führerprinzip is not one of them. But, I suppose that it derives from the ideal of a sage king who understands the will of Heaven. This could also reflect back negatively on Plato’s philosopher kings.”
 
“Listen, Karl, Chan plays down the absolutism. After all, that's a concern of modern times not ancient China with its emperor system. Although I can see how some people might think of Mao again--with the will of the Party rather than the will of Heaven. Or was Mao’s will the will of the Party rather than the other way around?”
 
“Well, I suppose the saving grace here is that it is not a subjective will which is at stake. Philosophy is called in to determine what is the best thing to do to promote the general good (by definition the will of Heaven) and this is to be objectively determined by the sage or philosopher king. So it’s really not absolutism in the sense of the personal will of the ruler. So Mo, Mao and Plato may be off the hook!”
 
“Well, that's it for the Mozi selections in Chan. Who's next?”
 
“I think we should look at Daoism and discuss Laozi.”
 
“Fine. Let's do him next"

​To read the Confucius Dialogue click here.
To read the Mencius Dialogue click here.
To read the Xunzi Dialogue click here. 

After he had an article published in Collier’s magazine, Phillip Bonosky returned to Duquesne, Pennsylvania, the steel town where he had grown up. A fellow worker had shown his father the article, and few working class people in the town had ever had anything published. In a recent conversation, Bonosky told me that his mother, who spoke Lithuanian and had been cook and housekeeper, never talking much about anything, now came to him and sang him a song in Lithuanian – a song about the suffering of immigrants. He was a writer, she said, and she wanted him to write for her, for the immigrants for the people who could often neither write nor read.

The notion of the role of a writer that Bonosky’s mother conveyed was different than the ideal of 'modernist' subjectivist literature, writing for yourself, and impressing others with your imagination that even then was being championed by establishment literary critics. As the modern working class developed with the rise of industrial capitalism, first in Europe and North America in the 19th century, workers fought for literacy and education, traditionally the privileges of ruling classes and their servants. Capitalists needed a workforce with basic skills, but not workers that would think for themselves. As mass literacy developed, capitalist societies produced a popular media and literature. Both were commercial, formalist, escapist and either denied the existence of working-class life or portrayed it in the most sordid terms, as most movies and television programs continue to do today.

However, there were writers who sought to explore capitalist class relations and understand through fiction the lives of working people. Called realists, they included the 19th century French writers Victor Hugo and Emile Zola, the 20th century US writers Theodore Dreiser, Upton Sinclair and Jack London and many others.

After the Soviet Revolution, working class literature, there called socialist realist literature, became the center of art and culture in a country whose diverse peoples, particularly in the countryside, were largely illiterate. Just as the class struggle between the capitalist system and the socialist world movement reached a higher level with the establishment of the Soviet Union, the war over art and literature, over its exchange and use value, reached a higher level in the 1920s and 1930s.

'Proletarian literature' or 'social realist' literature flourished in the US and other developed countries not under fascist control in the 1930s and 1940s. Such literature was literally publicly burned by the Nazis when they took power in Germany in 1933. It came under relentless attack as 'inferior,' 'party line,' and 'agit-prop,' by elitist conservatives and various rivals of the Communist movement on the left. As one example, the Partisan Review, a magazine originally founded to promote working-class literature in the 1930s, soon shifted editorial views and advanced what one might call anti-realist writers and artists, those who took the 'arts for arts sake' philosophy of the conservatives and turned it into subjectivist expression, action without content, language and situations that shocked for the sake of shocking, became the darlings of the critics, right, left and center, who formed an 'anti-Social-Realist United Front' in the cold war era. By the Cold War period, Partisan Review was aligned with the US government-funded American Committee for Cultural Freedom.

In the midst of this ferment, Phillip Bonosky was a proletarian writer. Growing up in an immigrant steelworker family in Western Pennsylvania, he got himself a library card for the children’s division of the local Carnegie library at age five. (Andrew Carnegie fancied himself a benefactor of the workers his steel company exploited and endowed libraries to improve his image.)

Bonosky published a poem in his school newspaper at the age of ten, which led to his becoming 'joke editor' of the newspaper. He later recalled that an African American student whom he got his first joke from really was denied the position, an early introduction to the pervasive racism of the society.

Eventually he got his adult card at the Carnegie library and began to read journals like the Nation, the New Republic and the Bookman, liberal journals, which, at the time, constantly criticized Communist actions without explaining their positions. This made him interested in what Communists had to say. He became high school class poet, but there wasn’t much of a future for a working-class youth outside of the mines and the mills, and the coming of the depression took away even that future. Bonosky realized that there had to be a deeper answer to what was happening beyond denouncing Herbert Hoover and demanding help, which his family and most working people were doing.

Bonosky joined large numbers of unemployed youth to ride the rails in the early 1930s, and eventually found himself in Washington, DC, living in a warehouse for transients that the early Roosevelt administration had provided. He already a had strong interest in the left and Communist movements, in the steel town from which he came. No one would openly proclaim themselves to be Communists because of the likely results – firing and blacklisting at best, terroristic company violence at worst. In Washington he met Communists and others seeking to organize working class struggle.

Like a hero in a Charles Dickens novel, Bonosky then met a 'patron,' a progressive social worker named Ann Terry White. (Ironically, White was the wife of Harry Dexter White, a prominent New Dealer, vilified to this day as a Communist and Soviet agent, even though he was the chief US negotiator at the Bretton Woods Conference creating the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank). White helped Bonosky first get into Wilson College in DC (a free college) and then into a small job with the New Deal’s resettlement administration.

When the Spanish Civil War broke out, Bonosky wanted to join the anti-fascist brigades, but his attempts to get a visa from the State Department failed. He formally joined the Communist Party USA in 1938, which had organized the Abraham Lincoln Brigade and led most anti-fascist activities.

As a local leader of the Workers’ Alliance in Washington, D.C., which represented workers in the major New Deal relief program, Works Progress Administration (WPA), Bonosky, along with other local leaders, met with Eleanor Roosevelt in the White House to discuss the administration’s cuts in WPA programs. He later participated in a public forum on the issue where Mrs. Roosevelt and he were on opposite sides. Subsequently, she gave him a check for $50s for the Workers’ Alliance and told him keep her gift a secret, itself a comment on the tenuous but productive center-left politics of the New Deal era. Bonosky never cashed the check because he did not have a bank account. Of course, few working-class people, not to mention Communists, ever, before or after, were invited to have tea with the First Lady in the White House.

Red-baiting was always a part of the world that Bonosky knew even in the best of times. Even before the Cold War, the State Department discriminated against anti-fascists, and right-wing vigilantes used the press and congressional committees to attack the left and purge New Deal agencies. The onset of the Cold War, however, gave it much more virulent form as 'new' Cold War liberal Democrats joined Southern segregationists and Republicans to support legislation that repress the CPUSA and intimidate all potential allies on the left.

By this time, Bonosky was an open Communist. But keeping one’s membership a secret was no guarantee of safety. He recalled that red-baiters particularly targeted both those who were not open members along with CPUSA leaders whom they sought to imprison.

During the Cold War, his writing and publications flourished. The Burning Valley, rediscovered today as a major proletarian novel, was published in 1953. Its story deals with workers’ struggles in the Pennsylvania coal fields. The Burning Valley was reprinted in 1998 as part of The Radical Novel Reconsidered Series, published by the University of Illinois Press. A number of novels authored by current and former members of the Communist Party were also re-published as part of this series. The Magic Fern, published in 1960, is a less appreciated and perhaps more significant work. It tells the story of steel workers’ organizing struggles in Pennsylvania. It openly talks about the role of Communist Party members in those struggles and responds to Cold War hysteria by showing how anti-Communism divides and weakens the workers’ movements. Unfortunately, this novel has yet to be reprinted. Bonosky also wrote a major non-fiction work, Brother Bill McKie, a biography of the remarkable Communist trade unionist and UAW founder.

Government agents stepped up their efforts to spy on Americans during the Cold war. Communist and left publications of all sorts lost large numbers of subscribers when it became known that federal, state and local police agencies stole or unscrupulously acquired subscriber lists. Just as workers in the pre-New Deal period had the 'right' to form unions and employers had the right to use blacklists and break those unions, so in the Cold War period the CPUSA remained 'legal' (though many of its leaders were imprisoned), and people had the 'right' to read Communist and left publications, even though subscribing or even being seen with those publications might led to police home visits, loss of jobs, and blacklisting.

After a decade of such actions, the official story in the US became that the Communist Party, left trade unionism and proletarian literature and the working class itself had 'ceased to exist' and US society had been transformed into a de-politicized suburban utopia, or dystopia, depending on how you look at it.

Bonosky refused to become a political turncoat or drop out into obscurity in the long period of political repression that followed World War II. Rather than a hindrance, his Communist Party commitment enabled him to continue to grow as a writer and an activist, to travel widely in the socialist countries, and reach an international audience. Still, most US critics treated him exactly the way they asserted the Communists treated all writers who didn’t toe the party line.

During the Cold War period particularly, both establishment and 'loyal left opposition' (found in journals like The Partisan Review, Dissent and Commentary) critics either celebrated repentant ex-Communist writers or looked favorably on those who gave up on politics or social content in their work. One should remember that the CIA’s first great moment as an impresario in the arts was the funding of the publication of a book titled The God That Failed, a collection of remembrances of former Communist writers, edited by the British laborite Richard Crossman. CIA sources funded its translation into many languages as well. Also, the CIA helped fund the creation of the World Congress for Cultural Freedom as well as various cultural journals of the 'democratic left' through the world to fight Communist and anti-imperialist writers, artists and organizations. George Orwell’s 1984, which gave the world such terms as 'unperson,' 'thought police,' and 'newspeak' were also disseminated globally by CIA connected sources at the same time that they used these 'Orwellian' methods on Communist and left writers who refused to toe the 'anti-party line' in the United States. At the height of domestic cold war repression, Bonosky joined with Charles Humboldt, Annette Rubenstein, Herbert Aptheker, Walter Lowenfels and others to publish Mainstream, a left journal of the arts which continued the people’s art and culture traditions of the New Masses. At this time, Bonsoky directed a Harlem writers workshop which included John Oliver Killens, Alice Childress, Audre Lorde, Lorraine Hansberry and Lonnie Elder III, along with other men and women who would become prominent in African American literature and theater in the postwar era. This was at a time when the publishing venues available for African American and women poets and writers were still severely restricted.

One of Mainstream’s important contributions was to nurture African American writers and artists along with educating readers about the cultural dimension of the global struggle against imperialism and for peace, which was the world’s 'mainstream' in the 1950s, however much US cold warriors may have denied it.

Unfortunately Mainstream has never really gotten the recognition it deserves for this still largely unwritten history. In research for this article, I found a tender tribute from Robin Washington in a Duluth newspaper. Washington’s father, an African American poet, had hoped to publish his poetry based on his experience in World War II with the help of a recommendation from Robert Frost. After a tangled series of events, the publication fell through and his father returned to business, never really getting the chance to write and publish the poetry that was his first love. Following his father’s death, Robin Washington accidentally threw out his father’s manuscript, and really was mortified. But, with the help of the Internet, he was able to find that some of the poetry that had been published in Mainstream in 1960. It also reconnected Washington with his father and gave his father’s poetry a place in history.

Bonosky continued to write widely about the fate of US literature and his work is still quoted and cited in scholarly studies of US literature, particularly his analysis of the general corrupting effects of the Cold War, commercialism and contemporary imperialism. In 1983 he published a book titled Afghanistan: Washinton’s Secret War, which was based on his time in Afghanistan as the Moscow correspondent for the People’s World, the newspaper of the Communist Party USA. It is an invaluable source for understanding the disasters that Reagan administration policy created first for the people of Afghanistan and then later for the people of the region and the US.

In the Afghanistan that Bonosky experienced in the 1980s, there were trade unions, schools for men and women and women without veils working in traditionally male-dominated jobs. The 'democracy' and attempts at 'modernization' that the Bush administration says it champions today were a reality. But Reagan and the first Bush administrations spent billions to arm and incite those who would become both the Taliban government and Al Qaeda in the service of overturning the Communist-led government there and to fight the Soviets that aided them.

Although Bonosky was born in 1916, when Woodrow Wilson was re-elected President on the phony slogan, 'he kept us out of war,' he remains active and optimistic today. While he still sees the working class largely missing in official US literature and culture and is dismayed by what he sees as an imperialist arrogance that has trickled down in the society, that is, everyone else has to 'learn' from the United States, he continues to see in the working class and in its literary tradition, one that Bonosky and many of his contemporaries share with Walt Whitman and Mark Twain, a road to freedom and eventually to socialism.

Although bourgeois literary criticism has long sought to add insult to HUAC-McCarthyite injury by contending that Bonosky and other proletarian writers and artists ceased to function after the 1950s, I discovered in my research for this article an amusing sidelight. Today there are Internet 'term paper mills' which sell term papers on every conceivable topic to students who then turn them in as their own. I found that someone can access a paper on the work of Phillip Bonosky for a literature class, a sort of left-handed compliment from a capitalist system that will seek to literally profit from the work of those it cannot effectively silence.

Although he first began to write on butcher paper when he was a child, Bonosky’s pen, typewriter and word processor remain dedicated to providing a voice for the working class from which he came and whose interests he has dedicated himself to. In his lack of dogmatism and deep sensitivity to the diversity and dignity of working people, Phillip Bonosky continues to be a model working class intellectual and artist.​

​Media jubilation reached a climax in Berlin on Nov. 9th, 2019, thirty years after the bumbling, perhaps even misunderstood decision to open the gate for all East Germans to stream through, hasten to the nearest West Berlin bank for their “welcome present” of 100 prized West German marks, and taste the joys of the western free market system.
 
Within less than a year, they would end the experiment known as the German Democratic Republic to join and fully enjoy, the wealthy, healthy, prosperous united Germany, with its freedom of the press, speech, travel, and consumer bliss.
 
The jubilation of thirty years ago is easy to understand and to sympathize with. The ability, whenever and as often as desired, to meet and celebrate with friends and relatives sufficed to bring tears to many, many eyes and the almost universal cries of “Wahnsinn!”—“Simply crazy!”
 
But moving as those scenes were, and happy to so many in their recollections, a history-based, sterner evaluation awakens doubts that, despite the paeans in the world media, this was not purely a peaceful  revolution, a choice of freedom by the masses, another successful victory for freedom and justice as in past centuries. We recall that revolutions are complex, that the American Revolution was followed by Shay’s Rebellion, a bolstering of slavery, and a bloody six-year war which forced most Indians from Ohio. The short era of Robespierre meant almost a year in prison for Tom Paine. And enthusiastic crowds can also make very false judgments.
 
East Germans soon learned that freedom of the press was for those who owned the presses, that freedom of speech helped most those who ruled over studios and cable connections. Most tellingly, they learned very quickly that those 100 West-marks were soon spent and new ones, for all those glistening commodities and travels, had somehow to be earned, while over 95% of the industry they had built up was taken over by Westerners and, robbed of any machinery of value, for the most part, shut down. It was now very simple to move westwards; several million did, now not for freedom, consumer goods, or better-paid jobs but for any job at all.
 
Professors, teachers, scientists, journalists, and administrators at every level were thrown out, replaced by second- and third-string West Germans who were certain they could do everything better—and got “bush bonuses“ for making the sacrifice of taking over East Germany. For workers, the wage level today is still below that in the West, while jobless figures and the length of the workweek for those now finding a job are both above the figures in the West.
 
The victory thirty years ago brought other changes. The old GDR had, until the end, no drug problem, almost no AIDS, no organized crime, no school shootings, none of the free food banks now so prevalent, since people in the GDR, while lacking food items like oranges, bananas, and other southern imports, all had enough to eat. Nor was there anyone in those years begging or sleeping in the streets, since there were always jobs a-plenty and evictions were illegal. So was any discrimination against women, who got equal pay, at least a half-year paid maternal leave, free abortions, cheap summer vacations and summer camps, and one paid day off a month for household duties.
 
Oh yes, there were blunders a-plenty—stupidity, careerism, dogmatism. Envy and greed could not be eradicated from the human soul, but with almost no feverish competition, they were lessened, as the polls found. True, where people gained positions of power they were as capable of misusing it as elsewhere. Nor could all the remnants of fascist poison be erased from 16 million heads in one or two generations. But they were forbidden, and those with racist thoughts and prejudices kept them to themselves or within their closest circles, while truly masterful films, books, and plays endeavored to combat them. Today, Nazi thugs march every weekend, and the pro-fascist Alternative for Germany party has 94 seats in the Bundestag and won second place in three state elections.
 
Here we hit on the main problem with the breaking down of the Berlin Wall. The GDR had thrown out—lock, stock, and barrel—all the giant cartels and monopolies which profited from World War I, built up Hitler when, during the Depression, working people became rebellious, then earned billions from slave labor during World War II, and, after 1945, regained immense wealth and power.
 
In the West, Bayer and BASF, major perpetrators of Auschwitz, are on top of the chemical pile, worldwide now with Monsanto. Powerful old fascist fat cats like Daimler (Mercedes) and Quandt (BMW) are cheating the environmentalists, Rheinmetall and Heckler & Co. are again making billions with their tanks and guns and missiles. All their properties were confiscated by the GDR—which is why they hated it and conspired against it, successfully. Also because the GDR, as opposed to its rival in Bonn (capital of West Germany), supported the Algerians in their fight for freedom, Allende against Pinochet, Mandela and the ANC and SWAPO in Africa, Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam, and freedom fighters everywhere from Nicaragua to Aden.
 
The very existence of the GDR represented a barrier against further expansion by the Bayers with their control of ever more seed sources and their destruction of natural life, from frogs and butterflies to orchids, cacti and rain forests, but also against weapons makers who desire nothing more than further world tension, especially with Russia and China, the two main remaining barriers to world hegemony of the billionaires.
After 1945 and until 1990, no uniformed Germans were shooting presumed enemies anywhere in the world. With the GDR out of the way, the Bundeswehr, Germany’s army, flew missions and dropped bombs in the mountains of Afghanistan and trained soldiers in the desert sands of Mali—after beginning by bombing Serbia, repeating Germany’s crimes in two world wars.
 
United Germany’s Minister of Defense, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, who hopes to become chancellor, has demanded that Germany play a far bigger role in today’s world and plans a big build-up of weapons to achieve this. She found smiling support from Secretary of State Pompeo, who came to Berlin and joined in the hallelujahs for the victory of democracy thirty years earlier. Yes, Pompeo!
The GDR had countless faults and limitations, caused by poor leadership—mostly aged anti-fascist fighters, trying to save the endeavor to achieve socialism in at least this small corner of Germany, but overtaken by modern developments and never able to find rapport with large sections of a vacillating population tempted by daily TV images of a wonderful world in the Golden West, which had been built up to become one of the world’s richest countries.
 
The GDR was battered by a world of problems from all sides, domestic and foreign, pressured into “arming itself to the death” militarily, limited by the giant costs of the new electronic, computer age, with no help from the east and a boycott by the west, plus its giant humanitarian project—supplying good, modern homes for everyone while keeping rents to about one-tenth of income.
 
In the end, the odds were against it. But just as a World Series victory by the Washington Nationals did not mean that team was morally better but simply that at the time it was stronger, the defeat of the GDR did not mean that the system it was trying to develop, strengthen, and improve—socialism—was proven false by its defeat.
 
The opening of the Berlin War was seen then and is still regarded by many as a wonderful victory. Looking around today’s deteriorating situation in Germany and much of Europe, with fascist movements on the rise and world-destroying weapons deployed and maneuvering dangerously, one might well recall the words of the Greek general Pyrrhus. After beating the Romans in the Battle of Asculum in 279 BCE, but with terrible losses for his own troops, he is quoted as saying: “Another such victory and we are lost!”

​Next week, the Ghosts of Plum Run Hour discusses the two meetings between Abraham Lincoln & August Willich, leader of 1848-49 revolutionary armies in Europe. The first meeting was on February 12, 1861, when Lincoln’s inaugural train tour took him to Cincinnati, where Willich delivered a speech in Lincoln’s honor. The speech was published in German and English that day in the newspaper Willich edited, the Cincinnati Republikaner.  The second meeting was at the White House on May 8, 1863, Willich now a brigadier general in the Union Army, recently released from Confederate prison after being captured at the Battle of Murfreesboro December 31, 1862. Willich had just spent 4 months on trains and in prisons in the heart of the Confederacy, and Lincoln wanted to hear from him about it.
 
Our two experts are David Dixon, author of the very first biography of August Willich, Radical Warrior - August Willich’s journey from German Revolutionary to Union General, and Andrew Zimmerman, editor of the most recent edition of Marx & Engels’  writings on the The Civil War in the United States - Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.
 
At the time of the White House meeting, Karl Marx was researching Das Kapital while writing about our Civil War in newspapers and to Engels. Time had cast the 1848 comrades to the four winds long ago. Communism split after the 1848 revolutions between Willich and Marx, and it was not just political. A Schapper-Willich wing faced off briefly against a Marx-Engels wing over control of the Communist League in London, specifically over how to continue the revolution in Germany. The Schapper-Willich wing was more popular, largely because of Willich’s deeds on the battlefield, which Willich promised to resume immediately. Marx had deduced that scientific socialism declared Willich’s zeal for acts, military and otherwise, was a window which had closed, and would not reopen until the dialectic said it would reopen. This is how Willich achieved the title “The Reddest of the Red”; Willich was too radical for Marx. During this split, things got very personal. Jennie Marx called Willich’s repeated attempts to bed her as “trying to coax out the worm that exists in every marriage.” Years later at the White House, oceans and more than a decade traveled, it was Willich seated across from a head of state with his sabre, having survived capital’s prisons to report on them to his president.
 
Lincoln actually mentions his meeting with the Reddest of the Red in a dispatch, the same day, to his latest failed commander of the Army of Potomac, General Joseph Hooker. Hooker had just suffered the most humiliating defeat of the entire war, the Battle of Chancellorsville, considered Robert E. Lee’s greatest masterpiece and where Stonewall Jackson’s myth takes hold by his death at the hands of his own men’s fire. Willich, entering the White House that day May 8, two days after Chancellorsville ended, would have certainly heard the blame landing as it always did on the German immigrants of the 11th Corps, who famously were overrun and surprised by Jackson on the first day. “Blame it on the immigrants!” Dixon describes as the media narrative in Washington after Chancellorsville, noting, “Where have we heard that before?”
 
Politically, the German immigrant vote was crucial to Lincoln’s electoral coalition across the country. A midterm election loomed in which anti-war “Copperheads”, northern pro-union voters opposed to the Emancipation Proclamation, were mounting candidates to save the Union as it was, with slavery. Racism and xenophobia was a cancer on the Union Army felt by Willich very personally that day in their meeting at the White House. Lincoln likely began the meeting addressing the matter. So, it is no surprise that in Lincoln’s dispatch to Hooker after the meeting, his characteristic wit both acknowledges the anti-immigrant fog engulfing the war effort, then swiftly deals with it. “He [Willich] says there was not a sound pair of legs in Richmond, and that our men, had they known it, could have safely gone in and burnt every thing & brought us Jeff Davis."
 
How red was the Reddest of the Red? Join us on our YouTube channel to find out!

​Although Karl Marx is not known first and foremost as an environmental theorist, in recent decades students of his work have argued that Marx had a systematic approach to environmental protection, that he recognized the key connections among labor, technology, and nature, and, according to sociologist John Bellamy Foster, that his discussions of the environment “prefigured some of the most advanced ecological analysis of the late 20th century.”   By analyzing the distorted relationship that capitalism imposes between humans and the rest of nature, Marx used developments in the agricultural science of his day to argue that by radically transforming socio-economic relations, it is possible to repair the rift between humans and nature.  A path to sustainability and environmental protection is possible.

Marx and Engels were witnesses to and keen analysts of the environmental problems inherent in nineteenth-century capitalism.  They wrote about the depletion of coal reserves, the destruction of forests, and, especially, about diminishing soil fertility, which Foster recognizes was the most pressing issue of the day.   Given breakthroughs in soil chemistry, large-scale land owners in the 1800s became aware of the value of additives like potassium salts, phosphates and guano (sea bird dung that accumulated in great quantities in South American and the Caribbean) to improve “exhausted soil.”  At the same time, farmers realized that mineral deposits that could be used for soil enhancement were expensive and in short supply.

One of the foremost agricultural chemists of his time, Justus von Liebig (1803-73), criticized agricultural practices that relied on highly limited resources like guano.  Such temporary fixes cannot restore the “conditions of reproduction” of the soil.   “Rational agriculture,” Liebig wrote in 1859, demanded a radical recycling plan that would return the nutrients of town inhabitants’ waste back into the soil of the countryside.  Only this could ensure sustainability.  Liebig called it “the principle of restitution; by giving back to the field the conditions of their fertility, the farmer insures the permanence of the latter.”

In his discussions of nature in Capital, Marx relies heavily on Liebig’s work and shows that the divide between urban and rural concerns in Liebig’s work echo the “greatest division of material and mental labor” — that is, the separation between town and country.  Capitalist production concentrates populations in cities, estranged from the natural foundations of human existence.   Capitalism, Marx wrote, “disturbs the metabolic interaction” between human beings and the planet on which they live; this is known as the concept of “metabolic rift.”  As he wrote in Capital (vol. 3):

Large landed property reduces the agricultural population to an ever decreasing minimum and confronts it with an ever growing industrial population crammed together in large towns; in this way it produces conditions that provoke and irreparable rift in the interdependent process of the social metabolism, a metabolism prescribed by the natural laws of life itself.

Here, Marx used the organic analogy of metabolism, referring to the biological systems in which an organism takes in nutrients from its environment and expels wastes, enabling it to grow and reproduce.   Metabolism can be used to describe regulatory processes of a single cell, an organism, an ecosystem, or indeed the whole planet.  Furthermore, Marx focused on social metabolism, in which the systems that connect humans with nature are mediated by productive forces.  The “metabolic rift” refers to the way human labor becomes alienated from its natural resources.

Marx here drew the parallel between capitalist exploitation of laborers in urban areas with capitalist agriculture’s depletion of natural resources like soil fertility in the countryside.  Large-scale industry impoverishes workers, and large-scale agriculture impoverishes the soil.  The metabolic rift on a global level is seen in the way imperialist nations rob colonized areas of natural resources, including depleting their soil.  Mining guano in Peru or collecting Chilean nitrates are temporary and false solutions to the problem of soil exhaustion. (In fact Liebig said English agriculture would need to find guano deposits about the size of English coalfields to use it effectively).

For Marx, the only lasting path to sustainability is the “conscious and rational treatment of the land as permanent communal property” – i.e. the abolition of private landed property.  Ecological sustainability is only a possibility in “a future society of associated producers,” a socialist society, which could bring about a new and higher synthesis, a union of agriculture and industry.

However, a transition to socialism alone doesn’t guarantee that the antagonism between town and country will be overcome automatically.  According to Foster, Marx emphasized the need for careful planning, for a more even dispersal of people over rural and urban areas, and for recycling of soil nutrients from town to countryside.     The early Soviet Union, especially during Lenin’s time, had more deliberate concern for the scientific management of natural resources and natural preservation.  Later, other priorities would cause late 20th century Soviet leaders to pursue policies that have been characterized as “ecocide,” losing sight of Marx’s argument about the metabolic rift. A better model of the potential of a society that is not dominated by huge private corporations can be found in Cuba, whose advances in coastal management, urban farming, and sustainable agriculture are well known.  These achievements are impossible when short-term profit for private owners is the primary goal.

John Bellamy Foster believes that we usually don’t see Marx as an environmental theorist because our definition of environmental thought is too narrow, contrasting ecocentrism (focusing on the natural world) and anthropocentrism (focusing on humans), while leaving out the interaction between society and the natural world.   While capitalism sees nature as something separate from humanity, something that can and should be dominated by humans and that is even a “free gift” to capital, Marx advanced a more profound viewpoint.  Even soil fertility, Marx wrote in The Poverty of Philosophy, “is not so natural a quality as might be thought; it is closely bound up with the social relations of the time.” The key to the mediation between humans and nature is found in technology, which is shaped by both natural conditions and social relations.  As Foster points out, advances in agricultural techniques created the new social relations that are inherently incompatible with sustainable agriculture.  What have to change are not more and different technical developments as much as change in the social relations themselves.
​
At a recent Youth Climate Strike March, a young man carried a sign that said “The only solution to the climate crisis is an end to capitalism.”  Marx would agree.  Structural change, a reining in of corporate power, will be the only effective way to protect the earth, which Engels wrote “is our one and all, the first condition of our existence.”


Citations

John Bellamy Foster. “Marx’s Theory of Metabolic Rift: Classical Foundations for Environmental Sociology.” The American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 105, No. 2. (Sep., 1999), pp. 366-405.


Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. The German Ideology. New York: International Publishers, 1970 [1846]. Full text available at http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/
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Karl Marx 1981. Capital vol. 3. NY: International Publishers.

There was hope that after the world-wide pandemic, mutual cooperation and sharing would be the new normal among all the countries affected by the pandemic. And we have seen a few hopeful signs in this regard but there are serious concerns now that we may not see real international cooperation become the norm.

If we look at the Interim National Security Guidance document put out by the Biden Administration recently the indications are that in foreign policy, we are getting from this administration the same old U.S. imperialism and it will take a massive mobilization to turn that around.
​
While Trump’s slogan was “America First,” the Biden foreign policy might be characterized as   “America is back.” There is a difference in tone but the foreign policy path the country is on is essentially the same.

Throughout the document, you see the word “strength” repeated constantly, 36 times. There are belligerent statements such as, “The United States will never hesitate to use force when required to defend our vital national interests.”

This document, even as it says it prefers to ditch confrontation, intends to continue a policy of strangling China’s technological advancement through “vigorous competition” which the administration has already shown involves lining up countries to help the US weaken China economically.

So far there is no rejection of the continued hot wars in the Middle East.
​
Biden calls Russia’s leader, Putin, a “killer” and threatens new sanctions against Russia, while only scolding “Bone-Saw Murderer” Mohamed bin Salman. MBS, as he is called, is the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, identified by Biden himself as authorizing the killing and dismemberment of Jamal Khashoggi at a Saudi consulate.  Khashoggi was a columnist for the Washington Post and a permanent resident of the United States.  Biden refuses to call MBS a killer.

​The aim of U.S. imperialism is to make the world safe for U.S. finance corporations to maximize their ill-gained profits. Other aims include setting international rules suitable to U.S. extreme right class economic and military interests, keeping the U.S. dollar as the global reserve currency, protecting death merchants defending the fossil fuel industry, and defending the chemical/pharma industry’s assault on the health of the planet and our international working class.

These predatory aims require the invention of enemies.  In the past, these used to be the Soviet Union and later, global terrorism.  Now it is China, Russia, North Korea, Venezuela, Iran, and other countries trying to exercise their independence and their right to develop and choose their own economic paths.

This “national security” guidance document shows clearly who the main target will be – China.  China is attacked at least 14 times.  Russia is attacked five times.  They are labeled as “biggest threats” and “antagonistic authoritarian powers.”

If we are to successfully achieve a world where everyone is cooperating to solve the problems of the planet these countries should be seen as partners rather than threats.

They are seen as threats because the U.S. security establishment sees them as an impediment to U.S. imperialism. As such these countries are described as enemies of “democracy” while the U.S. is held up as the epitome of democracy.

The reality is that the world is becoming more multilateral and U.S. imperialism is on the decline.  That makes U.S. imperialism more dangerous.  When the word “democracy” is mentioned, it is a code word for capitalism and imperialism.  The U.S. intends to revitalize the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the Indo-Pacific “Quad” Alliance – Japan,  India, Australia, and the U.S., thus attempting to “contain” the rise of China and Russia.

In this document, Biden tries to connect the problematic foreign policy to the issue of “making life better for working families.” It is merely a cover for the promotion of imperialist policies, at odds with the true interests of the working class. Can we really have a progressive policy at home and an imperialist policy abroad? The answer is obvious. This is, in the long run, an impossibility.

In the document, Biden pretends to modernize the national security institutions while making life better for working families.  It is the same old rhetorical argument made under Reagan, “Guns or Butter.”  Reagan chose guns.  It turns out that when this country promotes guns, little money is available for working families.  What has happened to the income of working families since Reagan? There has been a significant drop in the working-class standard of life and more inequality!

More recently, a certain sector of the ruling class has decided that the higher level of inequality is an existential danger to the capitalist system itself.  They are promoting a form of “inclusive capitalism” to avoid the pitchforks. “Inclusive capitalism” has no lasting substance, however, and cannot overcome the basic contradictions of capitalism.

During the pandemic, it has been easier to make the case for a Keynesian economic intervention to alleviate the worst of the pandemic-aggravated economic crisis (on top of the already existing capitalist crisis).

Underway are massive infusions of budgetary stimulus (fiscal stimulus) from the Federal spending budget plus a huge infusion from the Federal Reserve Bank (monetary stimulus).  Combined between 2020 and 2021, they total about $6 trillion dollars.
​
The bottom line, however, is that imperialism has never been good for the country nor good for the working class.  It has been very good for the stock market!

Biden’s interim national security strategic guidance, it turns out is a lot of smoke and mirrors!

​A populist leftist president in Latin America states that the main characteristic of conservatism (catchall phrase for capitalism and neoliberalist policy) is hypocrisy.  By conservatism, he speaks of the ideology of resistance to change, of having to give up private unwarranted privileges and wealth.  Most of this wealth is acquired through wage theft, corruption, tax avoidance, debt traps, and undemocratic practices.

While the national security guidance talks about “democracy”, “ U.S. values” and “universal” values, what they are really talking about is making the U.S. finance capital more profitable around the world.

The guidance document makes no mention of what happened during the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.

No mention is made of passage of laws that essentially take away the right to vote in many states.

No mention is made of the lies used to justify the war on and killing of the people of Iraq, the Afghan people, the Syrian people, the people of Yemen, Sudan, Somalia, and many more nations.

No mention is made of the CIA rendition and torture programs around the world, including Guantanamo’s U.S. military base and Abu Ghraib in Iraq.

No mention is made in the “national security” strategic guidance document about U.S. “undemocratic” support for the coup that overthrew the elected President of Bolivia, Evo Morales, efforts to overthrow the elected president of Venezuela, Nicolas Maduro, efforts to overthrow elected President Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua or the U.S. supported coup that overthrew the elected presidents of Honduras, President Zelaya in 2009 (Biden was Vice- President then, nominated by Obama because of his foreign policy “expertise”).
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Obviously, no mention is made of institutionalized racism in this country and the consequent political instability.   No mention is made of the consequences of savage capitalism (neoliberalism) introduced in the 1980s under Reagan in the U.S. and Thatcher in the UK.  This economic policy has resulted in the loss of good-paying jobs and a lower standard of life for the working class, not only in this country but around the world.

The U.S. and China had a joint meeting (March 18-19, 2021) between the U.S. Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, U.S. National Security adviser, Jake Sullivan, Foreign Minister of China, Wang Yi, and chair of the Central Foreign Affairs Commission Office of the Chinese Communist Party, Yang Jiechi.

The U.S. sanctioned 24 Chinese officials the day prior to the meeting. The U.S. State Department also came ready with preconditions to improved relations.

The summit turned into a posturing and recrimination session on China and U.S. human rights.  The facts point to this public confrontation as the real purpose of the U.S.- requested meeting.

“China urges the U.S. side to fully abandon the hegemonic practice of willfully interfering in China’s internal affairs. This is a longstanding issue, and it should be changed.” Yang Jiechi urged “the abandonment of Cold War mentality and zero-sum game.”

No communique was issued after this Biden Administration meeting with the Peoples Republic of China.

Hopefully, this is not a lost opportunity to advance solution to common problems like the pandemic, climate change, nuclear proliferation, global economic recovery after the pandemic, and to engaging in cooperation to help solve issues affecting developing countries.

Take the issue of vaccination against the pandemic.  Ten developed capitalist countries are hoarding 80% of the vaccines.  Mexico’s President Obrador, during an online meeting with Biden, asked the U.S. to share its vaccine. The reply by the White House press secretary was that “Joe Biden would not consider sharing its coronavirus vaccines.”

U.S. vaccines were denied in spite of hypocritical talk about the enduring partnership between the U.S. and Mexico “based on mutual respect and the extraordinary bond of family and friendship.”

Would you deny vaccines to your own “family”?  Now, the U.S. plans to “lend” some of its oversupply of the AstraZeneca vaccines to both Canada and Mexico. This comes after some vaccinated Europeans experienced isolated blood-clot issues and many European countries temporarily suspended the use of that vaccine.

Cyril Ramaphosa, President of South Africa and African Union chairman has criticized this vaccine nationalism.

China, Russia, and other countries have sent their own vaccines to developing countries in Latin America, Africa, and other locations. Socialist Cuba has developed a new COVID-19 vaccine and, in contrast to developed capitalist countries, provided exemplary international health care solidarity. Mexico has received vaccines from Belgium, China, Russia, and India.  Mexico also received the active ingredient for AstraZeneca from Argentina.

Later, under international pressure and condemnation, the U.S. pledged $4 Billion to the World Health Organization’s COVAX program.

If history is a possible indicator of future actions, the Biden administration intends to continue U.S. imperialist hegemony in a world that expects more multilateralism in foreign policy, respect for the national sovereignty of nations, and more international solidarity on common issues affecting the globe, such as pandemics, climate change, war prevention, labor migration, refugees, weapons control and global poverty alleviation.

There have been some positive moves made by Biden including extension of the New Start Treaty with Russia and willingness to rejoin the Non-Proliferation Treaty with Iran. It didn’t help that Biden bombed alleged Iranian assets in Syria, however.

There is an internal conflict between Biden’s foreign policy intentions and his domestic agenda.  Biden plans to pursue infrastructure jobs, raising wages, student debt forgiveness, economic recovery, and other domestic issues.  There is a growing domestic mass opposition and new coalitions created to oppose a confrontational foreign policy and a bloated military budget; its slogan is  – Money for Jobs, Not for War!

If you agree with this slogan, you are encouraged to join the coalition at moneyforhumanneeds.org. 

Biden says he wants to work with Mexico and Central American countries in a joint economic development program initiated by Mexico to alleviate the poverty and insecurity that is driving the labor migration from Central America and southern Mexico to the U.S. Nevertheless, Biden intends to keep Trump’s original 4,000 National Guard members on the southern border with Mexico, while continuing immigrant deportations and caging of 5,000 immigrant children. Biden only offers to help Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala, all of which have right-wing governments allied with the United States. Countries left out include left-led Nicaragua plus Haiti. The main reason for the labor migration and refugee exodus is poverty, an effect of global imperialist policy.  Other contributing factors include climate change, wars, and gang violence.

Biden’s regional commanders (North America and Southern Command) also cautioned in a recent press conference about possible terrorists coming through the southern border.  Sounds a lot like Trump’s racist and unfounded rhetoric! These outrageous remarks are an insult to Mexico.

Martin Luther King warned,  “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”
​
The military budget in the U.S. takes about half the discretionary spending of the national budget, leaving little money to meet social needs.  The U.S. spends (~$741 billion budgeted for 2021) more on the military budgets of the next 10 countries combined.

​Over 10 years before the civil rights sit-ins of the 1960s, like the one at the Woolworth’s in North Carolina, a coalition organized by a Communist Party member and others fought to desegregate a drug store in Des Moines, Iowa.
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In 1948 Iowa had a problem with racism. The state was north of the Mason-Dixon line, and many considered discrimination to be “not that much of a problem.” But a string of drug stores owned by the Katz family had been accused numerous times of violating civil rights laws; one letter to the NAACP described Katz’s treatment of Black people, saying, “Negro WACs and Nurses, even when wearing Uncle Sam’s uniforms, do not belong to the human race.” The NAACP tried and failed to prosecute Katz for the misconduct numerous times, each ending in acquittal or the accuser dropping out due to lack of witnesses.

Enter Edna Griffin.

On a hot day in July, Edna, John Bibbs, and Leonard Hudson entered Katz Drug Store in downtown Des Moines. Griffin and Bibbs took seats and ordered ice cream sundaes, but they were informed that the staff was not permitted to serve them because of their race. Eighteen months later, under the pressure of court losses and mass mobilizations and boycotts by a Black-white alliance against fascism organized by Edna Griffin, the Progressive Party, and the NAACP, Katz would agree to end all discriminatory practices.

​Edna Griffin moved to Iowa in 1947, with her husband Stanley. The pair had already been active in Nashville in fighting against fascism and for better wages for teachers, and they had joined the Communist Party. They were struck by the status quo of discrimination in Iowa. The vast majority of Iowans did not believe there was a problem. Indeed, while 83% of African American lawyers thought illegal discrimination was common, 87% of county attorneys thought it was not. Numerous court battles had already been fought and lost on account of “no witnesses.” In a state with a 99% white population, Black Iowans needed a way to convince white Iowans that discrimination existed, that it was a problem they should be concerned about, and that solving the problem depended on them.

In consultation with the NAACP and members of the Progressive Party, Edna hatched a strategy to win in the courts and in the court of public opinion. The first step was to make Edna seem relatable to white Iowans. While the defense tried to paint her as a professional agitator who caused a disturbance, Edna’s legal team drove home the point that Edna was a respected, educated, middle-income young mother whose actions were perfectly reasonable for a hot day in June and that the central question of the case was whether the law had been broken. Of course, Edna was a tireless “agitator” whose Communist affiliation caught the attention of the FBI, but the perception that she could have been anybody was crucial to not only gaining sympathy with the all-white jury but also to addressing the thrust of the question in court: was this discrimination under the law, and did it live up to the democratic ideals Iowans held about their state? Griffin tied the battle against discrimination to the battle against fascism, an idea that held a bit of weight just a few years after World War II. At the trial Griffin stated, “I volunteered in the armed forces knowing full it was a jim crow army, to help establish the equal dignity and equal rights of my people.”

Along with the battle in the courts, Griffin also fought in the street, organizing a series of protests, sit-ins, and boycotts designed to hurt Katz’s business. The two-prong strategy was necessary because, as Griffin put it, “Experience indicates that court action alone has not and cannot stop jim crow because the penalty exacted under the law is not sufficiently heavy.” As in the trials, the argument in the streets was made broadly as a fight against the forces of tyranny rather than as a narrow fight at one drug store. One brochure handed out during this time was titled, “Bill of Rights — Hitler Failed but Katz Is Trying” and read:

A lawsuit is pending against Katz Drugstore but we want you to know why Jim Crow undermines the rights of every citizen, not just the victims. The “master race” idea poisons the mind with hate, distrust, and suspicion. This turns the minds of the people from high prices, low wages, and no housing to violence against one another. It happened in Germany, and it can happen here.
Protest signs read, “The Bullets Weren’t for White’s Only. Don’t Buy at Katz” and “Counter Service for Whites Only. This is Hitler’s Old Baloney. Don’t Buy at Katz.”

The two-prong strategy — which engaged the masses to demonstrate that everyone had an interest in ending the problem of racism — won the fight overall. Griffin won a criminal case against Katz in 1948, but the drugstore owners continued to bar African Americans until December 3, 1949, after more than a year of additional civil lawsuits and street protests.

The success in either field of struggle depended on wins in both, and the appeal to white people’s broad collective interest rather than their individual self-interest was a winning strategy. The trials provided the context and legitimacy, and the work in the streets provided the economic and political force to make it happen. This strategy would prove itself time and again in the civil rights moments to follow throughout the 1950s and 1960s, perhaps most notably with figures like Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr.

Edna Griffin would continue to play vital roles in progressive fights for decades after this moment, with the Black-white progressive coalition built during the drugstore struggle playing a key role in the Henry Wallace campaign, in desegregation fights nationally, against the atomic bomb, against the Korean War, for unionization, and in many other fights.

Perhaps the most relevant endorsement comes from the FBI agent charged with tracking her: “She should not be underestimated as an individual. She is a very capable and intelligent person. She manages to get along with people and is always fighting for some noble cause.”


Citations

​
Noah Lawrence, “‘Since It Is My Right, I Would Like to Have It’: Edna Griffin and the Katz Drug Store Desegregation Movement.” Annals of Iowa 67, no. 4, pp. 298–330, 2008.

On March 8, 2021, the Supreme Federal Tribunal (STF) - Brazil’s highest court - struck down all the criminal convictions against Brazil’s former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Monumental in its impact, this decision finally brought an end to a ruthless lawfare campaign against Lula. ​

Things worked out quite differently than many in the Berlin media said they would at the congress of the LINKE, the country’s left-wing party.

The pandemic had forced postponements from June 2020 to October 2020 and from last October to March 2021, with most of the 580 delegates at home in front of a screen, microphone, and camera. Only the socially-distanced, masked leaders sat in a sparsely occupied hall in Berlin. Other political parties are meeting that way too.

The bitter, possibly fatal inner conflicts, greatly feared by some, greatly desired by others, simply did not happen. Unlike the angry quarrels, hostility, and near split-ups which troubled some earlier congresses, this time there was an amiable, friendly atmosphere throughout.

No surprise, at least for most members, was the choice of new party leaders. Their predecessors stepped down as required after two four-year terms (plus extra months due to the postponements). Only outsiders may have been surprised that both new co-chairs were women, Janine Wissler and Susanne Hennig-Wellsow, which was new.

But many were indeed moved to see the two so supportive of one another, each congratulating the other on her (separate) election and both assuring party members that they would get along very well while diving into the tough tasks ahead; a year full of elections in six states and, on September 26, in all Germany, and with the LINKE now polling at a worrisome 7 or 8 percent, too close to the 5 percent cut-off point below which a party is not entitled to seats in the country’s parliament.

Who are the two new leaders, no longer a male-female team but still the customary East-West duo?

Janine Wissler, 39, has led the LINKE opposition caucus in the legislature of the West German state of Hesse since 2014. She is known as a fighter. In the last election campaign, she covered her whole state by bicycle, speechmaking all along the route, and winning more LINKE votes than the party won in most of West Germany.
More recently, joining the protest against chopping down part of an ancient forest to build another highway, she stayed a while in one of the high tree huts aimed at holding off loggers and the police.

Susanne Hennig-Wellsow, 42, her co-chair, is also known to be plucky. Originally a speed skater, a very good one, she switched to educational issues in her East German home-town of Erfurt in Thuringia, and quickly climbed to a position equivalent to that of Janine Wissler’s just across the former East-West border, becoming chair of both the state party and its caucus in the legislature.

But unlike Wissler, she was not in opposition. Thuringia is the first and only German state with a LINKE leader, Bodo Ramelow, as minister-president (like a governor), because his party won the most seats. Since 2014 he has headed a shaky coalition with a small Social Democratic and even smaller Green caucus.

Hennig-Wellsow gained unusual fame last year after a conservative politician pushed Ramelow out as head of state, but only by accepting the votes of the neo-Nazi Alternative for Germany party (AfD), which, despite the leading role of the state’s Red, Red, Green coalition, is stronger and more rabid in Thuringia than anywhere else.

Tradition demanded that party-leader Hennig-Wellsow present the winner, any winner, with congratulatory flowers. She approached him, then suddenly let the bouquet fall to the floor. Impolite, but most anti-fascists rejoiced at what became a top YouTube hit. After a huge public outcry, the man had to step down three days later and Ramelow came back — with Hennig-Wellsow. Now, these two state leaders head the national party, and though they disagree sharply on some issues, they are in agreement on a host of others.

A striking feature of the LINKE congress that just ended was the age of the delegates. Among the delegates who spoke up electronically, with contributions strictly limited in time because so many wanted to speak, the number of young people and women was greater than ever before. This marked a change from the past when so many were aging, often male, and frequently former members of the old Socialist Unity Party, the ruling party in the GDR.

That generation is dying out. Ten years ago over 50% of Die Linke’s membership lived in the five smaller states of East Germany. Now they make up 38 percent of a total of 60,000.

With all due respect to these truly “Old Faithful,” the trend toward a new, younger generation is a greatly-needed cause for hope. And so is their militancy — which was reflected in the words and the spirit of Wissler and Hennig-Wellsow.

Most of these young members called energetically for more visible and militant action in all causes for which the party stands. A key theme was helping people recover from the pandemic, which is causing heavy debts, hardships, job losses, and bankruptcy for tens of thousands of small firms, retail shops, restaurants, and cultural workers while the biggies, from Amazon to Aldi, from Daimler-Benz to BMW rake in mountains of euros for their owners and stockholders. The LINKE demands genuine taxes on the wealthy, higher wages for the workers —a 15-euro minimum wage — and more for children and pensioners. It means much closer ties with the unions and their struggles. Some of the unions sent greetings to the congress, which still required a bit of courage.

Many stressed the related fight for the environment, too often neglected and left to the Greens. But the Greens, till now in second place in the polls ahead of the Social Democrats (SPD) but well behind the twin “Christian Union” parties, have moved ever closer to arrangements with big business, downplaying the needs of working-class people and even abandoning major principles in order to gain or keep cabinet positions, as in Hesse, where their coalition ministers concurred in sacrificing forest sectors to an unnecessary highway extension (where Wissler did some needed “tree-hugging.”)

Many delegates warned of further hospital privatization and supported the fight for affordable, publicly-owned housing to outpace the profit-based gentrification expanding through most cities.

There was praise for the LINKE in Berlin; it led local coalition partners SPD and Greens in pushing through a rent control law reversing the worst over-pricing and forbidding most increases. It also defied Green foot-dragging and SPD opposition to a referendum to buy out (or “confiscate”) Berlin’s biggest real estate giants.

Both of the two new party leaders and many delegates called for a constant, vigilant resistance to the growing menace of the fascists, some loosely bound up in local thug gangs and underground killer units, others organized on a party basis or embedded in the police, the armed services or as suspicious secret agents of the FBI-type Constitutional Defense Bureau.

There was also general agreement on re-directing billions spent on armament purchases and production toward the repair of decrepit schools, rutty roads, unsafe bridges, and all public facilities.

But general agreement on this edged onto questions dividing the party for years. Some members — and many in leadership — hope keenly that the LINKE can join with the Social Democrats and Greens in a national, governing “left-of-center coalition,” as in current state governments in Thuringia and Berlin. Former harsh rejection by the other two of any connection with the “former rulers of the GDR dictatorship” has now weakened, especially if the votes of LINKE deputies can help them over the 50% margin to victory. Since both the SPD and the LINKE adopted the color red as their symbol, this would be a Green-Red-Red coalition, or G2R, or RGR, depending on who would be top dog. Such an alliance, say its advocates, would be a bar against the right, meaning the Christian sister parties, the conservative Free Democrats, and the fascistic AfD.

The state and the national levels differ in many ways. Most important, only the latter deals with foreign and military policy, which erects big, important hurdles. Both SPD and the Greens insist on two conditions for an alliance: the LINKE must abandon its opposition to NATO and to sending Bundeswehr troops outside German borders, even on UN missions. That is their red line; No-NATO means No-go! And well-armed German troops must be able to flutter black-red-golden flags from Kabul to Bamako, from masts in the Indian Ocean, the Mediterranean, the Red Sea, or any sea or coast where it serves German purposes. Roll up the tanks, drones, fighters, and armed frigates!

Some LINKE leaders call for compromises. A humanitarian mission for the UN now and then should not be a major hurdle, while replacing NATO with a Europe-wide security agreement, including Russia instead of threatening it, is currently pure fantasy, they say. In a highly controversial open letter, Matthias Höhn, a leading LINKE member, said that such matters can be agreed upon, Germany need not totally reject U.S. demands for 2% of its budget for military build-up but might cut it to 1%, with the other 1% diverted to development aid for countries of the south.

His opponents were quick to reply; they insisted that Germany was threatened by no one; the Bundeswehr was in essence an instrument of the same expansive powers which have determined bloody German policy for over a century. Bombing Belgrade and Afghanistan was also called “humanitarian,” they note, and any backsliding in these matters was really a foot in the door, a dangerous foot, and would cancel the basic claim by the LINKE to be the one and only party of peace in the Bundestag.

This question has implications for even more basic questions. Does the LINKE support or oppose Germany’s present capitalist social system? Many leaders in the East, often having experienced advantages attached to cabinet seats on a state level, insist that the LINKE can only exert political effect to improve life if it takes part on a governmental level. The other side claims that the LINKE, as a tolerated little brother in such a coalition, would be granted a few lesser cabinet ministries but be easily outvoted on important policy questions, foreign or domestic, with only two options — bow down or quit.

“No,” they say, the party wants improvements but sees the need for a full social switch. That means active opposition and not becoming part of “the Establishment,” a role which has cost it dearly in eastern Germany in poll results, elections, and reputation. Essentially, some say that support for socialism and being part of the so-called establishment contradict one another.

The dividing line also affected the two new leaders. Hennig-Wellsow from Thuringia is ready to consider a GRR coalition, even with a compromise or two. Isn’t that what realistic politics sometimes requires? Wissler from Hesse says No; she wants no cozy, weak-kneed cabinet seat for LINKE. Let the SPD and Greens change their position, she says, and adopt a genuine peace policy that abandons dangerous “east-west” confrontation.

The differing viewpoints were put to a test during the vote for six deputy chairpersons. Matthias Höhn, who sent that letter proposing a retreat on armaments and deployment, received 224 voters. Tobias Pflüger, a disarmament expert opposed to any dilution of peace positions, beat him out with 294 votes. And it was Pflüger’s views which were more frequently reflected by the overwhelmingly young speakers’ list.

Many note that the coalition question is purely hypothetical anyway. With Greens and SPD now polling at 17 percent each and the LINKE at 8 percent (but hoping to get back to double digits), reaching 50 percent is still a dream.

That explains why so many stressed instead the need to fight far less in parliaments or party meetings but far more in the streets, factories, and colleges, among machinists, teachers, medical personnel, supermarket employees, truck drivers, and all the places where those who do the country’s work must move in defense against current attacks on living standards and values. This must reach at least as many women as men, both young and old, all sexual orientations, and definitely, those hit hardest, the millions with immigrant backgrounds. Hopeful symbols were the hearty greetings from the Alevite Turkish community, from several major unions, and young activists in Fridays for Future.
Disagreement on key issues could not and will not be ignored. But the happy surprise was that this did not lead to a split, which would have meant LINKE if not general left-wing political demise! The sides agreed to disagree and now work together to win supporters — and votes — in the six state elections and the national election soon challenging the party.

There was one other aspect which surprised many and deserves attention: how many participants, especially the younger ones, dropped past shyness and stated that the current social system, now proving its decay and inhumanity more clearly than ever, must be replaced.

The goal was also named, without many former taboos; a socialist economy, no longer determined by a tiny cabal whose lust for unearned profit caused a huge, growing gap between billionaire luxury and billions facing deprivation and despair.

If this new fighting spirit and renewed orientation can be maintained, the LINKE party could play a far more potent role in strengthening opposition within Germany. And after the vicious defeat of Jeremy Corbyn’s fight in Britain and with the weakness of leftist parties in France, Italy, and elsewhere in Europe, a militant Left in central, powerful Germany could regain the importance it once possessed in the heyday of people like Rosa Luxemburg — who was born 150 years ago, on March 5, 1871!

​

Two books by Slavoj Zizik (“Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism”, 1038 pp., and “Living in the End Times”, 504 pp.) were  reviewed by John Gray ("The Violent Visions of Slavoj Zizek") in the July 12, 2012 issue of The New York Review of Books. Professor Gray is to be commended for wading through 1500 pages of undiluted Zizek (and perhaps saving some of us from having to do so). I propose to review Gray's article and thus give a meta-critique, as it were, of some of Zizek's views as presented by Gray. If anyone is stimulated to go on to read Zizek so much the better, or worse as the case may be. You can find Gray's original article here:The Violent Visions of Slavoj Žižek by John Gray | The New York ...…. My reflections are divided into five parts.


1.) Zizek has produced over 60 books in the last two decades or so and has become one of the most famous public intellectuals in the West; propounding a sort of non-Marxist Marxism. The NY Review article has a picture of the philosopher sitting up in his bed in Ljubljana, Slovenia with a framed picture of Stalin on the wall behind him. New Yorkers may remember that he addressed the OWS movement in Zuccotti Park.


So what is Zizek's message? At one time he was a member of the Communist Party of Slovenia but he quit in 1988 and has since articulated a critique of capitalist society more influenced by a strange version of Hegel than by Marx. Gray says a CENTRAL THEME of ZZ's work "is the need to shed the commitment to intellectual objectivity that guided radical thinkers in the past."  Intellectual objectivity is a BOURGEOIS ILLUSION and most radicals, at least most Marxists, have always been partisans for the working class. Gray should be clearer about what ZZ is trying to express with this criticism.


ZZ wants to, in his own words, "repeat the Marxist 'critique of political economy', without the utopian-ideological notion of communism as its inherent standard." We had better be pretty familiar with, at least, the three big volumes of Das Kapital before we decide on accepting ZZ's "repeat" of Marx's project! ZZ doesn't think the world communist movement was radical enough. He writes, "the twentieth-century communist project was utopian precisely insofar as it was not radical enough." What does this mean? "Marx's notion of the communist society," ZZ writes, "is itself the inherent capitalist fantasy; that is, a fantasmatic scenario for resolving the capitalist antagonisms he so aptly described."


2.) It is all very well for ZZ to put down what he thinks is Marx's notion of communist society, but as a matter of fact neither Marx nor Engels spent much time speculating about a future communist society precisely because they thought such idle speculation unwarranted; they were more interested in dissecting the nature of capitalism and the methods needed to overthrow it. ZZ at least follows their example as Gray points out that nowhere in the 1000+ pages of “Less Than Nothing” does ZZ discuss what he thinks a future communist society would/should be like.


What he does discuss  says Gray (who calls the book a "compendium" of all ZZ's past work) is his new and unique interpretation of Hegel (by way of Jacques Lacan's unscientific reinterpretation of Freud) and its application to a new reading of Marx. In other words, the arch-rationalist Hegel is viewed from the point of view of the irrationalist Lacan and this mishmash of misinterpretation is used to explain Marx to us. 


One of Lacan's teachings is that REALITY cannot be properly understood by LANGUAGE. Which, if true, would make science impossible and bar us from ever understanding the nature of the world we live in. But it is language that Lacan uses to tell us something about the nature of reality, i.e., that language can't do that! Lacan also rejected Hegel's view that Reason is imminent in history. Big deal-- Marx and the entire history of post-Hegelian materialism has rejected this notion of Absolute Idealism for the last 150 years or more and no one needed Lacan to tell us about the outmodedness of this Hegelian notion. 


But ZZ thinks that Lacan has shown more than just that Hegel was wrong to think that Reason Rules the World. ZZ, says Gray, thinks that Lacan has shown "the impotence of reason."  This is a fundamental attack on the legacy of the Enlightenment upon which all attempts to understand the world scientifically and rationally are based; it is ultimately a fascist outlook.


ZZ has also been influenced by the contemporary French philosopher Alain Badiou (who has been himself influenced by Lacan and, shudder, Heidegger and has developed a form of Platonic Marxism).  Using some of Badiou's ideas ZZ constructs his own view of "dialectics" as being based, Gray says, on "the rejection  of the logical principle of noncontradiction." ZZ imputes this view to Hegel and thus claims Hegel rejected reason. ZZ writes  that for Hegel a (logical) proposition "is not  really suppressed by its negation." ZZ credits Hegel with the invention of a new type of logic: "paraconsistent  logic."


This is really confused. We have to distinguish between FORMAL LOGIC where the law of non-contradiction reigns, and Hegel's metaphysics or ontology of Being where there are different sorts of logic at work-- subjective logic (thoughts) and objective logic (the external world). But even here it is not a question of a "proposition" being suppressed. Hegel says neither things nor thoughts care for contradictions and when contradictions appear there is a movement to overcome and resolve them on higher levels of understanding and reason-- this is the inherent motion driving the "dialectic" a motion to overcome and eliminate contradictions.


Despite these considerations, ZZ forges ahead with his ill conceived "paraconsistant logic."  "Is not," he writes, "'postmodern' capitalism an increasingly paraconsistant system in which, in a variety of modes, P is non-P: the order is its own transgression, capitalism can thrive under communist rule, and so on?" 


At this point Gray quotes a long passage from “Less Than Nothing” in which ZZ lays out the main theme of his book dealing with the response needed to "postmodern" capitalism: "The underlying premise of the present book is a simple one: the global capitalist system is approaching an apocalyptic zero-point. Its 'four riders of the apocalypse' are comprized by the ecological crisis, the consequences of the biogenetic revolution, imbalances within the system itself (problems with intellectual property; forthcoming struggles over raw materials, food and water), and the explosive growth of social divisions and exclusions." ZZ misses here the fact that the four horsemen of the capitalist apocalypse are simply four manifestations  of the same fundamental contradiction underpinning the entire capitalist system, namely, the private appropriation of socially created wealth.


At this point Gray launches an unjustified attack on ZZ, accusing him of ignoring "historical facts" such as the environmental damage done by the Soviet Union and to the countryside by Mao's "cultural revolution." You can't just blame capitalism since both the SU and China had centrally planned economies. History, Gray says, does not provide any evidence that replacing capitalism by socialism will better protect the environment. 


What does "history" really show? Just take the case of the Soviet Union. The soviets tried to build socialism but were attacked by the western capitalist powers from day one. They had to take short cuts to industrialize and fend off the Nazi attack, and then the Nazi successor state as US imperialism took up the anti-communist crusade. China has a similar history. All parties in this conflict were societies still under the rule of the law of value, the reigning economic force in commodity producing economies. Socialism did not thrive (nor could it have thrived) in the primitive backward conditions it developed under in the 20th century. If socialist central planning were to replace the social anarchy of capitalism in the advanced capitalist states of the west (including Japan) where production could be based on need not profit (thus overcoming the law of value) we would be able to reign in our four apocalyptic horsemen and literally save the planet. This is what "history" really suggests and Gray's attack on ZZ on this issue is unjustified.


However, his next attack on ZZ has merit. ZZ's "Marxism" lacks any relation to the actual class struggle and does not reflect Marx's commitment to a materialist dialectic grounded in the empirical reality of day to day economic struggle. Here is what ZZ says: "Today's historical juncture does not compel us to drop the notion of the proletariat, or of the proletarian position--- on the contrary, it compels us to radicalize it to an existential level beyond even Marx's imagination. We need a more radical notion of the proletarian subject [i.e., the thinking and acting human being], a subject reduced to the evanescent point of the Cartesian cogito, deprived of its substantial content." 


This is just ridiculous. The worker treated in complete isolation from his/her class and relation to the means of production, treated as an isolated human being, is simply retrograde bourgeois idealism and in no way a more radical conception than that of Marx. It is an abandonment of the concept of the proletariat, or working class, as understood by Marxists.


3.) ZZ in fact abandons objectivity for a completely subjective position. "The truth we are dealing with here," he writes, "is not 'objective truth' but the self-relating truth about one's own subjective position; as such it is an engaged truth, measured not by its factual accuracy but by the way it affects  the subjective position of enunciation." In other words, "truth" is what inspires me to feel good about my chosen path-- my "project" and reinforces me in my actions to attain the fulfillment of my "project." ZZ thinks a communist society would be nice but doesn't think it's really possible to attain but that doesn't mean we should not act up and agitate against the status quo. ZZ also thinks it’s ok to engage in terror if it helps my subjective enunciation. He supports Badiou's position in favor of "emancipatory terror" and lauds Mao's Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.


To top off this witch's brew of petty bourgeois pseudo-revolutionary clap-trap, ZZ, Gray points out, "praises the Khmer Rouge." For all the meaningless killings Pol Pot and his gang indulged in ZZ does not blame their fall from grace as related to their barbarity. "The Khmer Rouge, were," he says, "in a way, not radical enough: while they took the abstract negation of the past to the limit [this is how a "Hegelian" refers to the killing fields!-tr] they did not invent any new form of collectivity." Would a new form of collectivity have justified their actions? [As we shall see ZZ rejects these criticisms by Gray on the grounds that his theory of violence has been misunderstood].


ZZ even goes so far as to call himself a Leninist. Gray gives a quote from a 2009 interview where ZZ remarks that: "I am a Leninist. Lenin wasn't afraid to dirty his hands. If you can get power, grab it." Gray is right to think that Lenin (as well as Marx) would hold ZZ's views in contempt. Lenin recognized the need for violence, it would be forced upon the workers by the ruling class, but he never celebrated it in the manner of ZZ who thinks it should be applied in a terrorist manner as a morale booster for the radical movement even though a successful revolution to get rid of capitalism is impossible. Gray gives another gem from ZZ on this topic: "Francis Fukuyama was right: global capitalism is 'the end of history.'" Very few, if any, people claiming to be Leninists believe that Fukuyama was right; I don't think, based on some of his current writings, that even Fukuyama thinks he was right.


4.) In this section I will deal with some valid points Gray makes against ZZ's fascination with the cult of violence, but points that are tarnished by Gray's own hyper cold war anti-communism and distortion of facts. ZZ does not think class conflict has an objective basis, according to Gray, who produces this quote from ZZ maintaining that class war is not "a conflict between particular agents within social reality: it is not a difference between agents (which can be described by means of a detailed social analysis), but an antagonism ('struggle') which constitutes these agents." It is therefore ultimately subjective-- just the opposite of what Marx and Lenin held.


To illustrate his position ZZ discusses the collectivization of agriculture and the struggle against the kulaks in the USSR in the 1920s and 30s. ZZ makes a valid observation that often non-Kulak poorer peasants  joined with the kulaks in opposing collectivization. This was a case of false consciousness. Americans are familiar with this phenomenon when they observe working people and minorities voting for the Republican Party and conservative candidates. ZZ says the Kulak non-Kulak boundary was often "blurred and unworkable: in a situation of generalized poverty, clear criteria no longer applied and the other two classes of peasants (poor and middle peasants -tr) often joined the kulaks (rich peasants- tr) in their resistance to forced collectivization." 


ZZ goes on to say, " The art of identifying a kulak was thus no longer a matter of objective social analysis; it became a kind of complex 'hermeneutics of suspicion," of identifying and individual's  'true political attitudes" hidden beneath his or her deceptive public proclamations." This is, by the way, the same "hermeneutics" Americans have to use, following the maxim that "all politicians are liars and say one thing but do another," when they try to figure out what candidates are saying and how they will actually behave once in office. 


 ZZ is wrong to think of this as a subjective process of self identification. Cases of false consciousness have objective social conditions (miseducation, prejudicial propaganda, poverty, illiteracy) as their causes. Gray is wrong, I think, to call ZZ's view "repugnant and grotesque" because he appeals to hermeneutics and doesn't criticize Stalin for killing millions of people but for using Marxist theory to try and explain what the actions of the USSR were with respect to collectivization. The idea that Soviet policy was to bring about forced collectivization by killing millions of people is a relic of cold war bunko. I recommend Michael Parenti's “Blackshirts & Reds: Rational Fascism & the Overthrow of Communism”  for a balanced discussion of the role of violence in Soviet history.


However, ZZ is to be faulted for rejecting using Marxist theory to understand and explain political actions. He says that a time comes to junk theory because "at some point the process has to be cut short with a massive and brutal intervention of subjectivity: class belonging is never a purely objective social fact, but is always also the result of struggle and social engagement." But you cannot have a successful people's movement (struggle and engagement) without a correct  analysis of the purely objective  social facts-- otherwise the movement has to rely on spontaneity and no movement has grown and prospered that based itself on spontaneity.


An idea of how far down the wrong road a social theorist calling him/herself a "Leninist" can wander is revealed by ZZ's attitudes towards Hitler and the Nazi apologist Martin Heidegger. Concerning Heidegger, ZZ writes, "His involvement with the Nazi's was not a simple mistake [of course not-- it was the essence of his world view-- tr] , but rather a 'right step in the wrong direction.'" How does ZZ arrive at this? He has a new reading of Heidegger to propose. He says, "Reading Heidegger against the grain, one discovers a thinker who was, at some points strangely close to communism…." Gray points out that ZZ  claims that the radically pro-Hitler Heidegger of the mid 1930s could even be classified as "a future communist."  Indeed. What future does ZZ have in mind? Heidegger died in 1976 without ever, to my knowledge, having become any kind of communist.


ZZ thinks Heidegger was wrong, but also kind of right, in being a follower of Hitler, because there was a big problem with Hitler. Here is what it was, according to ZZ's own words quoted by Gray: "The problem with Hitler was that 'he was not violent enough,'  his violence was not "essential" enough. Hitler did not really act, all his actions were fundamentally reactions, for he acted so that nothing would really change, staging a gigantic spectacle of pseudo-Revolution so that the capitalist order  would survive….  The true problem of Nazism is not that it 'went too far' in its subjectivist-nihilist hubris [ I am tempted to say it takes one to know one- tr] of exercising total power, but that it did not go far enough, that its violence was an impotent acting-out  which, ultimately, remained in the service of the very order it despised."


There is so much wrong with this that I hardly know where to begin. In the first place there was only one socio-economic order at any rate that Hitler "despised" and wanted to destroy-- that was the order represented by the Soviet Union (he also despised and wanted to destroy the Jews.) Hitler used all the power at his disposal to accomplish his aims. It is impossible to conceive of what destruction Hitler could have wrought if had used (and had) the means to wreak even more violence on the world that he in fact did. He would not have destroyed capitalism as that was the economic order he furthered in Germany-- it was socialism, Marxism that he wanted to destroy. The Nazi's also rejected bourgeois democracy-- but because it was too weak to save the West from the hoards of semi-barbaric Bolshevik Untermenshen waiting to burst out of the Soviet Union and inundate Aryan Europe. If World War II was an impotent acting-out, I shudder to think what Hitler could have achieved if he was on ZZ's  political viagra.


But what about the Jews? What about anti-Semitism? Gray suggests that ZZ's attitude towards eliminating anti-Semitism from the world would also involve eliminating the Jews. This may or may not be so but it does not make ZZ an anti-Semite; it only shows, if that is what he means, that he accepts the ultra-right Zionist view that non Jews will always be against Jews and the only solution is an exclusively Jewish state. Well, what does ZZ say about all this?


He states that "The fantasmatic [ZZ's own word for "fantastic"- tr]  status of anti-Semitism is clearly revealed by a statement attributed to Hitler: 'We have to kill the Jew within us.'" He continues: "Hitler's statement says more than it wants to say: against his intentions, it confirms that the Gentiles need the anti-Semitic figure of the "Jew" in order to maintain their identity. [Oh my! I hope Herr Hitler is not the representative spokesperson for the "Gentiles." Hitler's statement doesn't confirm anything other than his own personal anti-Semitism-tr] It is thus not only that 'the Jew is within us'-- what Hitler fatefully forgot to add is that he, the anti-Semite, is also in the Jew.  What does this paradoxical entwinement mean for the destiny of anti-Semitism?" 


Gray admits to having problems trying to figure just what ZZ means (he is too prolix and uses terms out of context from different philosophies to describe his own quite different views) but it seems quite a stretch to suggest that ZZ may be soft on anti-Semitism. ZZ himself has taken great umbrage at Gray's comments in this review and has penned a response that it is well worth reading and claims to set the record straight on this issue.  [“Slavoj Zizek Responds to His Critics”]


5.) An example Gray gives of using terms out of context is ZZ's assertion that one may say that Gandhi was more violent than Hitler. Why would anyone want to say that except for "shock value?" ZZ says, in his reply to Gray, that Gray has misinterpreted him. ZZ believes in a type of violence in which "no blood is shed" and then refers to Gandi's struggles against the British in India-- usually referred to as based on "nonviolence." Since "nonviolence" is a special sort of "violence" it appears that since Ghandi was more nonviolent than Hitler he was more violent than Hitler. This is the "Hegelian" dialectic run amuck.


Here is another example of ZZ, saying nothing according to Gray, engaging in meaningless wordplay. "The … virtualization of capitalism is ultimately the same as that of the electron in particle physics. The mass of each elementary particle is composed of its mass at rest plus the surplus provided by the acceleration of its movement; however, an electron's mass at rest is zero [sic], its mass consists only of the surplus generated by the acceleration, as if we are dealing with a nothing which acquires some deceptive substance only by magically spinning itself into an excess of itself." I'm not sure what ZZ is trying to say here about electrons, let alone capitalism (is surplus value "magical") but I don't think the rest mass of an electron is zero in the first place. For what it is worth Wikipedia says "The electron rest mass (symbol: me) is the mass of a stationary electron. It is one of the fundamental constants of physics….  It has a value of about 9.11×10−31 kilograms or about 5.486×10−4 atomic mass units, equivalent to an energy of about 8.19×10−14 joules or about 0.511 megaelectronvolts." 


Granted it is a very small mass, an electron is, after all, a very small particle-- but it is not zero. ZZ expects us to read 1038 pages of this stuff!  It might be a good reference book to ZZ ideas-- which don't seem to be very Leninist-- the index has 10 references to Lenin while Lacan has over 2 columns devoted to his views! Gray is a hostile reviewer, but he is also hostile to Marxism, nevertheless, his review calls into question ZZ's basic methods of thinking and expressing himself (Gray says he represents "formless radicalism"). To get some idea of where Gray is coming from (I don't think it's a very nice place since it's anti-Enlightenment) check out the following: John N. Gray - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
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I want to start this critique of Biden’s developing foreign policy by stating clearly and unequivocally that his $1.9 trillion rescue plan deserves total support from everyone in our country. It is nothing less than a dramatic disavowal of the right-wing era launched by Ronald Reagan some 40 years ago.

Although Biden deserves praise for his domestic policy so far, his characterization on national television of Russian President Vladimir Putin as a “killer” was just another indication of what is, unfortunately, turning out to be a dangerous trend in the foreign policy he is pursuing.

While his domestic policy radically departs from what we have seen in the U.S. over the last 40 years his, foreign policy—executed by stalwart representatives of the old establishment—is failed business as usual. And the unfortunate reality is that a continuation of the policy of military domination of the entire world will sooner or later require turning away from progressive domestic priorities.

As Biden begins his presidency, we are in a different and new world, one that did not exist in the  Reagan-Bush-Clinton days of neoliberalism. The planet is in a very real climate emergency and is reeling under a global pandemic. Super recessions and depressions are crippling many countries economically. The wealth gap is growing day by day, and corruption in government, which has always been a problem, is even worse now, with scandals happening in almost every country in the world. Also worse than ever are the attacks on democracy happening in nations that have previously prided themselves as beacons of freedom.

Solutions for these unprecedented problems will require unprecedented international cooperation. This is not the time then for the president of the United States to be calling the president of Russia, the second-largest nuclear power on earth, a “killer.” There are indeed plenty of killers running plenty of countries these days, as there have been in the past, including in our own. But the crises of today require cooperation between the two largest nuclear powers.

Calling Putin a “killer,” however, reflects some real and far more dangerous trends in U.S. foreign policy. It reflects the control still being exercised by the old foreign policy establishment that played such a big role in bringing us the world-wide mess we have today.

The U.S., thanks to the old foreign policy establishment, has almost 800 military facilities around the world. The new domestic and worldwide realities of today require dismantling of that network of bases. That will require changing the thinking about what constitutes national security. That shift will have to be as big if not bigger than the change we have seen from the Biden administration when it comes to domestic policy.

For starters, the U.S. will have to stop military adventures around the globe, including the confrontational ones on Russia’s borders. Calling Russia’s leader a “killer” while the U.S. threatens that country with our troops along its frontiers is hardly helpful to the cause of re-ordering our priorities.
Likewise, U.S. military confrontation with China in the South China Sea will not be at all conducive to the necessary reordering of priorities. There is no real indication yet that Biden is moving in the direction of ending confrontation with either Russia or China.

In Afghanistan, the United States has been at war for more than 20 years. Trillions of dollars have been spent on that war. Many have died. Biden is now signaling U.S. troops will stay there beyond the date which Trump had claimed American forces would pull out. What amounts to institutionalized warfare, it seems, is something Biden is willing to continue. There is no hope of getting back what has been lost in Afghanistan. The only prudent course is to get U.S. troops out of there.

Biden, during his campaign for the White House, promised to revive the Iran nuclear deal he helped negotiate when he was vice president. He promised to also bring back the constitutional role of Congress in declaring war. But he instead ordered the bombing—over the objection of Democratic senators who called it a violation of the War Powers Act—of what he said was an Iranian-backed outpost in Syria.

In addition, he has delayed removal of 900 U.S. troops who are uninvited occupiers in Syria. He is maintaining troops in a sovereign country against its will and has ordered a bombing in that same country’s territory.

Biden said he is reviewing our drone policies, but so far, that review has resulted in more focused targeting and no indication that use of killer drones will be ended.

He is continuing U.S. support for regime change by continuing inhumane sanctions against Venezuela—sanctions clearly intended to overthrow its government. To no avail, the UN has called on the U.S. to end its cruel blockade tactics that deny medicine and food to the Venezuelan people.

And back to Russia, Biden is ratcheting up dangerous confrontation with that country. In the next few weeks, Biden said, in answer to a question on national television, that “we will see” how he retaliates for last year’s SolarWinds hack of U.S. cyberinfrastructure—for which Russia was allegedly responsible. Knowledgeable sources say the administration will approve still more sanctions on Russia and clandestine cyber actions against Russian state institutions.

Such an escalation is likely to trigger more and worse cyberattacks by both sides. Is that what we really want right now? In the long term, that will do no good at all for either the American or the Russian people.

On China, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken has called relations with China “the biggest geopolitical test of the 21st century,” with the administration making a show of not just confronting China economically but also militarily in the South China Sea. U.S. naval maneuvers there continue.

As the administration does this, the Republicans put forward continued accusations in public congressional hearings that the “Chinese Communist Party” is responsible for both the pandemic and for economic problems in the U.S. resulting from the pandemic. Such anti-China rhetoric inflames the international situation while also fueling domestic anti-Asian hate crimes and attacks.

The United States cannot focus on and help solve the climate crisis, the pandemic, and worldwide economic disasters, including inequality and the wealth gap, by continuing institutionalized warfare, regime change, threats of military action, and maintaining 800 bases around the world.

No one pretends that the foreign policy of the U.S. can or will be radically changed overnight. The hope is there, however, that based on what we see happening in domestic policy, the Biden administration may yet begin to move in a better direction when it comes to foreign affairs.
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You can start, Mr. President, by not grandstanding against the Russians. That’s so old, and it gets us nowhere.