In Anti-Dühring, Friedrich Engels writes the following on definitions: "From a scientific standpoint all definitions are of little value. In order to gain an exhaustive knowledge of what life is, we should have to go through all the forms in which it appears, from the lowest to the highest. But for ordinary usage such definitions are very convenient and in places cannot well be dispensed with; moreover, they can do no harm, provided their inevitable deficiencies are not forgotten."[1] This quote arises in the context of the chapter’s attack on Dühring’s philosophy of nature. Specifically, Engels wants to point out the inadequacy, or, in other words, the abstract character, of the ‘definition’ of life. To understand this perspective on definitions we must comprehend the Marxist distinction between the abstract and the concrete, since it is, properly speaking, the abstract character of definitions which are problematic. Today we hear the word abstract, and we conjure up images of mental abstractions, of generalizations which occur in our mind and are a disconnected reflection of the sensible things in the world. This is not, generally, the way our tradition understands the ‘abstract’. We, of course, see a necessary role for mental abstractions in the process of acquiring theoretical knowledge. Theory is, always, a form of abstraction. However, this ‘abstraction’ can itself be more or less abstract or concrete – in the sense in which we specifically use the words. Etymologically, the Latin concretus referred to that which is mixed, composite, fused. As Marx and Hegel have put it, the concrete is that which contains many determinations.[2] The concrete is the unity which contains the many, a unity of opposites. It is that which is most complex, the whole or totality. When we say, for instance, that Marx provides a concrete study of the capitalist mode of production, we mean that he has logically reconstructed the mode of production as a whole, comprehensively, on the basis of ascending from its germ (the commodity, the most abstract integral component of the whole) to the whole itself. In Hegel’s logic the absolute idea stands as the most concrete form of the concept, that last form the concept takes, precisely because it self-consciously contains within it the many determinations it has gone through to achieve this utmost moment of logical concreteness. Abstractus, in Latin, refers to that which has been withdrawn, removed, extracted, estranged or isolated. It is quite evident to see how this operates in abstract thinking… in abstract mental abstractions. As Ilyenkov writes, “thinking abstractly merely means thinking unconnectedly, thinking of an individual property of a thing without understanding its links with other properties, without realizing the place and role of this property in reality.”[3] But the abstract is not simply this flaw in disconnected thinking, there are also real abstractions operative objectively in the world, abstractions which themselves can be understood concretely. For Marx, for instance, this is operative in commodity exchange, where the “general value-form is the reduction of all kinds of actual labour to their common character of being human labour generally, of being the expenditure of human labour-power.”[4] As you find in the first four chapters of Capital Vol. I, the exchange value of commodities (which comes to dominate over its use-value) is a reflection of the abstract labor time that went into it. It is a quantitative metric of the socially necessary labor time needed to produce a specific commodity. For such quantifiability to take place qualitatively incommensurable activities must transmute themselves into being qualitatively commensurable. The labor that goes into making a shoe and the labor that goes into making a coat must lose their uniqueness and obtain an abstract form in which each is comparable, as qualitative equals, in terms of quantity. This is a real abstraction.[5] That which is the most concrete, i.e., the ‘wholes’ or ‘totalities’ to be examined, cannot be studied directly qua whole. The concrete, in other words, cannot be a point of departure. Treating it as such limits you to engaging with what Marx called an “imagined concrete,” a concrete object of study approached through abstract thinking.[6] Instead, to understand the concrete concretely, an ascension from the abstract to the concrete is required. Marx, for instance, does not deal with the capitalist mode of production as a whole until the third volume of Capital, i.e., until he has arrived at the whole through a “process of concentration,” through an ascension to the concrete.[7] This ascension, therefore, requires initially the descending from the concrete (the whole) to the abstract (its determinate components). We exist, for instance, within the capitalist mode of life as a concrete reality. But to study such a reality Marx had to descend from the immediate experience of the concrete to its abstract components in order to reconstruct them logically through this process of ascension to the real concrete. Descending from the concrete to the abstract is a means, an intermediary disappearing moment for the ascension to the concrete. Both of these movements, the descending from the immediate concrete to the abstract to reascend from the abstract to the concrete, thereby reconstructing the concrete whole in the mind, are integral to the process of mental concrete abstraction… the antidote to the one-sidedness and disconnection central to abstract thinking. Primacy, however, is given to the ascension to the concrete. It is, as Ilyenkov notes, “the principal and dominant [movement], determining the weight and significance of the other, the opposite one [descending from the concrete to the abstract],” which “emerges as a subordinate disappearing moment of the overall movement.”[8] So, what does this have to do with the Marxist tradition’s view of definitions? Well, definitions, though helpful for practical purposes, too easily lend themselves to abstract thinking – i.e., to completely misunderstanding the world. One cannot provide one-sentence textbook definitions for complex (concrete) things in the world. Even for the most elemental things in the world, a basic abstract definition tells me very little about such a thing. This approach to definitions attempts to freeze frame whatever is being defined – to remove it from its spatial-temporal context, from the web of relations it exists in, and to ignore how such context is the horizon for the form the defined thing takes. Definitions, in other words, force our thinking into seeing things statically, disconnectedly, and free from the contradictions which pervade a thing’s existence as a complex, heterogenous entity. This does not mean we condemn definitions. They are, after all, an integral component of communication. Human social life without definitions would be impossible. But it does mean that, when participating in scientific inquiry (as Engels mentioned), or, frankly, in any other activity, we should not treat definitions as these pure sacrosanct things reality must mold itself into (for instance, how the purity fetish outlook treats the pure ‘idea’, or ‘definition,’ of socialism as something which could be used to look at socialist countries and say, ‘that’s not real socialism because it is not an accurate representation of the pure idea, or definition, that exists in my mind’). We should be cognizant of the fact that the things ‘definitions’ define are themselves in constant motion, riddled by contradictions, and necessarily interconnected to a host of other things within a given totality… all of which must be grasped so that phenomenon, currently captured abstractly through a definition, could be understood concretely. I can, for instance, tell you about how capitalism is a system where the owners of capital are in power over the productive forces and the state apparatuses (ideological and repressive) of society, and where such dominance is used to perpetuate the process of capital accumulation rooted in the exploitation of the working class’s labor. This, for instance, is a somewhat helpful ‘definition.’ But could one say they understand this concrete reality (this ‘whole’ form of life) concretely on the basis of such a definition? Of course not! It is not without reason that Marx’s Capital remained an open, unfinished project… it’s object of study was itself unfinished, continuously developing, obtaining greater concreteness. Therefore, those (like Marx and Engels) attempting to concretely reconstruct the mode of life as a whole in writing, require an openness in their intellectual project that reflects the open dynamism of its object of study. This is why Marxism (dialectical materialism) is creative through and through. It holds as an ontological reality this incessant development of the world, and thus understands that to continue to know it concretely (and, of course, to change it in a revolutionary manner), its thinking must creatively develop with it. References [1] Friedrich Engels, Anti-Dühring (Peking: Foreign Language Press, 2016), 81. [2] G. W. F. Hegel. Lectures on the History of Philosophy Vol. 2. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974., pp. 13. Karl Marx. Grundrisse. London: Penguin Books, 1973., pp. 101. [3] Evald Ilyenkov, The Dialectics of the Abstract and Concrete in Marx’s Capital (Delhi: Aakar Books, 2022), 27. [4] Karl Marx, Capital Vol I (Moscow: International Publishers, 1974), 57. [5] This is explored in Alfred Sohn-Rothel’s Intellectual and Manual Labor, which anticipates the argument from Richard Seaford in Money and the Early Greek Mind that the real abstraction found in the introduction of coinage (money commodity, universal equivalent) in Miletus was what sparked the development of philosophy, i.e., ideal concrete abstractions into the question of being. [6] Marx, Grundrisse, 100, [7] Marx, Grundrisse, 100. [8] Ilyenkov, The Dialectics of the Abstract and Concrete, 139. Author Carlos L. Garrido is a Cuban American philosophy instructor at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. He is the director of the Midwestern Marx Institute and the author of The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism (2023), Marxism and the Dialectical Materialist Worldview (2022), and the forthcoming Hegel, Marxism, and Dialectics (2024). He has written for dozens of scholarly and popular publications around the world and runs various live-broadcast shows for the Midwestern Marx Institute YouTube. You can subscribe to his Philosophy in Crisis Substack HERE. Archives February 2024
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2/28/2024 Another Lost Cold War Document: Zhou Enlai's March 8, 1952 Denunciation of U.S. Germ Warfare. By: Jeffrey S. KayeRead Now![]() Picture of the “Northeast China Group of the Commission for Investigating the Crime of Bacteriological Warfare Committed by the American Imperialists,” taken at Shenyang, April 1, 1952. From 1952 pamphlet, “Exhibition on Bacteriological War Crimes Committed by the Government of the United States,” pg. 13, published by The Chinese People’s Committee for World Peace (author’s private collection) Introduction This is an updated version of the original post. The update is necessary, in my opinion, because claims as to the availability of the materials described in the bulk of the post must be amended. While the “lost” statement of Zhou Enlai has in fact been nearly unobtainable in the U.S. for decades, in January 2024, a pamphlet containing Zhou’s statement, and other important material, was posted for viewing and download at The Internet Archive. A description of this, and links to the material are included in the updated post below. — Jeff Kaye In February 2018 I published online the full 669-page Report of International Scientific Commission for the Investigation of the Facts Concerning Bacterial Warfare in Korea and China (ISC Report), which corroborated the Chinese and North Korean claims that the U.S. had used biological weapons in an experimental fashion on civilian populations. I described it as a “lost document” from the Cold War. As I discovered later, the difficulty in tracking down a copy of the ISC Report was due to the fact that the U.S. government, utilizing a bogus interpretation of the 1938 Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) had likely destroyed almost every copy entering the U.S. via shipment from abroad. The FARA law initially was passed on the eve of World War II, and was initially meant to stop the importation of Nazi propaganda. But with the onset of the Cold War, and with the beginning of the Korean War, the U.S. Attorney General interpreted FARA to claim that any foreign entity sending materials from “Iron Curtain” countries — books, pamphlets, magazines, recordings, etc. — were in effect acting as “foreign agents.” Accordingly, the U.S. Postal Service and Customs agency, as well as the FBI, were authorized to seize all third class mail from Communist countries and destroy it. Literally hundreds of thousands of pieces of mails were duly confiscated and destroyed monthly for years! In my article on the subject, I noted that this is why we did not have many materials from that period in our libraries or archives, including the ISC report, or printed materials that included, for instance, statements from North Korean and Chinese leaders about the biological warfare (BW) attacks then taking place. Later historians often cited these BW statements, but they were rarely quoted verbatim, possibly because the historians in question were working off secondary accounts and not the actual statements. Hence, along with the article on FARA censorship (which was ended by Supreme Court decision in 1965), I posted online for the first time ever, in English, a copy of then-Foreign Minister of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Bak Hon Yong’s, statement accusing the United States of using germ warfare attacks, while “openly collaborating with the Japanese bacteriological war criminals” of Unit 731. Bak’s statement, originally issued on February 22, 1952, was published in a 1952 pamphlet published by The Chinese People’s Committee for World Peace, which I privately obtained. Luckily, this copy of the document, “Exhibition on Bacteriological War Crimes Committed by the Government of the United States of America,” was somehow spared the wholesale destruction of such documents that occurred in the 1950s and 1960s. If I had not found this document, then Bak’s statement would still be unobtainable, so far as I can tell. Perhaps it exists in UN archives somewhere. (Sadly, the format of the Exhibition on Bacteriological War Crimes document is too large for easy reproduction, but researcher Alice Atlas has written to tell me she succeeded in doing so.) A week after Bak’s statement, Zhou En-Lai (publishing as Chou En-Lai in the translation style then used for Chinese) issued his own statement on the U.S. warfare attacks. He was quite precise about the number of attacks and the kinds of pathogens dropped by the United States. Interestingly, his statement never mentions Unit 731 collaboration, although later Chinese statements and propaganda would. [Update: researcher Alice Atlas has informed me that a pamphlet of speeches, including Zhou’s March 8 statement, has been posted at Internet Archive. In an earlier February 24 statement of support for North Korean protests around U.S. germ warfare attacks, Zhou did specifically single out Unit 731’s “Shiro Ishii, Jiro Wakamatsu, Masajo Kitano and other Japanese bacteriological war criminals,” who have “carr[ied] out on the Korean battlefield experiments and manufacture of various types of lethal bacteria” (pg. 6).] Zhou’s document, like Bak’s, is not obtainable, so far as I can tell, in any online resource that I know of. [Except see paragraph above! - JK] Nor am I sure where one would find it in a library. As a service to the public, to historians more specifically, and for the readers of Hidden Histories, I’ve transcribed Zhou’s statement and am posting it here for what I believe is the first time online. So, hopefully, here is yet another “lost” document rescued from the U.S. censorship and book-burning campaign that lasted fifteen years of the early Cold War, as well as from the ongoing censorship that continues to suppress recognition of the U.S. war crimes described therein. Statement by Chou En-Lai [Zhou Enlai], Minister for Foreign Affairs of the People’s Republic of China, March 8, 1952 After launching large-scale, bacteriological warfare in Korea on January 28, 1952, the American aggressive forces, between February 29 and March 5, sent 68 formations of military aircraft, making a total of 448 sorties to invade China’s territorial air in the Northeast, and scatter large quantities of germ-carrying insects at Fushun, Hsinmin, Antung, Kuantien, Linkiang and other areas, and to bomb and strafe the Linkiang and Changtienhokow areas. The details of these incidents are as follows: (1) On February 29, American aircraft, in 14 formations, flew a total of 148 sorties over Antung, Fushun, Fengcheng and other areas and scattered insects over Fushun. An investigation on the spot showed that insects of a black colour were found within an area of 15-20 kilometers in Fushun County covering Takow, Lijen, and Fangsiao Villages and Lientaowan. (2) On March 1, American aircraft, in 14 formations, flew a total of 86 sorties to intrude over Fushun, Changtienhokow, Kuantien and Chian and scatter insects of a black colour resembling fleas over Makinchwang and other places in Fushun County. (3) On March 2, American aircraft, in 12 formations, flew a total of 72 sorties over Funshun, Antung, Tatungkow, Changtienhokow, Kiuliencheng, Chian, Kuantien and Changpai. They dropped large quantities of flies, mosquitoes, fleas and other types of insects over Takow and other parts of Fushun County and areas between Fushun and Shenyang. (4) On March 3, five formations of American aircraft, flying a total of 23 sorties, intruded and scattered insects over Antung, Langtou and Chian. (5) On March 4, thirteen formations of American aircraft flew a total of 72 sorties, to intrude and scatter insects over Antung, Langtou, Tatunkow, Kiuliencheng, Changtienhokow, Hsinmin, Chian, Hunkiangkow and Kuantien. At 11 a.m. of the same morning, six American aircraft were observed above Langtou. They dropped from a height of 5,000 meters two cloth receptacles which burst open some 2,000 meters from the ground; and then a swarm of flies was found near the highway. At 2 p.m., an American aircraft was observed over Paikipao and Jaoyangho in Hsinmin County. It dropped a load of flies. On the same day, American aircraft were active over Kuantien, and afterwards flies, mosquitoes, crickets and fleas dropped by American aircraft were immediately found east of Kuantien City and at Hunshihlatze and other places. (6) On March 5, ten formations of American aircraft flew a total of 38 sorties to intrude over Antung, Anpingho, Changtienhokow, Hunkiangkow, Tunghua and Linkiang. Of these, one group of 8 planes at about 8 a.m. indiscriminately bombed and strafed Linkiang, wounding 2 people and destroying 5 houses. In view of the fact that the United States government has dared repeatedly and openly to make air intrusions over China’s territory, spread germ-bearing insects and indiscriminately bomb, strafe and kill Chinese people at the same time as it is delaying the Korean armistice negotiations and obstructing a peaceful settlement of the Korean question in an attempt to prolong and extend the Korean war, I am authorised by the Central People’s Government of the People’s Government of China to protest solemnly against these most savage and brutal acts of aggression and provocation by the United States government. The open and direct acts of aggression of the United States government against the People’s Republic of China date from June 27, 1950 when U.S. President Truman announced the despatch of its navy to invade and occupy China’s territory of Taiwan. On August 27, 1950 the American aggressor troops in Korea began to send their military aircraft to intrude into the territorial air of Northeast China. From then on, the military aircraft of the United States government have many times intruded over Northeast China and carried out reconnaissance, strafing and bombing. Now, on the heels of its large-scale bacteriological warfare in Korea, the United States government is adding to its open violation of international law and all laws of humanity by scattering large quantities of bacteria-laden insects over Northeast China. This is an attempt by the criminal and vicious device of mass slaughter of peaceful people to further its aims of invading China and threatening the security of the Chinese people. These brutal crimes of the United States government will never be tolerated by the Chinese people. The opposition of the Chinese people in their wrath will assure the ignominious failure of these crimes. It is the view of the Central People’s Government of the People’s Republic of China that the United States government, pursuing its objectives of extending the Korean war and undermining peace in the Far East and other parts of the world, has employed bacteriological weapons, strictly prohibited by humanity and international conventions, against the peaceful population and armed forces of the Korean and Chinese peoples in Korea, and is even extending such crimes against the peaceful population in Northeast China by employing these unlawful bacteriological weapons in a brutal provocation. In its statement on February 24 [see pg. 5 at link], the Central People’s Government of the People’s Republic of China pointed out: “If the people of the world do not resolutely curb this crime, then the calamities befalling the peaceful people of Korea today will befall the peaceful people of the world tomorrow.” Now is the time for the peace-loving people of the world to rise and put an end to the maniacal crimes of the United States government. We are confident that human justice and peace will triumph. The Central People’s Government of the People’s Republic of China hereby makes it known that members of the American air force who invade China’s territorial air and use bacteriological weapons will be dealt with as war criminals upon capture. The Central People’s Government of the People’s Republic of China at the same time declares that the United States government must bear the full responsibility for all the consequences arising from air intrusions over China’s territory, the use of bacteriological weapons and the murder of the Chinese people by indiscriminate bombing and strafing. Author Jeff Kaye is a retired clinical psychologist. He's been researching and writing on US war crimes for over 15 years, and is the author of "Cover-up at Guantanamo: The NCIS Investigation Into the Suicides of Mohammed Al Hanashi and Abdul Rahman Al Amri." Currently he writes the blog "Hidden Histories" at Substack.com. Republished from 'Hidden Histories' Substack Archives February 2024 2/28/2024 China’s economy is still far out growing the U.S. – contrary to Western media “fake news. By: John RossRead NowGDP data for China, the U.S., and the other G7 countries for the year 2023 has now been published. This makes possible an accurate assessment of China’s, the U.S., and major economies performance—both in terms of China’s domestic goals and international comparisons. There are two key reasons this is important.
The factual situation is that China’s economy, as it heads into 2024, has far outgrown all other major comparable economies. This reality is in total contradiction to claims in the U.S. media. This in turn, therefore, demonstrates the extraordinary distortions and falsifications in the U.S. media about this situation. It confirms that, with a few honourable exceptions, Western economic journalism is primarily dominated by, in some cases quite extraordinary, “fake news” rather than any objective analysis. Both for understanding the economic situation, and the degree of distortion in the U.S. media, it is therefore necessary to establish the facts of current international developments. China’s growth targets Starting with China’s strategic domestic criteria, it has set clear goals for its economic development over the next period which will complete its transition from a “developing” to a “high-income” economy by World Bank international standards. In precise numbers, in 2020’s discussion around the 14th Five Year plan, it was concluded that for China by 2035: “It is entirely possible to double the total or per capita income”. Such a result would mean China decisively overcoming the alleged “middle income trap” and, as the 20th Party Congress stated, China reaching the level of a “medium-developed country by 2035”. In contrast, a recent series of Western reports, widely used in anti-China propaganda, claim that China’s economy will experience sharp slowdown and will fail to reach its targets. Self-evidently which of these outcomes is achieved is of fundamental importance for China’s entire national rejuvenation and construction of socialism—as Xi Jinping stated, China’s: “path takes economic development as the central task, and brings along economic, political, cultural, social, ecological and other forms of progress.” But the outcome also affects the entire global economy—for example, a recent article by the chair of Rockefeller International, published in the Financial Times, made the claim that what was occurring was China’s “economy… losing share to its peers”. The Wall Street journal asserted: “China’s economy limps into 2024” whereas in contrast the U.S. was marked by a “resilient domestic economy.” The British Daily Telegraph proclaimed China has a “stagnant economy”. The Washington Post headlined that: “Falling inflation, rising growth give U.S. the world’s best recovery” with the article claiming: “in the United States… the surprisingly strong economy is outperforming all of its major trading partners.” This is allegedly because: “Through the end of September, it was more than 7 percent larger than before the pandemic. That was more than twice Japan’s gain and far better than Germany’s anaemic 0.3 percent increase.” Numerous similar claims could be quoted from the U.S. media. U.S. use of “fake news”Reading U.S. media claims on these issues, and comparing them to the facts. it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that what is involved is deliberate “fake news” for propaganda purposes—as will be seen, the only alternative explanation is that it is disgracefully sloppy journalism that should not appear in supposedly “quality” media. For example, it is simply absurdly untrue, genuinely “fake news”, that the U.S. is “outperforming all of its major trading partners”, or that China has a “stagnant economy”. Anyone who bothers to consult the facts, an elementary requirement for a journalist, can easily find out that such claims are entirely false—as will be shown in detail below. To first give an example regarding U.S. domestic reports, before dealing with international aspects, a distortion of U.S. economic growth in 2023 was so widely reported in the U.S. media that it is again hard to avoid the conclusion that this was a deliberate misrepresentation to present an exaggerated view of U.S. economic performance. Factually, the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, the U.S. official statistics agency for economic growth, reported that U.S. GDP in 2023 rose by 2.5%—for comparison China’s GDP increased by 5.2%. But a series of U.S. media outlets, starting with the Wall Street Journal, instead proclaimed that the “U.S. economy grew 3.1% over the last year”. This “fake news” on U.S. growth was created by statistical “cherry picking”. In this case comparing only the last quarter of 2023 with the last quarter of 2022, which was an increase of 3.1%, but not by taking GDP growth in the year as a whole “last year”. But U.S. growth in the earlier part of 2023 was far weaker than in the 4th quarter—year on year growth in the 1st quarter was only 1.7% and in the 2nd quarter only 2.4%. Taking into account this weak growth in the first part of the year, and stronger growth in the second, U.S. growth for the year as a whole was only 2.5%—not 3.1%. As it is perfectly easy to look up the actual annual figure, which was precisely published by the U.S. statistical authorities, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that this was a deliberate distortion in the U.S. media to falsely present a higher U.S. growth rate in 2023 than the reality. It may be noted that even if U.S. GDP growth had been 3.1% then China’s was much higher at 5.2%. But the real data makes it transparently clear that China’s economy grew more than twice as fast as the U.S. in 2023—showing at a glance that claims that the U.S. is “outperforming all of its major trading partners”, or that China has a “stagnant economy” were entirely “fake news”. Many more examples of U.S. media false claims could be given, but the best way to see the overall situation is to systematically present the overall facts of growth in the major economies. What China has to do to achieve its 2035 goalsTurning first to assessing China’s economic performance, compared to its own strategic goals of doubling GDP and per capita GDP between 2020 and 2035, it should be noted that in 2022 China’s population declined by 0.1% and this fall is expected to continue—the UN projects China’s population will decline by an average 0.1% a year between 2020 and 2035. Therefore, in economic growth terms, the goal of doubling GDP growth to 2035 is slightly more challenging than the per capita target and will be concentrated on here—if China’stotal GDP goal is achieved then the per capita GDP one will necessarily be exceeded. To make an international comparison of China’s growth projections compared with the U.S., the U.S. Congressional Budget Office (CBO), responsible for the official growth projections for the U.S. economy on which its government’s policies rely, estimates there will be 1.8% annual average U.S. GDP growth between 2023 and 2023—with this falling to 1.6% from 2034 onwards. This figure is slightly below the current U.S. 12-year long term annual average GDP growth of 2.3%—12 being the number of years from 2023 to 2035. To avoid any suggestion of bias against the U.S., and in favour of China, in international comparisons here the higher U.S. number of 2.3% will be used. The results of such figures are that if China hits its growth target for 2035, and the U.S. continues to grow at 2.3%, then between 2020 and 2035 China’s economy will grow by 100% and the U.S. by 41%—see Figure 1. Therefore, from 2020 to 2035, China’s economy would grow slightly more than two and a half times as fast as the U.S. The strategic consequences of China’s economic growth rate The international implications of any such growth outcomes were succinctly summarised by Martin Wolf, chief economics commentator of the Financial Times. If China’s economy continues to grow substantially faster than Western ones, and it achieves the status of a “medium-developed country by 2035”, then, in addition to achieving high domestic living standards, China’s will become by far the world’s largest economy. As Wolf put it: “The implications can be seen in quite a simple way. According to the IMF, China’s gross domestic product per head (measured at purchasing power) was 28 per cent of U.S. levels in 2022. This is almost exactly half of Poland’s relative GDP per head… Now, suppose its [China’s] relative GDP per head doubled, to match Poland’s. Then its GDP would be more than double that of the U.S. and bigger than that of the U.S. and EU together.” By 2035 such a process would not be completed on the growth rates already given, and measuring by Wolf’s chosen measure of purchasing power parities (PPPs) China’s economy by 2035 would be 60% bigger than that of the U.S. But even that would make China by far the world’s largest economy. Wolf equally accurately notes that the only way that such an outcome would be prevented from occurring is if China’s economy slows down to the growth rate of a Western economy such as the U.S. Clearly, if China’s economic growth slows to that of a Western economy, then, naturally, China will never catch up with the West—it will necessarily simply stay the same distance behind. Therefore. as Wolf accurately puts it the outcomes are: What is the economic future of China? Will it become a high-income economy and so, inevitably, the largest in the world for an extended period, or will it be stuck in the ‘middle income’ trap, with growth comparable to that of the U.S.? The progress in achieving China’s strategic economic goalsTurning to the precise figure required to achieve China’s 2035 target, China’s goal of doubling GDP required average annual growth of at least 4.7% a year between 2020 and 2035. So far China, as Figure 1 shows, is ahead of this goal—annual average growth in 2020-2022 was 5.7%, meaning that from 2023-2035 annual average 4.6% growth is now required. China’ 5.2% GDP increase in 2023 therefore once again exceeded the required 4.6% growth rate to achieve its 2035 goal—as shown in Figure 1. From 2020 to 2023 the required total increase in China’s GDP to hit its 2035 target was 14.9%, whereas in fact its growth was 17.5%. This is in line with the 45-year record since 1978’s Reform and Opening Up, during which entire period the medium/long term targets set by China have always been exceeded. Therefore. to summarise, there is no sign whatever in 2023, or indeed in the period since 2020, that China will fail to meet its target of doubling GDP between 2020 and 2035—China is ahead of this target. Such a 4.6% growth rate would easily ensure China becomes a high-income economy by World Bank criteria well before 2035—the present criteria for this being per capita income of $13,846. It should be noted, as discussed in in detail below, that a clear international conclusion flows from this necessary 4.6% annual average growth rate for China to achieve its strategic goals. It means that China must continue to grow much faster than the Western economies throughout this period to 2035—that is in line with China’s current trend. However, if China were to slow down to the growth rate of a Western economy, then it will fail to achieve its strategic goals to 2035, may not succeed in becoming a high income economy, and will necessarily remain the same distance behind the West as now. The implications of this will be considered below. Systematic comparisons not “cherry picking”Having considered China’s performance in 2023 terms of achieving its own domestic strategic goals we will now turn to actual results and a comparison of China with other international economies. This immediately shows the factual absurdity, the pure “fake news” of claims such as that the U.S. has “the world’s best recovery“ and “the United States… is outperforming all of its major trading partners.” On the contrary China has continued to far outgrow the U.S. economy not only in 2023 but in the entire last period. China’s outperformance of the other major Western economies, the G7, is even greater that of the U.S. Entirely misleading claims regarding such international comparisons, used for propaganda as opposed to serious analysis, are sometimes made because data is taken from extremely short periods of time which are taken out of context—unrepresentative statistical “cherry picking” or, as Lenin put it, a statistical “dirty business”. Such a method is always erroneous, but it is particularly so during periods which were affected by the impact of the Covid pandemic as these caused extremely violent short-term economic fluctuations related to lock downs and similar measures. China’s assertion of superior growth is based on its overall performance, not an absurd claim that it outperforms every other economy, on every single measure, in every single period! Therefore, in making international comparisons, the most suitable period to take is that for since the beginning of the pandemic up to the latest available GDP data. As comparison of China with the U.S. is the most commonly made one, and particularly concentrated on by the U.S. media campaign, this will be considered first. China’s and the U.S.’s growth in 2023 It was already noted that in 2023 China’s GDP grew by 5.2% and the U.S. by 2.5%—China’s economy growing more than twice as fast as the U.S. But it should also be observed that 2023 was an above trend growth year for the U.S.—U.S. annual average growth over a 12-year period is only 2.3% and over a 20-year period it is only 2.1%. Therefore, although in 2023 China’s economy grew more than twice as fast as the U.S., that figure is actually somewhat flattering for the U.S. Figure 2shows that in the overall period since the beginning of the pandemic China’s economy has grown by 20.1% and the U.S. by 8.1%—that is China’s total GDP growth since the beginning of the pandemic was two and half times greater than the U.S. China’s annual average growth rate was 4.7% compared to the US’s 2.0%. Economic performance of China and the three major global economic centres Turning to wider international comparisons than the U.S. such data immediately shows the extremely negative situation in most “Global North” economies and China’s great outperformance of them. To start by analysing this in the broadest terms, Figure 3 shows the developments in the world’s three largest economic centres—China, the U.S., and the Eurozone. These three together account for 57% of world GDP at current exchange rates and 46% in purchasing power parities (PPPs). No other economic centre comes close to matching their weight in the world economy. Regarding the relative performance of these three major economic centres, at the time of writing data has not been published for the Euro Area for the whole year of 2023 —which would be the ideal comparison. However, it has been published for the the Euro area for the four quarters of 2023 individually and trends can be calculated on that basis. These show that In the four years to the 4th quarter of 2023, covering the period since the beginning of the pandemic, China’s economy has grown by 20.1%, the U.S. by 8.2%, and the Eurozone by 3.0%. China’s economy therefore grew by two and a half times as fast as the U.S. while the situation of the Eurozone could accurately be described as extremely negative with annual average GDP growth in the last four years of only 0.7%. Such data again makes it immediately obvious that claims in the Western media that China faces economic crisis, and the Western economies are doing well is entirely absurd—pure fantasy propaganda disconnected from reality. Relative performance of China and the G7 Turning to analysing individual countries, then comparing China to all G7 states, i.e. the major advanced economies, shows the situation equally clearly—see Figure 4. Data for China and all G7 economies has now been published for the whole of 2023. The huge outperformance by China of all the major advanced economies is again evident. Over the four years since the beginning of the pandemic China’s economy grew by 20.1%, the U.S. by 8.1%, Canada by 5.4%, Italy by 3.1%, the UK by 1.8%, France by 1.7%, Japan by 1.1% and Germany by 0.7%. In the same period China’s economy therefore grew two and a half times as fast as the U.S., almost four times as fast as Canada, almost seven times as fast as Italy, 11 times as fast as the UK, 12 times as fast as France, 18 times as fast as Japan and almost 29 times as fast as Germany. In terms of annual average GDP growth during this period China’s was 4.7%, the U.S. 2.0%, Canada 1.3%, Italy 0.8%, the UK 0.4%, France 0.4%, Japan 0.3% and Germany 0.2%. It may therefore be seen that China’s economy far outperformed the U.S., while the performance of all other major G7 economies may be quite reasonably described as extremely negative—all having annual average economic growth rates of around or even under 1%. Comparison of China to developing economies A comparison using the IMF’s January 2024 projections can also be made to the major developing economies—the BRICS. Figure 5 shows this, using the factual result for China and the IMF projections for the other countries. Over the period since the start of the pandemic, from 2019-2023, China’s GDP grew by 20.1%, India by 17.5%, Brazil by 7.7%, Russia by 3.7% and South Africa by 0.9%. This data confirms that the major Global South economies are growing faster than most of the major Global North economies, which is part of the rise of the Global South and draws attention to the good performance of India. But China grew more than two and half times more than all the BRICS economies except India—China’s growth was 15% greater than India’s. It should be noted that India is at a far lower stage of development than the other BRICS economies—all the others fall in the World Bank classification of upper middle-income economies whereas India falls into the lower middle income group. Comparison of China’s growth to Western economies Finally, this outperformance by China casts light on what is necessary to achieve its own 2035 strategic targets. China’s 4.6% growth rate necessary to meet these goals means that it must continue to maintain a growth rate far higher than Western economies—Figure 6 shows this in overall terms in addition to individual comparisons given to major economies above. Whereas China must achieve an annual average 4.6% growth rate the median growth rate of high income “Western” economies is only 1.9%, the U.S. is 2.3%, and the median for developing economies is 3.0%.That is, to achieve its 2035 goals China must grow twice as fast as the long term trend of the U.S., almost two and a half times as fast as the median for high income economies, and more than 50% faster than the median for developing economies. As already seen, China is more than achieving this. But such facts immediately show why it is an extremely misleading when proposals are made that China should move towards the macro-economic structure of a Western economy. If China adopts the structure of a Western economy then, of course, China will slow down to the same growth rate as Western economies—and therefore fail to achieve its 2035 economic goals. China will be precisely stuck in the negative outcome of the situation accurately diagnosed by Martin Wolf. What is the economic future of China? Will it become a high-income economy and so, inevitably, the largest in the world for an extended period, or will it be stuck in the ‘middle income’ trap, with growth comparable to that of the U.S.? Conclusion In conclusion, it addition to objectively analysing 2023’s economic results, it is also necessary in the light of this factual situation to make a remark regarding Western, in particular U.S. “journalism”. None of the data given above is secret, all is available from public readily accessible sources. In many cases it does not even require any calculations and simply published data can be used. But the U.S. media and journalists report information that is systematically misleading and in many cases simply untrue. While it lagged China in creating economic growth the U.S. was certainly the world leader in creating “fake economic news”! What was the reason, what attitude should be taken to it? First, to avoid accusations of distortion, it should be stated that there were a small handful of Western journalists who refused to go along with this type of distortion and fake news. For example Chris Giles, the Financial Times economics commentator, in December, sharply attacked “an absurd way to compare economies… among people who should know better.” Giles did not do this because of support for China but because, quite rightly, he warned that spreading false or distorted information led to serious errors by countries doing so: “Coming from the UK, which lost its top economic dog status in the late 19th century but still has some delusions of grandeur, I can understand American denialism… But ultimately, bad comparisons foster bad decisions.” But the overwhelming majority of U.S. and Western journalists continued to spread fake news. Why? First, the fact that identical distortions and false information appeared absolutely simultaneously across a very wide range of media makes it clear that undoubtedly U.S. intelligence services were involved in creating it—i.e. part of the misrepresentation and distortions were entirely deliberate and conscious, aimed at disguising the real situation. Second, another part was merely sloppy journalism—that is journalists who could not be bothered to check facts. Third, supporting both of these factors was “white Western arrogance”—an arrogant assumption, rooted in centuries of European and European descended countries dominating the world, that the West must be right. Therefore, such arrogance made it impossible to acknowledge or report the clear facts that China’s economy is far outperforming the West. But whether it was conscious distortion, sloppy journalism, or conscious or unconscious arrogance, in all these cases no respect should be given to the Western “quality” media. It is not trying to find out the truth, which is the job of journalism, it is simply spreading false propaganda. It remains a truth that if a theory and the real world don’t coincide there are only two courses that can be taken. The first, that of a sane person, is to abandon the theory. The second, that of a dangerous one, is to abandon the real world—precisely the danger that Chris Giles pointed to. What has been appearing in the Western media about international economic comparisons regarding China is precisely abandonment of the real world in favour of systematic fake news. This is a shortened version of an article that originally appeared in Chinese at Guancha.cn. About John Ross is a senior fellow at Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, Renmin University of China. He was formerly director of economic policy for the mayor of London. Republished from Monthly Review Archives February 2024 Marxist revolutionaries strive to analyze the surrounding bourgeois, capitalist world with the goal of fundamentally changing it. But the hegemony of bourgeois metaphysical modes of thinking in capitalist societies–modes that always end up assuring us that the essential institutions of bourgeois society are not susceptible to change and are as permanent as the law of gravity–can sometimes derail this goal. Karl Marx (1818-83), like Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) before him, emphasized that human societies can and do undergo dramatic transformations, moving from one social order to another where each formation is governed by its own distinct laws, and a discontinuous logic separates one social order from the next. In other words, both their philosophies exhibit an appreciation for a historical perspective almost totally lacking in preceding philosophical systems. Accordingly, both Marx and Hegel found the dominant scientific method of their time, the method of physics with its static laws, to be inadequate for capturing the logic of social transformations. Hegel was the first to turn to the dialectical method, whose origins go back at least to Plato, and used it to capture the logic of these historical leaps while at the same time systematically developing the logic of the dialectic itself. Marx, who was heavily influenced by Hegel, adopted his dialectic, but, as we will see, gave it a critical turn, declaring in the 1873 Afterward to the second German edition of Capital, Volume I: “My dialectical method is not only different from the Hegelian, but its direct opposite.” Nevertheless, their respective dialectical methods share fundamental features in common. In the same Afterward Marx credited Hegel with being “the first to present its general form of working in a comprehensive and conscious manner.” This essay will begin with an explication of these “general forms,” particularly when applied to understanding humanity; then show how they were employed by Marx in his revolutionary analysis of bourgeois society; and conclude by offering examples of both dialectical and metaphysical modes of thinking as applied to current social practices. As we shall see below, metaphysical thinking presently dominates both everyday thought and bourgeois philosophical modes of analysis. Dialectical thought, while not rejecting metaphysical thinking altogether, attempts to supersede it. While the dialectic is a powerful weapon that can help us escape from the shackles of bourgeois thinking, it does not offer an unambiguous tool that will produce the same results no matter who employs it. It is not a mechanical instrument. Nevertheless, it does provide some useful guidelines for revolutionary socialists who seek to understand our surrounding world for the purpose of changing it. Preliminaries: The philosophical context Understanding Hegel’s dialectical method requires an acquaintance with the method it was constructed to supersede–the prevailing natural scientific method that dominated the philosophical/scientific scene of Hegel’s time–particularly the method of physics, a form of thought that Hegel designated as “metaphysical.” Initiated in the 15th —16th centuries in Europe in conjunction with the rise of capitalism, this natural scientific method conceived nature as composed of discrete elements that could be understood in isolation from one another and that interacted in predictable ways according to inflexible laws such as cause and effect. As Friedrich Engels observed in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific: “To the metaphysician, things and their mental reflexes, ideas, are isolated, are to be considered one after the other and apart from each other, are objects of investigation fixed, rigid, given once for all.” The goal of the scientist was to discover the laws governing the interaction of these objects (for example, the law of gravity) and logically deduce predictions based on these laws, which then allowed humanity to advance its control over nature and more successfully satisfy human material needs. The natural sciences made huge gains during this period in discovering the laws of nature, thanks to Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), Johannes Kepler (1571-1630), Isaac Newton (1643-1727), and many others. Impressed by the positive impact of the natural sciences on humanity, philosophers quickly borrowed its method and applied it to humans with the hope of organizing society along “scientific” lines. Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) justified this transition by arguing that human beings, after all, were no more than complicated mechanisms, where “the heart [is] but a spring; and the nerves but so many strings; and the joints but so many wheels” (The Leviathan, Introduction). He added society was nothing more than an artificial man and hence could be captured by the same method as nature. Hobbes proceeded to argue that people are by nature competitive, distrustful of one another, and desiring of glory and hence engage in acts that are entirely predictable. For example, they will be aggressive with one another unless restrained by the threat of force. Using these assumptions about the nature of the individual, Hobbes proceeded to deduce the appropriate governmental structure for society. Philosophers of this period, then, assumed that people had a fixed nature in the same way as natural objects. That is, just as water has certain permanent characteristics that allow us to predict its behavior, and the falling of an object to the ground is completely predictable if the relevant variables are known and animal species have their fixed nature, human nature is equally fixed and predictable. Many agreed with Hobbes about the essential qualities of this nature: people are selfish, competitive and self-serving. Perhaps most importantly because of its methodological implications, they believed humans were essentially individualistic, meaning that each individual was assumed to possess a full range of human characteristics apart from their relation to other human individuals. Human societies were simply the sum of these atomic units and nothing more. Hegel’s revolutionary approach to the question of human reality required that he adopt a revolutionary method to capture its logic–the dialectic. His dialectical method, therefore, cannot be separated from the content of his social theory: “… this dialectic is not an activity of subjective thinking applied to some matter externally, but it is rather the matter’s very soul putting forth its branches and fruit organically.” (Philosophy of Religion) Here are some of the defining features of that social theory: First, societies are living organisms, which means they are composed of members that derive their identity from their place in the organism. Each member reciprocally interacts with other members as well as with their encompassing society, but society has a far greater influence on the individual than vice versa. In a significant sense, individuals are not even human apart from this social context, which provides them with language, a style of thinking, customs, a religion, morality, etc. As Hegel observed, “The individual is the offspring of his people, of his world …; he may spread himself out as he will, he cannot escape out of his time any more than out of his skin ….” (History of Philosophy). Anthropologists have made a similar observation. In a 1947 document addressed to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, the American Anthropological Association, in arguing that human rights should not be confined to individual rights but extended to community rights, emphasized that individual identity is inextricably tied to the surrounding community: "If we begin as we must, with the individual, we find that from the moment of his birth not only his behavior, but his very thought, his hopes, aspirations, the moral values which direct his action and justify and give meaning to his life in his own eyes and those of his fellows, are shaped by the body of custom of the group of which he becomes a member… [T]he personality of the individual can develop only in terms of the culture of his society." In other words, Hegel offers a radical rejection of the prevailing philosophical assumptions of his time that individuals are atomistic and autonomous, that they have a fully developed personality apart from their social relations, that societies are nothing more than the sum of these individuals, and that it makes sense to view the origin of societies as resulting from individuals engaging in contracts with one another where they agree to respect certain basic rules, etc. Second, since all natural organisms undergo a process of development to maturity–the acorn, for example, develops into an oak tree and children become adults–Hegel claimed humanity itself has matured through the ages. Just as the acorn has embedded in it its destiny to become an oak tree, humanity, which initially is governed more by instincts and feelings, is driven to become rational, free and self-conscious, a goal that guides the entire process: “We have defined the goal of history as consisting in the [human] spirit’s development towards self-consciousness,” (Philosophy of World History) a goal Hegel equated with fully developed freedom and rationality: “… for freedom by definition, is self-knowledge” (Philosophy of World History). This end-goal guides the entire (teleological) process: “Just as in the living organism generally, everything is already contained, in an ideal manner, in the germ and is brought forth by the germ itself, not by an alien power, so too must all the particular forms of living mind grow out of its Notion as from their germ” (The Philosophy of Mind). In other words, in the early stages, humanity was more instinctual than rational but gradually rationality became the more powerful drive: “World history begins with its universal end … it is as yet only an inward, basic unconscious impulse, and the whole activity of world history … is a constant endeavor to make the impulse conscious.” (Philosophy of World History) So, for Hegel, human history follows a logical path, or as he puts it, “… reason governs the world, and … world history is therefore a rational process.” (Philosophy of World History) Third, and following from the previous point, each stage of history has its own unique logic that permeates all its institutions. According to Hegel, The forms of thought or the points of view and principles which hold good in the sciences and constitute the ultimate support of all their matter, are not peculiar to them, but are common to the condition and culture of the time and of the people… All its knowledge and ideas are permeated and governed by a metaphysic such as this; it is the net in which all the concrete matter which occupies mankind in action and in impulses, is grasped (History of Philosophy). Accordingly, Hegel rejects the notion of a fixed human nature but argues that humans exhibit different qualities during different stages of history. This changing human nature distinguishes humans from other animal species, which lack consciousness and the ability to reflect on themselves and fundamentally change their behavior. Fourth, the transition from one historical stage to the next results from contradictions that emerge in the earlier stage, as will be explained below. Hegel’s dialectical exposition of practical freedom For Hegel, the free will or the completely self-determined will goes to the heart of what it means to be a human being. But we are not born with this capacity in a fully developed state. Rather, a modern individual must mature into adulthood to be able to exercise freedom in its most advanced form, and humanity has required millennia to acquire the proper social institutions that allow human freedom to attain its full potential. Hegel believed that, through the ages, humans have practiced three basic forms of freedom; each subsequent form, having been built on its predecessor, is more sophisticated and liberating. He did not consider these stages as completely distinct: the lower forms of freedom do not entirely disappear but are incorporated into the higher forms so that the highest form is a rich synthesis of all three. Personal freedom for Hegel represents the most elementary form. The individual “freely” chooses which impulses (desires/interests) to pursue, without this choice being determined by the impulse. Hegel describes personal freedom, which constitutes the first step in his dialectical presentation, as “abstract immediacy” or “the undifferentiated stage,” meaning we do not thoughtfully reflect on our options but arbitrarily decide without thinking which to pursue. Bourgeois theorists in modern capitalist societies, perhaps because they are surrounded by an economy that sets a premium on self-interest and greed, typically assume personal freedom is the only kind of freedom and go no further. Hobbes, for example, defined freedom as, “In deliberation, the last appetite or aversion immediately adhering to the action, or to the omission thereof, is that we call the will” (The Leviathan, Part I, Chapter 6). In other words, the will is all about desires and feelings, not about thoughtful choices. The second step of the dialectic is “particularity” or “difference” and amounts to looking at the real world to find the particular ways in which personal freedom, which initially was merely a vague undifferentiated universal, is realized. Hegel points to the institution of private property where individuals are granted the exclusive right over designated material objects as the purest manifestation of personal freedom since individuals can pursue their passions without fear of interference by others. However, this dominion over property, to operate successfully, requires laws to protect the rights of property owners, including laws governing the exchange of property by means of contracts as well as an agency mandated to enforce these laws. Without this legal apparatus, the will of the individual would not be free because of constant threats by other members of society who attempt to monopolize these material objects for their own pleasure. Consequently, this first conception of human freedom, which appeared to be a simple and unambiguous relation between a person and an object, requires a network of social relations–laws and a police force–to operate successfully. But then a contradiction arises: while individuals might enjoy the protection of their own property by state laws, those same laws, when used to protect the property rights of their neighbors, can feel like external coercion, especially if they covet their neighbor’s property. Hence, personal freedom does not fulfill the promise of a fully self-determined will–a will free of external constraints. It encounters its “negation” because of the constraining force of society’s laws. Hegel emphasized the human mind seeks unity and cohesion: “But the spirit cannot remain in a state of opposition. It seeks unification, and in this unification lies the higher principle” (Philosophy of World History). Accordingly, when contradictions flow from a position, the impulse is to seek their resolution by forging a new, hopefully contradiction-free conception. This represents the third step of the dialectic–a mediated unity or the negation of the negation, meaning that a new unifying framework or totality emerges that manages to retain the past conception of a free will but resolves the contradictions by situating them in a more comprehensive, nuanced unity, which amounts to a paradigm (world view) shift or a qualitative transformation rather than simply a quantitative addition. We have a simple illustration of Hegel’s reasoning when we consider a person who measures 5 feet tall, then later measures 5 feet and 5 inches, an apparent contradiction. Of course, the contradiction can be resolved by bringing into consideration that the individual is growing; a temporal dimension is added to the picture, which was previously present only implicitly, and in this way the contradiction is resolved in a larger, more comprehensive totality. Returning to Hegel’s analysis of freedom, moral freedom for Hegel represents this advance over personal freedom: it retains the idea of the pursuit of desires and the necessity of law and a system of justice required for this pursuit. But the law is no longer conceived as being imposed externally but as constructed entirely by the individual through a process of thoughtful reflection without borrowing assumptions from society. Immanuel Kant’s (1724-1804) moral law that we should always treat other people as an end and never as a means is an example. Since individuals themselves construct these laws based on their own sense of morality, the laws are not experienced as an external constraint but as a liberating guide to action, allowing for the pursuit of some impulses while rejecting others, depending on whether they conform to or violate the law. We have a new totality, then, in the sense that a new conception of free will and the individual emerges–an individual who has desires and impulses but also has the faculty of reason that generates moral laws which serve as a guide to acting on these desires and impulses. With this transition to moral freedom human nature shifts from being less impulsive to being more thoughtful and therefore, according to Hegel, freer. The first step of Hegel’s dialectic was the abstract universal. The second step is constituted by particulars or differences or contradictions. Hegel calls the third dialectical step “mediated unity” or a new “totality,” as was exemplified in the concept of moral freedom. It represents a new paradigm where the pursuit of desires remains but is now mediated by a moral law–a law that is no longer external to the individual but incorporated into the individual’s will with the result that the will is thoughtful, not impulsive or arbitrary. While representing the conclusion of the first of the three-step dialectical progression, moral freedom in turn becomes the first step–the immediate, the abstract, formal universal–in relation to a new dialectical progression. Once again, we look to see the particular forms moral freedom assumes when put into practice. And once again we find that moral freedom succumbs to contradictions. First, it cannot be realized by isolated individuals apart from their social relations but requires that individuals be socialized and educated to think rationally about possible principles of action. On the most basic level, the individual requires language, a capacity that cannot be acquired without socialization. Second, these moral principles generated by the isolated individual are, according to Hegel, too abstract, formal, and empty to serve as reliable guides in navigating life’s choices. For example, Kant offered a second version of his moral law: ask if it would be consistent to will that everyone do what you are proposing to do. Stealing property from someone else would not pass such a test because thieves do not want others to steal from them. But a problem arises here. In the Phenomenology of Spirit, for example, Hegel raises the question, “Ought it be an absolute law that there should be property?” In other words, is the institution of private property an unqualified good or does it harbor contradictions such as in the case of stealing? Would it fail to pass one of Kant’s moral laws? If contradictions arise, then the proposal fails. The answer Hegel supplies is that neither private property nor its opposite, “to each according to his need,” is self-contradictory, and therefore abstract, empty, formal laws alone are insufficient to serve as a guide. Contradictions only arise if we presuppose the existence of some social practice such as private property. Then stealing represents a contradiction of it. Unless one borrows concrete values and practices from the surrounding society, everything passes these highly abstract moral-law tests. But moral freedom purported to provide a law that was centered exclusively in the isolated individual–hence, a contradiction. Both these problems point to the fact that moral freedom alone cannot provide a coherent account of a fully self-determined will but must be supplemented with the indispensable role of social institutions, whether in the form of education or institutions such as private property, which leads to the third and highest form of practical freedom. Social or ethical freedom, while incorporating elements from both personal and moral freedom, represents a culminating advance by avoiding the contradictions that encumbered its predecessors. Taking into consideration the lessons that emerged from both personal and moral freedom, namely that freedom cannot be fully realized by an isolated individual, Hegel argues in favor of a more social and encompassing version of free will. Social freedom envisions individuals coming together to construct–through rational discussion–the kind of social and political institutions that embody a rational logic or universal justice. Here, people collectively take control of their world, either directly or through their representatives, and mold it to their will by creating institutions that safeguard personal and moral freedom. Personal freedom is preserved through the institution of private property. Moral freedom, while supplemented by the surrounding culture, persists in the sense that individuals may critically evaluate their surrounding social institutions. In this way the individual is still allowed to exercise their unique individuality but now exercises it within a rational social framework. Social freedom represents a revolutionary advance in several respects. First, the philosophical assumption that individuals are primordial and societies are secondary and inessential, which dominated the thought of Hegel’s contemporaries, is replaced by a philosophy built on the premise that human beings, while containing an element of individuality, are essentially social and cannot reach their full human potential apart from their membership in society. In The Philosophy of Mind, for example, Hegel argues: “Only in such a manner is true freedom realized; for since this consists in my identity with the other, I am only truly free when the other is also free and is recognized by me as free. This freedom of one in the other unites men in an inward manner, whereas needs and necessity bring them together only externally.” Second, by abandoning the supremacy of the isolated individual and replacing it with a collective subject, the world seems to undergo a transformation: from the standpoint of the isolated individual, the social world appears immutable but becomes pliant when confronted by large numbers of people who act collectively with a conscious plan. Third, human freedom in its fullest sense is not a matter of acting impulsively or thoughtlessly indulging in desires but acting rationally. Fourth, what counts as rational action is not determined by the isolated individual but by people in communication with one another and results from an open discussion. As Hegel said, “What is to be authoritative nowadays derives its authority, not at all from force, only to a small extent from habit and custom, really from insight and argument.” (Philosophy of Religion) Fifth, individuals act collectively not merely to create social institutions that will serve to safeguard personal and moral freedom. If this were the case, then individual freedom would remain supreme. Rather, social freedom also becomes an end in-itself. Individuals realizing their identity, in addition to having an individual side, is essentially tied to their surrounding community, its culture and social practices. We understand that we are not autonomous, fully defined humans apart from society but that we are more like members of a living organism. People feel that they are truly themselves when they are actively engaged with other members of the community, formulating policies where all are equally respected and each has the opportunity to influence the opinion of others. In this way individuals can experience a deep satisfaction by exercising their full social humanity. A summary of Hegel’s dialectic Hegel employs multiple ways to describe the dialectical process, but they are all pointing to the same general features. We have already touched on his description of the dialectic as starting with “abstract immediacy” or the “undifferentiated” stage. He also refers to this first step as “the abstract universal” or an “unconscious impulse.” The second step involves the “particular” (or “difference”), meaning the ways in which the first step plays out in existence. The third step unites the first two steps in a “mediated unity.” But Hegel also describes this process more abstractly as moving from the universal, to the particular, and then to the individual. In other words, we start with a vague idea or impulse, look at the particular ways it appears in the world, and then formulate a new more differentiated universal that resolves the contradictions appearing in the second step by situating them in a more encompassing, more complex universal. This third step then serves as the starting point for a new dialectical progression until the final point is reached. Hegel also describes the second step as the negation of the first step since the second step reveals contradictions, while the third step, which resolves the contradictions in a larger totality, is the negation of the negation. But Hegel uses another important formulation where something transitions from being “in-itself” to being “for-itself.” The in-itself is implicit, meaning that we are not aware of it, while the for-itself is where the implicit has become explicit and we have become conscious of it. For example, in our investigation of moral freedom we started with the moral actor as an isolated individual. But upon reflection we come to understand that the ability of an individual to act morally presupposes being socialized to think rationally and requires established social practices to serve as a context within which to employ moral principles. We become conscious of this necessary social context by reflecting on the practice of moral freedom; if we do not reflect, we do not become aware of it and, accordingly, cannot proceed thoughtfully. For Hegel, then, the process of history amounts to becoming increasingly self-conscious of what we are unconsciously presupposing so that we choose a course of action, not because we are impelled by unconscious impulses, but because we consciously conclude it represents the most reasonable alternative. He adds in Philosophy of World History, as was mentioned before: “… freedom, by definition, is self-consciousness,” and later adds, “We have defined this goal of history as consisting in the [human] spirit’s development towards self-consciousness, or in it making this world conform to itself (for the two are identical).” In other words, by engaging in collective action according to a plan that has been consciously adopted based on “insight and argument” rather than individuals pursuing their own selfish ends, we can create rational institutions that conform to our ideas of what is right. For example, Hegel argues in The Philosophy of Mind: Man is implicitly rational; herein lies the possibility of equal justice for all men and the futility of a rigid distinction between races which have rights and those which have none. Marx’s use of the dialectic Marx’s social philosophy shares many fundamental points with Hegel’s. Otherwise, the dialectic would be irrelevant. First, Marx also regards society as an organism, meaning that the isolated individual apart from society is no longer considered a meaningful construct. Rather, individuals are subordinate and to a large degree defined by their surrounding society. Individuals producing in society–hence socially determined individual production–is, of course, the point of departure. The individual and isolated hunter and fisherman, with whom Smith and Ricardo begin, belongs among the unimaginative conceits of the eighteenth-century Robinsonades…. (Introduction to the Grundrisse) [“Robinsonades” refers to Daniel Dafoe’s fictional character, Robinson Crusoe and the conception of humans as self-made individuals.] Only in a community [with others has each] individual the means of cultivating his gifts in all directions; only in the community, therefore, is personal freedom possible. (The German Ideology) Second, both see history as progressing in the direction of humanity becoming progressively free, rational, and self-conscious. Marx says, for example: “Reason nevertheless prevails in world history” (Comments on the North American Events, Die Presse, October 12, 1862). For Marx, as humanity gains more control over its material environment through technological advances, the potential for taking control of social relations and exercising social freedom by collectively directing the economy according to a rational plan, as opposed to letting the blind forces of the market dictate economic decisions, becomes increasingly possible. The overthrow of capitalism and move towards communism makes this imminently possible: “Let us finally imagine, for a change, an association of free men, working with the means of production held in common, and expending their many different forms of labor power in full self-consciousness as one single social force.” (Capital, Vol. 1, Chapter 1) And: With the community of revolutionary proletarians, on the other hand, who take their conditions of existence and those of all members of society under their control, it is just the reverse; it is as individuals that the individuals participate in it. It is just this combination of individuals [assuming the advanced stage of modern productive forces] which puts the conditions of the free development and movement of individuals under their control…. (The German Ideology) Third, Marx also viewed history as composed of distinct stages, but diverges from Hegel in their identification because of his materialist/economic approach to history. Accordingly, the categories he identifies are first communal societies, followed by the slave societies of Greece and Rome, then feudalism, then capitalism, to be followed sometime in the future by communism. Like Hegel, Marx argued each stage contains its own distinct logic: “The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life” (Preface to Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy). This means that the nature of the family, education, culture in general, philosophy, the state and politics, not to mention human nature, are all organically connected to the economic infrastructure at any particular historical stage. Fourth, the emergence of fundamental contradictions within society is responsible for its revolutionary transformation. For Marx, these contradictions are above all generated in the economy with the development of classes divided by antagonistic and contradictory interests, leading to the downfall of one society after another while giving birth to new, higher forms: “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.” (Manifesto of the Communist Party) As a result of these points of commonality, Marx adopts Hegel’s dialectic with the same schema of abstract, undifferentiated universal, followed by its negation in the form of particular determinations, and then to their resolution in a new mediated, more encompassing universal, or the negation of the negation. Marx’s 1857 Introduction to the Grundrisse contains the most extended discussion of his method: The economists of the seventeenth century, e.g., always begin with the living whole, with population, nation, state, several states, etc.; but they always conclude by discovering through analysis a small number of determinant, abstract, general relations such as division of labor, money, value, etc. As soon as these individual moments had been more or less firmly established and abstracted, there began the economic systems, which ascended from the simple relations, such as labor, division of labor, need, exchange value, to the level of the state, exchange between nations and the world market. The latter is obviously the scientifically correct method. The concrete is concrete because it is the concentration of many determinations, hence unity of the diverse. Here Marx is describing the dialectic that starts with the abstract universal (population, etc.), then moves to particular determinations (the division of labor, money, etc.), and concludes by reconstructing a new universal that contains these determinations in the form of a mediated unity. Marx’s monumental work, Capital, is an attempt to take the abstract notion of a pre-capitalist economy and show that, when it plays out in reality and develops into capitalism, the first stage of equality where everyone is an owner and performs their own labor is soon “negated” and replaced by a society composed of two opposed, unequal classes where a minority enjoys huge wealth while the majority struggles to survive. In other words, capitalism is preceded by “individual private property” or what has been referred to as “simple commodity production” or “simple exchange” (the abstract universal). In this stage individuals own their tools, etc., they perform labor and then own the product of their labor which they can take to the market for purposes of exchange–a system that at the outset lacks class divisions, equality prevails, and exploitation is absent. But capitalism negates this stage: as it develops, some of these producers go bankrupt (perhaps demand is lacking for their product, or perhaps they were wiped out by bad weather) and must seek employment from others to survive, which amounts to the first step towards capitalism proper where some in society (the capitalist class) own the means of production while others (the working class) own only their ability to work and must seek employment from those with the means of production. But capitalists have a competitive advantage over individual producers because of their size and efficiency, which results in more and more individual producers being thrown into the working class. Inevitably, wealth becomes concentrated in the hands of a minority of capitalists while the vast majority of the population is converted into workers employed by them. These classes are the particular determinations that flow from the original starting point of simple commodity production. Marx describes this movement in this way: “The capitalist mode of appropriation, the result of the capitalist mode of production, produces capitalist private property. This is the first negation of individual private property, as founded on the labor of the proprietor.” (Capital, Volume I, Chapter 32) But when society is divided into two vastly unequal classes with opposed interests, where the working class represents the vast majority of the population but is increasingly exploited, workers come to the realization that they are not simply autonomous individuals but members of a class defined by class exploitation. Instead of being unaware of their class membership, they become class-conscious. Their class membership, which was unconscious and “in-itself” becomes conscious and “for-itself.” Workers realize their misery is not the result of their own individual failure but of their class membership and can then engage in class struggle to liberate themselves as a class by abolishing the capitalist class system and replacing it with communism. This represents the negation of the negation: “But capitalist production begets, with the inexorability of a law of Nature, its own negation. It [the system that replaces capitalism] is the negation of negation. This does not re-establish private property for the producer but gives him individual property based on the acquisitions of the capitalist era: i.e., on co-operation and the possession in common of the land and of the means of production.” (Capital, Volume I, Chapter 32) In The Critique of the Gotha Program (1875), Marx argued that capitalist society could not immediately be replaced by a full-blown communist society but rather its revolutionary transformation would proceed dialectically: capitalism, with its deep division into antagonistic classes, would be replaced by its negation where classes would be abolished by adopting a new system of wealth distribution where people would be rewarded according to the amount of labor they performed, meaning that capitalists, too, would need to work to get an income. But Marx was quick to point out in this essay that this stage of the revolution had its problems because of contradictory results: The right of the producers is proportional to the labor they supply; the equality consists in the fact that measurement is made with an equal standard, labor. But one man is superior to another physically, or mentally, and supplies more labor in the same time, or can labor for a longer time; and labor, to serve as a measure, must be defined by its duration or intensity, otherwise it ceases to be a standard of measurement. This equal right is an unequal right for unequal labor. It recognizes no class differences, because everyone is only a worker like everyone else; but it tacitly recognizes unequal individual endowment, and thus productive capacity, as a natural privilege. It is, therefore, a right of inequality, in its content, like every right. With the appearance of this contradiction, eventually a new principle of distribution would be introduced, representing the negation of the negation: In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished; after labor has become not only a means of life but life’s prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly–only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs! (The Critique of the Gotha Program) In other words, people will no longer be treated with an abstract universal law of distribution blind to divergent individual needs but distribution will be conducted in an organic way so the different needs of individuals will be factored into the distribution of wealth. Of course, such a principle cannot be immediately adopted after the overthrow of capitalism because human nature will still be stamped with the effects of capitalism, where self-interest and an abstract, individualistic sense of entitlement prevail. Once this mindset is slowly eradicated by new social relations that engender a sense of solidarity, distribution can be established on a more personal, humanitarian, organic basis. A quick review of the dialectic The first contact we have with the surrounding world occurs with our senses–sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell–that provide us with a series of sense experiences with little connection among them. Gradually we begin to forge these connections and our world appears more continuous and rational. We organize our experiences according to their relation in time and space, by placing similar experiences under the same category and then connect these categories by means of relations such as cause and effect, substance and accidents, etc. Everyday thinking or what passes for common sense operates on this metaphysical level with its rigid categories. We see our surrounding world as static. One tree, for example, might die and be replaced by another, but the category “tree” remains. The law of gravity never changes. In a similar way we assume the surrounding society is immutable. Those who advocate radical change are dismissed as unrealistic. This apparently static universe is tied to the assumption that thought on the one hand is entirely divorced from the world of existence on the other. Universal categories such as tree, animal, private property, and wage labor are seen as purely mental constructs, while existence is composed of purely material objects or practices. The possibility of changing our material/social world to conform to our ideas so that ideas become a part of reality is beyond consideration. However, once we turn our attention to humanity’s long history and note that human societies during different epochs have displayed vastly different forms, each with their own distinct economy, political system, philosophy, human nature, etc., then the question arises: is there a logical connection between these social formations so that history itself is rational, or is history governed by pure chance? Hegel’s dialectic was an attempt to affirm the former alternative. Accordingly, it takes us beyond the level of the fixed categories into the realm of an organic system that undergoes development with an underlying logic connecting one stage to the next, illuminating the long journey of humanity to self-knowledge, rationality and freedom–with the understanding, of course, that many regressions along the way can stall progress. Both Marx and Hegel come to the realization that all past societies have been our [humanity’s] own creation, although without conscious planning, and each subsequent social formation represents an advance over its predecessor since it represents a gain in self-knowledge or technical control over nature, culminating in the realization that we can consciously make history according to a collective plan. While rigid metaphysical thinking dominates common sense, nevertheless some individuals, perhaps without any special training, intuitively recognize the need to go further and take into consideration the social/historical context to better understand human reality. They may also be open to the possibility of radical social upheaval and revolutionary change. To this extent, they are taking a step in the direction of dialectical thinking, an impulse that can be greatly enhanced by an introductory acquaintance with its forms. Examples of dialectical and metaphysical modes of thinking 1. The metaphysical practice of assigning grades to student work When children enter school, capitalist culture deems it appropriate to motivate their behavior by assigning grades to their work depending on its quality, emphasizing to the student how important grades are for their entire future. The grade is supposed to represent an accurate reflection of the student’s performance and/or abilities. But this claim is fraught with contradictions. For example, teachers cannot appeal to a single, unambiguous, universal standard of measurement when assigning grades. Are students being measured according to how much improvement they make during the school term so that they are not penalized if they enter the class less prepared than other students? Or are they graded on how their performance compares to that of the other students, in which case their grade can fluctuate according to who is in the class? Is it possible that all the students in a class do outstanding work and all deserve an ‘A’? Instead of assuming today’s grades are inflated, might the grading policies of the past have been deflated? The teacher’s performance also plays a role in a student’s grade. If the teacher does a poor job explaining the material to the students, or the test questions are confusing or unrelated to the material covered in class, the student’s grade can be adversely affected. Or the teacher might simply grade unfairly where they give generous grades to students they like. It is hard to say what will replace grades, if anything, in a socialist society, but surely grades as we know them will be abolished. 2. Casting moral blame as a metaphysical exercise Capitalist society, with its hyper individualism, creates a culture in which individuals cast moral judgments on one another purely as individuals, stripped of any social or historical context, with the assumption that the individual is entirely responsible for who they are and what they do. People who live in poverty are themselves to blame, as if poverty results above all from a failure of individual will-power rather than social policies designed to ensure part of the population remains poor. This tendency is particularly egregious in a situation where one nation has colonized a second nation or people. When an occupation drags on for decades, as in Gaza and the West Bank, and the oppressed population is treated with daily violence and cruelty; where Israel arrests Palestinians in the occupied territories without charging them with crimes; humiliates them in public by making Palestinians remove their clothes and dance; keeps them imprisoned indefinitely or tries them in rigged military courts; or incarcerates those in Gaza in an open-air prison where only enough food is allowed in to keep the population barely above starvation; when medical supplies allowed to enter are insufficient; where Palestinians are routinely and illegally pushed out of their houses and off their land with impunity or murdered with impunity; when the oppressed population lashes out in violent desperation after exhausting non-violent alternatives, moral condemnation suddenly rises to the occasion: those who have lived comparatively privileged lives are quick to condemn the Palestinian people for resorting to indiscriminate violence, thereby stripping the victims of their humanity by stripping them of their social/historical context. 3. Metaphysical politics US foreign policy, instead of viewing other societies, for example, Iraq or Afghanistan, as rich, complex, organic unities of culture, religion, economic practices, and system of government, assumes that by merely changing the government they can transform the country into a liberal western democracy, blind to the fact that the government does not exist in isolation but has deep connections to the surrounding economy and culture. Accordingly, U.S. foreign policy adventures typically end in abysmal failures. Even on the left many assume that working-class power can be achieved by electing socialists to office who will then, presumably, transform the nation from capitalism to socialism. However, electing politicians to office in capitalist societies does not require collective action on the part of the working class. The election process reflects the capitalist culture of operating as isolated individuals: everyone casts their ballot privately. The individualistic culture of capitalism remains intact. The Bernie Sanders’ “movement,” which was so highly acclaimed by many on the left, remained within the framework of capitalist individualism with its top-down decision-making where Sanders alone dictated policy, and everyone one else could either sign on or stay out. People participated as individuals, and nothing in the Sanders’ campaign remotely challenged that dynamic. His supporters were not afforded the opportunity to come together, discuss policy, and vote on how to proceed, a process that would have forged bonds among participants. Unsurprisingly, the “movement” collapsed the day after Sanders lost the election. Capitalism cannot be transformed into socialism without challenging the culture of the isolated individual. Moreover, revolutionary change cannot be achieved by a political elite at the top through piecemeal reforms as the German Social Democrat Eduard Bernstein (1850-1932) once proposed and many today consider possible. First, such an approach fails to take into consideration the counterattack the capitalist class will launch the moment these reforms become threatening. It fails to take into consideration that capitalist democracy tilts decisively in favor of the capitalists, especially with money that can be used to remove undesirable politicians. Second, progressive politicians who are elected to office join a political elite who have thoroughly adapted to the pervasive, corrupt capitalist culture that can quickly drown newcomers in a sea of self-interest and greed where money and power reign supreme. Third, and perhaps most importantly, capitalist culture is again not challenged because for the most part the working class remains passive and disengaged. 4. A dialectical approach to the union movement The recently unionized Amazon workers were confronted with a contradiction. Some argued the workers should organize a strike to pressure Amazon into negotiating a contract with favorable provisions. But others argued that the workers could not afford to strike, that they were living paycheck to paycheck and could not stay out long enough to win. Both sides had valid points. Here, a dialectical resolution could have been forged by bringing the larger union movement that is currently on the rise into the picture. An appeal could have been made to these other unions–many have large financial reserves–to contribute to a strike fund to support the Amazon workers long enough to prevail. The contradiction is resolved by enlarging the focus and situating the Amazon union in the totality of the union movement. 5. A dialectical political strategy For these reasons, Marx and Engels insisted that the overthrow of capitalism and introduction of socialism must be accomplished by the working class itself, defying the prevailing capitalist assumption that workers lack the insight and initiative. In an 1879 letter Engels explained: “At the founding of the International we expressly formulated the battle cry: The emancipation of the working class must be achieved by the working class itself.” (Marx-Engels Correspondence, September 17-18, 1879) When workers escape their passivity and act collectively to liberate themselves, they take the first step in building a new culture: workers in large numbers abandon their inter-competition and individual isolation; they organize themselves, a skill they have already acquired from their union experience; they discuss among themselves possible strategies in going forward, listening to one another and adjusting their positions when convinced of a better alternative, all while strengthening their social bonds. Then, by adopting policies that have the support of the majority, the individual perspective of each member is respected but the will of the majority prevails, enabling them to act collectively. The relations among workers undergo a dialectical transformation: instead of operating as isolated individuals, they transform themselves into members of an organic totality prepared to collectively change the world. This means, then, the capitalist state cannot remain intact after a working-class revolution since it has been constructed specifically to serve the interests of the capitalist class by requiring that workers participate as isolated individuals, not as members of an association. For this reason, Marx insisted that in the move to socialism, the capitalist state must be “smashed” and replaced by a workers’ state, where members of the working class do not participate as isolated individuals but as members of a community. In the 1871 Paris Commune, for example, workers participated through their neighborhood communes where they would discuss policies and direct their representatives how to vote. Similarly, in the early days of the Soviet Union workers, soldiers and peasants participated through their respective soviets. They would meet, debate policies, vote and direct their elected representatives to implement their decisions. A December 2019 New York Times article, “When Does Activism Become Powerful?” by Hahrie Han (Johns Hopkins University), reported that empirical studies confirm activism becomes powerful when “leaders built organizations designed to strengthen relationships with and among members”, and “that people were the source of their power.” The article continued: “These organizations put people in settings where they would build connections with one another, learn to work together and negotiate about the things they wanted, even with people who were different from them.” In contrast, “three million people marching down a boulevard may not bring about change”—precisely because they do not establish relations among one another and remain atomized. During the process of working-class activation, human nature undergoes a change. Capitalism’s hyper individualism is rejected and instead we have what Hegel described in the Phenomenology of Spirit as the “’I’ that is ‘We’ and ‘We’ that is ‘I’.” Workers embrace humanistic social relations where together they support one another, gain a sense of camaraderie, and take control of their lives by adopting new policies that champion a better world. The union slogan, “An injury to one is an injury to all,” is taken to heart, and “In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all” (Manifesto of the Communist Party, Chapter 2). When workers begin to create this working-class culture, and when they score big wins over their employers through massive strikes, etc., the movement can spread quickly. Others in the working class are then inspired by their courage, their values and their victories and want to become a part of this historic uprising. Hence, a new logic begins to rapidly spread that can lead to a revolutionary upheaval where working people take charge of society and proceed to transform it according to their own definitions of democracy, justice and freedom. Conclusion Metaphysical thinking can undermine this undertaking. Unable to imagine sudden, unexpected, upheavals where the logic of one historical stage is replaced by a new logic, it leads to the reinforcement of capitalist institutions, encourages reformism, and sidelines the working class. But these profound transformations can take place when large numbers of workers decide to put up a fight, as happened in the 1930s, and could happen again at any time. While not overthrowing capitalism, the uprisings of the 1930s changed its nature for decades to come. It is time for today’s working class to finish the job their predecessors began. The dialectic is waiting to serve them. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: I am particularly grateful to Bill Leumer for his helpful suggestions and to Frederick Neuhouser for his extraordinarily lucid books and articles on Hegel with thoughtful step-by-step elucidations of some of Hegel’s most abstruse ideas, making them accessible in ways that few others have done. AuthorAnn Robertson is a Lecturer Faculty emeritus of the Philosophy Department at San Francisco State University and a member of the California Faculty Association. This article was produced by Monthly Review. Archives February 2024 2/28/2024 It is dark before the dawn, but Israeli settler colonialism is at an end. By: Ilan PappeRead NowProfessor Ilan Pappe spoke at IHRC’s annual Genocide Memorial Day in London, UK on 21st January 2024, on the need to understand that the genocide of Palestinians we are currently witnessing, as brutal as it is, is also the demise of the so-called Jewish state. We need to be ready to imagine a new world beyond it. ------ The idea that Zionism is settler colonialism is not new. Palestinian scholars in the 1960s working in Beirut in the PLO Research Centre had already understood that what they were facing in Palestine was not a classical colonial project. They did not frame Israel as just a British colony or an American one, but regarded it as a phenomenon that existed in other parts of the world; defined as settler colonialism. It is interesting that for 20 to 30 years the notion of Zionism as settler colonialism disappeared from the political and academic discourse. It came back when scholars in other parts of the world, notably South Africa, Australia and North America agreed that Zionism is a similar phenomenon to the movement of Europeans who created the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. This idea helps us to understand much better the nature of the Zionist project in Palestine since the late 19th century until today, and it gives us an idea of what to expect in the future. I think this particular idea in the 1990s, that connected so clearly the actions of European settlers especially in places such as North America and Australia, with the actions of the settlers who came to Palestine in the late 19th century elucidated clearly the intentions of the Jewish settlers who colonised Palestine and the nature of the local Palestinian resistance to that colonisation. The settlers followed the most important logic adopted by settler colonial movements and that is that in order to create a successful settler colonial community outside of Europe you have to eliminate the natives in the country you have settled. This means that the indigenous resistance to this logic was a struggle against elimination, and not just liberation. This is important when one thinks about the operation of the Hamas and other Palestinian resistance operations ever since 1948. The settlers themselves as the case of many of the Europeans who came to North America, Central America or Australia, were refugees and victims of persecution. Some of them were less unfortunate and were just seeking better life and opportunities. But most of them were outcasts in Europe and were looking to create a Europe in another place, a new Europe, instead of the Europe that didn’t want them. In most cases, they chose a place where someone else already lived, the indigenous people. And thus the most important core group among them was that of their leaders and ideologues who provided religious and cultural justifications for the colonisation of someone else’s land. One can add to this, the need to rely on an Empire to begin the colonisation and maintain it, even if at the time the settlers rebelled against the empire that helped them and demanded and achieved independence, which in many cases they obtained and then renewed their alliance with empire. The Anglo-Zionist relationship that turned into an Anglo-Israeli alliance is a case in point. The idea that you can remove by force the people of the land that you want, is probably more understandable—not justified—against the backdrop of the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries—because it went together with full endorsement for imperialism and colonialism. It was fed by the common dehumanisation of the other non-Western, non-European people. If you dehumanise people you can more easily remove them. What was so unique about Zionism as a settler colonial movement is that it appeared on the international arena at a time where people all around the world had begun to have second thoughts about the rights of removing indigenous people, of eliminating the natives and therefore we can understand the effort and the energy invested by the Zionists and later the state of Israel in trying to cover up the real aim of a settler colonial movement such as Zionism, which was the elimination of the native. But today in Gaza they are eliminating the native population in front of our eyes, so how come they have almost given up 75 years of attempting to hide their eliminatory policies? In order to understand that we have to appreciate the transformation in the nature of Zionism in Palestine over the years. At the early stages of the Zionist settler colonialist project, its leaders carried out their eliminatory policies with a genuine attempt to square the circle by claiming that it was possible to build a democracy and at the same time to eliminate the native population. There was a strong desire to belong to the community of civilised nations and it was assumed by the leaders, in particular after the Holocaust, that the eliminatory policies will not exclude Israel from that association. In order to square this circle, the leadership insisted that their eliminatory actions against the Palestinians were a ‘retaliation’ or ‘response’ against Palestinian actions. But very soon, when this leadership wanted to move into more substantial actions of elimination, they deserted the false pretext of ‘retaliation’ and just stopped justifying what they did. In this respect, there is a correlation between the way the ethnic cleansing in 1948 developed and in the operations of the Israelis in Gaza today. In 1948, the leadership justified to itself every massacre committed, including the infamous massacre of Deir Yassine on 9th April, as the reaction to a Palestinian action: it could have been throwing stones at the bus or attacking a Jewish settlement, but it had to be presented domestically and externally as something that doesn’t come out of the blue, as self-defence. Indeed, that is why the Israeli army is called “Israeli Defence Forces”. But because it is a settler colonial project it cannot rely all the time on ‘retaliation’. The Zionist forces began the ethnic cleansing during the Nakba in February 1948, for a month all these operations were presented as retaliation to the Palestinian opposition to the UN partition plan of November 1947. On 10th March 1948, the Zionist leadership ceased talking about retaliation and adopted a master plan for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. From March 1948 to the end of 1948 the ethnic cleansing of Palestine that led to the expulsion of half of Palestine’s population, the destruction of half of its villages and the de-Arabisation of most of its towns, was done as part of a systematic and intentional master plan of ethnic cleansing. Similarly, after the occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in June 1967, whenever Israel wanted to change fundamentally the reality or engage in a full scale ethnic cleansing operation, it dispensed with the need of justification. We are witnessing a similar pattern today. At first the actions were presented as retaliation to operation Tufun al-Aqsa, but now it is the war named “sword of war” aiming to return Gaza under direct Israeli control, but ethnically cleansing its people through a campaign of genocide. The big question is why politicians, journalists, and academics in the west fell into the same trap they had fallen into in 1948? How can they still today buy into this idea that Israel is defending itself in the Gaza Strip? That it is reacting to the actions of 7th October? Or maybe they are not falling into the trap. They might know that what Israel is doing in Gaza is using 7th October as a pretext. Either way, so far, the Israelis claim to a pretext every time they assault the Palestinians, has helped the state to sustain the immunity shield that allowed it to pursue its criminal policies without fear of any meaningful reaction from the international community. The pretext helped to accentuate the image of Israel as part of the democratic and western world, and hence beyond any condemnation and sanctions. This whole discourse of defence and retaliation is important for the immunity shield that Israel enjoys from governments in the Global North. But as in 1948, today too, Israel as its operation lingers on, they dispense with the pretext, and this is when even their greatest supports find it difficult to endorse its policies. The magnitude of the destruction, the massive killings in Gaza, the genocide, are on such a level that Israelis find it more and more difficult to persuade even themselves that what they are doing is actually self-defence or reaction. Thus, it is possible that in the future more and more people would find it difficult to accept this Israeli explanation for the genocide in Gaza. For most people it is clear that what is required is a context and not a pretext. Historically and ideologically, it is very clear that 7th October is used as a pretext to complete what the Zionist movement was unable to complete in 1948. In 1948 the settler colonial movement of Zionism used a particular set of historical circumstances that I have written about in detail in my book The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, in order to expel half of Palestine’s population. As mentioned, in the process they destroyed half of the Palestinian villages, demolished most of the Palestinian towns, and yet half of the Palestinians remained inside Palestine. The Palestinians who became refugees outside the boundaries of Palestine continued the resistance of the Palestinians and therefore the settler colonial ideal of eliminating the native was not fulfilled and incrementally Israel used all its power from 1948 to today to continue with the elimination of the native. The elimination of the native from the beginning to the end includes not just a military operation, by which you would occupy a place, massacre people or expel them. Elimination needs to be justified or become an inertia and the way to do it is constant dehumanization of those you intend to eliminate. You cannot massively kill people or genocide another human being unless you dehumanise them. Thus, dehumanisation of the Palestinians is an explicit and an implicit message conveyed to the Israeli Jews through their educational system, their socialisation system in the army, the media and the political discourse. This message has to be conveyed and maintained if the elimination is to be completed. So we are witnessing a particular cruel new attempt to complete the elimination. And yet, it is not all hopeless. In fact, ironically, this particular inhuman destruction of Gaza exposes the failure of the settler colonial project of Zionism. This may sound absurd, because I’m describing a conflict between a small resistance movement, the Palestinian liberation movement and a powerful state with a military machine and an ideological infrastructure that is focused solely on the destruction of the indigenous people of Palestine people. This liberation movement does not have a strong alliance behind it, while the state it faces, enjoys a powerful alliance behind it—from the United States to multinational corporations, military industry security firms, mainstream media and mainstream academia—we’re talking about something that almost sounds hopeless and depressing because you have this international immunity for the policies of elimination that begin from the early stages of Zionism until today. It will seem probably the worst chapter of the Israeli attempt to push forward eliminatory policies to a new kind of level into a much more concentrated effort of killing thousands of people in a short period of time as they have never dared to do before. So how can it be also a moment of hope? First of all, this kind of a political entity, a state, that has to maintain the dehumanisation of the Palestinians in order to justify their elimination is a very shaky basis if we look into the more distant future. This structural weakness was already apparent before 7th October and part of this weakness is the fact that if you take out the elimination project, there is a very little that unites the group of people who define themselves as the Jewish nation in Israel. If you exclude the need to fight and eliminate the Palestinians, you are left with two warring Jewish camps, which we saw actually fighting on the streets of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem up to 6th October 2023. Huge demonstrations between secular Jews, those who describe themselves as secular Jews—mostly of European origin—believing that it’s possible to create a democratic pluralistic state while maintaining the occupation and the apartheid towards the Palestinians inside Israel, were confronting a messianic new kind of Zionism that developed in the Jewish settlements in the West Bank, what I called elsewhere the state of Judea, which suddenly appeared in our midst, believing they now have a way of creating a kind of a Zionist theocracy with no consideration for democracy, and believing that this is the only vision for a future Jewish state. There is nothing in common between these two visions apart from one thing: both camps don’t care about the Palestinians, both camps believe that the survival of Israel depends on the continuation of the elimination policies towards the Palestinians. This is not going to hold water. This is going to disintegrate and implode from within because you cannot in the 21st century keep together a state and a society on the basis that their shared sense of belonging is being part of an eliminatory genocidal project. It can work for some definitely, but it cannot work for everyone. We have seen already the indication for that before 7th October, how Israelis who have opportunities in other parts of the world due to their dual nationality, professions and their financial abilities, are thinking seriously of relocating both their money and themselves outside of the state of Israel. What you will be left with is a society that is economically weak, that is led by this kind of fusion of messianic Zionism with racism and eliminatory policies towards the Palestinians. Yes, the balance of power at first would be on the side of the elimination, not with the victims of the elimination, but the balance of power is not just local, the balance of power is regional and international, and the more oppressive the eliminatory policies are (and it’s terrible to say but it’s true) the less they are able to be covered up as a ‘response’ or ‘retaliation’ and the more they are seen as a brutal genocide policy. Thus, it is less likely that the immunity that Israel enjoys today would continue in the future. So, I really think that at this very dark moment what we are experiencing—and it is a dark moment because the elimination of the Palestinians has moved to a new level, is unprecedented. In terms of the discourse employed by Israel, and the intensity and the purpose of the eliminatory policies—there wasn’t such a period in history, this is a new phase of the brutality against the Palestinians. Even the Nakba, which was an unimaginable catastrophe does not compare to what we are seeing now and what we are going to see in the next few months. We are in my mind in the first three months of a period of two years that will witness the worst kind of horrors that Israel can inflict on the Palestinians. But even in this dark moment we should understand that settler colonial projects that disintegrate are always using the worst kind of means to try and save their project. This happened in South Africa and South Vietnam. I am not saying this as a wishful thinking, and I am not saying this as a political activist: I am saying this as a scholar of Israel and Palestine with all the confidence of my scholarly qualifications. On the basis of sober professional examination, I am stating that we are witnessing the end of the Zionist project, there’s no doubt about it. This historical project has come to an end and it is a violent end—such projects usually collapse violently and thus it is a very dangerous moment for the victims of this project, and the victims are always the Palestinians along with Jews, because Jews are also victims of the Zionism. Thus, the process of collapse is not just a moment of hope it is also the dawn that will break after the darkness, and it is the light at the end of the tunnel. Collapse like this however produces a void. The void appears suddenly; it is a like a wall that is slowly eroded by cracks in it but then it collapses in one short moment. And one has to be ready for such collapses, for the disappearance of a state or a disintegration of a settler colonial project. We saw what happened in the Arab world, when the chaos of the void, was not filled by any constructive and alternative project; in such a case the chaos continues. One thing is clear, whoever thinks about the alternative to the Zionist state should not look for Europe or the West for models that would replace the collapsing state. There are much better models which are local and are legacies from the recent and more distant pasts of the Mashraq (the eastern Mediterranean) and the Arab world as a whole. The long Ottoman period has such models and legacies that can help us taking ideas from the past to look into the future. These models can help us build a very different kind of society that respects collective identities as well as individual rights, and is built from scratch as a new kind of model that benefits from learning from the mistakes of decolonialisation in many parts of the world, including in the Arab world and Africa. This hopefully will create a different kind of political entity that would have a huge and positive impact on the Arab world as a whole. Author Ilan Pappé is Professor of History and Director for the European Centre for Palestine Studies at the University of Exeter. He is author of numerous books, the most recent being The Biggest Prison on Earth: A History of the Israeli Occupation of Palestine (Oneworld, 2015), The Idea of Israel (Verso, 2014) and The Modern Middle East; A Social and Cultural History (Routledge, 2014) Originally published: Islamic Human Rights Commission Archives February 2024 The dawn of the twentieth century saw the rise of modern, planned national economies around the world. In many of these cases, planned economies often were coupled with state ownership of production. China, especially due to becoming a Marxist-Leninist state in 1949, is no exception to this trend. It is commonly misconceived by both leftists and rightists that the People’s Republic of China has ceased to plan its economy; that the government has relinquished its obligations of maintaining state control, the private sector and “adopted capitalism”. When it comes to analyzing how state ownership operates within the People’s Republic of China, the information that is available on the Western internet tends to be sparse and vague. Many sources do not give specific evidence of how State-Owned Enterprises (SOEs) function, nor do they elaborate just how widely proliferated SOEs are, formally or otherwise. This article is designed to clarify the way SOEs and their subsidiaries function and interact with China’s domestic economy today. Formal State Ownership “State-owned enterprises are an important material and political foundation for socialism with Chinese characteristics, and an important pillar and reliance for the party to govern and rejuvenate the country.” — Xi Jinping, General Secretary of the Communist Party of China It is a well-established fact within Chinese political discourse that state-owned enterprises are an ever-present fact of the Chinese economy that won’t simply just “vanish” overnight or “erode” over time. In fact, since Reform and Opening Up, while the overall quantity of state-owned enterprises has gone down, the overall quality has increased. Rather than going on the path of root-and-branch privatization, the government has instead sought to make the numerous state-owned enterprises that still remain as efficient and competitive as possible. As a result, the top 150 SOEs, far from being inefficient, have instead become enormously profitable, the aggregate total of their profits reaching $150 billion in 2007. Unlike in the West or Western-aligned states, where privately owned firms overwhelmingly predominate, most of China’s best-performing companies are to be found in the state sector. [1] Contrary to popular belief regarding “Communism”, profit and to make a return on one’s investment is not contradictory to the way state-controlled firms should be run. In fact, it would be damaging if these firms were run in a way where they were actively making a loss or were wasting resources. Contribution to GDP and Scale of Assets In 2011, it was found that roughly 50% of non-agricultural GDP was generated by SOEs. Similarly, in regard to economic industries/sectors in which SOEs play a dominant or majority role, those include defense, electric power, petroleum and petrochemicals, telecommunications, coal, civil aviation, and shipping; as well as equipment manufacturing, automobiles, information technology, construction, iron and steel, nonferrous metals and chemicals. [2] In 2017, that number stood at 63.6%, where China’s GDP was RMB ¥82 trillion, of which non-financial SOEs count for RMB ¥52.2 trillion [3]. In 2021, SOEs accounted for around 66% of China’s GDP [4]. So, even formally speaking, in terms of overall contribution to GDP, SOEs have played a significant amount, rising over the past 10 years from 50% to 66%, rising approximately 1.6% to their contribution to GDP per year. In 2023, that number climbed to 68% of China’s GDP: China’s GDP was RMB ¥126 trillion, of which non-financial SOEs accounted for RMB ¥85.7 trillion. [ From 2002-2011, the value of SOE assets as a percentage of GDP started at roughly 550% before declining to a rate of roughly to 430% by 2008, its lowest point, before reaching a plateau of around 450% since 2009. Note, when Western analysts measure state-owned enterprises, they tend to only factor in what is directly translated as 国有企业, which is formally classified as a non-financial state-owned enterprise. Typically, when comparisons are made from Western studies or articles, they only focus on “SOEs” but neglect the two other formal “SOE categories” which are financial SOEs (国有金融/中央金融企业) and administrative SOE assets (行政事业性国有资产). This is why estimations for “SOE value” may be lost in translations and only partially accurate results can be extrapolated. For the following two sources, one produced by the IMF and the other produced by WSJ, the operative Chinese “SOEs” will be referred to as non-financial SOEs for clarification. Non-Chinese SOEs elsewhere in the world don’t follow these three distinctions. In 2018, a study from the IMF found that Non-financial SOEs assets for China as a % of GDP amounted to 180% of GDP. While in 2015, Italy, India, South Korea, Saudi Arabia and Norway’s SOEs did not rise above 50% [6]. According to WSJ, the value of French SOE assets in 2008 as a % of GDP amounted to 686 billion USD, which is 28% of GDP. In the same year, Chinese Non-financial SOEs were 6 trillion USD, or 133% of GDP [7]. In 2010, 94% of all assets held by the top 150 companies were controlled by the state, which represented 41.2% of all corporate assets in China, out of the total of roughly 5 million registered companies [8]. In 2012, the total assets held by the State sector in China amounted to 55.78% or 53% depending on the estimate used [9]. However, in comparison with European nations during the same year (elaborated by the figure below), the total assets of Eastern European nations (largely former Eastern Bloc) held by the state sector were around 13%. For the Netherlands, Italy, Spain, France, Belgium and Portugal, it was around 4.60%. For Ireland and the UK, even less than that number. For Austria and Germany, around 10.79%. For Scandinavia, it was 6.02%. [10] In 2022, the total value of SOE assets as a percentage of GDP amounted to 608%, of which ¥109.4 trillion or 90.4% of GDP was held by all 97 Central State Owned Enterprises (CSOEs), controlled directly by the SASAC (more on that later). And non-financial SOEs held 339.5 trillion, which accounts for 280.5% of GDP [11]. In comparison to the largest 500 private enterprises in the same year, their amassed assets held ¥41.64 trillion RMB, of which represents only 34.4% of GDP, which is dwarfed by the amount held by the 97 CSOEs [12]. In regard to share of total assets, SOEs own 60% of China's total assets as of 2021 [13]. Note, RMB (Renminbi) is more commonly known as Chinese Yuan (¥). Second note, a CSOE is an SOE directly controlled by the Central Government. In 2019 there were 3,777 listed companies on the public stock exchanges in Shanghai and Shenzhen, of which you need an operating income of ¥100 million RMB per year to even be available for listing, cumulative over the course of 3 years. Out of total assets, SOEs held 98% in the Telecommunications sector, 95% in the airline sector, 94% in the infrastructure sector and more than 93% in the utilities and energy sector. In the industry sector 74%, in the materials sector, more than 63% and in automobiles, more than 62%. [14] In 2023, out of a total of 4,763 listed companies, of which 1,300 are formally classified as SOEs. They make up 27% of the total enterprises, but capture 69% of the market revenue and 77% of the total profits. Most leading listed companies across key industries, including but not limited to banks, insurance, brokerage, oil & gas, chemicals, coal, power, telecom, construction, Chinese medicine and liquor, are all SOEs. [15] Furthermore, the amount of private involvement is exaggerated. As of the end of 2017, there are only 17 private-owned banks among 4,532 financial institutions classified as the banking industry. The number of people employed by these 17 private-owned banks only accounts for 0.1% of all banking staff. For example, in 1997, POEs (Privately Owned Enterprises) in the industrial sector accounted for only 6.5% by number, and this figure has increased to 57.7% in 2017. However in 2000, POEs in the industrial sector accounted for only 3.1% by the size of assets, and this figure peaked at around 22% in 2013, stagnating to a slight decline by 2017 of 21.6%. [16] Examples of Dominant SOEs Now that the persistence of SOEs in the modern Chinese economy has been established via statistical evidence, I want to provide some empirical evidence, some examples that could be used or shared in future for reference. Circling back to the point about “key sectors” of which SOEs must dominate, below are a few examples of the following SOEs that dominate their respective key sectors. The power-generating industry in China is dominated by five SOE power-generating company groups: China Huaneng Power Group, China Datang Corporation, China Huadian Corporation, China Guodian Corporation, and China Power Investment Corporation. And the public utilities sector is dominated by the State Grid Corporation of China (SGCC) and China Southern Power Grid Corporation [17]. The telecommunications industry in China is dominated by three SOE telecommunications carriers: China Telecom, China Unicom, and China Mobile [18]. ![]() China’s Three Gorges Dam - one of the largest dams in the world - is run by the “Three Gorges Dam Corporation”, a state-owned enterprise (SOE). Its subsidiaries include utilities companies such as China Yangtze Power, further illustrating state management of the economy. [Image Courtesy: China Daily] The petrochemicals industry is dominated by five SOE company groups: China National Petroleum Corporation, Sinopec, Sinochem, China National Offshore Oil Corporation and Shandong Energy [19]. And the natural gas industry is dominated by five SOEs as well, Sinopec, CNPC, CNOOC, Beijing Enterprises Group and Shenenergy Group [20]. China Baowu Steel Group Corporation, produces 80% of the auto-sheet metal for use in automobiles, major appliances, airplane fuselages and wings, architecture, and others and 60% of the silicon steel which are used in generators, motors, and transformers. Baowu steel remains to be a global leader in both categories as of 2022 [21]. The world’s largest producer of rolling stock and locomotives is under one company, the China Railway Rolling Stock Corporation — which is a CSOE — has 90% of the market share for train production [22]. The largest ship producer domestically and worldwide and sole ship producer in China, the Chinese State Shipbuilding Corporation produces 48% of all ships in the world [23].a You have China Minmetals, which has 90% of the domestic metallurgical market share [24]. They also hold 90% of the contract value for domestic metallurgical engineering and construction, which is the construction of industrial metal production engineering machines and items [25]. These are just a few of the prominent examples of the large and dominant SOEs that permeate through China’s domestic market. The more upstream an economic sector is, the more state ownership it will have. This is the general rule of thumb for the state involvement within the domestic economy. The Shareholder System The State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission of the State Council (SASAC) is an institution directly under the management of the State Council. It is an ad-hoc ministerial-level organization directly subordinated to the State Council. The Party Committee of SASAC performs the responsibilities mandated by the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party. [26] The way ownership is substantiated or demonstrated is through stock ownership. The SASAC owns 100% of the stock of a total of 98 CSOEs. There is a common misconception that companies must be 50% or more, or somehow totally state owned to be in function “state owned” or operate according to party directives. On paper, SOE employment rates and output rates are formally lower than the non-state sector, yet they continue to persist and play a dominant role in the economy. How is this possible? Through the shareholder system. One way the CPC maintains functional control over multiple enterprises is through a diverse shareholder system, where one CSOE directly or indirectly controls 100s or 200 enterprises via their own subsidiary system. Lenin notes in his book, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism of precisely this phenomenon, although inverted as it is now the state who is the “shareholder”, while he was analyzing the bourgeoisie who were shareholders. The head of the concern controls the principal company (literally: the “mother company”); the latter reigns over the subsidiary companies (“daughter companies”) which in their turn control still other subsidiaries (“grandchild companies”), etc. In this way, it is possible with a comparatively small capital to dominate immense spheres of production. Indeed, if holding 50 per cent of the capital is always sufficient to control a company, the head of the concern needs only one million to control eight million in the second subsidiaries. And if this ‘interlocking’ is extended, it is possible with one million to control sixteen million, thirty-two million, etc… As a matter of fact, experience shows that it is sufficient to own 40 percent of the shares of a company in order to direct its affairs, since in practice a certain number of small, scattered shareholders find it impossible to attend general meetings, etc. The “democratization” of the ownership of shares, from which the bourgeois sophists and opportunist so-called “Social-Democrats” expect (or say that they expect) the “democratization of capital,” the strengthening of the role and significance of small scale production, etc., is, in fact, one of the ways of increasing the power of the financial oligarchy.” [27] Lenin understood that it was entirely possible for the shareholding system to “increase the power” of the financial oligarchy. But what if, instead of a financial oligarchy sitting at the top of the pillar, it is the Communist Party? Or more specifically, the SASAC. Lenin notes in the above quote that owning merely 40% of the shares of a single company is sufficient to direct its affairs. And how “Mother companies” reign supreme over “Daughter companies” and indirectly control “grandchildren” companies. Therefore, it is entirely possible for “1 million to rule over 32 million”. And this is precisely how the SOEs obfuscate their formal state ownership within the Chinese economy while still maintaining de facto control and influence. This phenomenon is noted by Derrick Scissors, who is a former Senior Research Fellow at The Heritage Foundation. In 2007, he found that while 100% of state ownership may be “diluted” by division of ownership into different shareholders, of which are non-state, the majority of ownership/controlling shareholder largely trended towards state ownership. This is despite the fact that they might formally be considered non-state owned or sometimes foreign media may even label them private. He says that however, this phenomenon does nothing to change state control. Despite them being listed on foreign stock exchanges, the ultimate control rights remain in the hands of the state. [28] No matter their shareholding structure, all national corporations in the sectors that make up the core of the Chinese economy are required by law to be owned or controlled by the state. These sectors include power generation and distribution; oil, coal, petrochemicals, and natural gas; telecommunications; armaments; Aviation and shipping; machinery and automobile production; information technologies; construction; and the production of iron, steel, and nonferrous metals. The railroads, grain distribution, and insurance are also dominated by the state, even if no official edict says so. [28] The same is noted by Margaret Pearson who argues that despite the issuing of stocks, these stock issuances are not used for the purpose of wholesale “denationalization” or “privatization” of enterprises, but the intended goal is to rather upgrade and enhance the value of corporate state-owned assets. Even though some firms may have been listed on the stock market, their parent firms or “Mother firms” control rights firmly remain in the hands of the state. [29] Stephen Green, a member of the Royal Institute of International Affairs continues to corroborate the claim, making the statement that the way stocks are issued is not for the sake of denationalization of industries, but to support and subsidize SOE restructuring and to prevent private companies from raising capital. [30] A research study in 2009 concluded that the “privatization” campaign of China drastically differs from the ones conducted in Eastern Europe, that the sale of shares do not fundamentally alter state control. And that in fact, there has been no meaningful transfer of state control over to private hands. The majority of companies in China have around 66% of their shares being held in state hands. Even if shares can be traded/floated on the market, for the most part, shares will still indefinitely be maintained by state actors. [31] In 2014, another study found that China’s domestic market is entirely state dominated. The central government plays every role from issuer, to underwriter, to regulator, to controlling investor and manager of the exchanges. Efforts to simplify domestic arrangements have served only to conceal the fact that the state in its many guises still owns nearly two-thirds of domestically listed company shares. The combination of state monopolies with “Wall Street expertise” and international capital has led to the creation of national companies that represent little more than the incorporation of China's old Soviet-style industrial ministries. [32] A 2017 research paper finds that the state appointed nomenklatura working within these large “mother” companies are responsive primarily to the directives of the state instead of minority shareholders within their “daughter” or “granddaughter” firms. The core holding company is the one that coordinates business activity of the “daughter” and “granddaughters”, and these core holding companies are always dominated by state ownership. These business activities are committed in the interest, above all, of state industrial policy, and certainly with a preference for such national policy over what might be in the interest of shareholder wealth maximization for the nongroup, minority shareholders invested in the individual legal person subsidiaries often through the public capital markets. [33] From 1990 to 2003, it was found that only around 7% of all listed firms could truly be considered “private”. These companies are allowed to have access to private revenue, but their control rights are strongly within the hands of the state and should therefore be considered state firms. Even though many of these firms are not formally listed as SOEs, they are rather considered to be either joint-venture or shareholding firms instead. [34] LLCs/Shareholding Firms Widespread “privatizations” of small SOEs reduced the total number of SOEs from 250,000 in 1995, to 127,000 in 2005. It is naïve to view the state as simply having divested itself from ownership of the state sector. Virtually all of the figures that scholars and the popular press have picked as evidence of the declining role of the state, relates to the decline in state shares but ignores the rise of institutional shares. [35] The transformation of SOEs into share-holding firms took several forms: shareholding cooperatives, jointly owned enterprises, limited liability corporations and limited shareholding corporations. These firms held over 50% of capital assets and generated 35% of national sales. They replaced SOEs as the dominant public sector employers in the interior of the country. These hybrid forms were supposed to operate under hard budget constraints. [35] The introduction of stock markets in China appeared to be a capitulation towards “capitalism”. However, in July 2015, a crisis in the stock market revealed the inner contradictions between market pressures and state control as it exposed peculiar features of China's markets. Formally, all the institutions, organizations, administrative and legislative forms that are required to replicate Western stock markets exist. However, all aspects of the capital markets remain owned by some agency of the state. As a consequence, when share prices began to collapse in July 2015, state banks were told to lend US $209bn to the wholly state-owned China's 89 Securities Finance Corp in order to buy stocks. Market volatility was thereby contained by massive state intervention. This means that the fate of listed companies are ultimately determined by budget constraints which are set by the Central Government. [35] The widespread underestimation of the influence of state ownership in the economy is not simply a question of misidentifying concealed public ownership relations, but also of understanding the ‘dynamics of control’ exercised by organs of the party and state. [36] There is a consistent problem when attempting to identify firms as “state owned”. Many times, functionally state owned firms are listed as “foreign-held” simply because 30% of its shares are owned by a foreign entity, despite the control rights being operated by the state. [37] For example, the joint ventures of the Shanghai local government with GM and Volkswagen (Shanghai-GM and Shanghai-VW) are registered as foreign companies, despite the fact that the Shanghai local government holds 50% of each company (Of which is the largest share in the case of Shanghai-VW). [37] This can also happen when the company is owned by a holding company registered outside of mainland China. For example, Lenovo and CNOOC (a state-owned oil company) are owned by holding companies registered in Hong Kong and, thus, legally registered as foreign owned in China. Despite the control rights firmly being managed by state hands. [37] Second, many state-owned companies, particularly after 1998, are registered as limited-liability or publicly traded companies, despite the controlling stake held by a state-controlled holding company. The Baoshan steel company and Shanghais SAIC Group’s stand-alone car company (SAIC) discussed earlier are examples of publicly listed companies and, thus, registered as share-holding companies but with a controlling stake held by a holding company owned by the Chinese state. [37] 66% of all firms are directly or indirectly owned by the SASAC. In 2012, the number of “underreported” state firms ran at 50%, of which were being registered as private firms. Meaning that the formal state share of the economy is actually 50% larger. Note, state ownership being defined here as 50% or more of a firm being owned by the state. [37] We can extrapolate that number and apply it to asset ownership in 2012, of which 53% of all assets in China were held by the State Sector. Let’s again assume that the state having at least 50% ownership makes a company state-owned. 50% of 53 is 26.5, meaning that in 2012, if we include the "underreported" sector of the state, this means that the total state ownership of assets in 2012 actually amounts to 79.5%. Examples of the Shareholder/LLC system at work An example of how this works in function will be demonstrated using the example of the company known as Sinopec: a petrochemicals company owned directly by the SASAC and is one of the largest if not the largest petrochemicals company in the world. Sinopec has a monopoly on all downstream hydrocarbons businesses in China. [33] A sinopec core company which is 100% wholly owned by the SASAC is the center of the Sinopec group. A majority-controlled subsidiary, department, or affiliated entity would function as a dedicated "finance holding company" necessary for the allocation of funds and finance to and among operations and entities included in the Sinopec Group. Sinopec Group Holding Company - explicitly permitted in its business license to invest in other entities - in turn owns a vast number of only Sinopec business-related subsidiaries, each with a business scope allowing it to operate in a defined sector within the group's larger monopoly or defined geographical areas. A majority-controlled subsidiary, department, or affiliated entity would function as a dedicated "finance holding company" necessary for the allocation of funds and finance to and among operations and entities included in the Sinopec Group. Sinopec Group Holding Company, explicitly permitted in its business license to invest in other entities, in turn owns a vast number of only Sinopec business-related subsidiaries, each with a business scope allowing it to operate in a defined sector within the group's larger monopoly or defined geographical areas. Those subsidiaries will always show majority equity ownership in the hands of the Sinopec Group Holding Company or one of its controlled subsidiaries, but they can be financed directly by bank loans, minority non-public investment, or the public shareholder markets, domestic or foreign. This Sinopec Group can seek to reorganize a traditional SOE grouping of productive and social assets conducting a petrochemicals business, like in the Shanghai suburbs of Jinshan District into a Sinopec Group Holding Company-controlled company called "Sinopec Shanghai Petrochemical Company Limited," which could complete an initial public offering on the PRC domestic or foreign shareholder markets. After the IPO, issuer Sinopec Shanghai Petrochemical Company Limited would still be dominated absolutely by the core holding company (which is the Party-State Ran State-Owned Enterprise of Sinopec) via an 80 percent equity stake and its power to appoint all directors and officers of the listed subsidiary. This is how Sinopec controls over hundreds of its own subsidiaries even though a lot of them aren’t formally “owned” or listed as SOEs according to official Chinese statistics. An example of how a “foreign listed” company is actually state owned would be the SMIC, otherwise known as the Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation. The only reason it is considered “foreign listed/foreign owned” is because 58% of its shares are listed on the Hong Kong stock exchange. 14.11% of its shares are held by Datang HK which is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Datang Holdings, which in turn is wholly-owned by CICT which is a central state owned enterprises. [38] CICT itself directly holds an additional 0.92% of the total shares, bringing the total amount to 15.03%. 7.80% of shares are held by Xinxin HK, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Xunxin (Shanghai) Investment Co., Ltd., which in turn is wholly-owned by China IC Fund which is a state owned investment fund. An additional 1.61% is held directly by the IC fund. 0.46% is held by Guoxin investment which is a state owned fund. 0.50% is held by a subsidiary of the China construction bank which is a state owned bank. Finally, another 0.43% is held by a subsidiary of the Chinese merchant bank which is a state owned bank as well. The total amount of state ownership amounts to 25.83% [39]. The HKSCC share refers to just shares/stock listed on the Hong Kong stock exchange, which does not accurately reflect controlling shares. These shares can be bought by anyone who has access to the Hong Kong stock market. The majority shareholder and the largest shareholders are all state owned enterprises, which are either directly or indirectly connected to the central government with varying layers of connection. Even though the SMIC is not “formally state owned” it is functionally state owned. Another even simpler example would be the Mcdonald's China franchise, even though on paper it is a foreign enterprise, bearing the company name/franchise name of “Mcdonald”. The controlling shareholder is a SOE known as CITIC, which holds 52% of the total shares. Making Mcdonalds in China functionally state owned despite being formally a foreign owned company. [40] Finally, the last example demonstrates how an LLC can still functionally be a state-owned company even though the formal designation is of a “limited liability company”. Sichuan Changhong Electric is China’s largest television producer and the sole producer of batteries for the Chengdu J-10 “Vigorous Dragon”, a multirole combat aircraft. Even their official shareholders report states the following: Sichuan Changhong Electronic Co., Limited (“Sichuan Changhong”), a company incorporated in the PRC with its shares listed on the Shanghai Stock Exchange, has obtained the control over the board of directors of the Company since 2012. Sichuan Changhong Electronics Holding Group Co., Ltd., (“Sichuan Changhong Holding”, a company established in the PRC and wholly-owned by the State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission of the Mianyang city government and one of the Controlling Shareholders) is the single largest shareholder of Sichuan Changhong, which held approximately 23.22% of the entire issued share capital of Sichuan Changhong and has de facto control over the composition of the majority of the board of Sichuan Changhong. [41] Below is a chart that goes over the overall ownership structure that makes it easier to visualize. Conclusion In conclusion, “formal” SOE ownership is deliberately obfuscated and downplayed by Western media despite the large impactful role it continues to play within the Chinese domestic economy. Similarly, “informal” SOE ownership via LLCs, shareholding companies and joint-ventures with foreign enterprises have caused them to be counted as “non-SOEs” despite functionally acting upon state directives. SOEs continue to persist within China’s economy and continue to actively grow in size, scale and scope of economic activities. References Formal State Ownership[1] Jacques, Martin. 2012. When China Rules the World. p. 184. Contribution to GDP and Scale of Assets[2] Szamosszegi, Andrew, and Cole Kyle. 2011. An Analysis of State-Owned Enterprises and State Capitalism in China. p. 1. https://www.uscc.gov/sites/default/files/Research/10_26_11_CapitalTradeSOEStudy.pdf. [3] Latest Lessons in Bankruptcy of State-Owned Enterprises (SOEs) in China: An interactive structural approach model (ISM) approach. https://www.hindawi.com/journals/ddns/2022/1109442/. [4] State-Owned Enterprises’ Responses to China’s Carbon Neutrality Goals and Implications for Foreign Investors. https://gjia.georgetown.edu/2023/02/15/state-owned-enterprises-responses-to-chinas-carbon-neutrality-goals-and-implications-for-foreign-investors/. [42] Economic performance of state-owned and state-holding enterprises nationwide from January to December 2023, Ministry of Finance of the People’s Republic of China. https://zcgls.mof.gov.cn/qiyeyunxingdongtai/202401/t20240129_3927581.htm. [5] Rise of the ‘shareholding state’: financialization of economic management in China | Socio-Economic Review | Oxford Academic. https://academic.oup.com/ser/article-abstract/13/3/603/1670234. [6] People’s Republic of China: Selected Issues, Volume 2021, Issue 012, IMF. https://www.elibrary.imf.org/view/journals/002/2021/012/article-A002-en.xml. [7] China's 'State Capitalism' Sparks a Global Backlash, WSJ. https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748703514904575602731006315198. [8] Khoo, Heiko. 2018. Is China still socialist? A Marxist critique of János Kornai’s analysis of China. p. 85-89. https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/ws/portalfiles/portal/136790902/2018_Khoo_Heiko_1068757_ethesis.pdf. [9] Pei, Changhong, Chunxue Yang, and Xinming Yang. 2019. The Basic Economic System of China. p. 24-25. [10] State-Owned Enterprises Across Europe: Stylized Facts from a Large Firm-Level Dataset. p. 17. https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/ws/portalfiles/portal/136790902/2018_Khoo_Heiko_1068757_ethesis.pdf. [11] Comprehensive report of the State Council on the management of state-owned assets in 2022. https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/nvBGqtx7MuPB8RTC9XT6jA. [12] The top 500 Chinese private enterprises in 2022 released a total operating income of 38.32 trillion yuan. https://www.xinhuanet.com/energy/20220907/79f0e58b387f4e7c903a51be2a8fc3b6/c.html. [13] SOE reforms key to smooth recovery, ChinaDaily. https://archive.ph/44ZmP#selection-403.68-403.79. [14] García-Herrero, Alicia, and Gary Ng. 2021. China’s State-Owned Enterprises and Competitive Neutrality. p. 10. https://www.bruegel.org/sites/default/files/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/PC-05-2021.pdf. [15] China SOEs – the journey to extract values from their re-rating and revaluation trajectory from Premia Partners. https://archive.ph/mMjIq#selection-233.0-236.0. [16] Liu, Kerry. 2021. The Rise and Fall of China’s Private Sector: Determinants and Policy Implications. p. 8. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3921568. Examples of Dominant SOEs[17] Lewis, Joanna I. 2023. Cooperating for the Climate: Learning from International Partnerships in China's Clean Energy Sector. MIT Press. p. 44. [18] Telecommunications industry in China, Statista. https://www.statista.com/topics/6577/telecommunications-industry-in-china/#topicOverview. [19] The 5 Biggest Chinese Oil Companies, Investopedia. https://archive.ph/3POHm#selection-2275.1-2275.36. [20] Top 5 Chinese Natural Gas Companies, Investopedia. https://www.investopedia.com/articles/markets/090315/5-biggest-chinese-natural-gas-companies.asp. [21] China Baowu Steel Group Corporation Limited, FitchRatings. https://www.fitchratings.com/research/corporate-finance/china-baowu-steel-group-corporation-limited-09-03-2022. [22] Chinese rolling stock manufacturers merge to form CRRC Corp, Railway Gazette International. https://www.railwaygazette.com/business/chinese-rolling-stock-manufacturers-merge-to-form-crrc-corp/40956.article. [23] China becoming world’s go-to for shipbuilding after ‘boom of overseas orders’, but global de-risking threatens to rock the boat, South China Morning Post. https://www.scmp.com/economy/global-economy/article/3225973/china-becoming-worlds-go-shipbuilding-after-boom-overseas-orders-global-de-risking-threatens-rock. [24] Minmetals Holding Corporation, Publication of Offering Circular. p. 14. https://www1.hkexnews.hk/listedco/listconews/sehk/2021/0421/2021042100263.pdf. [25] China Minmetals Corporation, FitchRatings. https://www.fitchratings.com/research/corporate-finance/china-minmetals-corporation-16-08-2021. The Shareholder System[26] About Us, SASAC. http://en.sasac.gov.cn/aboutus.html [27] Lenin, Vladimir. 1917. “III. Finance Capital and the Financial Oligarchy.” In Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism. Marxists.org. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/imp-hsc/ch03.htm. [28] Liberalization in Reverse, Heritage Foundation. https://www.heritage.org/global-politics/commentary/liberalization-reverse. [29] Pearson, Margaret. 2005. “The Business of Governing Business in China: Institutions and Norms of the Emerging Regulatory State.” p. 304. https://www.jstor.org/stable/25054295. [30] Non-performing, The Economist. https://archive.ph/B5kSb#selection-863.68-863.133. [31] Yeung, Horace. 2009. “Non-Tradable Share Reform in China: Marching towards the Berle and Means Corporation?” https://digitalcommons.osgoode.yorku.ca/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=&httpsredir=1&article=1156&context=clpe. [32] Walter, Carl. 2014. “Was Deng Xiaoping Right? An Overview of China's Equity Markets.” p. 18. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/jacf.12075. [33] Hawson, Nicholas. 2017. “China’s ‘Corporatization without Privatization’ and the Late 19th Century Roots of a Stubborn Path Dependency”. p. 11. https://repository.law.umich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3021&context=articles. [34] Brandt, Loren, and Thomas G Rawski. 2011. China’s Great Economic Transformation. Cambridge University Press. p. 355. LLCs/Shareholding Firms[35] Khoo, Heiko. 2018. Is China still socialist? A Marxist critique of János Kornai’s analysis of China. p. 89-90. https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/ws/portalfiles/portal/136790902/2018_Khoo_Heiko_1068757_ethesis.pdf. [36] Szamosszegi, Andrew, and Cole Kyle. 2011. An Analysis of State-Owned Enterprises and State Capitalism in China. p. 25. https://www.uscc.gov/sites/default/files/Research/10_26_11_CapitalTradeSOEStudy.pdf. [37] Hsieh, Chang-Tai, and Zheng Song. 2015. “Grasp the Large, Let Go of the Small: The Transformation of the State Sector in China.” p. 7-8. https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/2015a_hsieh.pdf. Examples of the Shareholder/LLC system at work[38] “CICT”, China Govt Services. https://govt.chinadaily.com.cn/s/201812/05/WS5c07928c498eefb3fe46e304/china-information-and-communication-technologies-group-corporation-cict.html. [39] SMIC, “Announcement of 2022 annual results”. p. 96. https://www1.hkexnews.hk/listedco/listconews/sehk/2023/0328/2023032801249.pdf. [40] CNN, McDonald’s is investing more in China to tap ‘tremendous opportunity’. https://www.cnn.com/2023/11/21/business/mcdonalds-china-stake-prospects/index.html#:~:text=The%20deal%20to%20acquire%20investment,ownership%20with%20a%2052%25%20stake. [41] Changhong Jiahua Holdings Limited, Annual Report 2020. p. 69 https://ir.changhongit.com/pub/resource/application/2021042001499.pdf. Archives February 2024 2/28/2024 Herbert Matthews’ great interview, sixty-six years later. By: Guillermo Suárez BorgesRead NowI never did another story that gave me more professional satisfaction… I only take credit for having correctly interpreted what I saw and heard, for having realized that the extraordinary young man who opened his heart to me in whispers, for three hours, would be the one around whom the hopes and passions of Cuba would be concentrated, for a tide of victory. Herbert Matthews interviewing Fidel in the Sierras. This is how Herbert Matthews, the distinguished American journalist and editorialist who arrived in February 1957 at Epifanio Díaz’s farm, in the vicinity of the Sierra Maestra, to meet with Fidel, responded to his critics. Days before, the guerrilla leader had instructed the guerrilla to obtain an impact interview with a respected correspondent outside Cuba, but the unexpected betrayal of Eutimio Guerra left Fidel in such a compromised security situation that the visting journalist also was in real danger. “Without the press, Fidel Castro would be no more than an outlaw… isolated and ineffective,” said Matthews, who, as a profound connoisseur of Cuban and Latin American affairs, suspected that behind the iron censorship ordered by Batista in Cuba, there was a well-kept secret that was waiting to be told. In Refugio 106, the former offices of The New York Times in Havana, the possibility of the famous U.S. newspaper obtaining the exclusive of the moment was discussed for the first time: “Fidel is alive”. Ruby Hart Phillips, the paper’s snooty correspondent in Cuba, would professionally keep the secret. The arrival of Herbert and his wife Nancie hours later in the Cuban capital ratified the willingness of the newspaper’s editors to run the tremendous risk of going into the eastern mountains in search of that news. Everyone expected Matthews to reveal the name of the young journalist who would undertake the risky assignment, but they were surprised when he smilingly said: I will go up there myself. A well-oiled network of collaborators of the July 26th movement throughout the Island would be in charge of taking him to Fidel. The days would be hard for him and Nancie, undercover as American tourists interested in investing in the eastern zone. Many years later a specialist in Psychological Operations of the U.S. Army Southern Command would write: The propaganda and political warfare of the Cuban Revolution, when examined in its original context, illustrate a well-planned and executed psychological operation that influenced numerous audiences and led to behavioral changes that ended up helping Fidel Castro take power, while commanding a numerically and technologically inferior force. All kinds of reactions were generated by that front page of The New York Times’ Sunday paper on February 24, 1957. In the Presidential Palace they wondered how Matthews, now close to 60 years of age and under the prescription of his cardiologist, had managed to withstand the rigors of that journey and overcome the postures of the Batista troops in the Sierra, trained and armed by the United States. Edmund Chester, an American, former journalist of the Associated Press and CBS television, then hired as Batista’s press secretary and advisor for his speeches, superficially concluded that it was a trick of his experienced “colleague” and recommended the regrettable denial in the pen of the then Secretary of Defense, Santiago Verdeja, published by Bohemia Magazine. At Calzada 55, the advisors of Arthur Gardner, U.S. ambassador in Havana and a fraternal friend of Batista, refused to admit that they had not heard anything. Gardner’s fury would be such that, already replaced and disqualified, he would devote much energy to ruin Matthews’ professional career. Despite censorship and threats here and there, the three articles resulting from Matthews’ interview with Fidel spread like wildfire. The major U.S. newspapers ran versions of the interview, the nascent television reported it exclusively and an army of journalists began to plan their next trip to the Sierra Maestra. From that moment until November 25, 2016, the media in the U.S. did not stop monitoring Fidel’s trajectory. They followed him at every step. His meeting with Herbert Matthews would be but the first of many memorable exchanges with the main U.S. opinion leaders, whom he turned, without telling them, into the people who would explain the Revolution to the audience of the irate adversary. As the Revolution concretized the Moncada program, Cuba’s enemies attacked Matthews mercilessly, holding him responsible for the new destinies of the island and even undeservedly claiming that he “invented Fidel”. The unrepeatable Ernest Hemingway, his friend since the dark nights of fire and death shared during the Spanish Civil War, would write: Herbert Matthews is the most severe, the most capable and the bravest of today’s war correspondents, he has seen the truth where it has been most dangerous to see it… he stands today as a giant beacon of honesty… Author Guillermo Suárez Borges is a researcher with the International Policy Research Center (CIPI) in Havana, Cuba. Originally published: Resumen: Latinoamericano and the Third World Archives February 2024 To say that I was awed is an understatement. Standing in front of Picasso’s 11.5 ft. x 25.5 ft. celebrated painting Guernica is one of the most sobering encounters I’ve had the displeasure of experiencing. Displeasure because the massive composition’s theme is revoltingly gruesome. Since that dastardly first-of-its-kind-waging-of-wars, nations have not learned to abide by and practice peaceful and harmonious existence. World War 2 was followed by wars in Hiroshima/Nagasaki, Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, the Near East/Palestine (8 wars), Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Libya, Ukraine, Yemen, and Gaza, to name but a few. And in each of these wars massive bombings and aerial bombardment have been the weapon of choice, resulting in the death of millions of human beings. Aerial bombardment is brutal, heinous, and vicious. Aerial bombardment is the cowardly weapon of arrogant, fascistic, hegemonic, and egotistical maniacs. Aerial bombardment is the screen behind which powerful thugs hide to absolve themselves of crimes against humanity. Aerial wars’ indiscriminate annihilation of mostly innocent civilians, reducing them to paupers and beggars, goes against every decent norm. For well over 35 years I’d been showing Guernica to my students, expounding on the painting’s blending of a heinously ghoulish theme executed in the cubist style on a-never-seen-before massive scale. One of the world’s most prominent museums, Madrid’s Museo Reina Sofia, is finally home to this one-of-a-kind artistic expression bearing witness to ghastly human depravity. On my last visit to Spain some 12 years back, I spent well over an hour studying Picasso’s ingenious blending of form and theme in monochromatic colors. Standing in front of the composition, I viewed it from every angle, and I relived years of lecture terms, phrases, descriptions, questions, answers, student responses/opinions, and so much more. On April 27, 1937, mostly German and Italian warplanes conducted the first large-scale aerial bombardment on the town of Guernica. Nestled in northern Spain and with the complicity of Franscico Franco, Spain’s Fascist dictator, the Germans wanted to test their newly fabricated war machinery – the Nazi Luftwaffe’s planes and their newly designed bombs – produced solely for destruction on a massive scale. Because of its remoteness, Guernica was chosen as the perfect out-of-sight out-of-mind target. Like today’s Gaza, Guernica was reduced to massive rubble shrouding innocent civilians whose flesh, blood, bones, and sinews cloaked the bleak landscape of rubble, rebar, and crater-size pocked apocalyptic destruction where once high-rise structures, streets, and alleyways existed. And hospitals, ambulances, mosques, churches, and schools are being targeted – deliberately and mercilessly. In response to this nightmarish bombing, Picasso isolated himself in his studio for a lengthy time and vented his fury by working long hours and in isolation on what is perhaps the world’s foremost artistic political statement. Here is what I see today in Picassos’ composition: to the far right is a Gaza woman holding her arms to high heaven; she is screaming, pleading, imploring the gods for deliverance. At the top is a light, accompanied by a hand holding a lamp as though to shed light on the unfolding carnage. Call this the 90 plus journalists killed by Israeli snipers and drones so as to draw a curtain on what God’s chosen are doing in Gaza, today’s “graveyard of children.” In addition to its military strength, Israel is adept at conducting its carnage under the cover of dark. And its powerful choking of US media is adept at portraying it as the victim. To the top left Netanyahu and Co., along with Biden and Co., prance bullishly over the devastation as they squash the emaciated mother holding on to her dead infant. How many white shrouds have to be buried to appease the Hebraic God of revenge? And how many corpses have to be pulled out, with bare hands, from under the rubble? And how many tattered remains have to be placed in makeshift bags? Careful scrutiny of the foreground depicts newsprint, Picasso’s manner of telling the world “I am Guernica: Remember Me, Remember What Heinous Crimes You’ve committed.” And the crushed supine figure holding onto a broken weapon represents trampled, crushed justice under the weight of brute force. It is worth noting that while Peter Paul Rubens, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, and scores of mostly European artists have produced a massive volume of compositions under the title Massacre of the Innocents, a theme associated with Herod (the Not so Great), King of Judea, and around the time of Christ’s birth, Picasso’s Guernica stands in a class of its own. And is it not ironic that right around the time Christendom is about to celebrate the birth of its Savior, the Prince of Peace, the Redeemer, the Israelis are raining down 2000-pound bombs, some of them the awful phosphorus kind that vaporize their victims? To date the equivalent of three Hiroshima/Nagasaki bombs have been dropped on a starved, thirsty, disoriented 2.3 million displaced citizenry. And could we say that to date, timed with Christmas 2023, Israel has massacred over 8,000 thousand innocent children – and counting. And the West, today’s bastion of Christianity, is abhorrently supportive and silent? Yes, in the last few years Fascism has slowly sneaked into our halls of justice, our public spaces, our airwaves, and our digital formats. Joe “I am a Zionist to the Core,” Netanyahu’s puppet and apologist, has draped himself in the Israeli flag and has fashioned and emblazoned his tie, his shirt, his suit, and his rhetoric in the same style and rhetoric of Netanyahu, his alter ego and master. On December 10, 2023, Spain, the only Western nation with the moral fortitude to express its outrage at the Gaza carnage, held a solidarity event in the Basque city of Guernica’s market square, the same square that was bombed by the Nazis and Fascist forces way back in 1937. An aerial view depicts a massive Palestinian flag (the size of the entire square) in mosaic form the tesserae of which were held by citizens, trade unionists, artists, anti-war and anti-fascist groups, along with a large depiction of Picasso’s image depicting the mother, her child in her arms, crying to the high heavens. And for a whole minute the sirens blazed in solidarity with Gaza’s mothers and children. Viva Espana. Viva Palestina. Author (Raouf J. Halaby is a Professor Emeritus of English and Art. He is a writer, photographer, sculptor, an avid gardener, and a peace activist. Courtesy: CounterPunch.) Archives February 2024 Should one claim that, unless they have studied the Science of Logic, these scientists don’t know what they are doing? Doubtless, they know what they are doing but, philosophically speaking, they often do not know what they know and beyond a certain point this limitation cannot but have a regrettable influence on their work (Sève 2008: 91) Introduction The last century saw two prevailing trends between dialectics and science. On one side, Western Marxism, which was defined by Lukács rejection of Engels’ philosophy of nature; on the other, those who embraced the dialectics of nature, the dialectical materialists (Foster 2020). While the former tended to conflate science with positivism and therefore ignored it, the latter where ‘pro-science’ but also sought to determine the limits of science within capitalism [1]. This was not meant to undermine the cognitive validity of scientific result. Scientific results are related to society at large yet have inherent dynamics that exists in relative autonomy from this embeddedness. Hence, the dialectical approach to science is neither externalist nor internalist, but about the constitutive dialectics between the internal workings of science and the society in which it finds itself. Science is not an innocent activity, performed outside society. Lewontin and Levins write: ‘To do science is to be a social actor, whether one likes it or not, in political activity’ (1985: 4). Denying this fact is itself political, and it implicitly provides support to the prevailing system. Yet, even if science has been commodified, it is still highly important. As Richard Levins puts it: ‘When we say that all science is class science, that is not equivalent to saying that all scientific claims are lies. Class science can give powerful and valid insights into the world but within certain boundaries and restrictions’ (Levins 1981: 9). What is the Purpose of Science? We could say that contexts constrain but do not determine the cognitive veracity of research. This implies that a dialectical understanding of its relation to society is required. Of course, some contexts are more conducive to scientific progress, but even the narrow confines imposed by market imperatives cannot halt the forward march of science, even if it might slow it down. Also, views that are ignored for a period, might gain traction when the context changes, and science also contributes to such a change (Kosambi 1957). The relationship between science and society is complex and nonlinear. In line with Desmond Bernal (1939), science is not directly productive – aiming at producing an economic surplus – but reproductive, aimed at the reproduction of the processes that enable our societies to function and survive. In this view, it represents use value instead of exchange value (Lewontin and Levins 1987). It does not imply that science should uncritically contribute to whatever system is in place – suggesting a technocratic view of science, where the scientists are detached from the rest of society. If this happens, science becomes what Lewontin (1991) named a ‘institution of social legitimation.’ This shrinks the freedom enjoyed by the scientist, as she must simply accept the context in which she finds herself. It also makes the ethical responsibilities and philosophical basis of scientist seem irrelevant (Raju 2022). It makes science more about production that reproduction – more about supporting the status quo ante than questioning it. As such, the scientist is alienated and proletarianised.[2] By contrast, the view that scientist have a responsibility, ‘to insist upon the truth’ and to ‘see events in their historical perspective’ (Chomsky 1967), entails that science should seek to further the continued reproduction of society. It should ground the aims of science democratically in the needs of the people, not the interests of the prevailing social and economic system. This is simultaneously a liberation of science: “Only in science planned for the benefit of all mankind, not for bacteriological, atomic, psychological or other mass warfare can the scientist be really free. He belongs to the forefront of that great tradition by which mankind raised itself above the beasts, first gathering and storing, then growing its own food; finding sources of energy outside its muscular efforts in the taming of fire, harnessing animals, wind, water, electricity, and the atomic nucleus. But if he serves the class that grows food scientifically and then dumps it in the ocean while millions starve all over the world, if he believes that the world is over-populated and the atom-bomb a blessing that will perpetuate his own comfort, he is moving in a retrograde orbit, on a level no beast could achieve, a level below that of a tribal witch-doctor” (Kosambi 1957) Such a democratisation also requires scientific literacy. To make everyone a ‘reasonable sceptic’ as Lewontin (1991) says, we cannot glorify science as another religion, nor dismiss it cynically. Science is too important to be left for the experts. Science is a process; it is about change, not stasis. And it has the capacity to alter the scene on which it emerges. This indicates another aim than short-term profit: ‘The real task is to change society, to turn the light of scientific inquiry upon the foundations of social structure’ (Kosambi 1957). It echoes Marx’s understanding of science as a revolutionary force. If scientists find that the reproduction of society is threatened by the prevailing socioeconomic model, it has an obligation to criticise this society, and their own complicity in its development. If scientists disavow such findings, or delink them from historical and societal context, their analysis becomes too shallow and unsystematic to have any scientific value. Against this, science must seek to understand its conditions of existence scientifically (Raju 2021). The legitimate critique of positivism or scientism does not warrant dismissal of science as such. Disregarding natural science means undermining the critical potential of the dialectical approach at a time when its resources are direly needed. Instead, we should seek to identify the points at which science turns into ideology – grasping how ‘wrong theoretical assumptions may eventually lead to useful previsions and right performances, until a threshold of accumulating contradictions is reached’ (Bizzarri and others 2017: 13). The ideal suggested here does not entail making use of scientific results to confirm philosophical concepts, as if philosophy is outside science and untouched by it; nor does it mean passively accepting empirical findings at face value. Instead, it means dealing with tensions in how scientist interpret them and the theories that inform their views. We must unearth how philosophy operates within science and aim to contribute to its further development from the inside. This entails making scientists aware of the theoretical assumptions behind their views and the vagueness that many of them exhibit (Soto and Sonnenschein 2021). Weak Nature and Metabolic Rift Does science itself, as one such social institution, and as one set of cultural practices, remain the same within this different kind of naturalism? (Gallagher 2018: 117) Let us turn to nature. Lewontin held that the ideological biases of biology ‘prevent a rich understanding of nature and prevent us from solving the problems to which science is supposed to apply itself’ (1991: 15). This introduces a false dichotomy between holism and reductionism which influences the research that is undertaken. Another, dialectical, notion of nature might lead to another kind of science, but this progress is hindered by current scientific ideals, as well as the political-economic dimension of science (Supiot 2021). The different iterations of the dialectical approach share an emphasis on the idea that nature is not simply a static background for our actions, and that it also does not work on us a mechanical or external manner. Instead, nature is a complex system which is caught up with our activities, even if it also maintains autonomy from these. To concretise, I sketch Luca Illetterati’s Hegelian and Foster’s Marxist understanding of nature. In The Capital, Marx emphasised that the soil was being robbed for the nutrients necessary to sustain its fertility. He took this to indicate how the current organisation of production, capitalism, causes a rift between the social metabolism and the metabolism of nature, which sustains all life, and this rift can only be amended within another societal system (Foster 2022a). Metabolic rift denotes the breakdown of the relationship universal metabolism of nature and the social metabolism that sustains our society, which ultimately depends on the universal metabolism, ‘the biophysical conditions of production’. The universal metabolism of nature exists prior to and apart from human activity. It also interacts with and enables the social metabolism, which is a concrete shape of this ecological metabolism. Labour mediates between these metabolisms. While we can affect the universal metabolism of nature, we must grant nature autonomy – not regard it is wholly internalised by society. Nature places constraints upon human activities, and even if we may constrain nature in return, there are limits to how much we can change natural processes without undermining its capacity to sustain our societies. Contrary to the caricature, Hegel believes that science provides the content upon which philosophy must work, that ‘the empirical sciences […] have readied this material for philosophy by discovering its universal determinations, genera, and laws’ (Hegel 2010: 41). Further, he holds that nature is an enigma that can never be solved. It is not only beyond our conceptual capacities, but beyond itself. Our logical categories cannot deduce the concrete instance of nature because it is too contingent to display these categories reliably. In other words, nature lacks the capacity to control its own becoming (Di Giovanni 2010). Nature is weak because it is riddled with contingency and fails to be a completely logical sphere. Yet it displays a fragmented rationality, through its concrete shapes – which is also why detailed knowledge of its particularities is needed, why philosophy depends on science to provide its content. Conversely, science requires philosophy to be able to distil the logical principles that are displayed by nature. Philosophy cannot impose categories on science from without but should strive to ‘situate the sciences within their broader non/extra-scientific contexts’ (Johnston 2019: 55) and show how they contain more metaphysics than they are aware of. Hegel’s view indicates that there is already a rift in nature – pace Foster – before the emergence of a specific mode of production. This rift enables subjectivity to emerge, and it also changes retroactively by this emergence. In other words, subjectivity emerges from within the incompleteness of nature, not as opposite to it. This indicates how knowledge about nature enabled by nature itself. New Nature, New Science? The inability to articulate its own conditions of possibility characterises so-called contemplative materialism. Foster says that avoiding the contemplative stance is ‘exactly what the theory of contingent emergence developed in classical historical materialism […] is, in the final analysis, all about’ (Foster 2022b: fn22, 7–8 emphasis original). Emergent levels of organisation, which are interdependent yet autonomous, solves the problem. But if Heron (2021) is right, the notion of ontological incompleteness found in Hegel is also needed the cognise the emergence of the subject that can set itself apart from nature immanently. The notion of weak nature also suggests why science is simultaneously socially constructed and cognitively valid. It is because the distortions and contradictions we disclose are indicative of the nature of reality itself. It is the inchoate structure of nature that enables subjectivity (as self-determination) and allows us to understand it rationally, even if this understanding can only be aporetic. It is this inconsistency that enables the subject to emerge from within nature. Here, the rift is present in nature before the emergence of modern society, even if our current social system may exacerbate it. More important than their possible tensions, these approaches share the notion that no level is unconstrained or isolated from others but in a constant and formative interaction with them. Together, part and whole form a processual totality. Teleological causality is actual as it emerges from the interaction between different levels and scales. Dialectics thereby overcomes the mechanistic worldview that undergirds the contemplative stance, which dismisses everything that cannot be explained through efficient causality. Hence, a dialectical view of nature can provide a richer and more radical understanding of nature, the object of science, and of science itself – in which it includes subjectivity or self-determination as its own self-negation. Nature is beyond itself, not only external to us but to itself, and thus cannot control its own genesis. The same principle applies to science. Secondly, and implicitly, we get a more encompassing notion of causation, not as simple cause and effect but as complex, constitutive and reciprocal. Here, boundary conditions impose constraints that are not only limiting but also enabling (see Longo and others 2012). We are dealing with historical systems, whose space of possibilities are themselves subject to change. We should not limit the scope of naturalism to the confines deemed acceptable by a narrow conception of science. Instead, we need a naturalism ‘whose very core is the notion of life’ (Illetterati 2023: 188) – a naturalism which explains its own conditions of possibility through this living and constructive relation to the world. Marx held that there would be a unitary science in the future. It would, however, only be possible after the shackles of bourgeoise society has been lifted, in his view. But this view seems too unilinear, and erects a barrier between ideology and science, instead of admitting that ideology is an inherent part of science – without thereby undermining its cognitive validity. It also undercuts the degree to which science affects the scene on which it appears, and the revolutionary force that science was for Marx. Instead of waiting for a revolution to inaugurate a new relation between the sciences and between science and philosophy the, we should foster a relationship that prefigures a new society and contributes to its establishment. As we are constituted through our relationship to nature, the breakdown of this relation alienates us both form ourselves and from nature. A renewed concept of nature combats this alienation. It allows us to understand how freedom is ontologically possible and makes us aware of what it at stake if we do not exercise this freedom consciously and responsibly. Not only does it suggest another way to understand natural processes; it also pertains to the becoming and function of science itself, as part of a larger totality. Only within such a totality can the function of science be ascribed. We might never get a truly unitary science, not even if a new society is inaugurated, but we can achieve many advances through attempts at establishing a new naturalism and another mode of interaction between science and society, nonetheless. Bibliography Bernal, J.D. 1939. The Social Function of Science (London: George Routledge & Sons Ltd.) Bizzarri, Mariano, Ana M Soto, Carlos Sonnenschein, and Giuseppe Longo. 2017. ‘Saving Science. And Beyond’, 1.1: 11–15 <https://doi.org/10.13133/2532-5876_1.6> Chomsky, Noam. 1967. ‘The Responsibility of Intellectuals’, New York Review of Books El-Hani, Charbel Niño, and Claudio R. M. Reis. 2021. ‘Research Strategies and Value Outlooks in Scientific Practices:For an Organicist Thinking and a Pluralist Methodology in the Biological Sciences’, Philosophy World Democracy <https://www.philosophy-world-democracy.org/articles-1/research-strategies-and-value-outlooks-in-scientific-practices> Foster, John Bellamy. 2020. The Return of Nature : Socialism and Ecology. (New York, NY: Monthly Review Press) ———. 2022a. Capitalism in the Anthropocene: Ecological Ruin or Ecological Revolution (New York, NY: Monthly Review Press) ———. 2022b. ‘The Return of the Dialectics of Nature: The Struggle for Freedom as Necessity’, Historical Materialism: 1–26 <https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1163/1569206X-20222279> Gallagher, Shaun. 2018. ‘Dynamics and Dialectic’, Constructivist Foundations, 14.1: 114–17 <http://constructivist.info/14/1/114> Di Giovanni, George. 2010. ‘Introduction’, in The Science of Logic (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press), pp. xi–lxii Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. 2010. The Science of Logic, ed. by George Di Giovanni (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press) Heron, Kai. 2021. ‘Dialectical Materialisms, Metabolic Rifts and the Climate Crisis: A Lacanian/Hegelian Perspective’, Science & Society, 85.4 (Guilford Publications Inc.): 501–26 <https://doi.org/10.1521/siso.2021.85.4.501> Illetterati, Luca. 2023. ‘Beyond a Naturalistic Conception of Nature: Nature and Life in Hegel’s Early Writings’, in Nature and Naturalism in Classical German Philosophy, ed. by Luca Corti and Johannes-Georg Schülein (New York and London: Routledge), pp. 187–208 Johnston, Adrian. 2019. Prolegomena to Any Future Materialism, Volume Two: A Weak Nature Alone, Diaeresis (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press) Kosambi, D. D. 1957. Exasperating Essays: Exercises in the Dialectical Method (Poona: People’s Book House) Levins, Richard. 1981. ‘Class Science and Scientific Truth’, in Working Papers in Marxism & Science (New York, NY: The Science Task Force), pp. 9–22 Levins, Richard, and Richard Lewontin. 1985. The Dialectical Biologist (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press) Lewontin, Richard C. 1991. Biology as Ideology : The Doctrine of DNA (New York, NY: Harper Perennial) <https://doi.org/LK – https://worldcat.org/title/214484329> Longo, Giuseppe, Maël Montévil, and Stuart Kauffman. 2012. ‘No Entailing Laws, but Enablement in the Evolution of the Biosphere’, ACM Proceedings of GECCO: 1379–1392 Raju, Archishman. 2021. ‘The Revolutionary Science of W. E. B. Du Bois and D. D. Kosambi’, Science for the People, 24.1 <https://magazine.scienceforthepeople.org/vol24-1-racial-capitalism/revolutionary-science/> ———. 2022. ‘Science and Imperialism: Scientists as Workers for Peace’, Science for the People, 25.3 <https://magazine.scienceforthepeople.org/vol25-3-killing-in-the-name-of/science-and-imperialism-scientists-as-workers-for-peace/> Sève, Lucien. 2008. ‘Dialectics of Emergence’, in Dialectics for the New Century, ed. by Bertell Ollman and Tony Smith (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan), pp. 85–97 <https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230583818> Soto, Ana M., and Carlos Sonnenschein. 2021. ‘The Proletarianization of Biological Thought’, Philosophy World Democracy <https://www.philosophy-world-democracy.org/articles-1/the-proletarianization-of-biological-thought> Supiot, Alain. 2021. ‘Labour Is Not a Commodity: The Content and Meaning of Work in the Twenty-First Century’, International Labour Review, 160.1 (John Wiley & Sons, Ltd): 1–20 <https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1111/ilr.12205> [1] This text is more suggestive than argumentative. I will not discuss the historical relation between ecology and Marxism and will only be able to indicate how the dialectical view indicates a more ecological scientific ideal. I will not discuss how dialectical principles can be found within science, nor interpret concrete sciences dialectically. I save this for another, more systematic article. For a discussion, which informed this article, of how the organicist perspective requires a context-sensitive and pluralistic approach, see El-Hani and Reis (2021). [2] Proletarianisation involves a ‘fragmentation of skill’ and ‘specialisation’, which makes the scientist more replaceable and thus left in a more precarious position. Moreover, alienation concerns how ‘the producers do not understand the whole process, have no say over where it is going or how, and have little opportunity to exercise creative intelligence’ (Lewontin and Levins 1987: 202). Soto and Sonnenschein (2021) explain how the process of proletarianisation has affected biology, as new technologies have been introduced and undermined theory, with some even declaring its end. Archives February 2024 2/28/2024 Habonim Dror: How Israeli Regime Recruits Left-Wing Americans to Fan Zionism. By: Shabbir RizviRead NowOne of the most profound awakenings for Westerners since the launch of the Palestinian resistance operation Al-Aqsa Storm has been their understanding of how influential the Zionist lobby is. This lobby, which works in line with the US State Department when it can and independently and subversively when it cannot, tends to influence major arenas of societal interest. On the surface level, one can simply follow the money and understand the phenomenon: the Israeli lobby pouring millions of dollars into buying US politicians, Zionist hate groups unleashed to stifle Pro-Palestinian students on college campuses, celebrities and artists flown out to Israel to pose with Israeli Occupation soldiers in order to paint them in a positive light. However, more devious and subversive groups exist within American society, specifically designed to “normalize” the concept of not only an Israeli regime, but the imperialist-settler ideology of Zionism. These organizations are designed with the American “left” in mind: Using left-wing, pro-worker sloganism, Zionist groups specifically target left-wing movements, students, and youths in order to indoctrinate them into aligning with the Zionist cause. One of these groups is known as “Habonim Dror.” Habonim Dror is believed to have promoted the ideas of “social justice” and “peace” while running six Zionist student camps across North America. The group actively recruits young Jewish students from across the US and Canada (though they have more minor concentrations in New Zealand, Brazil, the UK, and other countries) indoctrinating them in their camps, and even including a year-long program to send them to Occupied Palestine. At first glance at their website and mission, it is clear that they are intent on separating themselves from the ruling Benjamin Netanyahu regime in Tel Aviv. Habonim Dror emphasizes the need for “Labor Zionism” and even goes as far as suggesting “ending the occupation,” but ultimately succumbs to the same-old “Two-State Solution” rhetoric that forces Palestinians to deal with an aggressive, genocidal and brutal “neighbor.” “Labor Zionism,” which can save you a few syllables if you just call it what it is - Zionism - was a mutated appeal to the labor movement in North America. Habonin Dror was established in the 1930s as an appendage faction of the mainstream Zionist movement, and it has until now taken a backseat role in picking up Jewish youth who at first were resistant to the idea of Zionism. For decades, the Israeli occupation has enjoyed total control of its image, and so its initiatives were less aggressive. Now, Habonim Dror represents a wave of Zionism meant to capture what would be dissenting Jewish voices and reprogram them to be tools for colonialism and imperialism. Its mission is designed to “meet the moment” of a resurgent left-wing movement in the United States, particularly after the Occupy Wall Street movement of 2011, the Bernie Sanders presidential run in 2016, and the George Floud Uprising of 2020 - all three of which propelled left-wing movements and revived an interest in socialism in an otherwise deeply reactionary society. Habonim Dror may use veils like “socialism” and “progressivism” to define itself. However, its “principles” mention nothing of anti-imperialism or anti-colonialism. The group’s “socialism” is a “national socialism” for its own fascist occupation - it is not rooted in internationalism or global worker solidarity. It is a corrupted “socialism” that uses sloganeering and symbolism that are aesthetic to socialism while driving a deeply reactionary and imperialist political line. Habonim Dror encourages its members, who can join as early as high school, to participate in local social justice issues, including police brutality, immigration reform, climate change, and other popular left-wing issues that have gained much attention in American society. It further trains participants to be (according to their website) “leaders, change-makers and activists in their communities.” Offering attractive scholarships, opportunities to travel to Occupied Palestine, a rich network of connections that could offer promising careers and formal leadership training programs, Habonim Dror seems similar to a fraternity or an innocent summer camp. However, it is adamantly dedicated to the Zionist cause - which demands the existence of “Israel.” It is a simple equation. Habonim Dror targets what would otherwise be neutral, uninterested, or otherwise hostile Jewish youth and codifies a “left wing” Zionism in them, then encourages them to embed themselves into their communities and local movements as leaders and changemakers. They represent the face of Zionism where Zionism would otherwise be unwelcome, and thus rebrand Zionism through a false definition. These initiatives are crafted to normalize collaboration with more “hardline” Zionists. By infiltrating otherwise progressive movements, ‘Labor Zionism’ agents can influence those around them to embrace Zionism and the Israeli occupation. Zionists know that principled left-wing movements outright reject their racist ideology. In order to adapt, groups like Habonim Dror have been crafted to mutate Zionism in order to appeal to a left-wing wave that does not have strong principles of anti-imperialism and anti-colonialism. The Palestinian issue is purposely framed as complicated and “sensitive” in American society. “Left Wing” Zionists can then be deployed to command the conversation in progressive circles, rejecting any idea of a true liberation for Palestinians. As long as Zionism itself is not seen as the main issue, the Israeli occupation is framed in a positive light. A prime example of the type of influencer Habonim Dror seeks to create is the aggressively Zionist and Islamophobic actor Sacha Baron Cohen. Cohen joined the group in his late teens in the 1980s, attending summer camps and ultimately moving to the occupied Palestinian territories for a year, working alongside other Zionist youth. Later, he would play the roles of deeply racist caricatures that fueled the fire of Islamophobia at the height of post-9/11 hysteria in the United States. Cohen now spends his time as a critic of the US right-wing lobby while simultaneously spreading Zionist propaganda and continuing his racism against Muslims. He came out in fierce defense of the Israeli response to the Palestinian resistance operation Al Aqsa Flood. Clearly, even “Labor Zionism” falls short of condemning the occupation, despite its insistence that it does. Some Habonim Dror activists have established networks with influential politicians such as staunch Zionist senator John Fetterman of Pennsylvania. The very existence of Habonin Dror activists threatens to normalize “Israeli” existence within progressive movements in the US, which at a critical movement like now are condemning the Tel Aviv regime. The group further prides itself on the collaboration of groups that are not Zionist in nature, citing various statistics of group participation in outside movements and leadership positions held, all while demonstrating their loyalty to the Israeli occupation, despite their alleged denunciation of “occupation.” This is a key goal for Habonin Dror: Zionists understand that isolation will only bring about their disaster. Therefore, groups like Habonim Dror must branch out in order to normalize the Israeli regime. This is their main factor of success. If local movements aren’t careful, they could be collaborating with Zionist infiltrators that could subvert Palestinian solidarity when it counts the most. Picture this scenario: a climate activist group is concerned about the Israeli genocide of Palestinians, as US weapons used themselves are a climate issue. Moving to condemn the genocide, grassroots organizers are then blocked by leadership that is Habonim Dror “activists.” A key voice within the US political realm is then silenced because of meticulously devised Zionist infiltration within an otherwise left-wing group. Habonim Dror isn’t the only Zionist youth group seeking to build a generation of Zionist influencers and “activists.” There are many different Zionist youth groups - some that are more “left-wing” in nature, and others that are “hardline.” Careful attention must be paid in order to understand how Zionists can subvert movements, organizations, and ideas - especially by weaponizing “progressivism” when a progressive movement is beginning to take shape and action. Let it be clear: there is nothing “progressive” or “left-wing” about the Israeli occupation or Zionism. At its core, it will always be a racist, colonial ideology that threatens war, expansionism, and exploitation. No rebrand can ever take away these core features of Zionism. Author Shabbir Rizvi Political analyst that specializes in US foreign and domestic policy, geopolitics, and military science; Anti-war organizer. Republished from Islam Times. Archives February 2024 2/28/2024 "An accursed evil": Darwin's Struggle to Write "On the Origin of Species". By: JEFFREY S. KAYERead NowToday is Charles Darwin’s 215th birthday. On the Origin of Species was published in 1859, when Darwin was 50 years old. After a period of extraordinary scientific creativity in his late 20s, after returning to London from the five-year circumnavigation of the HMS Beagle, a period that included his working out of the theory of evolution via natural selection, Darwin did not publish on the subject of evolution for the next 19 years. Why? There are a lot of reasons. As part of my dissertation research into Darwin’s life, I looked at that question as well. As a treat for my readers (I hope it’s seen that way), I’m resurrecting a selection of that old work of mine (written in the mid-1990s, with only a few editorial changes). Hopefully, readers will tolerate, if not enjoy, this deviation from the usual fare on this blog. I had often thought of publishing this work, but the vicissitudes of establishing myself as a psychologist, raising a family, and other matters, pushed the Darwin work off my personal agenda. I’m posting a portion here, partly as a tribute to Darwin on his birthday, but also because I think it speaks to the difficulties adherent to living out one’s personal dreams in a complex world, considering the sociological, economic, cultural, and personal pressures that steer our lives, often in ways that we don’t always understand. As the selection below begins, Darwin has completed his years’ long task of studying and classifying barnacles. He undertook the work because he sorely felt his lack of credentials in biology. The lack of such professional recognition meant, he felt, that his work on biological evolution would never be accepted by the academic elite and scientists. Once he completed the barnacles job, the question of publishing his evolutionary ideas rose before him again…. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ In November 1854, Darwin accepted a prestigious position on the council of the Royal Society, and then, later that winter, moved the entire family to London for a month. The visit was practically a debacle. His children became terribly ill, and a close scientific acquaintance, the kind of younger scientist Darwin thought would be a supporter whenever he finally published on evolution, suddenly died at age 39. Still, Darwin’s presence at the Royal Society represented his commitment to take more interest in and remain close to London scientific circles. He spent his 46th birthday at a rare party given by Lyell's brother-in-law, Leonard Horner. Charles Lyell was the most famous geologist in the world at that point, and had been a mentor and supporter of Darwin’s scientific career. While he suspected Darwin’s “transmutationist” heresies, he overlooked them and in many ways, Darwin had been seen up to this point as one of Lyell’s more prominent disciples. Shortly after his return to Down from London, Charles began two projects directly related to his studies on the proof of organic evolution. He began keeping pigeons, in order to study the heritability of their physical and behavioral variations. He also initiated a study of seed dispersal, as he was troubled with problems concerning the geographical distribution of plant life, an important topic in his analysis of how evolution via natural selection occurred. The seed project soon began to overwhelm him with its difficulties, and he feared a repetition of the barnacle job, in that it threatened to become a years long research project in and of itself. Such a project would swallow up most of Darwin's time, leaving him farther than ever from the completion of his chosen life's work, the scientific proof of evolution by natural selection. This is not what he wanted at this point in his career. Even more disturbing, the complexity of the data Darwin was collecting and analyzing for a future work on evolution began to overwhelm him. In March 1855, Darwin told his cousin William Darwin Fox that he doubted "whether the subject will not quite overpower me" (Burkhardt & Smith, 1989, v. 5, p. 294).[1] When, later that same spring, the seed experiments began to go awry, Darwin complained to Hooker, "All nature is perverse.... I am getting out of my depth" (p. 326). Even a year later, in March 1856, shortly after Charles turned 47, he confided again to Fox that he still feared a breakdown, "for my subject gets bigger & bigger with each months work" (Burkhardt & Smith, 1990, v. 6, p. 58). A sense that time was growing short loomed over the entire project. Darwin was very self-conscious about growing older, and despite all his work, he still did not feel ready to begin writing his hoped-for book on species. The rear of Down House in the Kent countryside, the home of Charles Darwin over the last forty years of his life. (Photo: English Heritage) During these years Darwin remained decisively committed to the importance of family. The children at home were intimately informed about the progress of their father's research. He was most happy when all the children were at home, even as he feared for their future in an "old burthened country, with every soul struggling for existence" (Burkhardt & Smith, 1990, v. 6, p. 55). By the time Darwin was 47, having had seven children, with two others lost in infancy and childhood, he said about his children that "one gets, as one grows older, to care more for them than for anything in the world" (p. 56). And, as if to highlight the sentiment, Emma became pregnant again that very year, although this was almost certainly an unplanned pregnancy. The early years of Darwin's middle age were marked by a widening circle of social and scientific acquaintances. He joined the upper-class pigeon-breeders' Philoperiston Club only weeks before his 47th birthday. There were also new responsibilities shouldered, whether it was as treasurer to the Down Coal and Clothing Club, or as reviewer of papers for the council of the Royal Society. The extent of Darwin's activities at this time belies his image as an invalided recluse for all the years he lived at Down. Besides his English associates, Darwin initiated contact at this time with naturalists and scientists all around the world. One of the naturalists with whom he corresponded was Alfred Russel Wallace, then doing field work in Borneo. Wallace's solution to the problem of species' geographical distribution would entail an independent discovery of the mechanism of natural selection. This discovery would exacerbate both developmental and internal conflicts Darwin was having during the early years of his middle age, a struggle that centered around what to do about publishing his theories. Alfred Russel Wallace, from London Stereoscopic and Photographic Company (active 1855-1922) - First published in Borderland Magazine, April 1896 (Source: Wikipedia, public domain) Even as he turned 47 years old, Darwin remained content to gather more data in order to refine his theory of evolution. He did not feel ready to go public with his ideas. He did inform a larger group of acquaintances privately about his project — and received largely censure in reply — but he did not consider setting his findings down on paper until Charles Lyell decisively intervened. Lyell was a famous geologist and proponent of scientific uniformitarianism, the idea that natural processes that can be observed now have always (or nearly always) been in effect. Lyell had also taken on the role of Darwin’s mentor in the years after Charles’s return from the long Beagle voyage. When Lyell visited Down in mid-April 1856, Darwin finally explained to his mentor his full theory of natural selection. — Imagine! He had kept the theory a secret for approximately twenty years from the man who most supported him in scientific circles! — Lyell was aware that Wallace, at least, was working on similar problems, and seemed to be concerned about establishing scientific priority for his disciple's views. He also thought that with Darwin's theories published, he could critique them in a future edition of his major work, Principles of Geology, and therefore possibly be able to control the debate over evolution. In the end, Darwin could not abide by Lyell's suggestion for a quick essay or pamphlet on natural selection. His ambition, as well as his sense of scientific integrity, chafed against the format of a simple sketch. After a few months, Darwin had decided, in the middle of his 47th year, to write the full book he had envisioned. It was a momentous moment for him, for he had to accept the role of an iconoclastic innovator. The planned multi-volume work was to be titled “Natural Selection.” On one hand, Darwin seemed fully confident in the future success of his ideas, and the certainty that they would revolutionize natural science. But on the other hand, he still felt keenly his own scientific isolation, in addition to a lingering sense of dilettantism. "I shall have little sympathy from those, whose sympathy alone I value," Charles complained (Burkhardt & Smith, 1990, v. 6, p. 236). Both his emotional and physical health fluctuated. With Emma suffering through a difficult pregnancy, Charles leaned even more for support upon his friend at Kew Gardens, Joseph Hooker. As Darwin went over his materials once again, following an outline not too different from that envisioned in his initial 1842 and 1844 private sketches of the subject, he made subtle but important changes in his theory. There was a new emphasis on inherent variability, on the relativity of good-enough adaptation, and the addition of a principle of divergence as a corollary to natural selection. Meanwhile, Darwin struggled with the meaning of what he was about to do. He agonized over his own quest for fame, as well as his continuing fear that writing the book would be too much for him. He also had qualms over the amount of time and energy the project required. Months after Wallace's theory was announced, necessitating a switch in strategy from a very large multi-volume compendium on the subject of evolution and natural selection to the writing of a shorter book-length abstract, Darwin, then aged 49, told Hooker, "It is an accursed evil to a man to become so absorbed in any subject as I am in mine" (Burkhardt & Smith, 1990, v. 6, p. 174). Even as Charles turned 48, Emma was arguing with her husband that he was so overwrought he should return to Malvern’s spa for a dose of water treatment. But Charles was reluctant. He worked persistently at his manuscript. He travelled to London to further the career of his young protégé, John Lubbock. When he did finally return to hydropathy for relief, in April 1857, it was at Moor Park, not Malvern. Moor Park was much closer to home than Malvern was. After a week, Darwin was feeling better. “I can walk & eat like a hearty Christian,” he wrote to Hooker, “& even my nights are good…. I have not thought about a single species of any kind, since leaving home” (p. 377). But back home in May, he was already sick again, telling Hooker, “I fear that my head will stand no thought, but I would sooner be the wretched contemptible invalid, which I am, than live the life of an idle squire” (p. 403). Distracted also from scientific work by concern for his children's health — there was a diphtheria outbreak in the neighborhood — and by disputes among his friends, at times Darwin wished he could sunder all relations, all affections. "A scientific man ought to have... a mere heart of stone," Charles told his scientific correspondent Thomas Huxley later that summer (Burkhardt & Smith, 1990, v. 6, p. 427). By autumn, he told his cousin Fox, "A man ought to be a bachelor, & care for no human being to be happy!" (p. 476). Charles remained especially dependent upon Emma's care and love. A few months after he turned 49, Darwin offered to take over the care of the children in order that Emma might have a rest. Darwin continued to work away at what he felt would be a gigantic magnum opus on evolution. Scientific problems kept arising. He worked obsessively, such that his frequent correspondent, his cousin Fox, remonstrated him for his perpetual overwork. Meanwhile, Darwin had tentatively sent a chapter of his work to his botanist friend, Hooker. He was immensely pleased when Hooker, who was still averse to accepting evolution as a theory, much less natural selection, told Darwin his new work was scientifically formidable. Darwin wrote to Hooker: “You would laugh, if you could know how much your note pleased me. I had firmest conviction that you would say all my M.S. was bosh, & thank God you are one of the few men who dare speak truth. Though I shd. not have cared much about throwing away what you have seen, yet I have been forced to confess to myself… if you condemned that you wd. condemn all — my life’s work — & that I confess made me a little low — but I cd. have borne it, for I have the conviction that I have honestly done my best.” (Burkhardt & Smith, 1991, v. 7, p. 102). On June 18, 1858, Darwin received an extraordinary package in the mail. It was a letter and a manuscript from Alfred Russel Wallace. The manuscript was entitled, “On the tendency of varieties to depart indefinitely from the original type.” Darwin read it and dashed off a note to Lyell. He told him to read Wallace’s manuscript, and added: “Your words have come true with a vengeance that I shd. be forestalled… if Wallace had my M.S. sketch written out in 1842 he could not have made a better short abstract! Even his terms now stand as Heads of my Chapters. “I shall at once write [Wallace] & offer to send to any Journal. So all my originality, whatever it may amount to, will be smashed. Though my Book, if it will ever have a value, will not be deteriorated; as all the labour consists in the application of the theory.” (p. 107) In one of the great coincidences in the history of science, Wallace had worked out the concept of natural selection in the jungles of the Malay Archipelago just as Darwin was preparing his long book on the subject. The crisis then precipitated by Darwin's loss of scientific priority found its solution via the intervention of Lyell and Hooker, who saw to it that both Darwin and Wallace’s essays were jointly published in a scientific journal. But, crucially, Wallace’s paper forced Darwin to reassess the value of his work, and he decided its importance was not diminished by Wallace's discovery. Charles understood that the significance of his own contribution lay in the multifaceted discussion of the theory's application. When the joint Wallace-Darwin papers were presented at the Linnean Society, their effect was minuscule; Darwin had reckoned correctly. Through mature reflection, he knew that the theory had to be demonstrated, not merely asserted. Perhaps Charles could suffer the difficult loss of priority, the loss of a portion of his dream, because he was then also recovering from the very recent death of his youngest son. His daughter, Henrietta, too had just caught diphtheria. Most importantly for Darwin, the crisis over the Wallace events proved that, as he was about to enter upon a new and ominous period of his middle age, he could count upon the love of his wife, the friendship of Joseph Hooker, and the cautious backing of his mentor, Lyell. Perhaps this is why his double loss — of scientific priority and of his youngest son — did not destroy him. Darwin's perseverance against tremendous pressures, illness, and catastrophic loss, is not easy to analyze. Darwin himself thought that energy of mind, steadiness, and ability to sustain rigorous and long-continued work were his peculiar strengths. It appears to me that Darwin was able to contend with much strife due to the stability of the life structure he constructed during his 30s and 40s. In this, Darwin may have been very prescient in choosing a wife who could provide immense emotional support over the years (even though she was quite religious and Charles was not). Cropped and rotated version of Image:Origin of Species.jpg, which is off the title page and the facing page of the 1859 Murray edition of the Origin of species by Charles Darwin. (Via Wikipedia) Within a month of the Wallace events, though feeling old and weak, Darwin began preparing an abstract of his earlier, larger planned book. He entitled the new manuscript “On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or The Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life.” In his later book, The Descent of Man, Darwin would make quite clear that all the races of men were of one species, a topic that was then still considered unsettled. While Darwin found value in the work he did, he still feared few would recognize its importance. With the publication of Origin of Species in Darwin's 50th year, Charles achieved, seemingly in one leap, a preeminent position in the scientific world. Yet his accomplishment was the result of long-prepared, gradual development during the years of early adulthood, mid-life transition, and initial middle age. Furthermore, the composition of the book was difficult, and Darwin more than once sought rest and hydropathic treatment at Moor Park spa. Darwin believed that he worked from an instinct for truth, but the pursuit of his dream of scientific accomplishment almost overwhelmed him. Even as he was finishing Origin, Charles fretted that his entire life's work had been for nought. At an extreme, he thought he might be insane. More than once, he told his friends how he longed to finish his "accursed" book, after which he could be "free" (see Burkhardt & Smith, 1991, v. 7, pp. 247, 270, 326, 328). He felt in his 50th year that, with the publication of Origin, his career had come to an end. The book had "half killed" him (p. 350). Yet, at other times, Charles also called his book "my child" and felt "infinitely pleased and proud" of it (p. 365). Lyell was helpful once again, this time in procuring a publisher. But Darwin realized very well that his book would be "one long argument" against anti-evolution theorists such as Lyell himself (Burkhardt & Smith, 1991, v. 7, p. 278). Accordingly, Darwin fervently hoped that his former mentor would be converted to evolution and natural selection. "Remember that your verdict will probably have more influence than my Book," Charles told him (p. 329). Darwin, uncertain of surviving a perilous future in scientific circles, and unwilling, perhaps, to surpass Lyell's accomplishments, fervently wished that the latter would accept evolution. Darwin knew that with the publication of his book, he was abandoning his former teachers and many naturalist friends. Neither was he sanguine about the response of his early mentor John Henslow, botany professor at Cambridge, to transmutationist heresy. Charles was resigned to Henslow's disapprobation. (Henslow died in 1861, and never was a major critic of Darwin’s work on evolution.) Darwin was barely ready to shoulder the responsibilities which his lonely scientific opposition would incur. Retreating to yet another water cure in Ilkley, he was joined by Emma and the children. Meanwhile, Charles was very dependent upon the approval and support of Hooker, Lyell (up to a point), and, increasingly, the young scientist Thomas Huxley. But it was Lyell who mattered most to Darwin, and the latter alternately argued and pleaded with the old geologist to accept the theories propounded in Origin. In the midst of this crisis, Darwin kept injuring himself repeatedly, hurting his ankle, his writing hand, and suffering repeated outbreaks of boils and rashes. As for Lyell, he never was able to “go all the way” with evolutionary theory in general, or natural selection in particular. The disappointment Darwin felt on this score led to a partial estrangement in his relationship with his former mentor, and increased Darwin’s sense of embattlement in the first years after the publication of Origin. When the full critical assault against Darwin's theory got underway, Origin had been in the bookstalls almost a year. Charles was turning 51 years old, and confused about what to do with the rest of his life. He was reticent about engaging with polemics with his scientific opponents. When Huxley offered to undertake the defense of Origin in the pages of various magazines and journals, Darwin was very grateful. He even egged Huxley on, especially as they shared an opponent in the powerful superintendent of Natural History at the British Museum, Richard Owen. In the scientific conflict with the powerful Owen, Darwin found access to his anger and aggression. He learned how to hate. It helped that he could hate, because he suffered from self-loathing. Over and over in his letters, Charles describes himself as "odious" or "arrogant" or "egotistical" (Burkhardt & Smith, 1991, v. 7, pp. 409, 457; v. 8, p. 141). In Owen, Darwin may have found a shadow figure. He often criticized aspects of Owen's personality that he found egregious in himself. For instance, Charles castigated Owen for his obsequiousness before the aristocracy, and for his slavishness to the court of public opinion. While these are not manifest traits in Darwin's own personality, he struggled through much of his adult life around issues of satisfying his social superiors, and was especially sensitive to public opinion. We can infer that what Darwin found so awful about Owen — the latter's propensity to bend his scientific integrity to the dictates of social approval — was an internal struggle within Darwin's character as well. When Darwin's theory began to divide the scientific world into warring camps, he suffered greatly for the destructive forces he believed he had unleashed. When, a few years later, the disputes degenerated into personal attacks over plagiarism among even his closest friends, the inner conflict Darwin suffered paralyzed him. But as he turned 51, Charles felt supported enough by Lyell, Hooker, Huxley and a few others, that he was willing to undertake a campaign for the support of his ideas. He was also trying to find a way he might continue his scientific work. On one hand, Darwin wished to finish the mammoth task of documenting the facts that had been presented in Origin as only an abstract of a treatise. This would mean many years spent on a multi-volume book, essentially a rewrite of the earlier omnibus manuscript, Natural Selection. On the other hand, Charles wanted to make new discoveries, and to remain a natural scientist. His work on the book which would become Variation of Plants and Animals Under Domestication, the companion volumes to Origin, was stalled again and again, as Charles found himself incapable of applying himself to the task. Instead, he looked to new objects of study — orchids, insectivorous plants, and the sexuality of flowers — in order to find suitable projects with which to apply his dream of scientific discovery. Footnotes [1] The references to Burkhardt & Smith in this post are to various volumes of The Correspondence of Charles Darwin, published by Cambridge University Press (1985-2023), which were edited by Frederick Burkhardt and Sydney Smith. At the time I wrote this material, this was the most comprehensive, scholarly, and accessible reference available for Darwin’s letters. Today, all the letters are online and accessible at Cambridge University’s fantastic resource, the Darwin Correspondence Project. The final volume of the printed work, number 30, was published last year. Hence all the quotes I use from Burkhardt & Smith in this article can be found at the DCP. (Later editions of the Correspondence sometimes had different editors.) Author: Jeff Kaye is a retired clinical psychologist. He's been researching and writing on US war crimes for over 15 years, and is the author of "Cover-up at Guantanamo: The NCIS Investigation Into the Suicides of Mohammed Al Hanashi and Abdul Rahman Al Amri." Currently he writes the blog "Hidden Histories" at Substack.com. Republished from 'Hidden Histories' Substack Archives February 2024 On February 9, 2024, Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that his army would advance into Rafah, the last remaining city in Gaza not occupied by the Israelis. Most of the 2.3 million Palestinians who live in Gaza had fled to its southern border with Egypt after being told by the Israelis on October 13, 2023, that the north had to be abandoned and that the south would be a “safe zone.” As the Palestinians from the north, particularly from Gaza City, began their march south—often on foot—they were attacked by Israeli forces, who gave them no safe passage. The Israelis said that anything south of Wadi Gaza, which divides the narrow strip, would be safe, but then as the Palestinians moved into Deir-al-Balah, Khan Younis, and Rafah, they found the Israeli jets following them and the Israeli troops coming after them. Now, Netanyahu has said that his forces will enter Rafah to combat Hamas. On February 11, Netanyahu told NBC news that Israeli would provide “safe passage for the civilian population” and that there would be no “catastrophe.” Catastrophe The use of the word “catastrophe” is significant. This is the accepted English translation of the word “nakba,” used since 1948 to describe the forced removal that year of half of the Palestinian population from their homes. Netanyahu’s use of the term comes after high officials of the Israeli government have already spoken of a “Gaza Nakba” or a “Second Nakba.” These phrases formed part of South Africa’s application to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on December 29, 2023, alleging that they are part of the “expressions of genocidal intent against the Palestinian people by Israeli state officials.” A month later, the ICJ said that there was “plausible” evidence of genocide being conducted in Gaza, highlighting the words of the Israelis officials. One official, the Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said, “I have released all restraints” (quoted both by the South African complaint and in the ICJ’s order). Netanyahu saying that there would be no “catastrophe” after over 28,000 Palestinians have been killed and after two million of the 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza have been displaced is puzzling. Since the ICJ’s order, the Israeli army has killed nearly 2,000 Palestinians. The Israeli army has already begun to assault Rafah, a city with a population density now at 22,000 people per square kilometer. In response to the Israeli announcement that it would enter Rafah city, the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC)—one of the few groups operating in the southern part of Gaza--said that such an invasion “could collapse the humanitarian response.” The NRC assessed nine of the shelters in Rafah, which are housing 27,400 civilians and found that the residents have no drinking water. Because the shelters are operating at 150 percent capacity, hundreds of the Palestinians are living on the street. In each of the areas that the NRC studied, they found the Palestinian refugees in the grip of hepatitis A, gastroenteritis, diarrhea, smallpox, lice, and influenza. Because of the collapse of this humanitarian response from the NRC, and from the United Nations—whose agency UNRWA has lost its funding and is under attack by the Israelis—the situation will deteriorate further. Safe Passage Netanyahu says that his government will provide “safe passage” to the Palestinians. These words have been heard by the Palestinians since mid-October when they were told to keep going south to prevent being killed by the Israeli bombing. Nobody believes anything that Netanyahu says. A Palestinian health worker, Saleem, told me that he cannot imagine any place of safety within Gaza. He came to Rafah’s al-Zohour neighborhood from Khan Younis, walking with his family, desperate to get out of the range of the Israeli guns. “Where do we go now?” he asks me. “We cannot enter Egypt. The border is closed. So, we cannot go south. We cannot go into Israel, because that is impossible. Are we to go north, back to Khan Younis and Gaza City?” Saleem remembers that when he arrived in al-Zohour, the Israelis targeted the home of Dr. Omar Mohammed Harb, killing 22 Palestinians (among them five children). The house was flattened. The name of Dr. Omar Mohammed Harb stayed with me because I recalled that two years ago his daughter Abeer was to be married to Ismail Abdel-Hameed Dweik. An Israeli air strike on the Shouhada refugee camp killed Ismail. Abeer was killed in the strike on her father’s house, which had been a refuge for those fleeing from the north. Saleem moved into that area of Rafah. Now he is unsettled. “Where to go?” he asks. Domicide On January 29, 2024, the UN special rapporteur on the right to adequate housing, Dr. Balakrishnan Rajagopal wrote a strong essay in the New York Times called “Domicide: the Mass Destruction of Homes Should be a Crime Against Humanity.” Accompanying his article was a photo essay by Yaqeen Baker, whose house was destroyed in Jabalia (northern Gaza) by Israeli bombardment. “The destruction of homes in Gaza,” Baker wrote, “has become commonplace, and so has the sentiment, ‘The important thing is that you’re safe—everything else can be replaced.’” That is an assessment shared across Gaza amongst those who are still alive. But, as Dr. Rajagopal says, the scale of the destruction of housing in Gaza should not be taken for granted. It is a form of “domicide,” a crime against humanity. The Israeli attack on Gaza, Dr. Rajagopal writes, is “far worse than what we saw in Dresden and Rotterdam during World War II, where about 25,000 homes were destroyed in each city.” In Gaza, he says, more than 70,000 housing units have been totally destroyed, and 290,000 partially damaged. In these three months of Israeli fire, he notes, “a shocking 60 to 70 percent of structures in Gaza, and up to 84 percent of structures in northern Gaza, have been damaged or destroyed.” Due to this domicide, there is no place for the Palestinians in Rafah to go if they go north. Their homes have been destroyed. “This crushing of Gaza as a place,” reflects Dr. Rajagopal, “erases the past, present, and future of many Palestinians.” This statement by Dr. Rajagopal is a recognition of the unfolding genocide in Gaza. As I speak with Saleem the sound of the Israeli advance can be heard in the distance. “I don’t know when we can speak next,” he says. “I don’t know where I will be.” Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor, and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter. He is an editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He has written more than 20 books, including The Darker Nations and The Poorer Nations. His latest books are Struggle Makes Us Human: Learning from Movements for Socialism and (with Noam Chomsky) The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and the Fragility of U.S. Power. This article was produced by Globetrotter. Archives February 2024 Revolution Has Survived and Flourished Despite U.S. Attempts to Destroy It February 2 marked the 25th anniversary of the Bolivarian Revolution. On that day in 1999, Hugo Chávez, a left-wing Venezuelan army officer, assumed power and initiated a socialist revolution that had ripple effects across the region and world. Invoking the legacy of Simón Bolívar, who had led much of Latin America’s liberation from Spanish colonization in the 1820s, Chávez’s government enacted measures to retake national control over Venezuela’s oil resources and to use the revenues to fund social programs. The government led by Chávez also strove for greater regional integration to undercut dependance on exploitation by the U.S. and provided a model for Third World nations striving to overcome a legacy of colonialism and neo-colonialism. On February 4, Venezuela Analysis and the Orinoco Tribune hosted a webinar assessing the legacy of the Bolivarian Revolution, which has consistently been misrepresented in U.S. media. Carlos L. Garrido, a philosophy lecturer and Ph.D. candidate at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, and member of the editorial board of Midwestern Marx, opened the webinar by stating that the Bolivarian Revolution was a monumental historical event that brought the working class to power and inspired the rebirth of left-wing movements in Latin America. The U.S. predictably used the entire tool kit of its weaponry to try to sabotage and destroy the revolution, kidnapping Venezuelan leaders, mounting coups, and imposing draconian sanctions that have failed to dislodge the Venezuelan government or crush the spirit of the revolution.
When Liger Smith pressed further, asking the professor why the U.S. imposed sanctions if socialism was a failed system, the professor’s face turned red and she gave a convoluted answer. Liger Smith said that, on that day, he decided to try to undertake his own objective study of Venezuela to find out the truth for himself. When he undertook that study, Liger Smith said he found out that the Bolivarian Revolution was not a failure but a great success, and that socialism was a more humane and superior system to capitalism. The primary success of the Bolivarian Revolution was that Venezuelans were able to regain control of their economy and oil that had been for years stolen by Western corporations. Chávez’s government and that run by his successor Nicolás Maduro improved the material conditions of the majority of the country’s people by using oil and other revenue to a) increase popular access to affordable health care and education; b) build schools; c) reduce inequality and malnutrition; and d) establish pensions for the elderly.[1] Further, the Bolivarian Revolution introduced new forms of popular democracy and helped to combat anti-indigenous racism. The reason that Venezuela is so widely demonized is because it has come to function as a thorn in the side of Western capitalism and U.S. imperialism; it is a country that the U.S. ruling elite cannot control or exploit and which has adopted an independent foreign policy. U.S. sabotage efforts—which Liger Smith said include efforts to lure skilled workers out of the country and steal Venezuelan assets—ultimately cannot and will not succeed because Venezuelans do not want to go to a past era where they lacked true independence. The second webinar speaker, Cira Pasqual Marquina, a professor of political science at the Universidad Bolivariana de Venezuela in Caracas, spoke about the significance of communes to the Venezuelan revolution and how those communes embody its egalitarian values and push for participatory democracy. Marquina said that the communes draw on some of the living practices of Venezuela’s indigenous population, and Soviet and Chinese communes as well as the 1871 Paris Commune that Karl Marx wrote about. Marquina said also that, when Chávez came to power, he invited people to read a Hungarian philosopher, István Mészáros, who wrote about some of the accomplishments and failures of Eastern Bloc socialism which Venezuelans could learn from, emphasizing the need for popular participation in decision-making. The third speaker, Saheli Chowdhury, an editor of the Orinoco Tribune, emphasized that the Bolivarian Revolution occurred during a dark time following the collapse of the Soviet Union when the U.S. was imposing neo-liberalism everywhere—a harsh economic model that fueled vast social inequality and misery for people across the so-called Third World. The Bolivarian Revolution brought a ray of hope in that time, signifying decolonization and resistance to neo-liberalism and neo-colonialism and that a different world was possible. In Latin America, it helped inspire a) the election of Evo Morales, a socialist who was the first Indigenous president of Bolivia; b) the return to power of the socialist Sandinistas in Nicaragua; and c) the rejection of the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) that had been pushed by the Clinton and Bush administrations. Chávez’s visionary policies were evident in his efforts to expand Venezuela’s ties to Asian countries and establishment of a strategic partnership with China and Iran as part of a coalition against the U.S. Empire. Chowdhury said that, in the 1990s, we were all told that history had ended and that capitalism had won, but the Bolivarian Revolution proves that history continues to be written by the people. The fourth speaker, Jesus Rodriguez-Espinoza, founder of the Orinoco Tribune, emphasized that, for all the disparagement in the media and some genuine problems with Maduro’s rule, Chavismo remains the dominant political movement in Venezuela. This is primarily because of its past achievements in empowering working class people and bringing them material benefits. Rodriguez-Espinoza predicted that Maduro would win Venezuela’s next election because Chavismo is bigger than any one person and people will vote to sustain the revolution. He also said that U.S. intelligence was recently behind a coup plot by far-right-wing activists who they were helping to arm.
An advocate of “open markets,” she is considered a traitor because of her support for U.S. sanctions and the violent overthrow of Venezuela’s government by a foreign power, and is as much of a joke as Juan Guaidó, a puppet of the U.S. who now teaches at Florida International University. Shaw said that, “if Machado did what she did in the U.S.., she would be in jail.”[2]
Telesur’s perspective is rightfully sympathetic to the Bolivarian Revolution, whose historic achievements will be recognized by historians years from now.
AuthorJeremy Kuzmarov is Managing Editor of CovertAction Magazine. This article was produced by CovertAction Magazine. Archives February 2024 Historical Materialist View of Ideas The collections of ideas we hold are historically conditioned by the mode of life we exist in. They reflect, in the realm of ideas, the limitations and possibilities of the mode of social life that dominates the era – of the forms of social intercourse which pervade our everyday lives. A feudal peasant cannot concern themselves with their social media profiles – with the likes their posts get, the shares it receives, and the subscribers or followers they have accumulated. These are, however, central concerns for most people today. We live in the era of profilicity as the dominant identity technology. As is evident, all the collections of ideas, concerns, aesthetic experiences, desires, beliefs, etc. which are tied to the profile-based mode of identity curation are dependent and grounded in the technological developments our era has achieved. In Marxist terms, these developments at the level of how we think (about ourselves and others) presuppose developments in the forces of production. Likewise, in most of the Western world, no youngsters would concern themselves with who their families will arrange them in marriage with. These preoccupations belong to an era that has passed – to a mode of social intercourse humanity has overcome. This is a central component of historical materialism – the “law of development of human history” which Engels’s eulogy tells us Marx discovers. It is pithily formulated in the famous 1859 preface to Marx’s A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, where he writes that: "The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness."[1] Ideological Institutions and False Consciousness The ideas that come to dominate a form of life do not exist in a transcendental realm. They are, instead, embodied materially through institutions and people. The influence these institutions hold varies. Their purpose, however, is the same: to sustain the consent of the masses (the subaltern) for the dominant order. They are tasked with ensuring the smooth reproduction of the current mode of life. In being the dominant institutions that pervade people’s everyday lives, they don’t simply get us to consent (which implies a conscious act of acceptance) but shape our spontaneous and common-sense worldviews to such an extent that we are unable to recognize, with the exception of those grand moments of rupture called ‘events’ in the history of philosophy, the conditioned and implanted character of our thoughts. Like the slaves in Plato’s allegory of the cave, we are deeply unaware of the structures which contain the horizon of how we view reality. Plato could not have been more correct in emphasizing the painful character of the hypothetical cave’s escapee. It is not easy to have our notions of reality so easily overturned – to have our desires, beliefs, aesthetic experiences, etc. demolished. Like the escaped slave, who painfully needs to readjust their eyes, the overcoming of bourgeois ideology is a painful process – not a spontaneous and immediate ‘moment’. When our conditions of life are so systematically pervaded by lies and manipulations, all aimed at preventing us from rocking the boat, truth is painful. Truth is dangerous. The quest for truth has always had, as W. E. B. Dubois notes, “an element of danger and revolution, of dissatisfaction and discontent, [but] nevertheless, men strive to know.” From the killing of Socrates to the killing of King, class society has shown its proclivity to fight back viciously when threatened by the truth tellers. This was, once again, already prophetically described by Plato’s allegory. Capitalism "is a social order that necessitates the general acceptance of an inverted understanding of itself... Reality [needs to be] turned on its head. But this is not, as Vanessa Wills notes, a problem of “epistemic hygiene”. The root of the ‘error’ is not in our minds, that is, in our reflection of the objective phenomena at hand. As I’ve argued previously, “it is much deeper than this; the inversion or ‘mistake’ is in the world itself… This world reflects itself through an upside-down appearance, and it must necessarily do so to continuously reproduce itself.” As Marx and Engels noted long ago, “If in all ideology men and their relations appear upside-down as in a camera obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life-process as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their physical life-process.” Capitalist ideology is as capable of accepting truth as vampires are of consuming garlic. Truth, which almost always stands on the side of the masses, is its Achilles heel. Shift in the Dominant Ideological Apparatuses The institutions that disseminate and enculturate us into bourgeois ideology, however, don’t all play an equal role. Some are far more influential than others. In the medieval world the church was, without a doubt, the “dominant Ideological State Apparatus” (ISA). In the transition to the modern world, as Louis Althusser notes, “the Ideological State Apparatus which has been installed in the dominant position in mature capitalist social formations as a result of a violent political and ideological class struggle against the old dominant Ideological State Apparatus, is the educational ideological apparatus.” Schools would come to replace the church as the institutional cornerstone of bourgeois ideology – the most dominant force for the reproduction of bourgeois hegemony. In some ways this is still the case. It is in the universities, for instance, where the ideas trafficked by popular culture are first developed in their utmost coherence. It is impossible to conceive of ‘wokeism’, today’s dominant form of liberal cultural intercourse, without the laying of its ideological foundations decades ago in the academy with the CIA manufactured compatible left. The ‘identity politics’ and ‘cancel culture’ so popularly debated in TV late-night roundtable discussions is far from being rooted in the communist tradition. Quite the opposite, that which today is called communism by the rightist pundits was explicitly produced to challenge Marxism. They were tasked with the role of being ‘radical recuperators,’ as Gabriel Rockhill calls them. Their job was (and is) to recuperate dissenting attitudes in the masses, especially young people, into the pro-imperialist anti-communist fold. As Michael Parenti correctly observed, these ABC (Anything But Class) theorists are tasked with developing “conceptual schemas that mute Marxism’s class analysis.” However, in the last decade a new ideological terrain has obtained the dominant position within bourgeois hegemony: social media. The average American today spends around two to three hours on social media. While for a select few it might just be filled with innocent pictures of cute cats, for the vast majority of people social media plays a role akin to a technological polis – a place where the battle of ideas, or better yet, the dissemination of the dominant ideas, occurs. While schools might still create the ideological foundation people are enculturated into, they often find themselves unable to comment on pressing issues of the day (with the exception, of course, of universities). Through social media, on the other hand, one encounters nonstop active manipulation on on-going events, with its scope and consistency far outweighing the influence university discussions on political affairs might have. Its impact, however, cannot simply be understood through quantitative metrics. Qualitatively, these social medias have revolutionized how we create our identities. As I have previously written, "We live in a time of profiles. Who we are, our identity, is deeply embedded in the curation of our profiles for general peers, those ‘users’ who validate our content through various interactive means (likes, shares, retweets, etc.). Our future posts are influenced by the reaction of previous posts. Those which tend to do good are repeated, those which don’t are not (often these are deleted outright). The dialectical interdependency of the individual and the social obtains a new form in the age of profilicity. Through these ‘social validation feedback loops’ (termed as such by Facebook president Sean Parker) we adjust our content to the reception of the general peer. Our identity is crafted with an eye to how we are ‘seen as being seen’. Second order observation becomes the norm; all judgement is subject to some degree of mediation by how the thing judged is seen by the general peer. These are some of the central insights of Hans Georg Moeller and Paul D’Ambrosio’s book, You and Your Profile: Identity After Authenticity. While it does have some blind spots (which I have hoped to bring light to in my work), it is without a doubt an essential text for understanding the dominant mode of identity technology in our day." Social Media, Profilicity, and Ideological Manipulation The potential for ideological manipulation brought about by the emergence of profilicity is, in some ways, far more potent than ever before. Following the 2019 coup in Bolivia, when 68 thousand bot accounts were used to make the imperialist narrative viral on twitter, I did a case study of how social media manipulation was used to legitimize the coup. I wrote: "The imperialist usage of bots and fake accounts engender an artificial general peer which functions as the condition for the possibility of imperialism’s control of a real one. This is because, at a certain nodal point, when the fake accounts and booster bots make something trend, the artificiality of the general peer’s reaction loses its artificial character, a real-people composed general peer picks up the baton from there and glazes the reaction with an ‘organic’ and ‘spontaneous’ vestment. In the age of profilicity, imperialism’s ability to control general peers is an indispensable tool for the attainment of its ends." Regardless of how powerful the armed forces of an empire are, if it is not able to hegemonize the discourse on historical and contemporary events, its legitimacy – both nationally and internationally – will totter and make it susceptible to being overthrown. Firms like CLS Strategies, along with the complicit Silicon Valley social media monopolies, function as indispensable tools of capitalist-imperialism in the age of profilicity. At a time when identity is constructed through the curation of profiles mediated by second-order observation and general peer powered social validation feedback loops, the ability to manipulate general peers amounts to the unprecedented capacity of capital and the state to control what people think. Additionally, the abstract character of this general peer conceals the manipulation itself. People construct their profile identities on the basis of how they would like to be seen as being seen, but the general peer doing the seeing has its eyes filtered through parental control imperialist glasses. How an event will be seen is determined by them – fake accounts will be made and boosted, dissenting accounts will be censored. This condition is depicted well in an old Soviet joke where a Russian and an American diplomat meet: the American asks “what are you here for,” the Russian replies “to learn about American propaganda techniques,” the American says, “what propaganda,” and the Russian replies “exactly.” Censorship is an integral component working in conjunction with controlling what is seen through the usage of bots and other forms of boosting pro-establishment narratives. On all major social media platforms (yes, even on Elon Musk’s so-called free speech loving ‘X’), those accounts with substantial following that challenge the imperialist narrative on key issues are often outright banned.[2] It is a very interestingly functioning tech-polis, where certain speakers are given a microphone to speak over others, others are muted or lowered to a virtually inaudible volume, while others are poof, disappeared completely. The Institute I work for is not unacquainted with these censorship tactics. Seven of our tiktok accounts, the platform we received hundreds of thousands of followers and millions of views in, have been outright banned. As Edward Smith, Noah Khrachvik, and myself have previously noted, "Those who keep our people misinformed and ignorant, who have made their life’s purpose to attack truth-tellers, do so under the insidiously categorized guise of ‘combating misinformation.’ In their topsy-turvy invented reality, as Michael Parenti called it, they posit themselves as the champions of truth and free speech—a paradox as laughable as a vegan butcher…" [In the capitalist-imperialist mode of life], the freedom of speech and media is, therefore, actually the freedom of pro-capitalist speech and media. V. I. Lenin’s description of the media in capitalist society rings truer than ever in the 2020s, it is dominated by an “atmosphere of lies and deception in the name of the ‘freedom and equality’ of capital, equality of the starved and the overfed.” Any absolute statements about the freedom of the press must be followed by the Leninist question: “freedom of the press… for which class?” The capitalist media’s freedom to deceive the masses in their defense of the existing order is in contradiction to the masses’ interests in searching for and publicizing the truth. The power to control the flow of ideas through these various means makes social media, as the dominant (or, at least, one of the dominant) ideological terrains of our day, virtually (pun intended) unmatched. What Should Communists Do? Some on the communist left often denigrate the role of social media work. ‘It’s just online, it has no bearing in reality,’ is a frequently expressed sentiment. Sometimes online ideological work is contrasted dis-favorably to protesting in the streets. Those in the streets are said to be actually doing something, while those who are online are not. There is a rational kernel to this overall incorrect sentiment. It is true that the anti-social characteristics of the ‘identity socialists’ (as I call them in The Purity Fetish), those which spend all their days online starting twitter beefs and splits, calls for a spiritual rekindling with reality. They must ‘touch grass,’ as the expression goes. But it is incorrect, on this basis, to denigrate online work as a whole, or to consider it ‘unreal’ in relationship to protests. Social media has, as I argued previously, developed itself into one of the most important ideological terrains of our day. It is a field where, as Gramsci would say, the war of position must be waged. No matter how much censorship, shadow banning, and manipulation occurs in this ideological field, it is still one of the most important places communists must participate in, waging the fight for the hearts and minds of the people. To ignore online work today is the equivalent of the French revolutionaries ignoring the institution of the church in their struggles against feudal absolutism. There is a key difference here, of course. Whereas the church in its heyday as the dominant ideological apparatus had to be fought from without, today social media, as the dominant ideological terrain, presents an internal field of struggle. The war of position on social media, necessary though it might be, is, of course, not sufficient. If every twitter (excuse me, ‘X’) account followed the Midwestern Marx Institute, or any other organization on the communist left, that does not mean we are anywhere near to grabbing power. Real, in-life organizing cannot be avoided. Organizing in your workplaces and communities continues to be the most important thing one can do. It is that baseline work that Silicon Valley cannot ‘ban’ you from. To wage a successful war of positions on social media requires mediums through which the people convinced to our side online can get involved in organizing in their communities. People must be ‘shuffled’ from simply agreeing with these ideas online to helping build organizations on the ground – to building working class, counterhegemonic institutions. The war of positions online must be conjoined with preparing the material and institutional foundations (i.e., parties and mass organizations) for the war of maneuver on the ground. Of course, just because these organizations would be ‘on the ground’ does not permit them to avoid the war of positions online. Online War of Positions What is the best way to wage the war of positions online? Is condemning everyone we don’t perfectly agree with as being whatever buzzword is popular the way to go? Clearly, this purity fetish mode of engagement, as I have argued before, leaves you surrounded only by those whom you already agree with. You reduce the pedagogic and recruiting tasks of the communist to someone who just sings to the choir. The battle of ideas, the war of positions, is fundamentally rooted in convincing. You cannot shame someone into agreeing with you. Talking down to working people with middle class patronizing attitudes is quite literally the opposite of what a successful war of positions looks like. You do not want the HR or DEI managerial departments to be the first thing someone thinks of when they speak to you. Quite the opposite. We live under a moribund capitalist mode of life. That will be reflected in some of the spontaneous common-sense worldviews of the people this mode of life produces. We must be patient and flexible, not snappy and rigid. Our goal is to convince. To win the hearts and minds of people. The first thing which must be recognized, then, is that any ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach will fail. The starting point (i.e., the spontaneous worldview) people have differs – often more or less depending on certain regional, generational, and other differences. We must take these into account in all conversations. But how should we start? What should we look for? Well, Gramsci is here perhaps our most important teacher. If I want to get from A to B, I cannot simply teleport directly from A to B. Maybe the technology will come around one day that allows me to do so. For now, if I want to get from A to B, I need to find a point of contact, a road, or series of roads, that when connected in my passage allows me to arrive to my destination. The process of convincing is no different. If there is no point of contact, there can be no ‘winning over’ of someone to our side. The process of ‘winning over,’ like the process of getting from A to B, is a voyage, an undertaking, or, in short, a process. It does not happen instantaneously. It takes time. In order for this process to begin, the point of contact must be found. Every spontaneous worldview the masses hold, deeply though they might be entrenched in various forms of bourgeois ideology, must nonetheless contain some rational kernels, ‘points of contact’ we can locate and start the voyage through. This is, for Gramsci, the essence of the war of positions. The task for communists, for the intellectual leadership of the working class movement, is finding, in the incoherent, ambiguous and spontaneous common-sense understandings and feelings of the masses, those rational kernels which can be disarticulated from their current worldview, and rearticulated towards Marxism. (See my chapter with J.P. Reed in the Elgars anthology on Gramsci for more). Concretely, how does this look? Well, for instance, in the U.S., the vast majority of people agree with the values of the Declaration of Independence. However, the values of life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, right to revolution, etc., have been unrealized for the mass of people under the dominant order. How can these egalitarian and emancipatory values be actualized under a system that produces, on the one hand, enormous wealth controlled by the few, and on the other, immense misery, debt, and oppression for the many? It is impossible. The universal ideals of the capitalist class have always been limited to their class – it has never been, from the start, anything more than the liberty of capital to exploit, and the sham ‘democracy’ of the capitalists to pick the political puppets that rule over the mass of people. This is why, as I have noted before, "In the face of growing inequalities and disparities, [in the 1820s and 30s] thinkers like Langdon Byllesby, Cornelius Blatchley, William Maclure, Thomas Skidmore and others, developed the Jeffersonian ideals of the Declaration of Independence into socialism, what they considered to be its practical and logical conclusion… Throughout the ages, generations of American socialists have appealed to the Declaration of Independence to argue for socialism in a way that connects with the American people’s common sense. Leading historians and theoreticians of the American socialist tradition, thinkers like Staughton Lynd, Herbert Aptheker, W.E.B. Dubois, Eugene Debs, William Z. Foster and others, have elaborated on the subject, noting that regardless of the limitations encountered in the founding of the American experiment, it was a historically progressive event, whose spirit [can only] be carried forth today by socialists and communists." So, here we have an example of a point of contact, a rational kernel, within our people’s common sense that can, and has historically been attempted to be, disarticulated from its bourgeois worldview origins, and rearticulated towards various socialist ones. This is an example that has been used since the 1820s. But, how, in the age of profilicity, can we specifically do this through social media? The essential elements remain the same. Find the individuals and institutions which play the most influential roles in shaping the common sense of various sections of the American masses. Within the worldviews they craft, find the rational kernels, the points of contact, you can establish a common ground with in discussions with working class viewers and readers of these ideologues. Always start the discussions with those points of contact – the ideas within their worldviews that can be dislocated from the worldview itself and used as a pathway for the new outlook. These rational kernels, of course, will differ with different sources. For instance, some weeks ago I commented on a video from Andrew Tate, the man that was once the most viral person on the internet. This is someone which holds great ideological influence in our societies, specifically in the youth, which embodies the future of any revolutionary project. The video I comment on is one where Tate describes wage labor as a form of wage slavery. This is, for Marxists, clearly a point of contact, a ‘rational kernel’ within the Tateian worldview. On the basis of this point of contact, I develop upon the often politically ambiguous history of the critique of wage slavery (for instance, while being a pillar of the socialist critique of capitalism, it was also a central component of the southern planter’s defense of chattel slavery, which they held was less evil and nefarious than wage slavery). Then, on the basis of the agreement with Tate of the slavish character of wage labor, I develop a critique of how this understanding is stifled by the Tateian worldview that had just formulated it. For Tate, the critique of wage slavery and the ‘matrix’ is not the basis for a collective emancipatory project. It is not rooted in a scientific, Marxist understanding of capitalist political economy. Hence, it is completely unaware of the internal laws of motion and contradictions which push the system towards its own destruction. He is unaware of the proletariat’s role as the gravedigger of the mode of life that produced them as a class. Perhaps it is less of a question of ignorance on Tate’s part, and more one of an awareness of his class interests as a part of the (often mocked) new bourgeoisie. Either way, the result is the same, a stifled understanding of that phenomenon we have gravitated to as a ‘point of contact,’ and an individualized formulation of ‘escaping the matrix’ through getting rich yourself (a gig that through ‘Hustlers University’ he greatly profits from). Tate did not create this form of radical recuperation, and neither is he the only one that preaches it today. It is central to what Dubois called the American Assumption, the notion that through hard work one can lift themselves up and become rich. The difference is that in the 19th and 20th century this ideology occurred within the confines of a direct apologetics of US capitalism. Post-1848 capitalism enters a distinctly reactionary stage, where even the veneer of progressivism that dominated the previous period is undone. In this post-1848 world, As Georg Lukács long ago noted, the defense of capitalism has to, in one form or another, present itself as an “indirect apologetics”. The superficial and culturalist critique of an often misidentified ‘capitalism’ (or matrix) has become an essential component for acquiescence to the system the critique takes as its object of critique. What has occurred in the Tate commentary is precisely what Gramsci expects of us in the war of positions. We located the rational kernel and, on the basis of a superior understanding of the phenomenon, dislocated it from the Tateian worldview and towards a Marxist one. In the process we showed the role Tate plays as a radical recuperador for the ‘matrix’ he, in a very sophist-like manner, charges people to help ‘escape’. After this video came out hordes of the liberals who think a hammer and sickle in their social media bios makes them communists came after us for ‘platforming’ Tate and lending credence to his ideas. This criticism, of course, is devoid of any semblance of the Marxist understanding of the war of positions. Neither the convincing of Tate himself, nor the sharing of his ideas, were the purpose of the video. What the video achieves (or at least attempts to), is quite literally the opposite – to be as efficient as possible in bringing people away from Tate and towards Marxism. One can argue that I failed in this enterprise, that a better job could have been done. But not deny, however, that this is the best route for combatting ideological opponents. It produces a double whammy, a removal of a follower to your opponent and an addition of a follower to your revolutionary project. This is the same double effect the black proletariat’s general strike during the Civil War had (removing the productive base of the Southern economy while adding soldiered, spies, and workers to the Northern forces), allowing them to win the battle for the forces of human liberation. Tate is far from being the only individual we ought to be doing this with. At the Institute, every major pundit of the bourgeoisie, even those who present themselves as ‘anti-establishment’ and ‘anti-Deep state’, receive this treatment. We have commented in like manner on figures all across the American bourgeois political spectrum, from David Packman to Ben Shapiro to Jordan Peterson. In each case we attempt, again, to find the point of contact (rational kernels) that can be dislocated from these worldviews and rearticulated towards Marxism. Engaging with these figures is also an excellent source for overcoming the algorithmic insularity that structures online spaces. People who wouldn’t encounter Marxist positions in their algorithms are opened to the possibility of this encounter when we discuss the ideologues that denizen their algorithms. People naturally want to make sense of the world around them. “All men by nature,” as Aristotle long ago noted, “desire to know.” No worldview is better capable of understanding the world, of helping people make sense of it, than Marxism. This is a task, therefore, which is often quite fruitful. That doesn’t mean, of course, that one doesn’t encounter zealots who religiously buy into these worldviews in dogmatic ways. But they are often the exception, especially amongst the youth. Most people are willing, if approached correctly, to accept the transition towards an outlook that helps them understand their surroundings a lot better – an outlook that, as the great Henry Winston teaches us, gives us vision even when our sight is lost. To succeed in this task requires getting our hands dirty; having the willingness to engage with some of the scummiest of the bourgeois ideologues in hopes, not of convincing them, but their working class listeners, that an alternative is not only possible, but necessary. This is the task at hand for communists willing to wage the war of positions on social media – one of the most important and influential ideological fields in the contemporary world. NOTES [1] My article on how this relationship of determination is not fatalistic: ‘Critique of the Misunderstanding Concerning Marx’s Base-Superstructure Spatial Metaphor’. [2] One of the ways to work around it is through mass reporting, such as we have seen over the last few months from the anti-genocide, pro-Palestine movement. Without a doubt these forces have won the information war – largely thanks to the flood of stomach-twisting videos telling the truth about the Israeli genocidal campaign against Gaza. Like the banks we were told were ‘too big to fail,’ these imperialist narrative-challenging images were too popular and widespread to censor. While Silicon Valley has definitely censored the leading voices speaking out for Palestine, they have not succeeded in censoring the millions of relatively smaller accounts who have taken it upon themselves to document the truth and expose the elite’s lies. Author Carlos L. Garrido is a Cuban American philosophy instructor at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. He is the director of the Midwestern Marx Institute and the author of The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism (2023), Marxism and the Dialectical Materialist Worldview (2022), and the forthcoming Hegel, Marxism, and Dialectics (2024). He has written for dozens of scholarly and popular publications around the world and runs various live-broadcast shows for the Midwestern Marx Institute YouTube. You can subscribe to his Philosophy in Crisis Substack HERE. Archives February 2024 Dear Malik, I am sitting here in bed with you in my arms. It is 11:59 PM, and you are fast asleep. Did you know you sleep talk? Yes at 21 months, you sleep talk. Sometimes you just chuckle and then roll to the other side, and other times you manage to touch my face and say “mama” while your eyes are closed. I am looking up at the ceiling fan and it’s lying perfectly still. Our vases are on the shelves- we’re not afraid of them falling. The windows are closed when we sleep. It gets chilly at night. Then you wake up to the sound of birds chirping at our window on our clean white sheets. We don’t hear anything except the birds here. You open your eyes and I am the first thing you see. If I am not there, you don’t panic, you just come to the living room and give me a hug. I couldn’t fall asleep like you, however. I was too busy holding you, and thinking of those who look like you, breathe like you, related to you. You are from a place where 21 month olds never sleep with messy hair. Your cousin told me he likes to comb it in case he never wakes up. “I want to die while looking nice” he said. You are from a place where 21 month olds do not sleep talk. They wake up multiple times at night afraid that the ceiling fan falls on them. You are from a place where no house has vases and the windows at night are always open. Leaving them closed will guarantee shattered glass. You are from a place where 21 month olds do not sleep on clean white sheets. Instead, they are buried in them. You are from a place where if 21 month olds wake up and do not find their mothers next to them- it is most likely they will never see her again. I do not know why I felt the need to tell you this. You won’t read this letter for a decade or two. But I wanted to remind you that the place you are from, despite the proximity of death, is a place worth remembering, worth loving, worth being proud of. To be from Gaza means that you are a child of extreme creativity. Did you know your older cousins can power a generator using just cooking oil? And your cousin Shahd knows how to crotchet the most beautiful dolls for you. A few weeks ago she made you a rabbit with overalls. You loved it. To be from Gaza means you know how to live life, often times because it is not guaranteed. It means you feel the beauty of our waters, and don’t mind sleeping on the fine hot sand. Children from Gaza don’t put on sunscreen- they don’t mind feeling the sun’s touch. To be from Gaza means seeing those who look like you perish in an instant. It means hearing the country where you live tell you that they deserve it. It means seeing the number of thousands of Palestinian children dead- and growing numb to it since we don’t hear their stories, know their names or see their photo collages on our screens. Instead, we just see them wrapped in bloody white sheets if they are lucky enough to even be whole when they die. But, my love, being from Gaza means you can understand deep love and deep hatred better than others. You understand that the talking heads’ hatred of you is not a reflection of you. Your humanity is in tact and your faith even stronger. Their’s is the one that is so deeply lost. Being from Gaza means you understand that the success of the Palestinian people, of your people, means the success of the down-trotted everywhere. From Ferguson, to Mexico, to Palestine- being from Gaza means you know that justice is the most important human pursuit a person can have. Even if they dehumanize you like they do to all other Black and brown folks, being from Gaza means you know that all walls and empires fall. Eventually. Our resilience is stronger than their hatred. Remember Gaza, for being from such a marvellous, beautiful, creative place means you understand that it is worth fighting for. Such a place can never die. I love you. Sincerely, Your mother AuthorThis article was produced by hebh jamal. Archives February 2024 |
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