I would like to share, as I write in my phone’s notes app thousands of feet in the air, what I think is my most scandalous theoretical position as a Marxist philosopher, one I arrived at around 2019, in my youth, and have ‘hid’ since.*
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I have a very distinctive memory from around the time I finished my undergraduate studies in philosophy. The semester I graduated a wonderful professor of mine, Kent Anderson, gifted me a few dozen books on Marxism, Mao, and liberation theology. At that point I had been a Marxist for many years, but it was through these precious gifts that I first read Mao (I was already familiar with liberation theology, albeit primarily through Enrique Dussel’s and Juan José Bautista Segales’s lectures, not through the readings I would spend the summer doing). 

From Mao I first read ‘On Contradiction,’ a groundbreaking text I’ve since had the opportunity to teach multiple times in seminars.** While it was in many ways illuminating, there was always something I - as someone who had traversed for years the history of philosophy - couldn’t wrap my head around: why such a stark bifurcation between ‘metaphysical’ and ‘dialectical’ conceptions of the world? I understood perfectly the need for some form of the distinction, but not for the usage of ‘metaphysical’ to describe non-dialectical thought.

My undergraduate studies were heavily influenced by an Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition. One semester we read Father William Clarke’s excellent text on the basics of Aristotelean-Thomism, The One and the Many, almost religiously. Few thinkers, therefore, shaped my early philosophical trajectory more than Aristotle.

It was precisely because of this background that I found the usage of metaphysics in some of the classical theorists of Marxism strange. Metaphysics seemed to be used as a catch-all for bad metaphysics, or, in other words, for some of the worst, most superficial, anti-dialectical philosophies.
It is only in this manner that one could explain why Aristotle - for whom metaphysics was first philosophy, and in whose corpus we first see the usage of the concept - was considered by Marx and Engels one of the great dialecticians of the ancient world. Even when referencing the greatness of Hegel, the one philosopher Marx ever avowed himself, in his later years, a pupil of, whom he was compared with was Aristotle. “Hegel,” for Marx and Engels, was “the Aristotle of the modern world.”

Hegel himself, in his Logic, addresses the famous quote from Newton: “physics, beware of metaphysics,” by saying that all humans are metaphysicians. It is only the non-human animal which remains purely at the level of physics. The degree of abstraction (concrete or otherwise) present in human thought was always-already performing that ‘going-beyond’ physics which, for Aristotle, defined in the most simple terms what metaphysics was. Metaphysics, in other words, was the inquiry into that which is beyond the merely tangible, physical, surface of the world we interact with. To think, that is, to think conceptually or through thought determinations, is fundamentally to operate with a degree of transcendence from that which is merely physical.

This is why, even when a science like physics thinks it is freed from metaphysics or philosophy, as Engels reminds us, they are often just in the grips of the worst metaphysics, operating with the most uncritical and shallow presumptions in their investigations. Similar to how, in our so-called post-ideological age, we often find ourselves under the meanest grip of ideology, precisely in thinking that we have gone beyond or above it.

And so why reduce metaphysics to simply non-dialectical thinking? To thinking that can’t think through immanent change, processes, contradiction, relationality, context, etc? When we speak about such forms of thought, are we not precisely talking about bad metaphysics, as opposed to dialectical thought, which stands as a good metaphysics? I think this is what, if made aware of the history of the usage of metaphysics, most Marxists in the tradition have actually meant when they attack metaphysics en toto.

When classical Marxist authors attack metaphysics, their actual object of critique isn’t metaphysics itself, but bad metaphysics, which is more fairly understood as something akin to what Evald Ilyenkov would later describe as abstract thought, or even what Hegel would previously label the ‘understanding.’***

Here is my scandalous proclamation:

Marxism, therefore, is not anti-metaphysical. It is, on the contrary, itself a metaphysics - a dialectical materialist metaphysics.

* In the sense that I haven’t addressed it in an article of its own, but only in scattered comments on streams and articles dedicated to other subjects. One such article was, for instance, my review of Kaan Kangal’s wonderful text, Friedrich Engels and the Dialectics of Nature, which I was pleasantly surprised to find in it a kindred spirit with regard to the unfair manner our tradition has often treated metaphysics in. I have opted to keep the article essentially the same as it was when I wrote it, wifi-less, in the plane. I didn’t want to start adding a ton of citations to it and turn it into something other than what it was intended to be: a short blog post. Perhaps later on I will expand this argument for an academic article.

** You can access the recordings of these seminars HERE.

*** There is, therefore, a sense in which Marxism remains within the project of an immanent critique of bad metaphysics which, in the modern world, was initiated by Kant’s critique of Wolffian metaphysics. (Although it is, of course, carried out in completely different terms.)

Author
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Dr. Carlos L. Garrido is a Cuban American Professor of Philosophy who received his M.A. and Ph.D. from Southern Illinois University Carbondale. He serves as the Secretary of Education for the American Communist Partyand as a Director of the Midwestern Marx Institute, the largest Marxist-Leninist think-tank in the United States. Dr. Garrido has authored a few books, including Marxism and the Dialectical Materialist Worldview (2022), The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism (2023), Why We Need American Marxism (2024), and the two forthcoming texts, Domenico Losurdo and the Marxist-Leninist Critique of Western Marxism (2026) and Hegel, Marxism, and Dialectics (2026-7). Dr. Garrido has published over a dozen scholarly articles and over a hundred articles in popular settings across the U.S., Mexico, Cuba, Iran, China, Brazil, Venezuela, Greece, Peru, Canada, etc. His writings have been translated into over a dozen languages. He also writes short form articles for his Substack, @philosophyincrisis, and does regular YouTube programs for the Midwestern Marx Institute channel. He is on Instagram @carlos.l.garrido

What interests me most in Yuk Hui’s Post-Europe is not simply his critique of Europe, but the difficulty of escaping Europe even when one declares the need to think after it. Hui’s book is important because it refuses two easy positions: the defence of Europe as the privileged bearer of universal civilisation, and the anti-European return to cultural essence or tradition. His central claim is that thinking today must begin from Heimatlosigkeit, or homelessness, rather than from the nostalgic desire to recover Heimat. I find this argument powerful because it speaks directly to our present condition: we can no longer return home, yet we also cannot live without some sense of locality, orientation, and belonging.
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Hui defines the task as one of “post-European thinking,” neither through the neutralisation of differences nor through a return to tradition, but through an “individuation of thinking between East and West.” I am sympathetic to this ambition. At the same time, I think the book’s strength also reveals its limits. The question for me is whether Hui’s attempt to move beyond Europe remains caught within the conceptual structures it seeks to overcome.

My first hesitation concerns Hui’s reliance on Heidegger. Hui draws on Heidegger’s diagnosis of modernity, technology, and uprootedness to develop the concept of Heimatlosigkeit. His originality lies in transforming this concept. Instead of following Heidegger’s desire for a return to Heimat, Hui asks us to think from homelessness itself. This is an important displacement. Yet I still wonder whether genuinely post-European thinking can begin so decisively from Heidegger.

Heidegger is not merely one European thinker among others. He provides much of the vocabulary of home, destiny, rootedness, world-historical decline, and technological danger that Hui wants to rethink. Even when Hui reverses Heidegger’s nostalgia, he still accepts Heidegger’s framing of modernity as a crisis of homelessness. In this sense, Post-Europe may not fully escape Europe. It may repeat Europe at the level of the question itself. Europe remains the wound, the point of departure, and the philosophical horizon from which the problem is posed.

For me, Hui’s most provocative move is to turn homelessness into a standpoint. Rather than treating Heimatlosigkeit only as loss, he presents it as an opening: a way to rethink locality, world history, and planetarity without returning to nationalism or cultural purity. I find this persuasive, but also politically ambiguous. Homelessness is not experienced equally. The homelessness of the refugee, the migrant worker, the colonised subject, the academic intellectual, the digital nomad, and the cosmopolitan philosopher are not the same.

This is where I think Hui’s argument risks becoming too elegant. Heimatlosigkeit can become a philosophical metaphor before it becomes a material condition. In the contemporary world, homelessness is produced by border regimes, war, housing speculation, debt, ecological destruction, racial capitalism, and state violence. Hui does mention the housing crisis, war, technological acceleration, AI, and ecological-economic catastrophe. But I would like to see a stronger account of the specific structures of power that cause people to become homeless. The political question should be: who is made homeless, by whom, and through what institutions?

This question becomes sharper when we compare Hui’s project with the Japanese wartime discourse of “overcoming modernity.” That debate also criticised Western modernity, rationalism, liberalism, capitalism, individualism, and cultural fragmentation. Yet, as the history of the Kyoto School and the 1942 symposium shows, the critique of Western modernity became entangled with Japanese nationalism and imperial ideology (Calichman, pp. vii–xvi, 1–40; Stevens, pp. 229–30). The desire to overcome Europe could become the justification for a new imperial mission (Stevens, pp. 229–35).

Hui is clearly aware of this danger. He does not propose Asia as Europe’s successor, nor does he replace European universalism with an East Asian counter-universalism. This is one of Post-Europe’s strengths. Still, once one begins to speak of Europe, Asia, East, West, tradition, and locality, one is already moving within a field of civilisational categories. Hui wants to pluralise these categories through individuation, but he does not always show how such individuation avoids being reabsorbed into cultural essentialism.
This does not mean that Hui repeats the Kyoto School’s politics. But the historical lesson is severe: a critique of European modernity is never politically innocent. It can open a path toward pluralisation, but it can also become the language of reaction, civilisational resentment, or authoritarian cultural politics.
This is why I remain uneasy about the East-West frame. Hui does not want a universal philosophy that subsumes all traditions into a single European model. Nor does he want a simple return to tradition. Yet his formulation still depends on the East-West binary. Even when Hui complicates the binary, it remains the main stage on which the drama of post-European thinking unfolds. Europe is provincialised, but Asia is still summoned as Europe’s privileged interlocutor.

For me, the problem is that neither Europe nor Asia exists as a stable civilisational substance. Europe is not simply the origin of reason, universality, or technology. Asia is not simply the bearer of relationality, spirituality, locality, or alternative cosmotechnics. Both Europe and Asia are modern historical constructions, produced through colonialism, capitalism, translation, war, nationalism, migration, and global comparison. Hui himself cites Françoise Dastur’s warning that discourses on Europe are ideological constructs bound to colonial conceptions of the world. But this insight must also be applied to Asia.

For this reason, the modern Asian discourse of “the people” is crucial. I want to treat both “Asia” and “the people” as political inventions rather than natural realities. Liang Qichao’s “new citizen,” Okakura Kakuzō’s “Asia is one,” Tagore’s ethical universalism, and Takeuchi Yoshimi’s “Asia as Method” all show that Asia was not simply discovered. It had to be imagined, narrated, and politically fabricated. The old civilisational order is replaced by a global map of nation-states, forcing China to imagine itself as a nation among nations and to refashion its population into a modern citizenry (Tang, pp. 9, 23). Liang’s “new citizenry” required a new collective consciousness and a rhetoric of national crisis through which the people could become the foundation of a modern state (Tang, p. 194).

In this sense, Asia is a strategic abstraction. It gathers immense differences, such as languages, religions, classes, regions, histories, and political struggles, into a single image. This image can be emancipatory when it resists Western imperial domination, but it can also become dangerous. Okakura’s claim that “Asia is one” turns Asia into a spiritual and aesthetic unity, a “united living organism” and “Great Mother” bearing a civilisational destiny (Okakura, The Ideals of the East, p. 9). His Book of Tea even identifies Teaism with the “true spirit of Eastern democracy,” displacing democracy from institutional politics to taste, sensibility, and everyday cultivation (Okakura, The Book of Tea, p. 4). This produces an Asia that appears morally and aesthetically unified, but it also risks erasing internal divisions of class, caste, gender, empire, and nation.

The history of Pan-Asianism clearly shows this ambiguity. What begins as anti-imperial solidarity can become civilisational nationalism; what begins as a critique of Western domination can become a justification for Japanese imperial expansion. The debate on “overcoming modernity” demonstrates precisely this danger. Bernard Stevens describes the 1942 symposium as a project that aimed to surmount modern Western civilisation, but one whose ideological consequences were disastrous in the context of the Japanese imperial regime during the Fifteen Year War (Stevens, pp. 229–30). His crucial point is that the Kyoto School’s philosophical and humanistic message must be separated from its political misadventures, especially because the critique of modernity could be redirected toward neo-fascist or ultranationalist ends (Stevens, pp. 229–35).

The Kyoto School is important here because it offers both a resource and a warning. Its thinkers did not merely import Western philosophy. They transformed it through Buddhist and Japanese concepts such as nothingness, emptiness, place, self, world, and historical existence. The Kyoto School was constituted by a rigorous commitment to East-West dialogue rather than by a dogmatic creed (Davis, Schroeder, and Wirth, pp. 1–2). They also stress that its thought is inherently dialogical, moving between Eastern and Western philosophical and religious traditions (Davis, Schroeder, and Wirth, pp. 2–4).

But this political ambiguity also shows that philosophical dialogue between East and West can be absorbed into nationalist or statist projects. Hui is aware of this danger. In his discussion of Nishitani, he shows how the experience of Heimat, even something as bodily and intimate as the taste of Japanese rice, can mediate the relation between body, land, and homeland. Yet this experience also leads toward the problematic history of “overcoming modernity,” in which European modernity is seen as a fragmenting force and East Asian thought appears as a possible alternative to European decadence.
This is where I would push Hui’s argument further. The task is not simply to think “post-Europe.” Nor is it enough to individuate thought between East and West. We must also ask how the very opposition between Europe and Asia was produced, and how it continues to shape our imagination. Asia is not outside Europe. It is one of the effects of European planetarisation, but also one of the sites where that planetarisation is resisted and transformed. Europe and Asia are not two separate worlds that later encounter one another. They are co-constituted within planetary modernity.

For this reason, the subject of post-European thinking cannot simply be “Asia.” Nor can it be “Europe after Europe.” What is needed is the invention of a new people. These people would not be defined by ethnicity, nation, civilisation, or homeland. It would be a political collectivity formed through shared struggles over technology, ecology, migration, labour, memory, and planetary inequality.

Here, Étienne Balibar’s concept of fictive ethnicity becomes useful. The people are never given; they are fabricated through narratives of origin, continuity, and belonging. In Balibar’s terms, populations are retrospectively represented as if they possessed a common origin, culture, and destiny that transcends their actual divisions (Balibar and Wallerstein, pp. 102–3). My point is that “the people of Asia” should be understood in this way too. They are not discovered in history. They are called into being as the possible subject of a world still to be made.

This is why I find Takeuchi Yoshimi’s “Asia as Method” more useful than a simple opposition between Europe and Asia. Takeuchi does not treat Asia as a fixed identity. Asia is a method, a critical standpoint from which Europe’s incomplete universalism can be transformed. He argues that European equality was never universal, since Europe’s history of colonial exploitation in Asia and Africa shows that its own values remained restricted and incomplete. The task of Asia, then, is not to imitate the West, but to “re-embrace” and transform it so that its universal values may be realised on a greater scale (Takeuchi, p. 165).

But I would also push Takeuchi further: if Asia is a method, then it must also be a method for overcoming “Asia” itself. Asia should not become the final name of the new subject. It should function as a transitional and critical device, a means of forcing universality beyond Europe without reducing Asia to a new essence. Hui’s Post-Europe opens the question of thinking beyond European universality, but it does not fully dismantle the Europe-Asia frame within which the question is still posed.
A genuinely planetary philosophy cannot remain confined to an East-West dialogue. It must also think with Africa, Latin America, the Pacific, Indigenous worlds, archipelagic worlds, diasporic worlds, and the internal colonies of both Europe and Asia. Otherwise, planetarity risks becoming a conversation between Europe and East Asia rather than a real transformation of the philosophical map.

Hui’s reflections on technology sharpen this problem. One of his strongest insights is that technology is not culturally neutral. Technologies carry forms of world-making, models of individuation, modes of production, and assumptions about human beings, nature, and social order. I agree with this. But I also think his critique of technological universalism remains underdeveloped at the institutional and practical levels. What would it mean to organise AI, logistics, agriculture, urban planning, or digital infrastructure according to the principle of post-European individuation? What legal, economic, ecological, and pedagogical forms would make technodiversity possible?

Without such mediation, technodiversity risks remaining a philosophical ideal rather than becoming a political-economic project. Technology today is not simply an abstract planetary force. It is owned, financed, patented, militarised, standardised, platformised, and governed. A critique of technological planetarisation must therefore also be a critique of corporations, states, infrastructures, standards, supply chains, and military systems.

This points to another concern. Hui sometimes gives philosophy a privileged role in responding to planetarisation. The task is presented as a reorientation of thinking, a transformation of standpoint, an individuation of thought. I value this, but I also think it may overestimate philosophy’s autonomy. The history of “overcoming modernity” shows that philosophy does not stand outside political forces. Philosophical concepts can be appropriated by the state, empire, nationalism, cultural institutions, and technological power.

For this reason, post-European philosophy must ask not only, “How should we think?” but also, “What protects thinking from becoming ideology?” Hui criticises the “state thinker,” but I think the book could go further in explaining how thought can remain politically effective without becoming attached to state power, civilisational mission, or cultural identity.

The unresolved question, for me, is universality. Hui rejects European universalism, but he also rejects simple relativism. His answer is individuation: different traditions must develop their own modes of thought in relation to one another. This is promising, but from a Simondonian perspective, it also raises a problem. Individuation, for Simondon, does not begin from already constituted individuals, cultures, or traditions. It begins from a preindividual field of tensions, potentials, and unresolved problems. An individual is not a fixed unit that later enters into relation; it is the temporary result of a process of becoming. Relation is not secondary to identity. The relation is constitutive of individuation itself.
This creates a difficulty for Hui’s formulation. If “Europe” and “Asia” are treated as already individuated traditions that must then enter into dialogue, the concept of individuation risks being culturalised. It becomes a way of pluralising civilisational identities rather than transforming the field from which such identities emerge. A Simondonian critique would therefore ask whether Hui’s “individuation of thinking between East and West” still presupposes East and West as relatively stable poles. If so, individuation is being used to mediate between inherited categories rather than to undo their very conditions of formation.

This also changes the question of universality. Planetary problems such as climate change, AI governance, war, migration, and ecological collapse cannot be solved by locality alone. But the answer is not simply to restore universality at a higher level, even in a non-imperial form. From Simondon’s perspective, universality should not be understood as a norm imposed from above, nor as a consensus among pre-existing traditions. It should be understood as a transindividual process: a collective individuation that emerges through shared problems, technical mediations, and common transformations.

In this sense, the planetary is not a universal framework into which localities must be inserted. It is a metastable field in which localities, technologies, institutions, bodies, and environments are co-individuated. Climate change, for example, is not merely a global problem requiring universal norms; it is a problematic field that forces new forms of collective and technical individuation. The same is true of AI, migration, and ecological collapse. These problems do not simply demand agreement between local traditions. They require the invention of new transindividual forms of life.

This is where Hui’s appeal to locality and technodiversity remains underdeveloped. If technologies are embedded in cosmological and cultural worlds, as Hui argues, then the task is not only to defend different technological traditions against Western technological universalism. The deeper task is to ask how new associated milieus can be formed: how technical systems, social institutions, ecological conditions, and collective subjects can be reorganised together. Simondon’s concept of the associated milieu is useful here because it shows that technology is never merely an instrument of a culture. A technical object individuates together with its milieu. It transforms the conditions in which it operates, just as it depends on those conditions for its functioning.

A Simondonian critique would therefore say that Hui’s post-European thinking still risks remaining too cultural-philosophical. It speaks of traditions, localities, and cosmotechnics, but it does not fully explain how new transindividual collectivities and associated milieus are produced. The problem of universality after Europe cannot be solved by multiplying local cosmotechnics alone. It requires an account of how shared planetary problems generate new processes of collective individuation.

The challenge, then, is not to choose between European universalism and plural localities. Nor is it enough to call for an individuation of thought between East and West. The more radical Simondonian question is: what new transindividual subject can emerge from the metastable tensions of the planetary condition? Universality would then no longer mean the expansion of one civilisation’s values, nor the abstract agreement of many cultures. It would name the open-ended process through which new people, new technical milieus, and new forms of collective life are individuated in response to planetary problems. The challenge, then, is to think a non-imperial universality: a universality that does not erase difference, but also does not abandon the possibility of common struggle. Hui gestures toward this, but I do not think the concept is fully developed.

For these reasons, I read Post-Europe as an important beginning rather than a final answer. Its strength is that it opens the question of thinking after Europe. Its limitation is that it does not fully ask how “Asia” itself must also be overcome as Europe’s mirror image. A truly post-European thinking must also become post-Asian in this specific sense: not by abandoning Asia, but by refusing to let Asia remain trapped as Europe’s other.

To sum up, Yuk Hui’s Post-Europe offers a powerful critique of European universalism and the reactionary desire to return home. But the project remains partly bound to the civilisational opposition between Europe and Asia. Since both Europe and Asia are historical constructions produced within planetary modernity, Asia cannot simply serve as the alternative to Europe. The task is not to replace Europe with Asia, nor even to pluralise Europe through Asia, but to dismantle the Europe-Asia dichotomy itself. What must be invented is a new people capable of carrying a non-imperial universality beyond both European universalism and Asian essentialism.

References
Balibar, Étienne, and Immanuel Wallerstein. Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities. Translated by Chris Turner. London: Verso, 1991.
Calichman, Richard F., ed. Overcoming Modernity: Cultural Identity in Wartime Japan. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008.
Davis, Bret W., Brian Schroeder, and Jason M. Wirth, eds. Japanese and Continental Philosophy: Conversations with the Kyoto School. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011.
Hui, Yuk. Post-Europe. Falmouth: Urbanomic/Sequence Press, 2024.
Liang, Qichao. Thoughts from the Ice-Drinker’s Studio: Essays on China and the World. Translated by Peter Zarrow. London: Penguin, 2024.
Okakura, Kakuzō. The Book of Tea. Tokyo: Tuttle Publishing, 1956.
Okakura, Kakuzō. The Ideals of the East: With Special Reference to the Art of Japan. New York: Stone Bridge Press, 2007.
Saaler, Sven, and Christopher W. A. Szpilman, eds. Pan-Asianism: A Documentary History, Volume 1: 1850–1920. London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2011.
Stevens, Bernard. “Overcoming Modernity: A Critical Response to the Kyoto School.” In Japanese and Continental Philosophy: Conversations with the Kyoto School, edited by Bret W. Davis, Brian Schroeder, and Jason M. Wirth, 229–246. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011.
Takeuchi, Yoshimi. What Is Modernity? Writings of Takeuchi Yoshimi. Translated and edited by Richard F. Calichman. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005.
Tang, Xiaobing. Global Space and the Nationalist Discourse of Modernity: The Historical Thinking of Liang Qichao. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996.

​Author

Alex Taek-Gwang Lee is a writer moonlighting as a philosophy and cultural studies professor in South Korea.

It is videos such as the one “Danny El Comunista” just did about Sovintern that demonstrate how improbable it is to unite with the social liberals who call themselves “leftists” or even “communist.” One of the great successes of the SOVINTERN INTERNATIONAL congress was how it was able to bring together people from such diverse cultural backgrounds – from individuals that came from more “woke” or “liberal” cultures, such as those that came from the Hispanic world, to those that came from more “traditional,” “religious,” or “conservative” cultures, such as those of the comrades from the East.

The congress was far from perfect, and no one should have expected perfection from the first steps taken in such a monumental task. But what Danny highlights as a defect in this event is precisely one of its strengths. In highlighting it Danny only demonstrates HIS defects, his purity fetish, his inability to focus – as the congress urged – on unity around the principal contradiction of the struggle against imperialism and the struggle for socialism.

Danny wants to impose – in a good cultural imperialist manner – his liberal morality on people that come from ancient civilizations whose cultures and traditions are not defined immediately by the dictates of liberal NGOs, but by communal bonds which stretch back thousands of years – and which are perfectly compatible with communism.

Danny condemns the Moldovan (who simply pointed out how modern capitalism reduces freedom to the freedom of changing one’s gender), the American, the British, and the Russian parties – parties that were founders of the international and made this unity possible – for being “reactionary socialists” (a term he wholly misinterprets through the petty-bourgeois liberal framework he mistakes for “Marxism”). Danny’s liberalism does not forgive these organizations who, alongside a Just Russia, made this herculean effect of unity possible, on the basis that they don’t share his arbitrary and INDIVIDUAL conception of social morality.

According to Danny’s Obama-like standard of what defines reactionary and progressive (i.e., liberal versus traditional cultural values) almost all of the socialist and anti-imperialist states in world history would be reactionary – at least if Danny was consistent. The Soviets would be reactionary, the Chinese (even today) would be reactionary, the Sandinistas (who were a co-founding party) would be reactionary, the Palestinians and the axis of resistance would all be reactionaries, the Alliance of Sahel states in Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger would all be reactionaries, revolutionary Cuba for most of its history would be reactionary, the Democratic Peoples’ Republic of Korea would be reactionary, etc. Given that all of these states upheld – and most still do – what Danny hears when the words “traditional morality” are uttered.

The only progressives for Danny would be the liberal NGO left propped up and financed by imperialism (Open Society, Ford Foundation, etc.) and at the vanguard of the tribalist struggles for liberal values which the dominant liberal wing of imperialism ‘defends’ (through this “left”) around the world.
If there is anyone who has shown real right-wing tendencies in the aftermath of this congress it is Danny himself, who has done the first FACTIONALIST hit piece on an event premised on unity around a principal contradiction.

Left and right is not defined – as Danny’s American exceptionalist paradigm holds – around social liberalism and conservatism. It is defined, instead, around where one positions themselves with regard to the dominant system – which today is capitalist-imperialism. Danny, by introducing factionalism into this venture – all for the sake of defending social liberalism – is the one that is acting in a true right wing fashion, dividing a left-wing effort at anti-imperialist unity over sectors of it not thinking like him (and all the other liberal NGO’s of imperialism) on issues of social morality.

This is, in large part, the world-historic significance of my organization – the American Communist Party – it has been able to keep the heads of thousands of cadres on the key issues, on the principal contradiction at hand. In doing so, it has seen the peaceful co-existence of socially liberal and conservative cadres, who might disagree on the status of something like trans issues, but who treat their comrades with respect, dignity, and tolerance, fighting side-by-side on the basis of a common principle, a shared class struggle.

Watch the stream on this topic below:

Originally published on Carlos' blog Philosophy in Crisis (Available in Spanish, too)

Author 
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Dr. Carlos L. Garrido is a Cuban American Professor of Philosophy who received his M.A. and Ph.D. from Southern Illinois University Carbondale. He serves as the Secretary of Education for the American Communist Party and as a Director of the Midwestern Marx Institute, the largest Marxist-Leninist think-tank in the United States. Dr. Garrido has authored a few books, including Marxism and the Dialectical Materialist Worldview (2022), The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism (2023), Why We Need American Marxism (2024), and the two forthcoming texts, Domenico Losurdo and the Marxist-Leninist Critique of Western Marxism (2026) and Hegel, Marxism, and Dialectics (2026-7). Dr. Garrido has published over a dozen scholarly articles and over a hundred articles in popular settings across the U.S., Mexico, Cuba, Iran, China, Brazil, Venezuela, Greece, Peru, Canada, etc. His writings have been translated into over a dozen languages. He also writes short form articles for his Substack, @philosophyincrisis, and does regular YouTube programs for the Midwestern Marx Institute channel. He is on Instagram @carlos.l.garrido

The development of thermodynamics in the nineteenth century fundamentally altered philosophical conceptions of matter. The first and second laws of thermodynamics—energy conservation and entropy increase—revealed a universe governed by dynamic energy exchanges rather than static mechanics. However, these laws appeared to predict the cosmos’s inevitable exhaustion, culminating in a final equilibrium or ‘heat death.’ Friedrich Engels challenged this fatalistic interpretation, arguing that it misrepresented the significance of energy. Engels, adopting a dialectical perspective, reinterpreted thermodynamics as a philosophy of production rather than decline, viewing energy as the dialectical pulse of matter that unites conservation and transformation.
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In Dialectics of Nature (1873–1886), Engels aimed to incorporate contemporary scientific discoveries into Marxist materialism. (Engels, 1883) He interpreted the first law of thermodynamics as evidence of the ‘indestructibility of motion’ and the second law as revealing the irreversible transformation of forms. Collectively, these laws embodied the dialectical unity of constancy and change. Engels contended that energy is not a static quantity but the ‘self-activity of matter,’ a continuous process of conversion among physical forms such as heat, motion, and electricity. As Engels asserted, ‘motion itself is a contradiction’: ‘rest and motion, identity and difference, are inseparable.’ (“Anti-Dialectics: Motion as a Contradiction,” n.d.)

Thus, energy embodied dialectics itself: it both conserved and transformed, negated and renewed. The apparent entropy observed in physical systems did not signify universal decay but instead revealed nature’s historical dynamism. In opposition to the mechanistic ‘heat death’ hypothesis proposed by Clausius and Kelvin, Engels argued that energy dissipation in one region invariably generates new gradients elsewhere. (“Materialism and the Dialectical Method,” n.d.) Nature, in this framework, is not a closed system tending toward equilibrium but an open, infinite totality engaged in continual self-renewal. Entropy, therefore, represents a temporary moment of negation within a broader cycle of regeneration.

Engels’s approach thereby historicized the concept of energy, framing it not as a metaphysical substance but as the medium of transformation connecting inorganic and organic processes. In Dialectics of Nature, he extended this logic to encompass life and thought, positing that the energy of living beings signifies the transformation, rather than the abolition, of physical energy. (Engels, 1883) Consciousness, in this view, emerges from the dialectical movement of energy through matter, culminating in labour and social production. Consequently, human history is continuous with natural energetics; the transformation of energy in labour mirrors transformations of energy in the physical world. For Engels, both natural and social production constitute energetic processes of negation and renewal (Zwart, 2022).

A century later, Engels’s proposition reemerges in the work of Deleuze, though in a transformed context. Like Engels, Deleuze rejects the interpretation of thermodynamics as a science of depletion and instead conceptualises energy as the fundamental principle of production. However, Deleuze reframes this energetic materialism not in dialectical terms but as a differential field of intensities that continuously generate new forms. While Deleuze also treats energy as a principle of production, he departs from Engels’s dialectical framework of negation.

In Difference and Repetition (1968), Deleuze differentiates between extensive and intensive magnitudes. Extensive quantities, such as mass, volume, and temperature, characterise stable, measurable states, whereas intensive magnitudes, including pressure, potential, and difference, define the gradients that drive change. In this framework, energy is not primarily a conserved quantity but a magnitude that differentiates. It serves as the source of individuation, described as ‘the difference which is the sufficient reason of all phenomena.’ (Deleuze, 1994)

Deleuze thereby transforms the thermodynamic concept of energy into a metaphysics of difference. While classical thermodynamics views energy as tending toward equilibrium, Deleuze conceptualises the universe as sustained by non-equilibrium, maintained through the productive tension of intensities. In this perspective, entropy does not symbolise decay but instead signifies the redistribution of potential across the field of difference. Dissipation becomes a precondition for novelty, as each expenditure of energy generates new gradients and possibilities for transformation.

For Deleuze, energy is not a unity or totality but a multiplicity. It does not reconcile opposites but proliferates differences. His ontology of energy rejects both the mechanistic model of closed systems and the dialectical model of cyclical synthesis. The world is a field of immanent production, a ‘plane of consistency’ on which intensities continually recombine without ultimate equilibrium. In this way, Deleuze offers a radical rethinking of energy. Life and thought are not exceptional forms of organisation but expressions of the same energetic creativity that pervades matter. The human subject becomes one configuration among many in a universal process of production. As he and Guattari put it, ‘production is everywhere … it is the production of production itself’. Energy is the material and affective substance of this production: the movement of desire, matter, and difference.

Engels and Deleuze both advocate for a non-mechanistic interpretation of energy, yet they fundamentally diverge in their respective conceptualisations. For Engels, energy embodies the unity of opposites within a totality—conservation and transformation, being and becoming—thereby ensuring both the permanence of matter and its historical development. In contrast, Deleuze conceives of energy as differential rather than dialectical; it possesses only variations, not opposites. Its transformations do not return to unity but instead open new trajectories of becoming. Deleuze’s differential ontology interprets production as the immanent creativity of energy, dissolving boundaries between human and non-human activity and privileging the discontinuity. The contemporary relevance of Engels and Deleuze is evident in their ecological implications. Engels’s focus on the interdependence of natural and social energetics anticipates ecological systems theory, which conceptualises the biosphere as a network of energy exchanges and feedback mechanisms. His critique of the ‘heat death’ hypothesis aligns with current rejections of linear models of ecological collapse, instead proposing that diffusion and renewal coexist within the planetary cycles.

Deleuze’s perspective is grounded in ‘corrected vitalism,’ which regards life as an emergent property of energetic differentiation. His conception of energy as creative intensity parallels contemporary theories of self-organisation and non-equilibrium dynamics. Isabelle Stengers later characterised Deleuze’s metaphysics as a ‘cosmology of becoming,’ where the irreversibility of energy is not a tragedy but a precondition for invention. (Prigogine & Stengers, 1984) Consistent with Engels, Deleuze maintains that the planet is not a passive system but a field of production.

Engels and Deleuze each transform the physics of energy into a philosophy of production, albeit through distinct frameworks. Engels interprets energy dialectically: it conserves through transformation and negates through renewal. Thus, every apparent loss or dissipation is integrated into a broader cycle of regeneration, with energy embodying the rhythm of contradiction and resolution. In contrast, Deleuze conceptualises energy as the effect of difference, produced by divergence and dissipated. Rather than returning to unity, each expenditure of energy initiates new trajectories of differentiation, so that what appears as loss from a thermodynamic perspective becomes, in Deleuze’s terms, the very condition for the emergence of new forms.

In short, Engels and Deleuze refute the image of energy as exhaustion and instead affirm it as the power of creation. In this sense, they offer two complementary responses to the thermodynamic imagination: Engels’s energy of contradiction and Deleuze’s energy of intensity. Each reveals that the cosmos is not condemned to entropy but animated by it, that energy, far from dwindling into equilibrium, is the world’s capacity to make itself anew.

References

Engels, F. (1883). Dialectics of Nature. Progress Publishers. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1883/don/index.htm
“Anti-Dialectics: Motion as a Contradiction.” https://www.anti-dialectics.co.uk/page%2008_03.htm
“Materialism and the Dialectical Method.” https://leninists.org/images/1/1a/Materialism_and_the_Dialectical_Method.pdf
Engels, F. (1883). Dialectics of Nature. Chapter 1: Introduction. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1883/don/don.pdf
Zwart, H. (2022). “Dialectical Materialism” in Continental Philosophy of Technoscience. Springer Nature Link. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-84570-4_3
Deleuze, G. (1994). Difference and Repetition. p. 222. https://www.amazon.com/Difference-Repetition-Gilles-Deleuze/dp/0231052130
Prigogine, I. & Stengers, I. (1984). Order Out of Chaos: Man’s New Dialogue with Nature. Publisher: Bantam Books. https://www.amazon.com/Order-Out-Chaos-Dialogue-Nature/dp/0553342530

Author

Alex Taek-Gwang Lee is a writer moonlighting as a philosophy and cultural studies professor in South Korea.

There is a famous quote from the preface of Carter G. Woodson’s The Mis-Education of the Negro which states that “when you control a man’s thinking you do not have to worry about his actions.”[1] In a basic sense he is, of course, correct. Education, and the formal institutions of knowledge production, are certainly not neutral. The parameters of acceptable discourse aim to reproduce the dominant social arrangement. Power is always-already inscribed in what is taken to be “neutral” education.

To put it in the terms Althusser employs in his later writings, the schools, the sites of “education,” are a subset ideological form of a whole set of forms of bourgeois class domination.[2] In this sense, of course, there is a concern with what a man thinks, insofar as those thoughts are seen as emerging from a series of practices rooted in specific institutions which play a pivotal role in the reproduction of the dominant order.

But is not an inversion of the Woodsonian formula operative as well in our cynical age? Is it not the case that, at a basic level, “when you control a man’s actions you do not have to worry about what he thinks?” This is the lesson, in my view, of how ideology operates today.

There is an unprecedented degree of institutional distrust that is operative in American society. By all relevant measures (faith in media, faith in politicians, faith in political parties, faith in major institutions like big pharma, the military industrial complex, the educational system, etc.) the distrust of the American people signals a deep crisis of legitimacy. Anywhere from 75-90 percent of the public experiences lack of faith in these institutions and the reasons they provide for their actions, for why things are the way they are.

There is no Hegelian ethical life (Sittlichkeit) present, people do not feel that their projects in life, their values, their ideals, their aspirations, are aligned with the trajectory of their society.[3] They experience an unhomeliness (unheimlichkeit) which is situated in this crisis of legitimacy or ethical life, not in some ontological predicament.

And so, to get back to Woodson’s formula, today the ruling order has already largely lost control over how people think. No one actually accepts the dominant narratives for the actions taken. The justifications provided for why things are the way they are no longer seem to be considered as authoritative. A cynical distance from dominant narratives, therefore, is already inscribed in the thoughts of most individuals.

This is why the brilliance of Slavoj Žižek’s critique of ideology is even more relevant today than in 1989, when the Sublime Object of Ideology was published. Ideological illusions and distortions are sustained in a cynical age precisely through our actions, through the ways in which our practices – located always within specific institutions or apparatuses – are constituted through illusions, fantasies, and distortions which embody objectified beliefs. As Žižek put it, “what they ‘do not know’, what they misrecognize, is the fact that in their social reality itself, in their social activity… they are guided by the fetishistic illusion.”[4]

The problem today, therefore, is not one of ignorance, “false consciousness,” or miseducation. It is not simply the case that people are “too stupid and ignorant.” Instead, what is absent is the counterhegemonic institutions which could be the locus for alternative, sovereign practices, rituals, and habits which challenge, and not simply reproduce, the dominant order.

This is why, paradoxically, a “Marxist” streamer like Hasan Piker is operating – in a basic sense of the word – in a reactionary fashion when he urges that the American people are too far away from “class consciousness” (a dubious term never sufficiently explained by most who employ it) to support a third party alternative. Instead, per Hasan, the “non-idealist” position is to support the “left-wing” of the Democratic Party – those who want imperialist war with Russia, China, etc. but who support 2SLGBTQI+ rights” (e.g., Kat Abughazaleh). It is with the Democratic Party, according to Hasan, that we obtain a large enough platform to reach people.
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For someone so successful at reaching millions of people, this assessment of the situation couldn’t be more incorrect. The problem of the American people is not one of an absence of “class consciousness,” but of an absence of alternative, sovereign left institutions of significant political weight which can structure a new series of counterhegemonic practices that match the cynical distance they already hold to the ruling order at the level of their thoughts. The problem, in other words, is that there is no left (i.e., anti-system) alternative for them to participate in. This is why, in 2016 and 2020, many of them gravitated to both Trump and Bernie. Irrespective of whether they were correct or not (they weren’t – and as a former “Bernie bro” I am a part of that “they”), their support was premised on the belief that these were “outsider” campaigns which challenged the status quo, i.e., the system, “deep state,” the establishment, the swamp, or whatever other signifier was used to signify the dominant order.

The American people, in other words, already desire a third-party alternative to the two-party duopoly. To reference a recent poll (and thereby satisfy the prerequisites of “evidence” in our “scientific” era), up to 63% of the American public supports a third political party in the U.S. And so, when the American people desire a third-party alternative and already see the institutions of the Democratic and Republican Parties as illegitimate, for Hasan – a “Marxist” – to channel them back into the Democratic Party through “progressives” is to (knowingly or not) try to relegitimize a delegitimized bourgeois institution – an institution which has shown what its function and limits are, namely, to be the liberal wing of the bourgeois, imperialist, and fascistic order dominant in the U.S.

There is no “pushing” of this party to the left, that is, to that which lays beyond the structural limits of the function it plays in the reproduction of the system. That was the lesson of the Bernie Sanders movement: even the mild reforms postulated by it laid beyond the limits of the Democratic Party. There was an incompatibility, therefore, between the demands that were being made by the Bernie campaign – the demands that motivated millions of young people (myself included) to fight for what they thought was a socialist political revolution – and the infrastructure of the Democratic Party that they were articulated within.

The lesson of the Bernie movement was that a “left” politics in the U.S. has to be sovereign, independent from the Democratic Party to not be collapsed into liberal fascism/imperialism. The true heirs of the rational kernel of the Bernie moment are those fighting for an alternative left politics outside of the Democratic Party, not those who – like Hasan – seek to spuriously entrap us in the Sisyphus enterprise of repeating 2016 and its assumptions.

If we presume Hasan is honest in his actions and thoughts, and therefore, fail to ascribe any malicious intent behind him, is not the metaphor for Hasan politically precisely that of the kid in high school who is so big and strong that they could easily wipe out all the snarky little bullies which mock him, but who refrains from doing so out of either insecurity or ignorance of their power? Hasan acts as if he, subjectively, isn’t a part of the objective predicament of our era. As if objectivity is something he remains outside and powerless in the face of. Hasan talks about the need to use the Democratic Party as a platform for our ideas as if this institution – and all other formal apparatuses like it – still sustain control over discourse. But in the digital era, they do not.

In our age of social media content consumption, anything which feels like it has an institutional agenda behind it is bound to fail. People are pretty good at spontaneously grasping what is authentic versus what is marketed to sell something (a party, a product, a politician, a celebrity, etc.). Hasan today is infinitely more influential for framing discourse, and hence, influencing that which he calls “class consciousness,” than the whole institutional apparatus of the Democratic Party.

If we cross out malicious intent as a justification; it is clear, then, that Hasan is both unaware of the cynical age we live in (exacerbated by the framing of discourse as it occurs on social media) and of the power he wields within it. What this predicament requires is not a doubling down of the attempt to revive delegitimized bourgeois institutions, but concrete efforts to build alternative new ones. This is what the dual power strategy of the American Communist Party hopes to accomplish.

My message to Hasan Piker is the following: you frequently state that you don’t seek to attack anyone to the left of you (this ignores, of course, how you have attacked and defamed my party, the ACP, since our founding – but I’ll consider that water under the bridge, as we have more important things to worry about than old resentments). Well, show us this concretely. You platform and promote the “left-wing” of the Democratic Party, why not also provide a space for discussion with those on the left who are outside of the Democrats? Why not provide us with a space to explain our thought process, our work, or to discuss, in comradely fashion, our disagreements?

We ask you to simply be true to what you say about yourself. If you are actually not against those organizing a left-wing politics outside the Democratic Party, why not engage with us in discussion (and this “us” doesn’t just have to be my party, the ACP, but genuinely all the others who are also, irrespective of our disagreements, trying to build alternatives outside of the two-party duopoly). Your response, presuming this message gets to you, will be a testament to the seriousness of your commitment to a left-wing politics in this country.

[1] Carter G. Woodson, The Mis-Education of the Negro (Virginia: Khalifa’s Booksellers, 2005), xiii.
[2] Louis Althusser, Philosophy of the Encounter: Late Writings 1978-1987 (New York: Verso, 2006), 89.
[3] Carlos L. Garrido and Christopher Helali, “Hegel, America, and the Crisis of the Sittlichkeit,” Journal of Philosophical Investigations 19(52) (2005) DOI: 10.22034/jpiut.2025.67944.4142
[4] Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (New York: Verso, 1989), 28.

Author
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Dr. Carlos L. Garrido is a Cuban American Professor of Philosophy who received his M.A. and Ph.D. from Southern Illinois University Carbondale. He serves as the Secretary of Education for the American Communist Party and as a Director of the Midwestern Marx Institute, the largest Marxist-Leninist think-tank in the United States. Dr. Garrido has authored a few books, including Marxism and the Dialectical Materialist Worldview (2022), The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism (2023), Why We Need American Marxism (2024), and the two forthcoming texts, Domenico Losurdo and the Marxist-Leninist Critique of Western Marxism (2026) and Hegel, Marxism, and Dialectics (2026-7). Dr. Garrido has published over a dozen scholarly articles and over a hundred articles in popular settings across the U.S., Mexico, Cuba, Iran, China, Brazil, Venezuela, Greece, Peru, Canada, etc. His writings have been translated into over a dozen languages. He also writes short form articles for his Substack, @philosophyincrisis, and does regular YouTube programs for the Midwestern Marx Institute channel. He is on Instagram @carlos.l.garrido

Something is amiss in society. Many people have noticed a seemingly recent tendency of people acting in such a way in public as to disregard the very presence of other people, listening to music without headphones, having facetime conversations in coffee shops (also without headphones), and so on. Perhaps all of this started with Covid, which exasperated the already existing social distancing of modern life (in the name of saving others), or perhaps it started with smart phones, which are perhaps the greatest anti-social technology since the automobile. Personally, I think that the increased anti-social tendency is in some ways a reaction to Covid, I think that the idea that we had to treat everyone, even employees as human beings in part generated some of the massive reaction against sociality as such that we are living through, but that is a digression you can follow the links to. Whatever the causes might be, the Hobbesian war of all against all seems to have trickled down into a series of ever frustrating micro-aggressions of everyday life.
All of this raises the question, what does it mean to live in a society. For a long time, I was obsessed with this provocative, yet cryptic passage from Althusser's contribution to Lire le Capital. Althusser writes, 
"The mechanism of the production of this ‘society effect’ is only complete when all the effects of the mechanism have been expounded, down to the point where they are produced in the form of the very effects that constitute the concrete, conscious or unconscious relation of the individuals to the society as a society, i.e., down to the effects of the fetishism of ideology (or 'forms of social consciousness' - Preface to A Contribution….), in which men consciously or unconsciously live their lives, their projects, their actions, their attitudes and their functions as social. In this perspective, Capital must be regarded as the theory of the mechanism of the production of the society effect in the capitalist mode of production. We are beginning to suspect, even if it is only because of the works of contemporary ethnology and history, that this society effect differs with different modes or production."

It is a strange formulation, provocative and cryptic, or perhaps provocative because it is cryptic. It is also a somewhat abandoned concept, appearing briefly in this text from 1965 only to disappear for the most part. (I have not kept up with all of the posthumous published drafts by Althusser, so I may have missed something)  I have written about it before in one of my first published essays, and I distinctly remember an reviewer (probably number two), telling me to drop the concept. It was a dead end. I am not so sure. It is possible to trace a line forward from this idea to Althusser's later theory of ideology, and backward to Spinoza and Marx. It unearths one of the common critical threads of Spinoza and Marx, their critique of the tendency to treat effects as causes. This is what links Spinoza's critique of the anthropomorphic image of God and Marx's critique of the commodity form. 

What does this mean when it comes to society?  It means that society exists because we act as if it does, society, being social is an effect that we treat as a cause. It is a bit odd, however, especially in a book on reading Capital, that Althusser argues that Capital is a theory of the society effect in the capitalist mode of production. I can only think of a few passages where anything like a society or social relations are addressed in Capital. There is of course the famous line, that I have quoted all too often,  "The advance of capitalist production develops a working class which by education [Erziehung], tradition, and habit [Gewohneit] looks upon the requirements of that mode of production as self-evident natural laws." This passage suggests a particular production of subjectivity, and production of society, in capitalism, capitalism functions because we treat its institutions, wage labor being central, as not something imposed, but natural. And, speaking of lines that I quote way too much, there is also Marx's comments about the sphere of circulation being one of "freedom, equality, and Bentham." Which is to say if there is a society effect in Marx it is often an anti-social one, one in which we are socialized as asocial, as isolated and separate. To end this reflection with one more passage, this time from the Grundrisse, one that I wrote a whole book as a meditation on, as Marx writes, 

"Only in the eighteenth century, in 'civil society', do the various forms of social connectedness confront the individual as a mere means towards his private purposes, as external necessity. But the epoch which produces this standpoint, that of the isolated individual, is also precisely that of the hitherto most developed social (from this standpoint, general) relations."

All of which is to say, that if there is a theory of the society effect in Marx, or if Marx posits a society effect in capital, it is a strangely asocial sociality, one of isolation, fragmentation, and competition. Of course this is what Althusser might mean when he says that the "society effect differs with different modes of production."

Shifting terrains somewhat abruptly, I have been following this question of what does it mean to be social in a different thread, one that follows Spinoza rather than Marx, and Macherey rather than Althusser, I was very excited to read that Macherey's latest book on Spinoza, BdS: Études Spinoziennes, had a chapter titled "Est-il Simple d'obéir." I found his remarks about obedience in Sagesse ou Ignorance: La Question de Spinoza to be quite provocative.  As in that book the starting point is the discussion of obedience in Chapter 17 of the Theological Political Treatise. As Spinoza writes,

“However, for a proper understanding of the extent of the government’s right and power, it should be observed that the government’s power is not strictly confined to its power of coercion by fear, but rests on all the possible means by which it can induce men to obey its commands. It is not the motive for obedience, but the fact of obedience, that constitutes a subject. Whatever be the motives that prompt a man to carry out the commands of the sovereign power, whether it be fear of punishment, hope of reward, love of country or any other emotion, which it is he who makes the decision, he is nevertheless acting under the control of the sovereign power. From the fact, then, that a man acts from his own decision, we should not forthwith conclude that his action proceeds from his own right and not from the right of government. For whether a man is urged by love or driven by a fear of threatened evil, since in both cases his action always proceeds from his own intention and decision, either there can be no such thing as sovereignty and right over subjects or else it must include all the means that contribute to men’s willingness to obey. whenever a subject acts in accordance with the commands of the sovereign power, whether he is motivated by love, or fear, or (and this is more frequently the case) a mixture of hope and fear, or by reverence—which is an emotion compounded of fear and awe—or whatever be his motive, he acts from his ruler’s right, not from his own.” 

Macherey focuses on the way that Spinoza effectively inverts Kant's categorical imperative. As anyone who has taken an intro to ethics class will remember, Kant stresses that it is not enough to have one's actions be in accordance with morality, a shopkeeper might be honest because they think it is good for business, a person might be kind because they want to be liked, and so on, but one must be determined by it, by the categorical imperative. It is our inner motivation, and not the actions themselves that are most important. What Spinoza describes here is the exact opposite. As Macherey writes,

"Nevertheless, if one follows this line of reasoning to its logical conclusion, the result is that obedience is not at all natural—at least not in the sense of that positive, and so to speak causal, self-evidence to which reason has access. Not only does the cultivation of justice and charity have no need to appeal to such evidence in order to assert itself, but it succeeds in doing so only by grounding its practice on entirely different terrain—thus, if not by radically ignoring such evidence, then at least by bypassing it. From the standpoint adopted by Spinoza, the notion of a categorical imperative—or the strict sense of the word "imperative" as referring to an imperium—would therefore be tainted by a certain ambiguity, and indeed, in the final analysis, would be contradictory: the only true imperative would be the conditional one, linked to the criterion of utility as it operates on the plane of the mediate infinite mode—a concept that, conversely, would be utterly devoid of meaning on the plane of the immediate infinite mode."

These two concepts, mediate infinite mode and immediate infinite mode, play an important role in this book, they refer to the two causalities that define every mode, every finite thing, which is at once situated in a causal series effected by this or that thing, which is turn affected by another, and so on, that is "mediate infinity," but at the same time everything that exists is an expression of the infinite power of god or nature, an immediate infinity. This is similar to André Tosel's reflections on (in)finite in Spinoza. The point here is that obedience relates only to the former, to the infinite mediated, to be affected by others, and not to the immediate infinite, the tendency to perservere in one's being. As Macherey goes onto write, 

"Consequently, obedience pertains exclusively to action undertaken under the scrutiny and control of a sovereign power—specifically regarding its effects, and not its inner motivations. These motivations are of no concern whatsoever to the authority wielded by such a power, for they ultimately stem from an irrepressible impulse—unlimited in its original principle—namely, the innate tendency to persevere in one’s being to the fullest extent; this tendency, being naturally inherent in every individual, constitutes their natural right and cannot be stripped away without causing that individual to cease to exist."

This opposition between Kant and Spinoza could be more productively be understood as a difference between ethics and politics, or ethics and social life more broadly. In ethics intentions matter, but in politics, or social life, only the actions matter. In political or social life it does not matter on some level, why people conform to the law, out of fear of punishment or sense of social responsibility, what matters that they do, and any existing state probably utilizes multiple means, means for different people and even for the same people at different times. 

Of course this heterogeneity of means and methods disappears in the very "society effect" it produces, to draw on another common point of intersection of Spinoza and Marx, what we see is obedience, not its causes.   As Marx writes, "the taste of the porridge does not tell you who grew the oats..."The causes disappear in the effect they produce. I think that this offers another way to make sense of the social breakdown that I referred to at the beginning. I think many of us, believe we live in a society (to quote Seinfeld), and think that others do so as well. That their actions, all of those little acts of deference and accommodation, were due to a shared understanding of social belonging and commitment to shared social space. As Spinoza argues, we judge others from our own temperament, and thus when we act in a social manner, aware of the presence of others, and taking it into account, silencing our phone at the movie theater, holding open doors for others, saying "excuse me" to get by people and so on, we assume that others do so for the same reasons. However, it seems we are learning that many of these people were doing such things because they were afraid that they would be caught,  shamed, or harassed, if they violated these social norms. This motivation, acting out of social acceptance, is the most volatile and unstable. As soon as one person violates the norm without consequences, has a zoom meeting in a café without headphones, then everyone around them feels like that is possible as well. On a broader level, part of the appeal, and effect of Trump, is that his very existence in the highest office of US politics has been in undermining the very standards for acting, he has let everyone feel that it is okay to be crude, cruel, racist, and sexist. To put it into Freudian language, we did not elect a new superego, or even an ego ideal, some standard, but an id, which is why his violations of the norms of his office, and basic decency, only increase his appeal. He is the fantasy of being able to do anything and get a way with it. 
I do not want to end talking about Trump, but in thinking about all of this I am reminded of a passage from one of Marx's first published pieces, "On the Jewish Question" in which he writes the following, 

"The state abolishes, after its fashion, the distinctions established by birth, social rank, education, occupation, when it decrees that birth, social rank, education, occupation are non-political distinctions; when it proclaims, without regard to these distinctions, that every member of society is an equal partner in popular sovereignty, and treats all the elements which compose the real life of the nation from the standpoint of the state. But the state, none the less, allows private property, education, occupation, to act after their own fashion, namely as private property, education, occupation, and to manifest their particular nature . Far from abolishing these effective differences, it only exists so far as they are presupposed; it is conscious of being a political state and it manifests its universality only in opposition to these elements."

There are a lot of ways to make sense of this passage, and like all things in Marx's essay, it is overdetermined, provocative and problematic ideas dwell side by side, but I have always understood it as a statement of the limitations of the law as a social force. Declaring that property, social rank, or birth make no difference politically, to legally declare them to be irrelevant, has its effects, anyone can run for office, but it does not eliminate the existence of these hierarchies. They continue to have their effects, effects not just in the private life of individuals, but in political life as well. Anyone born in the US over thirty five can run for president, but only a few have the finances to fund their own campaign. 

Marx was drawing his distinction from the US, from the American revolution, which abolished certain claims of title or property as necessary to political life (while keeping others in place). He is referring to the eighteenth century. However, I think that his point can be extended to the nineteenth and twentieth, to the trajectory that moves through the abolition of slavery to the civil rights act and beyond, actions which have made distinctions of race, gender, and sexuality "non-political" distinctions. In other words, the process by which certain kinds of discrimination were rendered illegal and socially unacceptable. To make certain actions of discrimination illegal, unprofitable, or even socially unacceptable, is not the same as eliminating them, they continue to exist and have their effects in social life and in the hearts and minds of people. (I am reminded of Spinoza on the limits of power over speech and thought).  I think that many of us believed that racism suffered some heavy blows from the period of reconstruction to the civil rights era, but we are seeing now that racism did not disappear even as it was stripped of legal enforcement and cultural recognition, it just retreated. No one wanted to be seen as a racist, but that did not mean that they stopped harboring racist views and ideals. The same could be said for the revolutionary transformations around the status of gender, and sexuality, these revolutions were more about legal norms and social customs than actual changes of attitudes and ideals. 

On this point, and to bring Marx and Spinoza, together, I am reminded of Spinoza's caution that it is never enough to cut off the head of the tyrant, without changing the social relations that underly his rule. "This, then, is the reason why a people has often succeeded in changing tyrants, but never in abolishing tyranny or substituting another form of government for monarchy." As many have argued, Spinoza's anti-revolutionary claim here is one in which revolutions fail because they do not go far enough, do not change the social relations which tyranny rests on. I think that we can say the same things about the series of transformations referenced above, which changed the legal structure of discrimination and racism, but left its social basis intact. As Franck Fischbach writes in Faire Ensemble: Reconscruction sociale et sortie du capitalisme, drawing on Spinoza, "Individuals will not come together institutionally, legally, and politically unless they are prepared for, supported in, and shaped by social relationships that enable, foster, and inform social practices of reciprocal complementarity, mutual utility, mutual fittingness, and mutual aid." Politics is downstream from the political, in the social and economic relations that produce the relations and activities that make solidarity and recognition possible. 

We are learning now, the hard way, how incomplete the transformations of the nineteenth and twentieth century were, how much they affected actions and not thoughts, were inscribed in laws but not practices, and how much further we need to go if we really want to live in a society. Or, more to the point, to live in a society that lives up to our ideals. More to the point, a society which has as its economic basis isolation, individuation, and competition, is ill suited to function as a society. 

The following text may be understood by some readers as a crude comparison. I want to make clear from the outset, therefore, that its intention is to defend the benefits of responsible integration into the international market—an integration that does not diminish national interests, that does not ignore the traditions of peoples, in favor of planning for the country’s development and in the face of the prevailing anarchy of the market, whose uncertainty has marked recent generations of Costa Ricans, though we young people feel it more acutely.

In 1949, the People's Republic of China and the Costa Rica’s Second Republic were founded just a few months apart. The coincidence may seem anecdotal, but when examined closely, it reveals something deeper: two very different societies that, at similar historical moments (the end of World War II and the founding of a new global order), found an ideological framework capable of articulating the national spirit and directing it toward a collective project. That similarity is worth celebrating.

In China, the ideology that channeled that impulse was Marxism, understood not only as an economic doctrine but also as an expression of sovereignty, cohesion, and patriotic affirmation in the face of a century of foreign intervention. In Costa Rica, that role was played by social democracy (together with the social doctrine of the Catholic Church), which also functioned as a national project oriented toward development, stability, and social justice. Both frameworks shared a fundamental intuition: that development could not be left to the spontaneity of the market and that the state had to assume an active role as an engine of cohesion and modernization in societies marked by dependency. It is worth remembering that, at the time, China was emerging from decades of colonial domination, while Costa Rica still operated under the logic of a “banana republic”; in both cases, it was the spirit of seeking freedom and self-determination that drove the revolutions that gave rise to both republics in 1949.

In the case of Costa Rica, that vision translated into constitutional social guarantees, public education and healthcare, and a bold decision for its time: the nationalization of banking, which made it possible to finance national companies, housing, social programs, and the formation of a broad middle class.
In the case of China, Socialism with Chinese characteristics, adapted to a continental scale and very different material conditions, over time supported what international organizations recognize as one of the largest reductions in poverty in modern history, lifting more than 800 million people out of poverty, and positioning the country as one of the major economies of the 21st century.
 
The key to the comparison between the birth of both republics lies precisely in that historical equivalence: two distinct national projects that, at their origin, sought to build internal cohesion, modernization, and a sense of collective purpose based on their own political vision, adapted to their respective conditions. Neither copied foreign models literally. Both combined state planning, national investment, and, over time, openness to the global market.

The decisive difference came over the following decades. In China, that ideological framework has been maintained and adapted to new historical and economic realities: opening to international trade occurred without abandoning planning or state control over strategic sectors, and foreign investment was used as a tool for internal development, not as a substitute for it.

In Costa Rica, by contrast, that framework gradually weakened and lost centrality. Entry into structural adjustment programs in the 1980s, associated with the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, brought benefits that should not be minimized, but it also gradually displaced the logic of a national project toward an economy increasingly dependent on decisions made outside our borders.
Today, that loss of centrality has visible costs. When a multinational company decides to leave, the country has little capacity to respond. Tax incentives tend to favor foreign capital over domestic producers. And development is too often conceived in terms of what external markets demand, rather than what the country actually needs.

It is not about demonizing the relationship with United States, which has been a source of cooperation, academic exchange, investment, and opportunities for thousands of Costa Ricans. Nor is it about idealizing China, which is today seen by experts as an attractive alternative in terms of investment and financing. The issue is something else: recovering the ability to choose and to put Costa Rica first. That begins, above all, with rebuilding its own political framework that once again gives centrality to national development.

Seventy-seven years later, the two republics that were born in 1949 remind us of something simple: development is neither inherited nor imported. It is planned, sustained, and above all, built from an independent political vision that responds to the common interest of the homeland.

Author
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Ximena Madrigal Amador – Historiadora (UCR), comunicadora social y analista internacional.
@rabot_rants