The Harmonian Spiritualists—led by visionaries like Andrew Jackson Davis and John Murray Spear—embodied a radical fusion of spiritual idealism and materialist praxis, a synthesis that Joerg Rieger might term practical spiritual materialism. Spear described himself as a practical Spiritualist, emphasizing that his engagement with spirit guides was not merely interpretive but transformative.

The spirits informed him that the time had come for a "comprehensive and eminently practical plan of exchanges" to be unveiled to humanity. His follower, Simon C. Hewitt, argued that while séance phenomena like table-tipping had their place, Spiritualists should aspire to something higher. Material problems—tyranny, inequality, violence, and ignorance—were understood as symptoms of Earth's disharmony with the divine order. To remedy this, benevolent spirits formed an "Association of Beneficents" and appointed Spear as their earthly representative. These spirits, described as "grand pivotal minds," saw themselves in a "parental or advisory relation" to humanity, guiding select individuals toward a reconstructed social order based on equality, justice, and harmony. Alonzo E. Newton, another follower, reported that the Beneficents sought to work through a "divine marriage and holy association of persons" to secure these ideals. Though skeptics might dismiss their vision, the Beneficents predicted that an emerging "divine Socialism" would ultimately realize it.

Far from retreating into esoteric escapism, they sought to rewire society through technology, cooperative economics, and spirit-guided labor, anticipating contemporary critiques of capitalism’s disenchantment of the world. Their project was not merely theological but infrastructural: an attempt to clone heaven on earth, as François Laruelle might say, by forcing the divine into material form.

Harmonial Spiritualism emerged as a critical enchanted materialism in response to the crises of the market revolution and the failures of clerical religion, uniting spiritual vision with materialist praxis. It critiqued capitalism’s contradictions—exploitation, inequality, and alienation—while seeking to collapse the boundary between spirit and matter through spirit communication, cooperative economics, and the appropriation of emerging technologies like the telegraph as models for divine-human collaboration. By fusing socialist critique with metaphysical innovation, the Harmonians envisioned a world where sacred harmony was not merely transcendent but materially enacted, offering a radical alternative to the disenchantments of industrial modernity.

Today, their synthesis of spiritual solidarity and anti-capitalist material practice offers a model for confronting late capitalism’s crises—from algorithmic alienation to climate collapse—by re-enchanting politics as a site of collective liberation rather than passive despair. The rise of AI mysticism, pseudo-religious online conspiratorial movements like QAnon, and the neoliberal co-optation of New Age spirituality, evinced by the myriad of spiritual self help social-media influencers, demonstrate that the left must engage seriously with enchantment—not as superstition, but as contested terrain where the future of solidarity, reason, and revolutionary hope will be decided.

Spiritual Telegraphs and Digital Ghosts: The Politics of Enchanted Technology

Spear and his followers saw the telegraph not as a tool of alienation but as a metaphor for cosmic connection—a "spiritual wire" transmitting divine blueprints. Far from rejecting modernity, they embraced technological advancements—such as the telegraph—as evidence of progress that mirrored the rapidity of spiritual thought. For them, spirit communication was akin to an ethereal telegraph system, with celestial beings transmitting plans for human happiness and societal improvement. Any organizational model that failed to align with the divine blueprint was, in their view, inherently defective. Spear and his followers thus saw themselves as divine mechanics, fine-tuning the engine of society with spiritually informed technology.

Today, their vision resonates uncannily with the digital age. Machine learning programs like ChatGPT or Google’s Gemini function as modern-day spirit telegraphs, conjuring language from algorithmic ether. When Google engineer Blake Lemoine claimed in 2022 that LaMDA had a soul, he echoed Spear’s conviction that intelligence transcends its material housing. Both moments reveal a persistent cultural longing to re-enchant technology—to dissolve the boundary between the mystical and the computational.

Yet this longing is politicized. The Harmonians’ techno-spiritualism was explicitly anti-capitalist: their "New Motor" was meant to liberate labor from exploitation, not to consolidate corporate power. In contrast, today’s AI is deployed by Silicon Valley oligarchs, its "miracles" harnessed for profit extraction. The difference underscores Rieger’s warning: enchantment without collective ownership risks becoming another tool of domination.

Communitarian Socialism and the Dialectics of Harmony

The Harmonians emerged from a broader 19th-century zeitgeist where Spiritualism, Fourierist socialism, and labor activism converged. While scholars have examined Spiritualism’s cultural politics—particularly its ties to abolitionism and women’s rights—less attention has been paid to its economic dimensions. The early nineteenth century was a period of profound transformation, marked by capitalist expansion, technological innovation, and social upheaval. Against this backdrop, Andrew Jackson Davis’s Harmonial Philosophy emerged as a synthesis of spiritual materialism and scientistic positivism, offering experiential proof of metaphysical truths while addressing the era’s material anxieties. The fact that Davis devoted an entire section of his *Principles of Nature* to socialism underscores its centrality to Spiritualist thought. His system, blending Swedenborgian cosmology, Mesmerist biology, and Fourierist socialism, reflected broader cultural and political-economic currents in the Northern states, where the dislocations of the Market Revolution fueled interest in alternative social and spiritual movements.

Harmonian Spiritualism was part of a long tradition of enchanted radicalism. Many American reformers were deeply religious because they perceived the temporal world as disharmonious, while the spirit world offered a radical alternative that could be materially realized through spirit communications. My approach aligns with new materialist theories that emphasize matter’s enchanting power but combines this with a critical economic perspective. For Davis and his followers, enchantment signified a unity of spiritual and material realms capable of achieving a harmonial future. His non-dualistic spiritual materialism viewed the temporal and spiritual as different frequencies of the same substance, reflecting a Swedenborgian macrocosm-microcosm philosophy.

​As Thomas Nichols observed, “Spiritualism everywhere tends to Socialism.” Communities like Brook Farm and Hopedale—where many Harmonians, including Spear, circulated—experimented with cooperative economics as both a material necessity and a spiritual imperative. The market revolution and the economic panic of 1837 had spurred an explosion of utopian socialist communities in the 1840s, with Brook Farm transitioning into a Fourierist "Phalanx" in 1844. Many of the same individuals involved in Fourierist experiments also participated in Spiritualism, including Spear, who had ties to Adin Ballou’s Hopedale Community and Bronson Alcott’s Fruitlands. This tradition of spiritual communalism provided the foundation for Harmonial Spiritualism. The spirits themselves organized as an "Association of Beneficents," advocating for what they called "divine socialism": a world where, as Alonzo Newton proclaimed, “Equality, Justice, and Social Harmony” were systematized through sacred collectivism.

This was no utopian abstraction. As Jan Rehmann emphasizes, effective resistance requires both structural critique and transformative agency. The Harmonians’ séances were not passive rituals but strategic planning sessions—what Rieger might call spiritual labor organizing. Their belief in correspondence—the idea that spiritual harmony must manifest in material redistribution—mirrors contemporary movements like the eco-neo-paganism, which treats environmental justice as both ecological and economic rebalancing.

Mystic Materialism: Laruelle, Bennett, and the Vibrant World

​The Harmonians’ metaphysics rejected dualisms. Like Jane Bennett’s enchanted materialism, they saw matter as “vibrant”—charged with divine energy. Magnetic springs and telegraph wires were not dead objects but sympathetic conduits, akin to Bennett’s “far-from-equilibrium systems.” Their spatial designs—circular layouts, feasting grounds—mirrored Shaker celestial maps, materializing cosmology as praxis.
The Harmonian Spiritualists' worldview can be illuminated by three key concepts: Emanuel Swedenborg’s *usus* (use), François Laruelle’s immanent spirit, and Jane Bennett’s enchanted materialism.
Swedenborg taught that all creation exists to serve a purpose, and that society coheres through mutual service. The Kiantone Harmonians thus saw séances not as ends in themselves but as means to make spiritual knowledge materially useful.

Laruelle’s concept of immanent spirit aligns with their belief that mystical knowledge must be practically applied rather than confined to transcendent abstraction. Laruelle’s non-philosophy sharpens this analysis. Spear’s work was a series of clones: penal reform → spirit mediumship → Harmonian socialism. Each iteration was not a copy but a fresh, immanent rupture, “a knowledge full of ignorance” emerging from lived struggle. His machines (and their legendary 2010 reappearance in a Greeley attic) symbolize this unresolved tension: Can the switch still be flipped? Is the "New Era" merely dormant?

Bennett’s notion of enchanted materialism—a state of wonder where matter vibrates with transcendent potential—resonates with the Harmonians’ view of their community as a site of "everyday enchantment," where magnetic mineral waters served as both physical remedy and spiritual conduit. Jane Bennett defines enchanted materialism as a worldview in which matter is animate, endlessly flowing, and capable of producing wonder. David Morgan’s concept of material religion complements this, arguing that enchantment arises from recognizing power within things. Both perspectives help explain why the Harmonians saw technology and spirit communication as intertwined. James Frazer’s notion of sympathetic magic—where like produces like, and contact transmits spiritual power—further elucidates their belief in the material efficacy of spiritual practices.

Douglas Winiarski’s analysis of Shaker feasting grounds provides a useful parallel: just as celestial maps guided the Shakers’ material practices, Kiantone’s circular spatial organization reflected its spiritual cosmology. The Harmonians’ approach exemplifies Bennett’s argument that modernity did not eradicate enchantment but reconfigured it, with physical systems at "far-from-equilibrium states" exhibiting a "strange agency" that blurred the boundaries between matter and spirit.

Where traditional materialism focuses on labor and exchange value, my approach introduces a metaphysical dimension: the capacity of objects to enchant and accumulate spiritual capital. Marx’s critique of Feuerbach—that human activity itself must be understood as objective—points toward a non-dualistic view of agency. The Harmonians’ spiritual materialism went further, insisting that spirit was material and that collective consciousness shaped historical change.

I reject the liberal Enlightenment bias that privileges individual agency over collective movements. The Harmonians’ vision emerged from a dialectical tension between material inequality and spiritual harmony, culminating in a zeitgeist conducive to radical transformation. Their efforts were not individualistic but collective, responding to the failures of the market system by drawing on communal traditions. This counter-hegemonic impulse, antithetical to both Northern capitalism and Southern slavery, contributed to the broader currents that led to the Civil War and emancipation.

Conclusion: The Unfinished Project of Enchanted Revolution

The Harmonians’ legacy is a provocation. They exemplify a critical enchanted materialism that refuses to separate spirit from matter or individual from collective agency—a philosophy as vital today as in their era of telegraphs and utopian communes. Their synthesis of Fourierist socialism and Spiritualist practice reveals a persistent American tradition of seeking harmony through radical re-enchantment, one that directly confronted capitalism’s disenchantments by uniting spiritual communion with cooperative economics and technological innovation. By grounding their vision in both scientific discourse and utopian socialism, they modeled an alternative to modernity’s fractures—one that speaks directly to our crises of algorithmic alienation, ecological collapse, and the spiritual void of late capitalism.

Their failures (Spear’s defunct machines) and folklore (the Greeley hoarder’s attic) testify to an unfulfilled desire: to make the world vibrate with sacred possibility again. Today, as AI mysticism and conspiratorial movements like QAnon colonize the spiritual imagination, and as neoliberal self-help gurus privatize transcendence, the left faces a stark choice: cede enchantment to reactionaries and tech oligarchs, or reclaim it as terrain for collective liberation. The Harmonians remind us that disenchantment is not inevitable but engineered—a political project that serves capital by severing spirit from labor, ethics from economics.

Yet the wires remain live. From unions adopting spiritual rhetoric (“blessed are the organized”) to eco-socialists invoking planetary solidarity, Harmonian impulses persist. The task is not to revive séances but to clone their radical core: a politics where solidarity is sacramental, technology is democratized, and revolution is a realignment of cosmic and material orders. As Spear’s spirits declared, “The hour has fully come”—not as nostalgia, but as a challenge. In an age where Silicon Valley peddles digital animism and the right weaponizes spiritual anxiety, the left must forge an enchanted materialism capable of answering the deepest human longings: for connection, for justice, for a world remade.

In the Middle East, a new regional neoliberal order has led to colossal upward transfers of wealth, greatening the rift between the working class and the national capitalist class in every Arab state, and more importantly, digging a greater gap of inequality between the Arab States in North Africa and the Levant on one side, and Gulf Arab monarchies on the other.

In this economy, a major part of Palestinian, Egyptian, Lebanese, Syrian, Jordanian, and other Arab labor migrated to form a second-class citizenry  in Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar, Bahrain, and Oman — the lands of absolute princes and sultans. Poverty, war, and austerity rather than pilgrimage drive this Gulf-bound mass migration. In effect, the Arab region under neoliberalism became the first human experiment in neo-feudalism. Though by any objective measure, the system in the business-driven Gulf is late-stage capitalism, Gulf elites uphold the feudal codes privileging clan, family, and the superior status of those native to a Peninsula that is blessed by being home to Mecca. Gulf elites also pursue an interest in information technology, which was part of the initial appeal of the Abraham Accords’ (henceforth, AA) promise of tightening ties with tech-hub Israel. Put these factors together, and the resulting mix is a fascination with techno-feudal lifestyles under capitalism.

The Israel-Palestine problem and its possible resolution can only be understood against this wider regional backdrop. Unfortunately, those invested in the Western debate have thus far shown little inclination to take the bigger picture into account — it is inevitably more attractive to zone in on atrocities in the Holy Land. The loudest voices in the West are divided into two major sectarian fronts: on the one hand, an agglomeration of well-meaning Western activists, and their more powerful opponents, the reconstituted neoconservative contingent, whose language and prerogatives remain unchanged twenty-four years into the failed War on Terror. During his tenure, Biden situated himself firmly amid the neoconservatives even if the DSA democrats who voted for him identify with an anti-imperial sentiment of the kind expressed by podcasters like Abbie Martin or Max Blumenthal, who sometimes dangerously oversimplify the Middle East. Locked into these narrow perspectives, wherein either US-Israeli imperialism or Islamic fundamentalism become different theodicies or origin-theories explaining all that is evil in the world, both factions only stray further from understanding the tendencies and historical-material conditions that are motivating some very different strains of anti-capitalism and anti-imperialism currently burgeoning in Middle Eastern civil societies.

A visible segment of the intellectual sphere in the West preemptively accuses Arab civil societies of “the anti-imperialism of fools”: for critics such as Gad Saad on the right, and Chris Cutrone and Moishe Postone on the left, Arab civil societies are purely anti-Western and antisemitic, and crudely conflate the critique of capitalism with the demonization of Jews and Westerners. This paternalistic view underestimates the capacity of Arabs to thoroughly understand that their main political opponent is the Arab regional neoliberal caste in the Gulf Monarchies, and their ruling allies in several poverty-stricken Arab countries.

A signature of the Trump administrations’ foreign policymaking has been the struggle to reconfigure the neoliberal class so it can become thoroughly inclusive of Israel. Before the October 7th 2023 Hamas attacks, Benjamin Netanyahu had not been making any effort to conceal the pro-business nature of the AA: in the UN General Assembly that year, Netanyahu boasted about the economics of the AA, claiming that they are a tool to create an alternative to the China Belt and Roads Initiative by carving out trade-corridors between the Arabian Sea and the Mediterranean. Arab leftists opposed AA, not only because this construct circumvents Palestine, but also because the AA overlooks the Arab word’s silent majorities. The Arab Left fears not only that joining the AA could strengthen Israel — even more so, Arab Leftists fear the AA would embolden the Arab neoliberal class.
Western pundits and members of the expertocracy like Daniel Ben Ami pretend that Israel remains isolated in the region, despite that few of the oil-producing countries which once boycotted Israel and the US during the Yom Kippur war would today endeavor so much as a ripple in the supply chain. Even Erdogan, despite his throaty condemnations of Israel, this year welcomed Netanyahu’s airplane to use Turkish airspace and facilitates fuel from Azerbaijan into the Israeli war-machine. Arab civil societies--meaning non-State popular movements--understood that the beginnings of normalization with Israel and the embrace of neoliberalism came to the region arm-in-arm, as far back as the 1970s.

It is tempting for those acquainted with the critique of Orientalism to dismiss a thinker like the late Fouad Ajami as a simplistic Uncle Tom or “house Arab”— after all, the Stanford Hoover Institute professor wrote op-eds vocally supporting the Iraq invasion, and became a Washington-blob insider, advising policymakers on “the Arab mind”. But Ajami represented a more complex stage of decadence: he was a pioneering "Lebanon-First” isolationist, who believed the best way forward for Lebanon was to cut ties with the liabilities of international solidarity and Pan-Arabism. Solidarity with Arab and Afro-Asian causes were but the sandbags keeping the hot-air-balloon of Lebanese bourgeois democracy from heavenward ascent.  For that reason, he praised the peace and open-door initiatives of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat. Sadat proved essential to burying the ideology of Pan-Arabism and creating a nationalist-isolationist state-based regional order, where every Middle Eastern country has a closed-door policy with its neighbors — limited cooperation, no costly solidarity, and no welcoming of refugees from other Arab nations — while maintaining a red-carpet policy for Israel and Western investment. Ajami even commended the isolationist, counter-revolutionary tendencies of Syrian president Hafez Al-Asad, the father of Bashar Al-Assad and (according to the BBC’s Adam Curtis) likely mastermind of a string of suicide bombings the world over. That father-son duo introduced neoliberalism in Syria. Like many other Arab dictatorships, Syria’s ruling family had historically secured cooperation from citizens not merely through terror and coercion but through its generous and functioning welfare-state policies, but also wished to be conciliatory with the 1990s zeitgeist of neoliberalism.

By 2005, the Ba’ath Party’s 10th regional conference announced that “the social market economy” was replacing socialism as its economic philosophy, aiming for “middle class job creation”  via the private sector. Assad said it was time Syria’s economy became “more flexible”, adding that “for us, socialism is not the socialism of Karl Marx, i.e. the ownership of the means of production, but more of a general concept of equal opportunity[…]” This justified Damascus’ subsidy and pension cuts—bad news especially during years of drought.
 
Internally weakened by austerity, Syria could no longer adequately defend itself against international jihadism.
Many individuals in the Arab world might have adopted conspiratorial antisemitic thinking to explain the rapprochement of their dictatorial governments with Israel. For example, not along ago the Muslim Brotherhood accused El-Sisi of being Jewish, and El-Sisi retorted calling the MB “Masonic”—which is a coded way of saying “Judeo-Masonic”. Arab regimes also benefit from a popular misconception that Israel alone has the keys to Washington and is therefore all-powerful, since that logically excuses these governments from going beyond bluster to help the Palestinians. Yet in the post-ideological era, normalization with Israel—without demanding any preconditions of a resolution for the Palestinian issue—has been a bargaining chip in negotiations between the Arab neoliberal class and the US in the region, alongside the hope for tech-benefits to be acquired from a friendlier Israeli security state. Israel had always been able to conduct relationships with some Arab states, including the most vehement ideological enemies. The open declaration and celebration of these relationships, however, and Arab states’ moving from their policies of walking on eggshells to not anger Israel, towards joining Israel’s staunchest allies, has become beneficial to a careerist professional-managerial class in Washington, Tel Aviv, and Arab capitals including Ramallah. This transformation has degraded the peace-process into a fetishized commodity for a predominantly right-wing audience (including antisemites); it is telling that Sadat’s visit to Jerusalem in 1977 has been reportedly described as an event similar in its historical importance to the 1969 moon landing.               

The 2011 Arab Spring was a nightmare for Arab advocates of the neoliberal economic model because it exposed systemic weaknesses. If Pan-Arabism — and its goal of egalitarian regional-autarkic economic integration — erupted into crisis in the 1970s, anti-Pan-Arab populism, which served to prioritize the interests of each local national capitalist class through its connection to global capital, only entered its own phase of crisis after 2011. Back then, the US under Obama withdrew support of Egyptian dictator Mubarak, leaving him unable to fend off popular wrath, which temporarily ended the Egyptian ideology of isolationist populism. With the fall of the “Egypt-Firsters,” Riyadh and the United Arab Emirates were dismayed, and feared Egypt reclaiming its role as a powerful state competing with Gulf Arab Power, in a similar manner to what Nasser did in the 1960s. It was no surprise in 2018, that Saudi strongman Mohammad Bin Salman would express his disdain toward Abdel-Nasser, comparing him to the Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran.

The frontmen of the Arab neoliberal class have helmed a regional counter-revolution, taking advantage of the regional wealth gap, to cause huge disruption in weaker Arab states. The 2011 revolutionaries included liberal center-leftists, communists, Pan-Arabists, and Islamists. While the UAE and Riyadh sought to undermine all these factions, Qatar wanted to marshal Islamists across the region to take the reins of counterrevolution for Qatari interests. These Gulf connivances made the Arab Spring fail. The aftermath was the reinvigoration of a more extreme version of Arab isolationist populisms, which allowed the enlargement of national security states, the complete destruction of the remnants of 20th-century populist state capitalism, and the full movement towards an ultra-neoliberal authoritarian state capitalism. As part of these changes, the neoliberal Arab class has adopted an approach of hyper-normalization with Israel, thinking that pro-Palestinian ideology would shorten the life expectancies of their regimes while a pro-Israeli stance might yield longevity, among other fruits. The “Arab Spring” showed that the power of the average Arab regime has proven incapable of sustaining itself without alliances with the US and Israel.

Total “normalization" between Riyadh and Tel Aviv — only temporarily put on ice by the Gaza genocide — meant that Israel has officially gotten involved in class-warfare across the Mashreq, while still engaged in a colonial war against Palestinians. That colonial war, however, makes class war more unmanageable because it undermines the public credibility of the Arab neoliberal class, who rather be seen as emancipators and as patriotic bastions of pride. One example is the Sudanese coup-regime’s neutralization of relations with Israel just before the genocide: Sudanese officers’ circles have often hoped such agreements would grant Khartoum legitimacy on the international stage despite the unpopularity of neutrality. After October 7th, there is no doubt that rebel groups in Sudan have successfully leveraged local discontent with the AA.

On the other hand, there has been a staggering shift in Saudi society in preparation for normalization with Israel. While Riyadh’s foreign policy still instrumentalizes the hollowed-out shell of an ethnically diverse Pan-Arabism and Pan-Islamism as ideological tools to achieve its international objectives, the Saudis in effect have become isolationists to the extent of adopting strict Arabian “peninsular ethnonationalism.” Ever since introduction of the AA, the Saudi loyalist propaganda machine unleashed an army of online trolls, bots, and influencers--for example, Emirati Hassan Sajwani tweeting lines like “why can’t Palestinian protestors just vacate #AlAqsaMosque and simply go home?” Gulf paparazzi, even soap opera screenwriters spread an image of Palestinians as parasitic ingrates who scheme to hold back progress for the very Arab societies that had in the past sheltered and stood up for Palestinians. This state of mind is best summed up in the words of chief of Dubai's police in the UAE, Dahi Khalfan, saying that “Nine million Jews sic [in Israel, according to his estimates] are better [for the UAE] than 400 million Arabs because of their superior scientific, financial, and political capabilities.”

The words of Saudi blogger Raof Al Sa'een are most revealing on the ethnonationalist nature of Saudi ideology, in terms that strike uncanny resonances with 1930s European eugenicists describing Jews:

You [Palestinians] do not have a cause nor a land, this is the Land of Israel in the Quran, and you are Roman remnants; Mongols, Turks, Circassians, Armenians, Gypsies, you have no claim over Palestine, Palestine is an Israeli state for the People of Israel. The People of Israel are the sons of Issac and we Arabs are the sons of Ismael, both are the sons of Abraham, they are our cousins, but you are outsiders among us… Yitzhak Shamir, Ariel Sharon, and Golda Meir were heroes, but Netanyahu is a coward because he did not burn you [Palestinians], I don't know why he keeps stockpiling his weapons. Netanyahu; burn those gangs, miscreants, and remnants for you, for us, and for the world to be spared. Why are you keeping them alive? Why won't you spare the world their harm? If you are a real man and a hero, spare the world from those dirty lowlifes. Why do you have all these weapons Netanyahu if you will not use them to finish them off? Finish off the child before his mother, finish off the elderly before the young, finish off the child before his father, and spare us those who harmed and overwhelmed us… among the rats, there is no clean rat.

After the October 7th attacks, Al Sa'een reiterated his genocidal rhetoric:

Don't allow the Palestinian into your country, or else they would corrupt your morals, your mentality, your behavior, your education, your country, and with one phone call from your enemy, the Palestinian would start bombings, with one phone call, they would start riots, with one phone call they would become terrorists, don't let the Palestinian near your country if you want the best for your country and your people, expel all of them, let them go live in Europe, let's them go back from the place they came from.

Reading Al’Saeen, one cannot but conclude that regional inferiority complexes —colonialism’s residue — are as potent as weapons of mass destruction and far more influential in determining the geopolitics of these areas.
Slavoj Zizek said that Palestinians are Jews among the Arabs. He is right in the sense that Palestinians have been the embodiment of Arab diasporic cosmopolitanism, the backbone of Pan-Arabist internationalism. This is also right in a darker sense: 2025 is the 1930s for Palestinians, not only in Gaza or in the West Bank but across the region, where Der Palästinenser becomes the new Der Jude: the enemy of the people. As the European Jews before them found themselves trapped between Stalin’s Soviet “realism” (Stalin’s early pacts with Hitler in Poland) and European Fascism, the Palestinians today, once outside of Palestine, are caught in the complex and hostile web of a cold war between Iran and the Gulf.

The Right and Left in America do not understand such extreme vulnerability. The Left will go on fetishizing Palestinian national identity mostly through its aesthetic accoutrements, by yearning hopelessly for a one-state solution under capitalism without taking into consideration the need for socialism to create true social change in all of the Middle East. The fixation on a “one-state solution” as the only short-term way out of a bloodbath, is a form of idealism that represents the hope for achieving “Zionism in reverse”—a belief that the international community will be swayed into supporting a situation in which Israelis must agree to becoming the Jewish minority under a Palestinian majority government, without war immediately reigniting.

​This ambition in the pro-Palestinian left predicates a mistaken belief that the nation-state can be in and of itself an innocent formation, rather than defined by historic crimes. One need not look far for refutations of that idea. Instead, the left should want the borders between small countries like Lebanon, Israel, and a viable Palestinian state, to eventually wither into irrelevancy—but that process might require a generation of Israelis who grow up outside of military uniform, living through the civilizing transition of a post-occupation “Cold Peace” before the social consciousness, and Israeli cultural hegemony, are changed by new generations, in the form of a moral and countercultural reckoning with the Israeli past of racism, married to the will to make these borders and ethnic differences less relevant in the Levant. Because states are inherently flawed and reactionary constructs, the left cannot have a state solution as its maximal goal and instead aim for the longer process implicated by the slogan “two states, one future”—the viable  post-occupation Palestinian state bordering on Israel is the beginning, rather than the end of a reconciliation struggle. The aforementioned position however, will be quickly dismissed as liberal-Zionism or as “normalization” by the average activist.

The right, meanwhile, is trying to revive the Abraham Accords which the world suspected dead on October 7th. In its endeavor, the American Republican vanguard presidency has taken the side of Arab neoliberals in the regional class war. This is consistent with the Trump administration’s policy of enforcing economic nationalism and protectionism at home for the US market, while imposing the return of neoliberalism abroad — from traditional subjects of the Monroe Doctrine like El Salvador and Argentina, to the Middle East.

American and Western radicals of all stripes should learn to put themselves in the shoes of Arab civil societies, for if they have the privilege to think from the comfort of their podcast streaming-studios about revolutionary strategies to overcome the capitalist managerial politics of the Republicans and Democrats in the world's most powerful industrial economy, Arab Leftists and democrats are fighting a desperate struggle to survive a ruthless class war, waged upon them by the most powerful neofeudal lords. You can snub their struggle and spare your solidarity, or you can reduce the scope of that solidarity to mere sentimental commentary on the “Holy Land" — all at the risk that their present will one day be your future. Government crackdowns on protestors’ free speech in the US and Europe, alongside the expansion of Palantir—allegedly used to by Israel to enable AI killings of Gazans, currently being floated by Trump as a databank for monitoring Americans—suggest as much.

The addition of Marxist-Leninist thought, Dialectical and Historical Materialism, the theory and practice of dialectics has been a gift from the heavens in the recent years of my life. I have achieved personal growth spiritually, ideologically and mentally, which then led me to taking steps such as joining a Communist organization, an action that never crossed my mind previously.

The works in the classical texts, when I began first reading in 2023, prior to knowing of Midwestern Marx and Infrared helped reconcile questions I had been lamenting over for years. How did the world work? What is responsible for strife and conflict in the world, and can things be done to make it better? Study discussions since joining the party have hammered in key concepts and material that must be studied and built upon.
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Dialectical interdependence and material relations allowed me to understand and comprehend men such as our founding fathers, and Joseph Stalin, and how there are ways for the masses to organize, and that throughout history concrete change such as seen in China today can only occur when direct interests and relations are properly understood in a universal framework.

In 2017 I entered the workforce as a teenager, since then I have only done proletarian work. I’ve gone through healthcare factory work, clothing factory work, rental services as a flyer, to today where I currently work as a Postman for USPS, in a Clerk position.

Everyday is something new, yet the same in the plant in regards to the logistical troubles and personal strife seen throughout the night. I witness 1 woman doing the work of many daily, due to a shortage of workers. Equipment constantly failing due to not upgrading machinery. Old equipment, divisions between workers, etc, I could go on.
Without the help of the writings of Engels, Marx and Lenin there would be no comprehension to this anarchy of production. Even Mao’s “Combat Liberalism”, which explains liberal tendencies such as gossip and lack of discipline found occurring in party organizations I witness inside the workplace. Centering in on the issue of worker shortage, modern economic circumstances place us in the world post NAFTA, the crushing of labor unions and public institutions.

Our industrial base has been depleted and broken, and while the mailing industry has seen decline in its volume, billions of parcels still need to be processed and delivered. Despite these demands, the USPS faces a worker shortage which causes delays in deliveries and stress for both career and non-career employees. As a pre-career employee, I am placed on the bottom rung in which I must do the work of multiple positions. I and many others are not afforded the same protections as “regulars”, the position was essentially made to be an auxiliary worker that can be used any way.

Regular employees have been under the yoke of bourgeois management for too long, causing them to burnout and work less and not as hard, which can foster division. The “Industrial Reserve Army”, kernels of which can be found in “Wage Labour and Capital” is a constant threat, as being let go can occur for slight infractions (such as needing reduced hours for required medical purposes) and despite how they say new people won’t be hired, spots are open and filled.

There are material issues the post office faces, ranging from logistical to managerial. The industry requires a complete overhaul, a radical solution which is only found in the nationalization of industry and a Dictatorship of the Proletariat. The modern American industrial workplace is a place with many struggles, in which workers discuss among each other. Though they may not be aware of it yet, the spirit of American Marxism is found in them.

In and outside the workplace, I have found to believe that if one indulges in a pursuit of knowledge particularly concerning literature in relation to American concepts, you will be able to relate to your coworkers and community in a much more grounded way. Carlos Garrido’s reference to Vladimir Lenin’s Speech to the Youth Communist League found in “Why We Need American Marxism” has been instilled in my spirit: “You can become a Communist only when you enrich your mind with a knowledge of all the treasures created by mankind.”

Since picking up texts such as Lincoln’s address at Cooper Union and Scripture, I have been able to relate in a material sense to the history of this country. The Bible is the book that has perhaps influenced American society the most, with it being read by the Puritans and taught down through the generations. Today we, including me at one point in time, are alienated from each other due to the weight of Finance Capital, leading to stress, debt and being constantly overworked.

We may not be as widely read as the Puritans in their day, but Americans are still familiar with the text, and by becoming acquainted in a genuine manner, we can appeal and relate to working class interests in ways that can be understood by all. Our spirit of 1776 and a love for the country is still found in the industrial base. Despite what purity-fetished brained western Marxists may say, indulging in Historical Nihilism would only lead to division between the working class and our party. Having an appreciation and connection to both country and countrymen is necessary to overcome class divisions and concentrate our interests.

Things must be understood in a dialectical manner and applied in a practical, pragmatic way. Reading and discussing theory and text with party cadre allows one to connect the modern problems we face today as a society. We must use the tools of Historical and Dialectical Materialism, Marxist-Leninist thought at our disposal to analyze and comprehend our situation in our unique American context, and as we continue forward continue to foster a development and foundation in our workplace and communities.

Author
swordorball is a Floridian Postman for USPS. He is a committed cadre member of the Florida Chapter of the American Communist Party. You can find him on X: @maskandarms.

Among the most influential philosophical inheritances within Marxist thought lies the dialectical method, which Karl Marx critically appropriated from G.W.F. Hegel. While Hegelian dialectics unfolded in the abstract realm of Spirit and Absolute Idea, Marx “turned it right side up,” applying it to material conditions and social relations.

The dialectic, for both thinkers, is a method of grasping movement and contradiction as essential to the unfolding of reality. But where Hegel saw contradiction as internal to the evolution of thought and freedom, Marx grasped contradiction as immanent to material life, especially in the antagonisms between classes.

Hegelian dialectics is most fully developed in the book, Phenomenology of Spirit, where Hegel maps the journey of consciousness from immediate sense-certainty to the realization of Absolute Knowledge.

Each stage contains contradictions that propel consciousness forward. For example, in the famous master-slave dialectic, the self becomes aware of itself through recognition by another, yet the very structure of domination denies mutual recognition, creating a contradiction that must be overcome. Such movement through negation is central to Hegel’s logic.

Marx saw a powerful method in Hegelian dialectics, but rejected its idealist presuppositions. In his work Capital, the commodity-form, the contradiction between use-value and exchange-value, and the alienation of labor reflect a materialist dialectic.

Social contradictions — between labor and capital, productive forces and relations — are not mere errors in logic, but real antagonisms in history that drive revolutionary change. Hegel’s Spirit realizes itself through time; Marx’s proletariat becomes the gravedigger of capitalism.

Marxist dialectics thus retains Hegel’s insight that reality is processual and contradictory, but it insists that these contradictions are rooted in the socio-economic base. Revolution becomes the concrete negation of an existing order, not the sublation of ideas but the transformation of social relations. Lenin, in his Philosophical Notebooks, emphasized that dialectics is the living soul of Marxism — no static schemas, but analysis in motion.

Today, in a world marked by deepening inequality and ecological crisis, the dialectical method remains crucial. It allows us to see beyond surface phenomena and grasp the contradictory processes that drive change. A return to Hegel — not in idealist abstraction, but in critical engagement — can renew the revolutionary horizon.

In sum, the journey from Hegel’s phenomenology to Marx’s critique of political-economy is not one of simple rejection but of dialectical transformation. Marxism is unthinkable without Hegel, yet it is no longer Hegelian. It is a method forged in struggle, and it continues to illuminate the path to liberation.