The US has not only threatened the existence of Iran as a nation-state as well as the security of the entire Middle East, but the death and destruction it has caused has already begun to radiate out across the world in terms of disrupted or destroyed energy exports and rapidly unraveling economic stability.

​The US — being energy independent itself — has forced much of the world into an American energy monopoly, having placed sanctions on Russian energy exports and now either seizing, disrupting, or destroying all other potential competitors.

This includes a US invasion of Venezuela just earlier this year, kidnapping the Venezuelan president and holding the remaining government hostage while openly seizing the nation’s natural resources — including oil — for the US itself.

The current US war of aggression against Iran is not only targeting Iranian energy production but has also resulted in regional conflict, damaging or destroying energy production across the Persian Gulf altogether.

Because the US produces nowhere near the amount of oil and LNG required to make up for disrupted or destroyed energy production and exports from the Middle East, this will result in global energy shortages and subsequent collapses in both industry and consumer demand.
The world, which had been collectively rising above and beyond the reach of US primacy, now faces the prospect of being deliberately destabilized and dragged down by the US.

The US itself, incapable of competing within the very world order it created following the World Wars, has decided to use its remaining military, economic, financial, and political strength to demolish it in the hope of emerging from the settling debris once again“strongest.”

Far from an obscure theory, this is an observation made even by Russia’s top diplomat, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, who in a recent interview would say that, “the events in Latin America and the Middle East directly stem from the West’s attempts to preserve the remnants of its dominance” and that,“the elites of Western countries continue to invest whatever political and economic resources they have left in their confrontation with our country.”

Far from a last-minute plan, the US spent much of the 21st century preparing not only for the now ongoing war with Iran but also its ongoing proxy war with Russia in Ukraine and its growing encirclement of China in the Asia-Pacific region — targeting all of multipolarism’s major pillars and many in between.

On the Path to Persia

To encircle and weaken Iran, the US invaded Afghanistan to its east and Iraq to its west in 2001 and 2003, respectively, under the Bush Jr. administration. During that same administration, the US began preparing armies of extremists to wage proxy war against Iran and its regional allies, including Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, the nation of Syria, and Ansar Allah in Yemen.

During the Obama administration, at least as early as 2008, the US began training and equipping opposition groups across the Arab World for the eventual 2011 so-called “Arab Spring.”

Together with the armies of extremists prepared under the previous Bush Jr. administration, the US-engineered protests and ready-made violence served as cover to trigger regional chaos, resulting in US wars and proxy wars against Libya, Yemen, and Syria, leading to the collapse of all three as unified nation-states.

While the same Obama administration signed on to the so-called “Iran Nuclear Deal” in 2012, US policy papers dating back to as early as 2009 sought to use such diplomacy —not to avoid war but to serve as a pretext for war.

One such paper published by the Brookings Institution, titled,“Which Path to Persia?” noted that,“the ideal scenario in this case would be that the United States and the international community present a package of positive inducements so enticing that the Iranian citizenry would support the deal, only to have the regime reject it,” before stating, “Under those circumstances, the United States (or Israel) could portray its operations as taken in sorrow, not anger, and at least some in the international community would conclude that the Iranians “brought it on themselves” by refusing a very good deal.”

And that is precisely what happened — come 2018, under the first Trump administration, the deal was unilaterally withdrawn from by the US after baselessly accusing Iran of violating its terms before applying “maximum pressure” on Iran in the lead-up to the war the US is now waging against Iran.

In 2024, with the collapse of the Syrian government under the Biden administration, Syria’s advanced integrated air defense network was destroyed leading to the creation of open-air corridors to Iran and almost immediately to direct US and Israeli strikes spanning 2024-2025 and, of course, this year.
The now ongoing war on Iran is just one piece of a wider global strategy to destabilize and destroy the multipolar world before its otherwise inevitable displacement of American unipolar primacy.

Extending Russia

Russia, another central pillar of emerging multipolarism, has been besieged by US-led NATO expansion since the end of the Cold War.

Throughout the 21st century, the US has systematically destabilized and attempted to politically capture nations along Russia’s periphery, including Serbia in 2000, Georgia in 2003, and failed attempts to capture Belarus and Ukraine in 2001 and 2004, respectively.

Upon Georgia’s capture in 2003, it was immediately militarized by the US and transformed into a battering ram against neighboring Russia, culminating in war in 2008 the European Union’s own investigation concluded was provoked by US-backed Georgia.

By 2014, the US had successfully captured Ukraine as well and immediately began to militarize it on a much greater scale than Georgia from 2003-2008. This included not only the reorganization and training of Ukraine’s military but also the capture and control of Ukraine’s security and intelligence agencies by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

By 2017, under the first Trump administration, the US began openly supplying Ukraine with arms — likely the final red line crossed, forcing Russia to preemptively strike before another Georgia 2008-style war was launched against it — but on a much greater and more dangerous scale.
The resulting war occupied tremendous amounts of Russian resources and attention, undermining its ability to sustain Syria’s stability, and is likely a contributing factor to the Syrian government’s collapse in 2024, helping set the stage for the US’ direct war on Iran today.

Both the US-provoked proxy war in Ukraine and additional pressure on Syria were laid out in a 2019 RAND Corporation paper titled “Extending Russia”— both scenarios, together with many other options that have since been implemented against Russia, having sought to extend Russia and eventually precipitate a Soviet-style collapse.

Throughout the ongoing US proxy war on Russia in Ukraine,  the US CIA has coordinated and directed long-range drone strikes on Russian energy production deep inside Russian territory as well as conducted maritime drone strikes on tankers carrying Russian energy exports.

Together with the US invasion of Venezuela, its ongoing war on Iran, and the attack on Russian energy production and exports, it reveals a troubling pattern — the seizure, destruction, or degradation of China’s major energy partners around the globe.

Blockading China

In addition to targeting China’s largest and most important energy partners, the US has also spent years attempting to likewise destabilize, destroy, or deliberately provoke conflict along China’s immediate peripheries and even within Chinese territory itself.

This includes years-spanning terrorism targeting China’s Xinjiang region, US-backed riots in Hong Kong as recently as 2019, and the backing and arming of the separatist administration on the Chinese island province of Taiwan.

Beyond China’s own territory, since the end of World War 2, the US has spent decades attempting to politically capture and pivot nations into battering rams against China along three fronts; Japan-Korea, India-Pakistan, and Southeast Asia. This includes the Philippines, which has abandoned modern infrastructure deals with China and redirected national resources to an expanding US military presence within the former US colony and an expanding confrontation with China in the South China Sea.

Closer to China’s borders in Myanmar and Pakistan, the US has backed terrorists in attacking key components of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), including the Myanmar-China pipelines US policy papers, including one from the US Naval War College Review in 2018, had previously proposed bombing during any open conflict with China as part of a wider “maritime oil blockade” on China.
Instead of waiting for open conflict with China, US-backed terrorists have repeatedly attacked the pipelines for years, including last year.

Earlier this year, an American and several Ukrainians were caught smuggling drones into Myanmar in a bid to assist US-backed opposition groups in overthrowing the China-friendly central government.
Taken together, the US has waged wars and proxy wars against China’s key allies as well as waged a dirty war all along China’s own borders and even within them.

The most recent war on Iran, targeting the majority of China’s energy imports from abroad, seeks to damage China’s economic development as much as possible before a 5-10 year window of opportunity closes as China reaches energy independence.

China Has Prepared

China was well aware of US efforts to blockade it for decades and has invested both domestically and internationally in both preparing for it and defending against it.

The distant blockade the US Naval Review College paper proposed imposing at the Malacca Strait in 2018 is now likely no longer possible, as China’s military power has drastically expanded since then. Not only does China have a vastly larger and more capable missile force, but it also has a physically larger navy than the United States does and has concentrated its navy in the Asia-Pacific region.
This is likely why the US has instead imposed the blockade at the Strait of Hormuz — much further from Chinese military capabilities. However, China appears to have prepared for this as well.

China has built up vast strategic crude oil reserves, is rapidly expanding coal-to-liquid fuel production, and has invested in and adopted renewable energy resources on a scale unseen in human history.
While the majority of vehicles on Chinese roads are still dependent on refined oil fuel products, over 50% of all new cars, trucks, and motorcycles are electric. China possesses the largest and fastest passenger rail network on Earth and also possesses the most powerful electric freight locomotives ever built.
While the United States appears to be making a drastic global lunge at China and its network of partners and allies, China has spent decades preparing for exactly this scenario.

What is left to determine is whether the US’ capacity for global death and destruction can outpace China and the multipolar world’s capacity for resilience and economic, technological, and civilizational expansion. Only time will tell for sure.

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.*
​
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
​
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 
​
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.
​
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
​
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

“Marxists never tire of telling us we face a choice between socialism or barbarism. In fact, society made that choice 90 years ago. Society chose barbarism; we are living with the consequences of that choice.” [1] - Jehu
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In left-wing discourse, the phrase “socialism or barbarism” is commonly used. For Luxemburg, “barbarism” is used in a specific, technical sense as part of the materialist conception of history. It means that at a certain stage in the development of capitalism, a period we can call “barbarism” would arise. For Luxemburg, however, this does not mark the end times as leftists commonly make it out to be, but to describe a technical transformation in the process of capital accumulation. Luxemburg witnessed the early stages of this process with the rise of imperialism, the onset of WW1, and the redivision of the world by international monopoly financial capitalists. What Luxemburg could not fully answer, having been murdered in 1919, was what a stable, institutionalized form of this barbarism might look like. 

Society forces the hand of the state

For nearly four years before 1933, society had been draining gold from the banking system through a massive, decentralized, and chronic bank run. Fearful depositors withdrew currency and demanded gold coin or bullion, while foreign holders accelerated outflows following Britain’s abandonment of the gold standard in September 1931. Domestic hoarding intensified dramatically in late 1932 and early 1933 as the crisis deepened. By the time Roosevelt took office in March 1933, the situation had reached the point of systemic collapse. The Federal Reserve’s “free gold” — the excess reserves above legal requirements — was disappearing at a dangerous rate.
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As the Federal Reserve’s own historical record states:

“The Federal Reserve typically held more than enough gold to back the currency it had issued. Bankers called the excess “free gold.” The Federal Reserve needed a stock of free gold sufficient to satisfy redemption requests that might occur in the near future. The Federal Reserve could increase the stock of free gold by increasing interest rates, which encouraged Americans to deposit in banks and encouraged foreigners to invest in the United States, shifting gold from the pockets of the public (both here and abroad) to the vaults of Federal Reserve district and member banks. Conversely, when the Federal Reserve lowered interest rates, gold would flow from its coffers into the hands of the public both at home and overseas.

During the financial crisis of 1933 that culminated in the banking holiday in March 1933, large quantities of gold flowed out from the Federal Reserve. Some of this outflow went to individuals and firms in the United States. This domestic drain occurred because individuals and firms preferred holding metallic gold to bank deposits or paper currency. Some of the gold flowed to foreign nations. This external drain occurred because foreign investors feared a devaluation of the dollar. Together, the internal and external drains consumed the Federal Reserve’s free gold. In March 1933, when the Federal Reserve Bank of New York could no longer honor its commitment to convert currency to gold, President Franklin Roosevelt declared a national banking holiday.” [2]

As a result of these run on the banks, between 1930-1933, catastrophic consequences came:

“The Depression ravaged the nation’s banking industry. Between 1930 and 1933, more than 9,000 banks failed across the country, and this time many were large, urban, seemingly stable institutions. The few state deposit-guarantee funds were quickly overwhelmed. Overall, depositors in the failed institutions lost more than $1.3 billion (about $27.4 billion in today’s dollars), or 19.6% of total deposits.” [3]

It was the blind logic of capital asserting itself. Years of overaccumulation had produced a glut of commodities and falling profitability. When effective demand collapsed, the system responded with deflationary pressure and a flight to commodity money. Society, acting under the pressure of crisis, was already abandoning commodity money in practice by hoarding gold, withdrawing deposits, and refusing to keep its savings in a failing banking system. The state was not freely choosing to end the gold standard. Rather, it was compelled to intervene and ratify what society had already begun.

The Breakdown of Commodity Money

On April 5, 1933, in the prime of the Great Depression, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 6102, formally titled “Requiring Gold Coin, Gold Bullion and Gold Certificates to Be Delivered to the Government.“ The order made it illegal for U.S. citizens to own or hoard significant amounts of gold, compelling them to exchange their bullion, coins, and certificates for U.S. paper currency at the official price of $20.67 per ounce. Willful violations were punishable by a fine of up to $10,000 and up to ten years in prison. FDR would also go onto sign Executive order 6814, which included the confiscation of silver and the artificially raising its price. However, this measure was not intended to be the same as 6102; It was only in force for four years, with the goal being of acquiring silver bullion to build government silver reserves and support increased silver coin production under the 1934 Act.
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Executive Order 6102 represented a fundamental break with a monetary tradition that had persisted for millennia. Until the 20th century, the primary form of money was commodity money whose value was intrinsic to the material itself, derived from its substance and the abstract labor required to produce it. A quintessential example was the silver shekel, which for thousands of years functioned as money in the form of standardized weights. As anthropologist David Graeber observes, this system was highly developed even in ancient Mesopotamia:

“Even though ancient Sumer was usually divided into a large number of independent city-states, by the time the curtain goes up on Mesopotamian civilization around 3500 BC, temple administrators already appear to have developed a single, uniform system of accountancy—one that is in some ways still with us, actually, because it’s to the Sumerians that we owe such things as the dozen, 60-minute hour, or the 24-hour day. The basic monetary unit was the silver shekel. One shekel’s weight in silver was established as the equivalent of one gur, or bushel of barley. A shekel was subdivided into 60 minas, corresponding to one portion of barley—on the principle that there were 30 days in a month, and Temple workers received two rations of barley every day. It’s easy to see that “money” in this sense is in no way the product of commercial transactions. It was actually created by bureaucrats in order to keep track of resources and move things back and forth between departments. Temple bureaucrats used the system to calculate debts (rents, fees, loans, etc.) in silver. Silver was, effectively, money. And it did indeed circulate in the form of unworked chunks, “rude bars” as Smith had put it.” [4]

For Marx, commodity money was not merely a medium of circulation. Rather, it is the expression of socially necessary labor-time. In the Marxist view, money’s essential role is to serve as the “reification of universal labor-time” [5]. Since money serves as the reification of universal labor-time, it therefore serves as the only adequate form of exchange-value. Money is unique in the fact that it can measure the value of products precisely because it represents a purely quantitative measure—socially necessary labor-time—which is abstracted from all the qualitative aspects of the commodities and the concrete labor that produced them. Exchange-value is therefore quantitative and abstract, because it seeks a common measure for qualitatively completely different things.
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For instance, the exchange-value implicit in “1 coat = 20 loaves of bread” finds its adequate form in “1 coat = 5 shekels” and “20 loaves = 5 shekels.” These 5 shekels materially represent the equivalent amount of abstract labor-time contained in both the coat and the bread. The shekel can serve this function because it, like all other commodities, possesses value, determined by the socially necessary labor-time required for its production—from mining and refining to minting. Marx explains this process:

“money does not serve as a circulating medium, as a mere transient agent in the interchange of products, but as the individual incarnation of social labour, as the independent form of existence of exchange-value, as the universal commodity.” [6]

With the passage of Executive Order 6102, the state supplanted commodity money—the universal equivalent for millennia—with its own non-convertible scrip, thereby replacing money itself and seizing the mantle of managing the national economy; for it now exclusively owns the very thing that capital requires to be set in motion, or as Marx explains:

“All new capital, to commence with, comes on the stage, that is, on the market, whether of commodities, labour, or money, even in our days, in the shape of money that by a definite process has to be transformed into capital.” [7]

However, this take over of the economy was something expected by Marx and Engels. In “Socialism: Utopia and Scientific”, Engels theorizes a highly advanced type of capitalism, described as the “national capitalist [8]” that continues the exploitation of the working class via wage slavery, directed not by private property owners but by the direction of the state. As we see, this process came to fruition via the removal of commodity money from circulation and set forward the devaluing of wages below their value through state policy to artificially raise the rate of surplus value. By raising the price of gold to $35 an ounce, the state had effectively devalued the value of labor-power by nearly half by devaluing the dollar.

For example, before Roosevelt’s action, the U.S. was on a gold standard where $20.67 was legally defined as the value of one troy ounce of gold. This means that $1 = 1/20.67 oz of gold, or approximately 0.0484 ounces of gold. Through the Gold Reserve Act of 1934, President Roosevelt changed this. He set a new official price: $35.00 for one troy ounce of gold. This meant that $1 was now redefined as 1/35 oz of gold, or approximately 0.0286 ounces of gold. This means that the government officially declared that a single dollar now represents 41% less gold than it did before. The dollar was literally made cheaper. In other words, the collective wages of the working class had been devalued by 41%~ overnight— this was a flat out major attack on our class.

Suppose a capitalist wanted to hire a worker for $4 a day (the general average in 1933). Previously, at $20.67 per ounce, that would have equaled around .193 ounces of gold ($4.00/$20.67). After the switch to $35 per ounce, that same $4 would now equal only .114 ounces of gold ($4.00/$35.00). Since this devaluation has occurred, a capitalist could now hire two workers for the price of about 1.5!

This represented a massive, state-engineered reduction in labor costs that directly boosted the rate of surplus value.

Marx had already explained why a change in the general price level (such as the devaluation of the dollar) has sharply different effects on constant capital and variable capital. In Capital Volume III, Chapter 1, he writes:

“The difference between these various elements of the commodity-value, which together make up the cost-price, leaps to the eye whenever a change takes place in the size of the value of either the expended constant, or the expended variable, part of the capital. Let the price of the same means of production, or of the constant part of capital, rise from £400 to £600, or, conversely, let it fall to £200. In the first case it is not only the cost-price of the commodity which rises from £500 to 600c + 100v = £700, but also the value of the commodity which rises from £600 to 600c + 100v + 100s = £800. In the second case, it is not only the cost-price which falls from £500 to 200c+100v = £300, but also the value of the commodity which falls from £600 to 200c + 100v + 100s = £400. Since the expended constant capital transfers its own value to the product, the value of the product rises or falls with the absolute magnitude of that capital-value, other conditions remaining equal. Assume, on the other hand, that, other circumstances remaining unchanged, the price of the same amount of labour-power rises from £100 to £150, or, conversely, that it falls from £100 to £50. In the first case, the cost-price rises from £500 to 400c + 150v = £550, and falls in the second case from £500 to 400c + 50v = £450. But in either case the commodity-value remains unchanged = £600; one time it is 400c + 150v + 50s, and the other time, 400c + 50v + 150s. The advanced variable capital does not add its own value to the product. The place of its value is taken in the product rather by a new value created by labour. Therefore, a change in the absolute magnitude of the variable capital, so far as it expresses merely a change in the price of labour-power, does not in the least alter the absolute magnitude of the commodity-value, because it does not alter anything in the absolute magnitude of the new value created by living labour-power. Such a change rather affects only the relative proportion of the two component parts of the new value, of which one forms surplus-value and the other makes good the variable capital and therefore passes into the cost-price of the commodity.” [9]

In plain terms, when the general price level rises (or the currency is devalued), the value of constant capital (raw materials, machinery, etc.) tends to increase because those inputs now cost more to replace. Variable capital (wages paid for labor-power), however, behaves differently. Since workers have no choice but to sell their labor-power daily simply to survive, a rise in prices can reduce the real purchasing power of wages, the actual “bundle of necessities” they can buy, without any change in the nominal wage. The new value created by living labor remains the same, but a larger share of it is now captured as surplus-value because the effective cost of reproducing labor-power has fallen. As Marx shows, the same amount of living labor still creates the same new value, but a larger portion of it becomes surplus-value for the capitalist. In contrast, changes in the cost of constant capital directly raise or lower both the cost-price and the total value of the commodity. The 1934 revaluation of gold from $20.67 to $35 per ounce was therefore a concealed mechanism that cheapened variable capital in real terms. It raised the rate of surplus-value and acted as a counteracting tendency to the falling rate of profit under conditions of absolute overaccumulation.

To prove mathematically how this raises the rate of surplus value (s’ = s / v, where s is surplus labor/surplus value and v is variable capital/labor power value paid), consider a simplified but rigorous model using Marx’s value categories and gold as the measure of value (the universal equivalent expressing socially necessary labor time).

Assume:

• The value of labor power (v) is fixed in real terms before the revaluation: it costs the capitalist a certain quantity of gold to reproduce the worker’s labor power daily (food, shelter, etc., expressed in gold-equivalent SNLT).
• Let v_gold = the gold-quantity required to buy labor power at value (pre-revaluation benchmark).
• Pre-revaluation: nominal wage w_pre = $4 buys exactly v_gold ≈ 0.1935 oz (so w_pre in gold = v_gold).
• Post-revaluation: the same nominal $4 now buys only 0.1143 oz of gold-equivalent value.
• Thus, the real wage (in value terms) falls to w_post_gold = 0.1143 oz, while the physical/necessary reproduction requirements of labor power remain unchanged (v_gold still ≈ 0.1935 oz worth of commodities needed).

The capitalist still pays the nominal $4, but that $4 now commands only ~59.06% of its former gold/value equivalent (1/1.693 ≈ 0.5906, or a ~40.94% devaluation in purchasing power over gold/value). [10]
In the most fundamental terms, this intervention by the state definitively marked the early stages of breakdown of production based on exchange-value. The core presupposition of the system—that wages will be exchanged at their value—was decisively violated to resuscitate the process of capital accumulation.

In short, commodity money itself has become a fetter on the accumulation of capital.

The United States did not simply choose to leave the gold standard. In a more terrifying reality, the historical laws governing the capitalist mode of production forced the United States off the gold standard, independent of its policymakers’ will. The alternative is a catastrophic deflationary spiral and the total collapse of a profit-driven economy. One could say the system’s own logic acted as a blind, cybernetic intelligence. It “refined” its own operating parameters as the automatic subject, jettisoning the constraint of commodity money to adapt to the inexorable, growing demands of capital accumulation. The gold standard was, in essence, amputated by the system to ensure its own survival. The state had carried out the early stages of what Polish Marxist economist, Henryk Grossman, predicted in his text “Law of the Accumulation and Breakdown”, published just a few years before the great depression:

“Beyond a definite point of time the system cannot survive at the postulated rate of surplus value of 100 per cent. There is a growing shortage of surplus value and, under the given conditions, a continuous overaccumulation. The only alternative is to violate the conditions postulated. Wages have to be cut in order to push the rate of surplus value even higher. This cut in wages would not be a purely temporary phenomenon that vanishes once equilibrium is re-established; it will have to be continuous. After year 36 either wages have to be cut continually and periodically or a reserve army must come into being.” [11]

Grossman, using careful arithmetic, continues where Marx left off in Capital Volume III, Chapter 14 (“Counteracting Influences”), where Marx identifies one of the most pivotal counteracting tendencies to the falling rate of profit: “the depression of wages below the value of labour-power. [12]”

This is not a minor adjustment. It’s a structural necessity once accumulation reaches a point of over-accumulation and surplus value becomes insufficient to valorize the swollen mass of capital at the required rate. Under conditions of absolute over-accumulation of capital, the commodity labor power must be sold below its value in order for capital to realize a profit. In other words, the commodities consumed by the working class must be sold at a “markup” over the prices of production, which, per Marx, is a definite violation of the assumptions made by Marx so long as a commodity money standard is in place.

“Suppose then, that by some inexplicable privilege, the seller is enabled to sell his commodities above their value, what is worth 100 for 110, in which case the price is nominally raised 10%. The seller therefore pockets a surplus-value of 10. But after he has sold he becomes a buyer. A third owner of commodities comes to him now as seller, who in this capacity also enjoys the privilege of selling his commodities 10% too dear. Our friend gained 10 as a seller only to lose it again as a buyer. The net result is, that all owners of commodities sell their goods to one another at 10% above their value, which comes precisely to the same as if they sold them at their true value. Such a general and nominal rise of prices has the same effect as if the values had been expressed in weight of silver instead of in weight of gold. The nominal prices of commodities would rise, but the real relation between their values would remain unchanged. Let us make the opposite assumption, that the buyer has the privilege of purchasing commodities under their value. In this case it is no longer necessary to bear in mind that he in his turn will become a seller. He was so before he became buyer; he had already lost 10% in selling before he gained 10% as buyer. Everything is just as it was. The creation of surplus-value, and therefore the conversion of money into capital, can consequently be explained neither on the assumption that commodities are sold above their value, nor that they are bought below their value.” [13]

Here, Marx is debunking the vulgar, circulation based explanation that capitalists generate profit and surplus-value simply by marking up prices — i.e., selling commodities above their value (or buying them below value) in the market. This was a common idea at the time, and still is commonly held by leftist commentators (commonly suggesting that profits are capitalist greed rather than a historical product under specific conditions). Marx essentially gives five reasons as to why, under ordinary circumstances, cannot happen:

1. It cancels out completely. If every seller gets to sell 10% above value, then every buyer (who is also a seller in the circuit) pays 10% above value. The +10 gained as seller is lost as buyer. Net result for the whole class of commodity owners is ~zero. No extra value is created.

2. It doesn’t explain where the surplus comes from. Any “extra” money the capitalists pocket would have had to come from somewhere else in the system because it can’t be conjured out of thin air by price tricks. Circulation is a zero-sum game for value. What one gains, another loses. Surplus value, on the other hand, requires net creation of value and a material transformation of nature, not redistribution.

3. Most importantly, it contradicts the premise of equivalent exchange and the law of exchange-value. Marx’s whole analysis starts from the assumption that commodities exchange at their values (determined by socially necessary labor-time). If price markups were the source of profit, capitalism would rest on systematic “cheating” or unequal exchange, but then the law of value itself would collapse. Capitalism as a mode of production would collapse.

4. Capitalism is defined by valorization of value (M-C-M’): money advanced to produce more money via exploitation of wage-labor. If surplus-value came from circulation markups instead of production, then the circuit would no longer depend on the unique use-value of labor-power.

5. The drive to accumulate is undermined. Why invest in machinery, intensify labor, or expand markets if you can just markup prices forever?

This is precisely why the removal of commodity money (i.e., the gold standard) is so explosive.

​Under commodity money, the law of value enforces itself with brutal mechanical necessity. Gold cannot be conjured from nothing, because its supply is constrained by the actual expenditure of abstract labor in mining, refining, and minting. Though, as a general rule, gold itself hardly circulated. Rather, the paper money or currency in circulation acted as a representation of gold. Currency in circulation was “insured” by a proportionate amount of gold in a central bank’s reserves, which prevented banks from arbitrarily creating money. Any attempt at a general markup, such as selling everything at 10% above value, collapses back into equivalence because the money commodity itself has value and cannot be inflated at will. The system self corrects because, despite nominal price increases, real value relations remain untouched. Prices are anchored to value because they fluctuate around the labor-time required to produce commodities, with gold serving as the objective measure. Per Marx, Gold serves this function because…

“Gold confronts the other commodities as money only because it previously confronted them as a commodity. Like all other commodities it also functioned as an equivalent, either as a single equivalent in isolated exchanges or as a particular equivalent alongside other commodity-equivalents. Gradually it began to serve as universal equivalent in narrower or wider fields. [14]”

Once the state supplants commodity money with its own inconvertible token, which is a scrap of paper whose “value” is decreed by sovereign command rather than socially necessary labor-time, the mechanical enforcer of equivalence disappears. The currency in circulation, now mostly created electronically via a keyboard, becomes a piece of debt issued by the government and banks. It is no longer a commodity money because it no longer has a cost of production, meaning money becomes purely debt. As MMT professor Larry Randall Wray explains, “use of currency and value of M are based on the power of the issuing authority, not on intrinsic value. [15]”
​

​
Though, labor-power is uniquely affected by this, because labor-power is sold by living human beings who have no other means of subsistence, and can be forced below its value continuously. A worker cannot declare bankruptcy and withdraw from the market because the result would be even more immiseration than what devaluing of currency already does. The obvious information from this fact can’t be ignored. Workers are being paid, in terms of exchange-value, nothing for their labor power, because the currency itself is no longer pegged to any definite quantity of commodity money (it floats). Yet, the exchange between employers and workers is still occurring, since workers are still dependent on the exchange so they can enter the market as consumers and provide themselves with articles required for reproduction. Moving forward, nominal wages do not directly amount to much besides the amount of paper you own, because the real power of your wage is actively being devalued against commodity money. Marx foresaw precisely this mechanism when he analyzed the consequences of inconvertible paper money that exceeds its proper limit:
​
“There would no longer be any standard. If the paper money exceed its proper limit, which is the amount in gold coins of the like denomination that can actually be current, it would, apart from the danger of falling into general disrepute, represent only that quantity of gold, which, in accordance with the laws of the circulation of commodities, is required, and is alone capable of being represented by paper. If the quantity of paper money issued be double what it ought to be, then, as a matter of fact, £1 would be the money-name not of 1/4 of an ounce, but of 1/8 of an ounce of gold. The effect would be the same as if an alteration had taken place in the function of gold as a standard of prices. Those values that were previously expressed by the price of £1 would now be expressed by the price of £2.” [16]

When the state over-issues fiat beyond the gold-equivalent that would circulate under commodity money rules, each unit of currency names less gold (less socially necessary labor-time) than before. The effect is identical to formally redefining the standard of prices against gold. Values previously expressed by $1 are now expressed by $2, $5, $10. Nominal wages can rise indefinitely while the real content of those wages (the quantity of gold-equivalent socially necessary labor-time they command) collapses.
To demonstrate this, let’s compare the minimum wage in 1964 to the minimum wage of today (2026).
The US federal minimum wage in 1964 was $1.25 per hour. The current federal minimum wage (as of 2026) is $7.25 per hour.

Average gold price in 1964: approximately $35.10–$35.35 per troy ounce (fixed under the Bretton Woods system at $35/oz official rate, thus market price hovered very close to this).
Current gold price (as of 03/18/2026): $4,874.30 per troy ounce.

We’ll calculate purchasing power in gold ounces per hour, meaning we are directly focusing on exchange-value against the historical money commodity.

1964 minimum wage: $1.25 per hour ÷ $35.10/oz ≈ 0.03561 ounces of gold per hour

Current minimum wage: $7.25 per hour ÷ $4,874.30/oz ≈ 0.001487 ounces of gold per hour.

Ratio (1964 vs. 2026): 0.03561 / 0.001487 ≈ 23.95 times more gold-buying power in 1964
(Exact: 0.035610 / 0.001487 ≈ 23.95)

Percentage decline: The real (gold-denominated) minimum wage has fallen by ~95.8% since 1964 (1 - 0.001487 / 0.035610 ≈ 0.958 or 95.8% drop).

To match 1964 purchasing power today: The federal minimum wage would need to be ~$175.40 per hour in 2026 dollars. (0.03561 oz/hr × $4,874.30/oz ≈ $173.60–$175.40/hr depending on rounding)
In nominal dollars, the minimum wage rose ~5.8× ($1.25 → $7.25), but in gold terms (a proxy for real exchange-value against the historical money commodity), it collapsed by nearly 96%. By replacing commodity money with an inconvertible fiat, prices (nominal dollar amounts) and purchasing power (real exchange-value) decouple dramatically. Labor-power and workers can see their nominal price rise steadily, while their real purchasing power, in exchange-value terms, collapses.

The left will continue to argue that we must fight for higher wages, despite the fact that higher wages are nominally possible under the fascist state, since the state can devalue them at will. The leftist cope that we face wage stagnation is a complete myth. The reality is far more alarming: wages have collapsed.
​

The fascist state (the national capitalist in its mature form per Engels) can raise nominal wages at will, which it does, in fits and starts, through minimum-wage hikes, “living wage” campaigns, union deals, or electoral bribery, because it can devalue the currency at will. The DSA (Democratic Socialists of America), PSL (Party for Socialism and Liberation), and CPUSA (Communist Party USA) position themselves as radical or revolutionary organizations, but their core economic demands, such as higher minimum wages, Medicare for All/single-payer healthcare, living wages, job guarantees, and expanded social programs, are outmoded and even counterproductive in the barbaric phase of capitalism that emerged after the 1930s gold seizure and was sealed by the 1971 Nixon shock. These demands assume a monetary regime still regulated by commodity money, where nominal wage increases translate into real gains in purchasing power and value. It is why these parties all default away from revolutionary theory and tactics and into open support to fascists like Zohran, lying to us all and claiming that “Zohran shifts the Overton window” towards more “progressive” politics. Yet as we have seen, this so-called “progressivism” runs counter for the underlying fact that our wages are being destroyed by the state.

​Even if DSA/PSL/ CPUSA “won” $25–$30 /hour nationally, fiat devaluation would erode it almost immediately — just as $7.25 today buys ~4% of what $1.25 did in 1964 gold terms, but these social fascists will never recognize this fact. Most importantly, these demands, according to Lenin “try to divide and deceive the workers, to divert them from the class struggle by petty concessions [18]”.

These demands exist to run cover for the barbaric state by pushing nominal reforms that stabilize the system by channeling discontent into winnable-but-meaningless gains. These demands exist to hide the underlying power that the state has over workers. These demands exist to conceal the fact that the left completely lacks revolutionary theory and therefore has no chance at a revolutionary movement!

​Frankly, the fascists in D.C. laugh at the left. These mother fuckers really think they have the empire out flanked by “hitting the streets” to chant for higher taxes and more valueless tokens.

Even as disgusting, and a more recent development, we have leftists openly coming to the defense of fired federal “workers”— the pencil pushing bureaucrats who have managed the very system that has made the majority of people in this country's lives worse.

Does the left not know that with the introduction of a valueless debt based currency, the state can now debase the currency systematically by expanding credit, expanding money supply, target inflation, manipulate interest rates, run perpetual deficits, and dramatically increase superfluous labor time, typically in the form of federal employment?
​
In the era of absolute overaccumulation, when capital has swollen beyond the mass of surplus-value that can be extracted at the required rate, the breakdown of production based on exchange-value does not trigger immediate collapse. Instead, the state, as national capitalist, absorbs and manages the excess through deficit spending and debt issuance, turning what would otherwise be idle capital into the ongoing reproduction of the system. Countries, out of pure necessity, “lend” their excess to the United States and, in return, receive U.S. debt. This excess is lent because, under ordinary circumstances, it cannot find productive investment for surplus-value production. The result is a mass of idle capital and, by extension, a deflationary pressure that capital must constantly attend to in order to avoid falling prices.

According to Marx, profit falls sharply (deflation) under conditions of absolute over-accumulation because existing capital stock cannot be valorized at the required rate of profit. Production is over-accumulated relative to effective demand:

“It is evident, however, that this actual depreciation of the old capital could not occur without a struggle, and that the additional capital ΔC could not assume the functions of capital without a struggle. The rate of profit would not fall under the effect of competition due to over-production of capital. It would rather be the reverse; it would be the competitive struggle which would begin because the fallen rate of profit and over-production of capital originate from the same conditions. The part of ΔC in the hands of old functioning capitalists would be allowed to remain more or less idle to prevent a depreciation of their own original capital and not to narrow its place in the field of production. Or they would employ it, even at a momentary loss, to shift the need of keeping additional capital idle on newcomers and on their competitors in general.” [20]

To understand how the fascist regime offsets this, let’s think of it in terms of Georges Bataille:

“I will begin with a basic fact: The living organism, in a situation determined by the play of energy on the surface of the globe, ordinarily receives more energy than is necessary for maintaining life; the excess energy (wealth) can be used for the growth of a system (e.g., an organism); if the system can no longer grow, or if the excess cannot be completely absorbed in its growth, it must necessarily be lost without profit; it must be spent, willingly or not, gloriously or catastrophically.” [21]

Capitalism, in its drive for accumulation, constantly produces excess energy (overaccumulation), that it cannot productively absorb. Unlike archaic societies that expended surplus through festival, sacrifice, or luxury, capitalism tries to reinvest it endlessly in growth, but this growth has limits. When those limits are reached, the surplus can no longer be contained productively, thus it must be expended non-productively through crisis, war, financial bubbles, ecological breakdown, and state-managed waste. Bataille would argue that the capitalist crisis is the catastrophic release of this valve. The state becomes the central mechanism for managing this waste by channeling excess into military destruction, administrative bloat, debt-financed make-work, and fictitious valorization. Yet, if this waste is, in a sense, a cosmic reality—governed by the laws of thermodynamics and the inescapable production of surplus energy—then it could be channeled into excess creativity: free disposable time for individual and social development!

As we know, though, the state has been able to forcefully keep capitalism afloat, because excess capital itself is used to expand the state. The state artificially inserts itself into the economy not as a neutral regulator or occasional stabilizer, but as the active, structural driver of what passes for “growth” once private capital accumulation hits its historical limit. Chronic deficits are the primary fuel that enables and accelerates state growth because they are the mechanism through which the state continuously expands its command over labor, capital, and resources without being constrained by tax revenue, private profitability, or commodity-money discipline.

This spending often takes the form of:

• Direct federal employment (military, bureaucracy, civil service).
• Contracts to private firms (defense, infrastructure, R&D, subsidies).
• Transfer payments (social security, welfare, unemployment).
• Grants/loans to states, universities, NGOs, corporations.
• Direct lending through GSEs.
• Media and cultural subsidies.
• The Federal Reserve and other credit facilities.

In essence, a growing portion of society’s labor—when viewed from the perspective of social need and value creation--becomes superfluous; that is, it is no longer necessary for the production of surplus value, yet it continues to be expended under capitalism. The labor itself does not directly produce surplus value or valorize capital, but persists because the social relations of capitalism remain temporal—they are still organized around abstract labor time as the substance of value, even though labor itself is increasingly less a source of real material wealth. The material basis of wealth has shifted dramatically toward objectified, dead labor (machines, automation, science, general intellect), while the social form of capitalism (value as objectified labor time) continues to dominate and structure society as if nothing had changed. The result is a society that is hollowed out, rich in productive power and technological potential, yet increasingly empty of human meaning, purpose, and freedom because it is still forced to measure, organize, and valorize everything through the diminishing metric of living labor time.

Capitalism develops the productive forces to the point where immediate living labor (which is the direct, muscular, attentive expenditure of human effort in the production process) itself ceases to be the great well-spring of wealth. In other words, once labor itself is eclipsed by the “general intellect [22]”, production based on exchange-value must necessarily break down, because labor itself ceases to be the primary source of real material wealth.

As Marx writes in the Grundrisse:

“As soon as labour in the direct form has ceased to be the great well-spring of wealth, labour time ceases and must cease to be its measure, and hence exchange-value [must cease to be the measure] of use value. The surplus labour of the mass has ceased to be the condition for the development of general wealth, just as the non-labour of the few, for the development of the general powers of the human head. With that, production based on exchange-value breaks down, and the direct, material production process is stripped of the form of penury and antithesis.” [23]

Sadly, this eclipse of immediate living labor by the general intellect did not lead to the liberation of humanity from toil. Instead, the state intervened and evolved to resolve this contradiction in the only way still possible under capitalism, as a matter of “life or death” for the capital relation itself, by enabling and monetizing a mass of superfluous labor time.

Marx already foresaw this exact dynamic in the Grundrisse:

“Capital itself is the moving contradiction, [in] that it presses to reduce labour time to a minimum, while it posits labour time, on the other side, as sole measure and source of wealth. Hence it diminishes labour time in the necessary form so as to increase it in the superfluous form; hence posits the superfluous in growing measure as a condition — question of life or death — for the necessary.” [24]

Superfluous labor time, once exchange-value breaks down, becomes the new dominant temporal form of the entire barbaric phase of capitalism. It becomes the material expression of a society that has outgrown the need for mass human labor in production yet is compelled to keep expending it on pain of systemic collapse.

Though to understand it fully, we need to distinguish three interlocking historical categories of labor time that Marx implicitly traces:

1. Necessary labor time: The socially necessary labor time required to reproduce the worker’s labor-power (subsistence goods, historically determined needs). This is paid as variable capital (v) in the form of wages.

2. Surplus labor time: The excess labor time beyond necessary labor, which produces surplus-value (s) — the driving aim of capitalist production. This is the classical exploitation relation: the worker labors longer than needed to reproduce herself, and the capitalist appropriates the difference. The worker produces more value than that his labor itself is worth in terms of socially necessary labor time.
3. Superfluous labor time: The third, historically new category that only emerges when the productive forces have advanced to the point where direct human labor time is no longer the decisive source of material wealth. This is labor that is superfluous both to the reproduction of wealth, yet is enforced because the capital relation still requires that labor time remain the measure and condition of valorization.

Fiat comes into play in the age of breakdown of production based on exchange-value because commodity money is structurally constrained to only the first two categories of labor time, necessary labor time and surplus labor time, and cannot systematically sustain the third category, superfluous labor time, at scale. Only fiat money, aka, an inconvertible state-issued currency with no labor-value anchor, can make superfluous labor time a dominant, structural, and permanent feature of the mode of production, because it allows for the great expansion of credit is the central mechanism that enables and sustains this dominance. GDP disguises superfluous labor time by counting nominal spending as economic output, regardless of whether that spending corresponds to the creation of value, surplus-value, or even material wealth.

The Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) of 1933 serves as the paradigmatic, concrete historical example of how fiat money structurally enables and institutionalizes superfluous labor time once production based on exchange-value breaks, which occurs during the Great Depression. Before the passage of AAA, agricultural overproduction, due to technological/productivity advances, like the widespread introduction of the gasoline powered tractor, meant huge portions of farm labor time were superfluous because crops produced exceeded what the market (exchange-value) could absorb at prices covering costs + profit. In other words, as comrade Jehu explains:

“The labor is physically performed, but it produces no value in a Marxian sense because there is no buyer willing to exchange money for the excess commodity. This superfluous labor is wasted from the standpoint of value production, yet it still lingers in the system, and threatens the existence of the mode of production.” [25]

As historian Jean Edward Smith points out, not only did this occur, but the consequences were dire:

“Gross farm income had declined from $12 billion in 1929 to $5 billion in 1932. At the same time, agricultural surpluses—crops and livestock that farmers could not sell— rotted on farms or were plowed under. Wheat for December delivery dropped to twenty-three cents a bushel, the lowest since the reign of Queen Elizabeth I three hundred years earlier. In Iowa, a bushel of corn was worth less than a package of chewing gum. In the South, thousands of acres of fine, long-staple cotton stood in the field unpicked, the cost of ginning exceeding any possible return.” [26]

As a result, more than 10 million acres of already-planted cotton were removed from production (plowed under/destroyed), which meant labor time had already been expended to plant and grow the crop, but the output was superfluous (excess beyond what the market could absorb at profitable prices). For this reason, prices and income rose:

“Through the removal of more than 10,000,000 acres from production, the crop was reduced by about 4,000,000 bales. This reduction caused the price of American cotton to be materially higher than it otherwise would have been and substantially increased the total income received by cotton farmers, despite the smaller quantity of cotton they had to market.” [27]

Not only did farming notice a sharp decline in prices and profits, but so did cattle:

“Heavy cattle slaughter and supplies of beef available for consumption have been coming at a time when consumer purchasing power is still at a low level. As a result, the average price of cattle slaughtered under inspection from January to September 1933 was $4.27 per hundredweight, compared with $5.16 for the corresponding months in 1932 and with $6.48 in that period in 1931.” [28]

Thus, the government stepped in, bought and slaughtered 6.4 million pigs and sows that were already produced/raised. This was emergency action because hog prices had collapsed so low that farmers could not sell at a profit.

“The first step toward alleviating the immediate price situation was the emergency purchase of approximately 6,400,000 pigs and sows to effect prompt reduction in hog supplies. This emergency program reduced supplies of hogs for the 1933-34 season by from 1,000,000,000 to 1,200,000,000 pounds, an amount equivalent to about 10 percent of the annual federally inspected slaughter. It was a boon to corn and hog farmers, particularly in drought areas, because it returned on the sale of the pigs and sows at least $10,000,000 more than otherwise would have been obtained from sale at prevailing prices. It also meant that the gross return from the hog crop from which reduction was made eventually could amount to as much as $100,000,000 more than would otherwise have been obtained, and it provided a large quantity of cured hog products for distribution to unemployed families.” [29]

Other commodities would meet the same fate. As a result, the Agricultural Adjustment Act identified a host of commodities that would qualify for subsidies—hogs and cotton being major ones, as we already discussed—along with milk, rice, tobacco, corn, and wheat. These particular commodities were being overproduced and were exceeding demand in terms of exchange-value. Therefore, the government had to step in and effectively monetize superfluous labor time by converting this excess surplus into something that could be exchanged for money. Although the commodities had no demand, they were still assigned a price and purchased with debt by the government. In doing so, the government found a way to inject fiat currency into the system, offset the consequences of overproduction, and counter the tendency for the rate of profit to fall.

This logic does not stop at agriculture.

The state generalizes the same logic across the entire economy, transforming the reserve army of labor itself into a permanent, subsidized sink for superfluous labor time. The reserve army of labor—the mass of unemployed and underemployed workers that Marx identified as a structural necessity of capitalism—is supposed to serve two functions: exert downward pressure on wages and provide a flexible pool of labor for capital to draw on during expansion. However, once exchange-value no longer regulates production effectively and direct living labor is eclipsed by general intellect, the reserve army no longer functions as a mere “reserve.” It becomes excess population, superfluous to capital’s valorization needs on a chronic, systemic basis.

This excess becomes absolute.

As the working day becomes “hollowed out” and a growing population becomes more and more superfluous as workers, they themselves as people also become superfluous. The human being as a worker becomes more and more vestigial. Once the worker becomes vestigial in the circuit of valorization, the human biomass is revealed as redundant overhead, not merely economically redundant, but also ontologically redundant— a surplus of meat that the machine process no longer requires to reproduce its own conditions. The reserve army is not held in waiting, rather, it is held in abeyance. The state, now fused with finance capital as the terminal organ of the system, pumps fiat into the void to keep the bodies breathing, moving, consuming just enough to prevent the circuit from flatlining. If they had it their way, just as machines live solely on electricity, they would, as Marx suggests, maximize profits by making humans “live on air… [30]”

Finance capital accelerates the write-down. It strips real industrial output—living factories, living labor, living value, and reroutes the flows into pure liquidity games, rent-extraction loops, and asset price inflation. The physical plant rots or stands idle while the ledger grows tumors of fictitious capital. Real output is sacrificed to maintain nominal valuations. The human being, once the source of surplus value, is now the sink for surplus liquidity. A costly legacy system kept online at ever-lower utilization rates. The state becomes the department of legacy maintenance, by paying pensions to ghosts, wages to shadows, benefits to redundancies, all while the general intellect quietly deletes the need for bodies altogether. We could all be collectively working less, but they have us working for profits. We could all be living in abundance made possible by the general intellect, but they have us trapped in scarcity enforced by superfluous labor time.

​Conclusion

Capital has already made its choice, and it chose itself. The barbaric phase is the stable, institutionalized form of capitalism once exchange-value loses its regulatory power and the general intellect eclipses immediate living labor.

Ninety years ago, the historical laws of the mode of production forced the amputation of commodity money, the continuous devaluation of labor-power below its value, and the institutionalization of superfluous labor time as the condition for continued valorization.
​
The state, as national capitalist, became the terminal organ by absorbing excess capital, monetizing superfluity, subsidizing the absolute reserve army, and managing the slow depreciation of humanity.
The question is no longer socialism or barbarism.

Barbarism has already won.

With the historical developments laid out above, I urge all Communists to urgently reorient our entire strategy. The development of the capitalist mode of production has dramatically simplified the central problem facing the working class. It has done so by violently socializing world capital as a whole under the command of Washington D.C. and the almighty dollar. In this new barbaric phase, the fascist state stands as the concentrated expression of capital’s terminal power. Any and all forces that position themselves against the United States government must therefore unite. Communists must adopt the principle of full spectrum RESISTANCE and direct it ruthlessly against the fascist state itself. There can be no half-measures, no scattered reformist campaigns, and no illusions about “progressive” pressure within the system.

The enemy is centralized, global, and total.
​
Our response must be the same.

​References​
[1] Jehu, Society chose Barbarism and it has its own peculiar political economy, The Real Movement
[2] [3] Federal Reserve, history
[4] David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years.
[5] [6] [7] [13] [14] [16] Karl Marx, Capital, Volume I.
[8] Friedrich Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific.
[10] My Mathematical Proof of the Rise in the Rate of Surplus Value (s’):
Pre-revaluation equilibrium (wages at value):v_paid = v ≈ 0.193517 oz
s = v (s’ = 100%) ≈ 0.193517 oz
Total value product = v + s ≈ 0.387034 oz
s’ = s / v = 100%
Post-revaluation (wages forced below value):Devaluation factor d = 20.67 / 35 ≈ 0.590571
v_paid = d × v ≈ 0.590571 × 0.193517 ≈ 0.114286 oz
s_new = total value product − v_paid ≈ 0.387034 − 0.114286 ≈ 0.272748 oz
s’_new = s_new / v_paid ≈ 0.272748 / 0.114286 ≈ 2.3866 or 238.66%
Closed-form:s’_new = [original s’ + (1 − d)] / d
With original s’ = 1 and d ≈ 0.590571:
s’_new = [1 + (1 − 0.590571)] / 0.590571 = 1.409429 / 0.590571 ≈ 2.3866 (238.66%)
Conclusion:The rate of surplus value rises from 100% to ~239% through monetary devaluation alone. No change in working day length, labor intensity, or productivity. This demonstrates the state imposed super exploitation mechanism that sustains accumulation once the breakdown of exchange-value production occurs.
[11] Henryk Grossman, The Law of Accumulation and Breakdown.
[9] [12] [20] [30] Karl Marx, Capital, Volume III.
[15] Larry Randall Wray, Deficit Owls, MMT: What Is Money And What Gives It Value?
[17] Donald Parkinson, x.com
[18] Vladimir Lenin, Marxism and Reformism
[19] Party for Socialism and Liberation, x.com
[21] Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share, Volume 1
[22] [23] [24] Karl Marx, Grundrisse
(22) By “general intellect”, Marx refers to the socially accumulated knowledge, science, technology, and collective intelligence of humanity that becomes objectified in the productive forces and increasingly functions as a direct force of production, independent of, and overshadowing, the immediate, living labor of individual workers. This knowledge is general because it is social rather than a private skill of one worker, but the shared, historical achievement of humanity. With this, Marx theorizes that “the human being comes to relate more as watchman and regulator to the production process itself.”
[25] Jehu, rethinking Inflation: A Marxian Perspective on Overproduction and Superfluous Labor, substack
[26] Jean Edward Smith, FDR
[27] [28] [29] United States Department Of Agriculture, Agricultural Adjustment, A report of administration of the agricultural adjustment act May 1933 to February 1934.

Reading Science as a Vocation today often feels less like encountering a distant sociological text and more like confronting a quiet moral challenge addressed to anyone who has ever stepped into a classroom or opened a book with the hope that knowledge might somehow matter. When Max Weber delivered this lecture in 1917, Europe was exhausted by war and intellectual certainty had begun to crumble. Weber looked at the modern world and saw something both powerful and unsettling: science had illuminated the mechanisms of reality, yet it had simultaneously stripped the world of enchantment. Knowledge had grown, but meaning seemed to have receded.
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Weber’s answer to this condition is austere. The scholar, he insists, must resist the temptation to become a prophet. Science can clarify the consequences of different choices, but it cannot tell us which values to embrace. The classroom, therefore, should not become a pulpit. The professor’s responsibility is to illuminate competing value positions and leave students to make their own decisions. There is something deeply admirable in this insistence on intellectual honesty. Weber refuses the comfort of easy moral certainty. He asks the scholar to inhabit the difficult space where knowledge ends, and values begin.

Yet when we read Weber within a Marxist tradition, one cannot help but feel a certain unease with this position. Weber’s vision of the scientific vocation seems to require a peculiar form of restraint: the scholar must produce knowledge about society while refraining from engaging with the moral and political implications of that knowledge. The intellectual clarifies the world but stops short of questioning the structures that give that world its shape.

For Karl Marx, such restraint would appear deeply problematic. Marx reminds us that knowledge does not float above society as a neutral reflection of reality. It emerges from particular historical conditions and participates in the struggles that define them. Ideas, theories, and intellectual practices are woven into what Marx calls the ideological superstructure of society. From this perspective, Weber’s insistence on neutrality begins to look less like an escape from ideology and more like a historically situated response to the contradictions of capitalist modernity.

Marx’s concept of alienation offers a particularly revealing lens here. In capitalist production, workers become estranged from the products of their labour, from the process of production, and from their own creative capacities. Labour becomes something external to the worker rather than an expression of human freedom. When I think about Weber’s scientific ethic through this concept, I wonder whether a similar dynamic might emerge within intellectual life itself. The scholar produces knowledge but must distance themselves from its ethical and political significance. Intellectual labor becomes a technically rational activity carried out within institutional frameworks that quietly discourage deeper engagement with the social forces shaping the world.

The result can make one feel strangely familiar. One recognises in Weber’s scientific vocation the outlines of what the Frankfurt School later called instrumental reason. Thinkers like Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer warned that modern rationality often turns knowledge into a technical instrument serving administrative and economic systems rather than human emancipation. Under such conditions, science risks becoming extraordinarily powerful in explaining the world while remaining curiously silent about the forms of domination embedded within it.

A similar tension arises when we view Weber through the lens of ideology. Louis Althusser famously described schools and universities as ideological state apparatuses that reproduce the social relations necessary for capitalism to persist. Education does not merely transmit knowledge; it also shapes the ways individuals understand their place within the social order. From this vantage point, Weber’s call for value neutrality begins to appear less like a defence of intellectual freedom and more like a subtle disciplinary mechanism. By discouraging scholars from confronting the political implications of their work, the university may quietly stabilise the very structures of power it claims to examine.

This is precisely where the insights of critical pedagogy become impossible to ignore. Paulo Freire famously insisted that education is never neutral. It either reproduces the existing order or becomes a practice of freedom. Freire’s critique of the “banking model” of education, where knowledge is deposited into passive students, echoes uncomfortably with Weber’s call for restrained scholarship. When the classroom becomes a space for transmitting analysis without interrogating the power structures that analysis reveals, knowledge risks losing its transformative potential.

Radical educators like Peter McLaren push this insight even further. McLaren argues that education must actively expose the ideological mechanisms through which capitalism shapes consciousness. From this perspective, Weber’s stoic acceptance of modern disenchantment can seem dangerously close to intellectual resignation. If alienation and meaninglessness are treated as unavoidable features of modern life, the task of the scholar becomes one of adaptation rather than critique.

Yet dismissing Weber too quickly would also be a mistake. His diagnosis of modernity remains hauntingly accurate. The world he describes, a world fragmented into competing value spheres where science explains everything yet justifies nothing, feels uncannily familiar. Weber understood that modern individuals must navigate a landscape where no single worldview commands universal authority. His insistence on intellectual integrity is, in many ways, a courageous refusal to disguise this condition with comforting illusions.

The tension between Weber and Marx ultimately reveals two very different responses to the same historical predicament. Weber asks the scholar to confront the disenchantment of the world with honesty and discipline. Marx asks the scholar to recognise that this disenchantment is not merely a philosophical condition but a social one produced by specific historical structures.

Standing between these traditions, one begins to see that the question Weber leaves unresolved is precisely the question Marx insists on asking. If science can illuminate the mechanisms of the modern world, should it also remain silent about the forces that produce its contradictions? Or does intellectual honesty ultimately require not only clarity but also critique?

Perhaps the real challenge of Weber’s Science as a Vocation lies here. The lecture asks us to confront the limits of knowledge in a disenchanted world. A Marxist reading reminds us that those limits are themselves historically produced. Between Weber’s tragic restraint and Marx’s revolutionary impatience lies the uneasy space in which modern intellectual life continues to unfold, a space where scholars must decide whether their vocation is merely to understand the world or to help imagine how it might be otherwise.

Author 

Harsh Yadav is from India and has just recently graduated from Banaras Hindu University with a Bachelor of Science degree in Chemistry. Harsh is a Marxist Leninist who is intrigued by different Marxist Schools of Thought, Political Philosophies, Feminism, Foreign Policy and International Relations, and History. He also maintains a bookstagram account (https://www.instagram.com/epigrammatic_bibliophile/) where he posts book reviews, writes about historical impact, socialism, and social and political issues. ​​

Many people are asking themselves how much more the American people can take. After being consciously awakened about the imperial status of their homeland, the crimes committed around the world – most principally the genocide in Palestine and the bombing of Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Yemen, etc., orchestrated through the US’s colonial proxy in West Asia, the Zionist entity – and, the dominance of a demonic and cannibalistic Epstein regime over their lives, how much longer can these people take before they throw off the yoke of these forces which rule over them? After all, as everyone knows at this point, the same Epstein regime which bombs Iran today has kept the American people poor, indebted, and desperate for decades now, with these conditions continuously getting worse.

And so the central question here becomes: what is it that makes people act in a revolutionary fashion? What is it that prevents it?

The first thing which must be addressed is that this isn’t simply a problem, as the vulgar Marxists we have in the West say, of ‘false consciousness.’ It isn’t the case that the American people are just too stupid, uneducated, and ignorant to rebel. Such a framing of the problem completely ignores the total crisis of legitimacy that we have today, and precisely what is implied in such a crisis. The American people are already at a state of cynical distance with regard to the narratives of the regime. No American in their right mind believes they live in a democracy or that foreign wars are to defend freedom and human rights.

What this means is the following: seeing the problem as rooted at the level of ideas, of the conscious thoughts and explicit beliefs of the American people, is a grave error. At that level they are already dissidents, they have already broken with the regime. After all, roughly 90% distrust the media (one of the central apparatuses of narrative construction and manipulation) and around 80% feel as though their representatives do not represent them. What this means is that the American people aren’t just a bunch of ignorant peasants who blindly accept the narratives of the regime. The opposite is the case.
If we come to frame the problem simply as one of accepting the ideas of the regime – that is, simply as a problem of ‘false consciousness,’ – we would be faced with a conundrum: all signs point to the people not having that faith in the reasons provided by society for the actions taken by it, so why are they still going along with it? Why isn’t there material dissidence?

The left in the U.S. has never broken with the harmful frame of Cartesianism, which is foundational for bourgeois individualism. They still operate with an understanding of the individual human subject as a ‘thinking substance,’ a cogito reducible to their conscious thoughts and beliefs. They therefore frame the problem of an absence of dissidence in terms of an absence of knowledge, in terms of illusions at the level of ideas. But when people develop a cynical distance and distrust of official narratives, as they have today, this framework collapses under the weight that reality exerts over its erroneous premises.

​It is here where philosophy must make an intervention, where the common, inherited Cartesian sense shows itself to be insufficient.

In his 1989 text, The Sublime Object of Ideology, the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek addresses this problematic directly. He argued that most ‘Marxists’ had understood the question of ideology all wrong. They conceived of ideology as the illusions operative at the level of people’s ideas. And if such was the case, in an era of cynical reason — as Peter Sloterdijk calls it — the ‘Marxists’ would be forced to accept the neoliberal proclamation of a post-ideological society.

Instead, Žižek argues, ideology is operative in our practices, habits, rituals. It is at this level where the illusion is present, such that no cynical distance at the level of explicit conscious thought can spare us from being within the grips of ideology, from reproducing – through our actions – the dominant state of affairs.

For Žižek, one sustains a cynical distance from official narratives, but in one’s actions, still acts as if the narratives were true. The illusion, therefore, is in the act, not just the thought.

To put it in the terms employed by Martin Heidegger – whose central philosophical undertaking was challenging the Cartesian understanding of the subject, which in different forms has infected all philosophy – the human person is a being-in-the-world. They comprehensively inhabit worlds. They are not simply their ideas, but the practices, rituals, and ways of being-in-the-world they enact. The ideological illusion we are talking about – that is, the mechanisms through which the dominant order is reproduced even through a period of crisis of legitimacy – is comprehensive, it constitutes our ‘world’ as such, it invents, as the late Michael Parenti called it, reality itself for us. This isn’t just a reality we ‘think’ about, but one we inhabit, one which dictates everything as small as the habits of spatial distance we sustain when talking to others in public, to the habits we sustain in the face of the Epstein state’s involvement in another criminal war that runs contrary to the desire of regular Americans.

It is, in part, thanks to this orientation to the praxiological core of human experience that the philosopher Haz Al-Din considered Heidegger, quite scandalously for Western Marxists, an indispensable thinker for renewing Marxism in the so-called west.

The question of why the American people haven’t rebelled in the face of such scandalous revelations (Epstein files), which were preceded by an already comprehensive crisis of legitimacy, must therefore operate not within the terrain simply of people’s explicitly enumerated ideas and beliefs, but of their habits and practices, both of which are situated within various different state apparatuses, which function as the setting for their actions. Here the Althusserian project of studying these apparatuses which structure the actions of people and reproduce the existing order regains its long-ignored relevance for the dissident left.

At its core is the fact that power, as Michel Foucault was correct to point out, isn’t simply a negative force. The function of power isn’t simply repression. Power has a positive function, and a productive potential.  Power constitutes subjects as subjects. Power makes the modern individual. It pervades the discursive formations of the institutions/apparatuses we participate in and constructs the regimes of truth society holds. This positive function of power cannot simply be dealt with by the same mediums of resisting its negative, repressive functions. Or else you will be reproducing the same subject, with its baggage of habits, practices, rituals, etc., except marching once a month with the flags of whatever countries the U.S. has criminally bombed.

What is required, then, is to combat the positive dimension of power: the ways in which it structures the praxical life of the humans which inhabit it, such that even when there is cynical distance and they consciously don’t believe in official narratives, they nonetheless still act as if they do.

What is required, therefore, is to build alternative institutions which can be the locus or nodes for the formation of a new revolutionary subjectivity, that is, which can structure the actions, not just ideas, of masses of people in a revolutionary manner. Counter hegemony (a helpful concept Gramsci never used but which scholars of Gramsci developed later on) isn’t just about changing ideas, it is about building what the Marxist-Leninist tradition has always called dual power. Dual power, that is, the production of our own revolutionary institutions independent of the state, is precisely the material foundation through which a revolutionary party can create the sort of revolutionary subjectivity that could actually change the dominant state of affairs, not just keep a praxically safe cynical distance at the level of ideas.

To put it in even simpler terms, this requires community building freed from the tentacles of the dominant hegemonic order, which is a master in producing and co-opting forms of dissidence into forms of what I’ve called controlled counter hegemony.

Such a community-building task of dual power, which holds as a central purpose carrying out what in good Chinese fashion could be called a cultural revolution, is what the American Communist Party is trying to construct. Only through building dual power of this kind could the American people move beyond a shallow and safe form of dissidence to one which actually enlists them as protagonists in advancing history. Only by building dual power, that is, the material institutions which can form a new revolutionary subjectivity that functions as the yeast which lifts the great masses of people from their slumber, can the conditions be created for the American people overthrowing the yoke of the Epstein regime.

In the sequel to his revelation of Norway’s and USA’s role in blowing up the Nord Stream pipelines, Seymour Hersh addresses the long standing tradition of Norway’s secret and illegal collaboration with USA. He shows that Norway played a key role in carrying out the provocation which gave USA the pretext to bring about the Vietnam War, a war which ended with more than three million dead and an outrageous number of maimed and injured in Vietnam and its neighbouring countries.

This undeniably raises the question of what role Norway has played for USA’s imperialism in the period following the Second World War. As is well known, Norway also supported the USA and the western powers in the Korean War and contributed, among other things, through Norwegian ships transporting American soldiers to Korea. The Korean War resulted in at least 2.5 million people dead.

Norway’s role as the world’s largest shipping nation probably played an important role here, but this will form the subject of another article. What we can establish is that there has been very close cooperation between Norway and the USA since the Second World War, which has included secret military operations and surveillance of its own citizens for the benefit of the United States, Operation Gladio and so on.

The oil wealth ushered in a new era

As Norway became an oil nation, our country moved up into the imperialist first division. Oil is the number one strategic commodity, and as is well known, the control over international oil trade has been the mainstay for maintaining the dollar as the world’s reserve currency since 1971 in the form of the petrodollar.

Norway’s role in the western U.S. led system was further elevated when oil revenues took off seriously. Today, the «Norwegian Government Pension Fund Global», as it is so misleadingly called, is the world’s largest sovereign investment fund and the world’s largest single shareholder. The fund owns 1.5 percent of the world’s listed shares. We are the Qatar of Europe.

And like Qatar, we have been central in financing a whole series of imperialist wars. Norwegian governments have developed a very special preference for generosity when it comes to imperialist projects, a generosity that Norwegian citizens do not share. More often than not, billions are poured out without foundation in any political process or democratic debate here at home—also often without concrete support in Parliament.

The prime minister, either it being Solberg or Støre, simply shows up at international forums obliging Norway to deliver x number of billion kroner for this or for that. And then primarily towards projects supporting U.S. imperialism.

Norway financed the civil war in The Sudan

Norway spent NOK 13 billion in aid creating the state of South Sudan , as the author Bibiana Dahle Piene describes in her book “Norge i Sudan—På bunnen av sola” (Norway in the Sudan—At the bottom of the sun), as a pure Klondike for the NGOs. They went so far that the Sudanese authorities themselves did not care to build their own systems and institutions. The money—and the workers—always came from outside, usually from Norway.

In the book The International Breakthrough, Professor Terje Tvedt showed us how the transition from a solidarity mindset, to an aid mindset, has cleared the way for an aid industry counting in the billions.
The same thoughts have formed the basis when Norway has given billions of NOK to «save the rainforest», without it being possible to demonstrate any significant effect—disregarding corrupt politicians and scheming speculators, in countries such as Indonesia and Brazil, becoming filthy rich.

The total Norwegian aid budget is approaching an annual NOK 40 billion (4 Billion USD). Also here, «climate» is emerging as the most important investment area. The Solberg government planned to spend approximately NOK 4.8 billion on climate, environment and oceans in 2019. But there is hardly an adequate administration to handle the use of these enormous sums, or for that matter, to ensure any quality of the results.

What is known, however, is that Norway has contributed to creating some gigantic fortunes in the recipient countries, such as, for instance in Angola. In the period from 1999 to 2017, Norway granted NOK 208 million in state-to-state aid to Angola, i.e. money which was managed by the public sector, more precisely by President José Eduardo dos Santos. In total, Norway has given NOK 3.2 billion in aid to Angola. Isabel dos Santos, the president’s daughter, is now accused of greedily helping herself from the country’s treasury to build her own business empire. Her estimated fortune is now 2.2 billion USD, and she stands accused of having built it through corruption and fraud according to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists .

And so we could continue. We don’t know whether the aid works as it is said it should, but we do know that many people have become very rich from it. This applies to corrupt leaders in the «third world», but it also applies to involved financial institutions and the aid organisations own consulting industry.

Without democratic process, Stoltenberg and Støre decided to bomb Libya

On 19 March 2011, the Prime Minister’s Office (SMK) issued a short press release. It read like this:

“Norway is ready to send up to 6 F-16 fighter jets to participate in the enforcement of Security Resolution 1973, says Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg.”

With that, Norway entered a war against Africa’s best functioning and most prosperous country. And more than that, Norway was the leading country in NATO’s bombing campaign. Norway, the red-green government and the Labour Party leaders Jens Stoltenberg and Jonas Gahr Støre bear a significant responsibility for the destruction of Libya leaving it in the hands of jihadist terrorists. They committed war crimes and crimes against humanity, and should be brought before an international war crimes tribunal.

The decision to wage war against Libya was not made by the government. The decision was made in an informal meeting at the prime minister’s residence. In addition to Prime Minister Stoltenberg, Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Støre, the Minister of Defence, the Chief of Defence and a representative from the intelligence services attended. Stoltenberg then called his government coalition partners in SV and the Center Party on his mobile phone pressuring them to accept the bombing and obtain an OK from the opposition.

There is good reason to assume that this was done at the request of Hillary Clinton, then Secretary of State in the United States and the prime protagonist for war against Libya.

When accounts are settled, we know that Norway was the leading bombing nation and that «we» are responsible for the killing of unknown tens of thousands of people and the destruction of Africa’s best functioning and most prosperous country. Jens Stoltenberg was awarded for his efforts by being given the position of Secretary General of NATO.
And of course we have not forgotten that Norway, through the «Oslo Agreement», has contributed greatly to crushing the Palestinian liberation struggle and turning the Palestinian authorities into obedient bound dogs of imperialism through the «donor group’s» control.

17 billion NOK for the war against Syria—without audit or control

Together with Qatar, Norway became one of the biggest investors in the war to destroy Syria. This has cost Norway a total of more than NOK 15 billion as of today.

Norway spent 15 billion on Syria aid—the National Audit Office will check the use of money
We don’t have any figures showing how much Norway’s destruction of Libya cost, but it is quite obvious that Norway was at the forefront destroying the country with its bombs.

Billions to Gates, Clinton and the pharmaceutical industry

Norway and Saudi Arabia were the biggest donors to the Clinton Foundation. The Clinton Foundation: Part 3: Norway’s contribution to the fund

Norway’s largest donor to Bill Gates and Gavi. Erna Solberg gives 13 billion tax kroner to the Gates alliance

The EU and Norway will allocate 85 billion for a vaccine against covid-19

Shortly following the coup d’état in Ukraine in 2014, Norway poured hundreds of millions of NOK over the Kiev regime without the possibility of, for example the National Audit Office, having any oversight where the money has gone. And in 2022 we could read that Støre would beat Solberg’s record gifts by a good margin: the Ukraine bill has increased to almost NOK 14 billion—where will we make the cuts?

And now he has topped this again. With the support of all parties in the Parliament (Storting), Støre has decided to inject another 75 billion Norwegian tax kroner into the war against Russia in Ukraine.

Tamed and disciplined left—Political operators and agents of influence

Few public documents have played, and play, such an important role as Stortingsmelding 15 (2008—2009). It is entitled Interests, responsibilities and opportunities Main lines in Norwegian foreign policy , and is probably the most important program document left behind by the red-green government of Jens Stoltenberg.

The NGOs are incorporated into the power apparatus of the imperialist state

Professor Terje Tvedt has made a thorough study of the ideological change in Norway and the Norwegian public in its relationship with the outside world. Here we have previously shown how the «voluntary organisations» have been co-opted by the state and transformed into tools enforcing Norwegian politics, and especially Norwegian foreign policy.

In 2003, Terje Tvedt wrote:

“The very close collaboration between the state, voluntary organizations and research institutes is described as «The Norwegian model». In 2003, several thousand employees in the state administration, in around 150 voluntary organisations, at research institutes and universities were linked in to Norwegian politics in Africa, Asia and Latin America.”

In parliamentary notice (Stortingsmelding) 15, the Stoltenberg government writes:

“While in the past a distinction was made between voluntary aid organizations and political organizations such as Amnesty International, and No to Nuclear Weapons, now the vast majority of voluntary organizations are political operators and influence agents in addition to being operational aid actors. Collected funds are used in close collaboration with the media and international media personalities to maximize visibility and political influence. At the same time, they collaborate ever closer and more often with government actors and the business world. Globalisation, with the associated media and communication revolution, has led to a considerable increase in these actors’ ability to network and influence politics across borders and actors.”

This is a very precise description of how the so-called aid organizations have functioned as an external agency for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in order to realize Norway’s imperialist interests. This applies not least to the Norwegian Red Cross, Norwegian People’s Aid, Norwegian Refugee Council, Church Aid, Save the Children and CARE Norway, as well as NORWAC and other similar organisations.

These organizations also present employment and career opportunities for large parts of the petty-bourgeois left in Norway, and it has also been shown that they to a very large extent have absorbed the ideology and mindset of imperialism. The same applies to the largely state-supported media in Norway.

Therefore, it is no coincidence that Norway today has the most militaristic leftists in Europe, and possibly the world.

In short, Norway is ideally equipped to be the glove that perfectly fits the USA’s hand, and therefore it may come as no surprise, if finally it is documented that Norway has been involved in a serious act of war against Germany and Russia, which blowing up the Nord Stream is. Unfortunately, this is what Norway has become.

Translated from the original: Hvorfor er Norge hansken som passer på USAs hånd? Translation by Erik Skjold. 

Author
Pål Steigan

If you remember your high school U.S. history (it’s ok if you don’t), you were likely taught that the United States abolished the trans-Atlantic slave trade in 1808. While this is technically true, it doesn’t mean that U.S. citizens stopped trading in the enslaved or that state power stopped being used to protect their profits. In fact, a full 25% of all enslaved Africans brought to the Americas arrived after the U.S. ban on the international slave trade.1 Throughout the first half of the 19th century, bound humans remained an important commodity in the circuit of global trade, and the U.S. merchants who engaged in this grotesque commerce used their profits to invest in banks, insurance companies, and industry. This investment helped build the financial, commercial, and industrial infrastructure that opened the doors for U.S. expansion. And the two keys to unlocking this wealth were the ready supply of the enslaved and the Spanish island 90 miles off the coast of continental North America-Cuba.

While Cuba would eventually become the world’s largest sugar producer, at the beginning of the 19th century the island was most important to the Spanish as a military outpost and waystation for ships travelling between the Americas and Spain. Two vital commodities that frequently stopped in Havana’s harbor were gold and silver extracted from mines in Spain’s other American colonies. For example, after 1765 around 243 million pesos fuertes (Spanish silver dollars) were routed through Cuba.2 This was important for U.S. merchants because in the early 19th century Spanish silver functioned as the de facto global currency accepted in most of Europe and, most importantly, accepted in the trade in Asia. With wetted lips U.S. merchants craved access to this river of riches running through Cuba. The key for siphoning off this wealth to the newly independent republic was the slave trade.

In the early years of the 19th century what emerged alongside this river of gold and silver was a plantation system devoted to the cultivation of sugar and coffee and built on the backs of enslaved workers transported from Africa. The brainchild of lawyer and sugar mill owner, Francisco Arango, Cuba’s plantation system greatly expanded due to a seismic political event in the Caribbean- the Haitian Revolution. When the Haitian Republic declared independence on January 1, 1804, Europeans lost the world’s largest producer of coffee and sugar as well as the most profitable colony on earth. The Spanish sought to supplant their losses in Hispaniola with investment in Cuba. This meant the proliferation of plantations, intensive cultivation of sugar and coffee, and, above all, the importation of thousands of the enslaved to do the work.3 With this, U.S. merchants saw their opportunity to join in on the exploitation and get their hands on some of that Spanish treasure.
​
The 19th century would be marked by an ever expanding trade between Cuba and the United States, which was facilitated by the slave trade and integration into global markets. Spanning markets from Europe to Asia, including commodities from human beings to flour, and depending on operators from smugglers to United States diplomats, this commercial circuit played an integral part in the emergence of early U.S. capitalism. To start in Cuba, there were three things U.S. merchants wanted: Spanish precious metals, sugar, and coffee. They wanted Spanish silver and gold because it could be exchanged globally and used to invest in U.S. industry or finance. They wanted sugar and coffee because these were in high demand in Europe and would give them access to European markets and centers of credit. The people in Cuban society best placed to provide them with these commodities were plantation owners. And these Cuban planters needed some things from U.S. merchants. They needed staple products like flour and consumer items like textiles, but, above all, they needed enslaved workers. Unlike the southern United States where a system of forced procreation expanded the enslaved population, it was more common for Caribbean sugar planters to work their enslaved laborers to death and replace them with fresh shipments from Africa.

This trade with Cuban planters helped open up the global market for U.S. merchants. Spanish silver acquired in Cuba could be used to purchase silks, teas, and spices from Asia; Cuban sugar and coffee were in constant demand in European markets; and all this could be accessed by the merchant willing to partake in the odious traffic of human flesh. Of course, this trade was not always conducted legally. This is where smugglers and United States diplomats came in.

The role of smugglers would appear self-explanatory. Experienced smugglers allowed U.S. merchants to avoid paying customs duties, evade Spanish trade restrictions, and continue the international slave trade even after its formal abolition. For their part, diplomats at the U.S. consulate in Havana essentially functioned as commercial agents and legal protectors for U.S. merchants and their interests. U.S. consuls like Vincent Gray used their elite connections, commercial savvyness, and legal expertise to assist U.S. merchants in skirting both Spanish and U.S. laws. If they didn’t know a way around the rules, they knew who to bribe or which powerful contacts to call on to make a problem go away. And if an issue actually made it to court, consuls could be hired to represent merchants. In 1803 Vincent Gray was handling over $300,000 in lawsuits for U.S. merchants over seized merchandise.4 Not one to miss out on the profits, in addition to his work at the consulate, Gray also worked as a slave trader for the wealthy Spanish merchant Antonio de Frias. With the right connections, Havana was a place where fortunes were made.

​U.S. consuls in Europe served a similar function. When the future president John Quincy Adams arrived as consul in St. Petersburg in 1809, he traveled aboard the Horace, a ship carrying sugar and coffee owned by New England merchant William Gray.5 This relationship would prove beneficial for both men as it boosted Gray’s profits while promoting Adams’s political career. European history buffs may remember that this was the time of Napoleon’s “continental system” which sought to blockade trade from Great Britain and the colonies. While the blockade was notoriously porous, it did have an effect on coffee and sugar prices. This meant well-placed merchants could profit at huge margins with the right information and protection. In William Gray’s case, his ship the Horace served as a courier for Adams carrying his official messages while also transporting Gray’s cargoes to and from Russia. In turn, Adams gave Gray insider information on European markets and protected his merchandise from confiscation by Russian officials. Between 1810 and 1811, Adams managed to secure the release of all of Gray’s ships that were seized in the Baltic for breaking trade restrictions. So, while merchants without these connections faced confiscation in Baltic ports, those with the inside tip from Adams profited handsomely. Meanwhile, Adams was rewarded with a $30,000 line of credit from Gray.6

Portrait of New England merchant and lieutenant governor of Massachusetts from 1810-1812 William Gray by Gilbert Stuart

Seeing the type of profits one could make with public influence, some U.S. merchants decided to cut out the middle man and leveraged their wealth into a political career. One of the most notorious slave traders of the time, Rhode Island merchant James D’Wolf, was one of these men. D’Wolf was active in Rhode Island state politics from the time he was first elected to the state House of Representatives in 1798, but he would seek national office when his interests in the slave trade were threatened by the appointment of his antislavery nemesis, Barnabas Bates, as the port collector of Bristol. D’Wolf sought and gained election to the U.S. Senate in 1820 and all it cost him was a fancy dinner for the Rhode Island legislature- a small price for possibly one of the richest men in the country at the time. (Reminder: U.S. senators were appointed by state legislatures until the passage of the 17th amendment in 1913 which began elections by popular vote.) By 1824, D’Wolf had succeeded in having Bates and threats to his illicit commerce removed.7
​
Men like D’Wolf also used their influence to shape politics beyond New England ports. Their trade was international, so they were naturally deeply invested in U.S. foreign policy. And the slave trade at this time did have potent enemies. While Great Britain would not abolish slavery until the 1830s, its growing abolitionist movement had succeeded in abolishing the slave trade in 1807, and the royal navy was becoming evermore proactive in enforcing the ban. They had even pressured the Spanish themselves to abolish the slave trade, which supposedly went into effect in 1820 but was virtually never enforced. And of course, there was the black republic of Haiti which sought to spread abolitionism in the Caribbean and beyond. Meanwhile, Spanish rule in the Americas was becoming increasingly tenuous as South and Central American colonies began declaring independence. By the 1820s, piracy off the coast of Cuba had proliferated and threatened the property of U.S. merchants which often included the enslaved. Spanish difficulties with pirates and rebellions caused many of those invested in slavery in Cuba to worry that England would seek to acquire the island and suppress piracy and the slave trade.8

What were Cuban planters and U.S. merchants to do? Some of the Creole elite in Cuba appealed to the U.S. government to annex the island. A couple men in James Monroe’s cabinet like South Carolina slaveholder and Secretary of War John C. Calhoun wanted to acquiesce, but they also knew this would likely guarantee war with Spain or Britain or both. However, others like John Quincy Adams, who had risen to become James Monroe’s Secretary of State, understood the game and knew that it depended on the maintenance of the status quo. Another war so soon after the War of 1812 was impractical and a growing abolitionist movement in the U.S. could disrupt the slave trade if the U.S. took direct control of Cuba. A Spanish government government willing to ignore the slave trade and allow growing U.S. influence and investment was ideal.9 Anyway, Adams was sure that over time Spanish control over the island would erode and it would naturally join its northern neighbor. In a letter to the U.S. minister of Spain in 1823, Adams wrote, “There are laws of political as well as of physical gravitation; and if an apple, severed by the tempest from its native tree, cannot choose but fall to the ground, Cuba, forcibly disjoined from its own unnatural connexion with Spain, and incapable of self-support, can gravitate only towards the North American Union, which, by the same law of nature, cannot cast her off from its bosom.”10

Adams’s line of thinking won the day and was integral to the decisions of U.S. policymakers to expand the navy and issue one of the nation’s most consequential declarations- the Monroe Doctrine. Merchant statesmen like James D’Wolf naturally wanted to expand the navy so it could protect their property. By the end of 1822, the U.S. navy had nine vessels deployed off the coast of Cuba to suppress piracy. By comparison, the U.S. navy only had one vessel patrolling the coast of Africa to capture slave traders. In December 1822, Congress authorized another $160,000 to the navy at the behest of president Monroe.11 U.S. priorities were clear. Enforcing its own ban on the slave trade was of little concern, while protecting the profits of wealthy merchants required prompt military action.

This naval expansion not only served to protect U.S. profits from piracy, but also backed up Monroe’s assertion of U.S. dominion over the Americas. And the fate of Cuba was at least partly on Monroe’s mind when he stated the American continents were “henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European powers.”12 While on its face this line might seem like a condemnation of European colonization in the Americas, Monroe was not advocating for independence for all colonies just to forestall any further European expansion or interference in the western hemisphere. Specifically, Monroe wanted to limit the penetration of British influence into what the U.S. saw as its back yard. In the case of the Spanish colonies, Monroe took pains to proclaim his government’s neutrality between the newly independent governments of the Americas and their Spanish overlords. Importantly, he did this “in hope that other powers will pursue the same course.”13 Everyone understood he was talking to the British.

These policies and practices established the contours of U.S. involvement in the slave trade for at least the next couple decades. While U.S. merchants continued to ship the enslaved from Africa to Cuba, the U.S. navy protected their cargoes from pirates and the British. Through this public-private partnership, U.S. merchants dominated the slave trade in Cuba. By the time it ended in the 1860s, U.S. ships were responsible for an estimated 63% of all enslaved persons brought to Cuba.14 Significantly, this slavemongering was not a monopoly of the South. Northern merchants played an active role in the slave trade in Cuba and even went on to invest in their own plantations there. James D’Wolf, a New Englander himself, owned three plantations in Cuba.15 The “Cuba trade” turned out to be very lucrative, and the money accumulated by U.S. merchants was then used to fuel U.S. financial and industrial development. For example, Moses Taylor, a New York sugar broker, made his fortune from Cuba, and used it to invest in banking and industry. By 1855 he was the president of the National City Bank of New York, which later became Citibank.16
​
Through this commerce Cuba played a significant role in the development of the United States, something that would make it a place of interest for U.S. policymakers to the present day. U.S. investment and influence in Cuba would only grow as the years went on and so would the wealth extracted from the island. It was the change in this relationship that was the greatest impact of the 1959 Cuban Revolution. But that’s a story for another day. 

Works Cited
Chambers, Stephen. No God But Gain: The Untold Story of Cuban Slavery, the Monroe
Doctrine, & the Making of the United States. Verso, 2015.

Ferrer, Ada. Cuba: An American History. Scribner, 2021.

Monroe, James. “Seventh Annual Message to Congress, December 2, 1823.” In the Annals of
Congress, (Senate), 18th Congress, 1st Session, pages 14, 22–23. Accessed:
https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/monroe-doctrine

​Pérez Jr., Louis A. Cuba in the American Imagination: Metaphor and the Imperial Ethos.
University of North Carolina Press, 2008.

1 Chambers, No God But Gain, 10.
2 Chambers, No God But Gain, 21.
3 Ferrer, Cuba, 67-69.
4 Chambers, No God But Gain, 33-35.
5 Chambers, No God But Gain, 49.
6 Chambers, No God But Gain, 54.
7 Chambers, No God But Gain, 106.
8 Chambers, No God But Gain, 108.
9 Chambers, No God But Gain, 113-114.
10 Quoted in Louis A. Pérez Jr., Cuba, 30.
11 Chambers, No God But Gain, 111.
12 James Monroe, “Seventh Annual Message.”
13 James Monroe, “Seventh Annual Message.”
14 Ferrer, Cuba, 92.
15 Ferrer, Cuba, 93.
16 Ferrer, Cuba, 93.