While neoliberalism is the economic and political ideology that dominates most of the Western world today, it is an ideology that is unknown to most American citizens. The purveyors of neoliberal ideology present themselves as objective and as being above ideology, which serves as a method of concealing the real underlying principles of neoliberalism, which are actually wildly unpopular with regular people. In this book journalist George Monbiot and filmmaker Peter Hutchison attempt to reveal these hidden principles of neoliberalism so that the ideology can be better understood and combatted. And while they do a good job revealing what makes neoliberal capitalism such a predatory, exploitative, unequal, imperialistic, and ecologically disastrous system, they also fall into the left-anticommunism that plagues so much of the Western left, which was critiqued brilliantly by Michael Parenti in his 1997 classic Blackshirts and Reds.
         
The most valuable contribution of this book is that it traces the ideological history of neoliberalism through different thinkers such as Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig Von Mises, and Milton Friedman, up until today where neoliberals themselves now reject the word neoliberalism because of how unpopular it has become. Instead, neoliberals prefer to posture as being above ideology, and to portray the principles of neoliberalism as being natural and eternal.

The authors show how the rise of politicians like Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and Agusto Pinochet represent a transition away from Keynsianism and toward neoliberalism, or an unregulated, monopolistic, financialized, version of capitalism, justified by the idea that if we allow the rich to concentrate as much wealth and power into their hands as possible, then somehow this wealth will eventually “trickle down” to the rest of us at the bottom. Since the rise of Reagan and Thatcher inequality has skyrocketed, ecological degradation has accelerated, countless wars have been fought on behalf of corporate plunder, rents and debts are through the roof, and wealth has been concentrated at the top at unprecedented rates.
         
The book also makes a pertinent and valuable analysis of the rise of right wing populist demagogues like the business tycoon Donald Trump in the US, the Musolini praising Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, and the far right Hindutva associated leader of India Narenda Modi. Monbiot and Hutchison avoid falling into what some have called “Trump derangement syndrome” by making a sober and realistic analysis of Trump’s rise to power, arguing convincingly that deteriorating economic conditions make people more susceptible to right wing demagogues who claim to be fighting the establishment while doing its bidding in reality. They point out that it was Bill Clinton, the husband of Hillary Clinton who Trump ran against in 2016, that allowed many good manufacturing jobs in middle America to be outsourced to the Global South with the passing of the free trade agreement NAFTA. Free trade is a core principle of neoliberal ideology, and thus the authors show how it is neoliberalism that set the stage for the populist right wing movement, masterminded by the likes of Steve Bannon, and brought to fruition by his preferred candidate Donald Trump.
         
I also found the author’s analysis of mental health under neoliberalism to be pertinent, as too often we overlook the atomization of humanity and the lack of social connection that permeates throughout the neoliberal system. Obviously these factors play a role in the unprecedented rates of depression, opioid addiction, and mass shootings that now exist across the US. Too often the issue of social isolation in society is overlooked as politicians push half-baked cure-all solutions to these problems that won’t upset their corporate donors. For example the Democrats pushing for gun control, and gun control alone, everytime a new shooting takes place, while generally having very little to say about social isolation and the deterioration of community. It is important to understand that these social issues are complex and are rooted in the social system, and therefore, require systemic and complex solutions. The authors do a fantastic job of making this case in their systematic critique of neoliberalism.
         
Neoliberals tell us that the current state of society is the way things have to be, that this is the natural order of life which must be maintained forever because there are simply no alternatives. And it is this assumption that Monbiot and Hutchison look to challenge in their book. However, by also claiming that communism is a “failed ideology” {1}full stop, with absolutely no explanation or analysis of why it has “failed”, they too are unwittingly propagating the idea that there is no alternative to capitalism. In the words of Michael Parenti, “to claim that Communism can never work is to ignore that fact that it has for millions of people around the world.” Today China is leading the charge against neoliberalism and in doing so have accomplished the incredible feat of bringing 800 million people out of poverty. {2} A fact that the authors of this book don’t even attempt to grapple with, instead falling back on the lame cold war talking point that communism has simply failed.

I would encourage these two authors to read economist Michael Hudson’s fantastic article “America’s Neoliberal Financialization Policy vs.China’s Industrial Socialism”{3} which lays out in great detail the systemic differences between American neoliberalism and Chinese socialism. Although, if a positive word was spoken about Chinese socialism in this book it might not have gotten published by Penguin publishing house. Thus, the decision to badmouth socialism while completely ignoring all of its successes may have been more of a financial decision than a scholarly one.
         
Existing socialist countries are only mentioned a few times in this book and always disparagingly. In Blackshirts and Reds Michael Parenti says “For decades, many left leaning writers and speakers in the United States have felt obliged to establish their credibility by indulging in anti communist and anti-Soviet genuflection, seemingly unable to give a talk or write an article or book review on whatever political subject without injecting some anti-red sideswipe. The intent was, and still is, to distance themselves from the Marxist Leninist Left.” {4} The authors of Invisible Doctrine: The secret history of neoliberalism repeatedly engage in this time honored tradition of bashing socialist countries in order to distance themselves from the communist left, and to fit their message within what is allowed by the established political orthodoxy. It’s amazing how the authors can be aware of the fact that our society is dominated by corporations, bankers, and shareholders, who spend billions of dollars trying to manipulate the public’s understanding of political economy, yet they seem to believe everything that these entities are telling us about communism. As a result the author's analyses of communism sound no different than what you would see in old school cold war propaganda, or a corporate owned news outlet like Fox.
         
Parenti’s text goes on to say that “sorely lacking within the US (or in this case the British) Left is any rational evaluation of the Soviet Union.” {5} Likewise, sorely lacking from the Invisible Doctrine: The secret history of Neoliberalism, is any kind of rational evaluation of China, Cuba, Vietnam, or even non-socialist nations like Iran, who are attempting to construct an alternative economic system to Western neoliberalism. Which you’d think would be important in a text about neoliberalism. The authors choose to totally ignore the emerging multipolar world which is challenging the existing Western power structure and trying to bring about a world where the neoliberal US is no longer the unipolar global hegemon. Even the notedly anti-communist academic Noam Chomsky made a better analysis of China and the multipolar world in his recent book The Withdrawal which was a joint effort with Communist academic Vijay Prashad. {6}

Instead of socialist nations like China, these authors choose to champion the region of Rojava as an existing example of a possible alternative to neoliberalism. Rojava is a semi-autonomous region in Syria which is governed by a self described socialist party with many different branches known as the PKK or the Kurdistan Workers Party. During the Syrian Civil War the PKK sided with the US and CIA backed Free Syrian Army which allied itself with Jihadist extremist groups like ISIS and Al-Nusra in their effort to overthrow the sovereign Government of Bashar Al-Assad. It was in the chaos of this horrific civil war that the Syrian Kurds were able to establish a semi-autonomous zone in so-called Rojava for the first time. Rojava and the PKK have been criticized, especially by the Marxist Leninist left, for acting as proxies of Western imperialism, and for enforcing ethno-nationalist policies that have reportedly led many Syrian Christians to flee Rojava. [7]

The authors champion Rojava because of its efforts to implement Democratic reforms, socially progressive policies distinct from the rest of Syria, and to establish worker cooperatives. But there are many reasons to question whether Rojava should be upheld as a viable alternative to Western neoliberalism, especially when Rojava and the Kurds were recently used as pawns in a regime change effort led by Western neoliberals, intended to overthrow a sovereign state by putting arms in the hands of some of the worst extremist groups in the region. The US currently maintains seven military bases in so-called Rojava which further brings into question whether or not this region is truly a new kind of popular democracy distinct from Western neoliberalism. It is highly possible that Rojava is being allowed by Western neoliberals to experiment with some new forms of Governance so long as they continue to act as a proxy of Western power in the Middle East. {8}

Similarly to Rojava, the state of Israel has adopted a progressive veneer in the past, claiming to be champions for women's rights and for the labor movement, or even claiming to have a socialist economic system due to the prevalence of worker co-ops. However, nobody in their right mind would argue that Israel is a country that anyone should attempt to emulate. As they have of course been charged with maintaining a system of apartheid that systematically discriminates against Palestinian Arabs, who have been ethnically cleansed by the US and British backed State of Israel for over 70 years. Palestinian living standards have reached disastrously low levels, and over 70% of Palestinian people are now living in refugee status, proving that it is impossible to build an equitable and democratic state so long as you allow yourself to be a pawn of western imperialism.  We should be wary of any US backed countries that claim to be heroes for women's rights and Democracy.

Comically, Parenti’s Blackshirts and Reds singles out two left anti-communist intellectuals for specific criticism, those being the anarchist environmentalist Murray Bookchin, and the self described socialist novelist George Orwell. Murray Bookchin once mocked Parenti for trying to make a balanced analysis of the Soviet Union by derriding him for caring so much about “the poor little children who got fed under communism” (his words). Ironically, it is Bookchin’s vision of a future society that Monbiot and Hutchison champion as the most viable alternative to neoliberalism. Despite the fact that no such society has ever been created and sustained in practice, unless you accept their fallacious argument about Rojava. This is not the case with Marxist-Leninist socialism, which has seen a great deal of success in practice, and has already elevated living standards for billions of people.
The other ideologue who Parenti criticizes, George Orwell, used his voice to vehemently denounce and criticize the Soviet Union at a time when they were locked in a mortal struggle with Hitler and the Nazis. Ironically, George Monbiot won the Orwell award for journalism in 2022 and has since given lectures for the George Orwell Foundation {9} carrying on Orwell’s legacy of criticizing capitalism, while bashing and deriding those around the world who are doing the most to construct an alternative to it.

While this book grasps the evils and contradictions of neoliberalism quite well, it fails to understand the geopolitical situation today in which a new multi-polar order is arising against US dominated neoliberal hegemony. The US is desperate for regime change in countries like China, Russia, Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, etc. because they continue to build stronger economic ties with one another, while preventing western neoliberals from plundering their resources and manipulating their Government policy.

Confusingly, the authors at one point lump Russian President Vladimir Putin together with neoliberal demagogues around the world such as Bibi Netanyahu in Israel, Donald Trump in the US, and Narenda Modi in India. And while Russia did fall in line with the Neoliberal world order during the 1990s with the collapse of the Soviet Union and subsequent plundering of the Russian economy by Western capital, under Putin they have largely reversed course, building stronger trade ties with China, nationalizing sections of the energy industry, cracking down on certain oligarchs and Russian firms, and investing more resources in infrastructure development. It is for these reasons that the US desperately seeks regime change in Russia today, dumping billions of dollars into a Ukrainian Proxy war against Russia, and terroristically blowing up the Nord stream Pipeline to sever Russian economic relations with Europe. The Russia of today, with Putin at the helm, is far from fitting in with neoliberal puppets of the West like Netanyahu in Israel or Zelensky in Ukraine. This is why Putin receives only vitriol from the US Government, while the other two receive a seemingly endless supply of money and guns.

The authors also make the claim in this book that China’s production quotas under Mao Zedong had no social utility whatsoever, which simply shows a complete lack of understanding of Chinese history and socialist economic planning. Prior to the era of Mao, China was a feudal agrarian country with very little industry to speak of. The country was dominated by feudal landlords who ruled over vast swaths of land worked by impoverished peasants. In order for China to become a modern society Mao needed to industrialize the nation and teach these peasants to engage in modern economic practices such as steel working. This is why the now infamous backyard furnaces came about, as Chinese peasants had to be given tools by the state in order to teach themselves how to do modern industrial production. And while these policies were far from perfect, the first years of Mao’s rule in China were the fastest increase in human life expectancy that has ever been seen in human history. China transformed in a matter of decades from a backwards feudal agrarian dictatorship, into a modern economy where social metrics like literacy, housing, and access to healthcare, have been massively expanded. To say that the production quotas under Mao had no social utility, and to compare them to production as it now exists in the neoliberal United States, is a statement that can only be described as absurd and ignorant.

The authors do choose to acknowledge the power of central economic planning and how it can be used to direct production towards social ends. However, instead of analyzing how the USSR and China used economic planning to transform themselves from being semi-feudal agrarian countries into industrialized global superpowers in a matter of decades, the authors instead choose to praise Franklin Delano Roosevelt for the way that he was able to direct all production towards military equipment during the Second World War. And to be fair, this is not a bad example. It does show that the US can, and has historically, used central economic planning to direct production toward social ends. However, to use this as an example while dismissing China’s use of central economic planning as a failure is completely ludicrous.

An area of agreement I have with the authors is that the left of today needs to offer people a new narrative as to how our system can be radically changed. We at the Midwestern Marx Institute for Marxist Theory and Political Analysis have been attempting to do just that, by fleshing out a theory of American Marxism, or what we call the American Trajectory. We believe that America has already gone through three periods of revolutionary change, those being the 1776 revolution against british colonialism, the Civil War of the 1860s which abolished slavery and made capitalism the dominant mode of production in the American South, and the civil rights movement which did away with apartheid putting black and white workers on a more equal playing field, and allowing them to organize together against the ruling class as one. As Americans we need to understand that our history is one of colonial plunder and corporate power, but it is also a history of resistance to that power. Heroes like WEB Dubois and Martin Luther King helped to fight for historic advances that brought us to the situation we are in today free of slavery and apartheid. The struggles of the past have moved our society forward and set the stage for what must come next… American Socialism. The abolition of the neoliberal capitalist system and the transition into a truly democratic system where production is directed towards social ends, rather than the production of surplus value alone. This is the American Trajectory and this is the “New Story” that I believe we need to start selling the American Public on.

Marxism is not a failed ideology. It is a science that must be applied uniquely to each country so that we might understand our current situation and how to change it through class struggle. Once we learn to apply Marxism to our own conditions and use it to understand our country’s history, we can start to understand how we got to the current situation, and how we can best move forward with changing it. There are many analyses in this book that are passed off as unique, but were already made by Karl Marx more than a century ago. Such as the idea that the ruling economic class of society will try to portray its own narrow interests as being in the interest of the whole of society, including the workers they exploit. This was something that Marx and Engels realized as early as 1840 in his text The German Ideology. The authors reformulate Marx and Engels’s analysis in different words without crediting or citing them, before turning around and claiming that Marxist ideology has failed. Such instances are common among Western Leftists who tend to throw endless shade at the work of Marx while copying some of his most important analyses of capitalism without credit.

Despite falling into left-anticommunism throughout, the authors of Invisible Doctrine: the secret history of neoliberalism, provide a solid and pertinent critique of capitalism and the current neoliberal social system. Because of this book, many people will come to understand how the social problems we face today are rooted in capitalism, and the neoliberal political ideology that stems from it, and serves to justify its continued existence. The book proves without a shadow of a doubt that for the vast majority of people living under neoliberalism the system has failed.

However, by arguing that capitalism's antithesis, socialism, has also failed, the authors further confuse the masses and push them to seek solutions in the anarchist school of thought which has yet to produce a successful revolution, or build a social system separate from western capitalism and imperialism. By arguing that keynesianism, neoliberalism, and socialism have all failed the authors extinguish some of the hope that the masses might place in the rise of socialism and the multipolar world. This might be acceptable if the authors made a sober analysis of rising socialist powers like China and Cuba, or their non-socialist allies like Russia and Iran, in order to argue that their rise will not be enough to destroy neoliberalism, and there is still much work to be done by workers here in the imperial core. Which is an argument that I would agree with. However, the authors instead fall back on cold war style state department talking points to dismiss these rising socialist and socialist adjacent powers without offering a shred of real analysis. And thus the book gives a solid analysis of neoliberalism, but confuses the current state of geopolitics by neglecting to analyze the massive and growing resistance to neoliberalism that is taking place in the East and the Global South.
​
Read this book if you want to gain a better grasp on modern neoliberalism, and especially its ideological roots which can be traced back to the beginning of the last century. However, also make sure to pick up Vijay Prashad and Noam Chomsky’s The Withdrawal for a more all encompassing and accurate analysis of the current geopolitical situation. Also don’t be afraid to pick up some Marx and Lenin. I promise there is more to learn from them than what much of the Western left would lead you to believe.

Citations

1. Monbiot, George, and Peter Hutchison. The Invisible Doctrine: The Secret History of Neoliberalism. Penguin Books Ltd, 2024.
2. “Lifting 800 Million People Out of Poverty – New Report Looks at Lessons from China’s Experience.” Worldbank.Org, The World Bank, 1 Apr. 2022, https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2022/04/01/lifting-800-million-people-out-of-poverty-new-report-looks-at-lessons-from-china-s-experience. Accessed 2024.
3. Hudson, Michael. “America’s Neoliberal Financialization Policy vs. China’s Industrial Socialism.” Michael-Hudson.Com, 14 Apr. 2021, https://michael-hudson.com/2021/04/americas-neoliberal-financialization-policy-vs-chinas-industrial-socialism/.  Accessed 2024.
4. Parenti, Michael. “Left Anti Communism.” Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism & the Overthrow of Communism, City Lights Books, San Francisco, California, 1997, p. 43.
5. Parenti, Michael. “Left Anti Communism.” Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism & the Overthrow of Communism, City Lights Books, San Francisco, California, 1997, p. 45.
6. Prashad, Vijay, et al. The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and the Fragility of U.S. Power. The New Press, 2022.
7. Hamou, Ammar, and Will Christou. “Syrian Christians: Exploited or Protected Minority?” Syria Direct, 22 Dec. 2019, syriadirect.org/syrian-christians-exploited-or-protected-minority/.
8. Line Struggle Collective. “On Rojava and the Western Left.” Linestruggle.Medium.Com, Medium, 22 Apr. 2022, https://linestruggle.medium.com/on-rojava-and-the-western-left-bac1b858173e. Accessed 2024.
9. “George Monbiot.” The Orwell Foundation, The Orwell Foundation, 13 July 2022, www.orwellfoundation.com/journalist/george-monbiot/.

aiti is again breaking news. One of the top news stories in the world on March 12 was the alleged “cannibalism” of a Haitian gang. No different than the Department of Health’s equating Haitians with carriers of the AIDS virus in the 1980’s and Hollywood films such as The Serpent and the Rainbow, this disinformation campaign is a racist attack on the collective Haitian self-esteem. Such propaganda seeks to ideologically justify the impending fourth U.S.-directed invasion and occupation of Haiti in the past 100 years. 

But where there is repression, there is resistance. Haitian grassroots actors and their supporters around the world are saying no to both internal and external mercenaries usurping Haitian participatory democracy. As Haitian Bald Headed Party-affiliated (PHTK) paramilitary death squads rampage through Port-au-Prince, seeking to displace and massacre as many families as possible, Jake Johnston’s new book Aid State: Elite Panic, Disaster Capitalism and the Battle to Control Haiti is a valuable contribution to understanding the geopolitical origins of these “gangs.” The book provides context on why the Biden government appointed the unelected prime minister, Ariel Henry, in 2021 and then requested his removal from office last week  as continued support for the illegitimate leader became untenable.

Gangs or Mercenaries for Hire?

Johnston’s page-turner is a necessary read for those new to Haitian studies, as well as those long familiar with the anti-dictatorship and anti-paramilitary struggles that Haiti has embarked upon in decades and centuries past. One thing is clear: the current paramilitaries, described in the mainstream press as “gangs,” must be analyzed on the historical continuum of U.S.-sponsored, state-affiliated armed groups, tasked with subduing the perennially “restless natives.” The preferred weapon of the mercenary gang bosses—Izo, Kempès, Barbecue, and others—is the torching of the communities they seek to subdue. Johnston points to the Michel Martelly administration (2011 - 2016) as being the first expression of the PHTK to use armed mercenaries to do their bidding. This assault on Haitian democracy, as personified by the politically-active populations of Belè, Lasalin, Solino, Delma anba, and the other ghettos of downtown Port-au-Prince, has reshaped Haiti’s capital city (spellings of Haitian words are in Haitian Kreyòl and not in the French colonial language). While early 2021 saw a mass movement that sought to topple the second expression of the PHTK dictatorship, headed by Jovenel Moïse, today armed and masked gunmen control some 80 percent of Port-au-Prince. 

According to the Displacement Tracking Matrix of the International Organization of Migration, 330,000 people have been internally displaced in Haiti, the majority of whom are children. Consistent with one of the principal themes of the book, I documented in visits to refugee camps at the end of January how the U.S.-sponsored Haitian state has yet to even visit the thousands of families sheltered in schools, alleyways, public plazas, and beyond.

Aid State compiles 10 plus years of Johnston’s research in the Capital Beltway and 1,400 miles away, in the ancestral homeland of Haitian revolutionary leaders Dutty Boukman, François Makandal, and Jean-Jacque Dessalines. The backdrop of the work is a literary tour de force of the spellbinding mountains of the Grandans department, the crowded refugee camp of Titanyen, and the abandoned farms of the Grannò. The reader who has not visited Haiti in the past years as a result of what the Haitian people call the ensekirité planifye e òganize (planned and organized instability) is sure to shed a tear or two of nostalgia upon reading of the landgrabs of armed thugs employed by the PHTK.

Haitian Patriots or Colonial Lackeys?

The meat of the book provides a broad overview of the corrupt inner workings of Haitian state corruption beginning with the selection of Martelly as president in 2011 up to the present, and the U.S. government puppeteers who oversee the clumsy “politics as usual.” Johnston examines from the inside-out how the “aid state”—a state almost wholly dependent on thousands of private, foreign NGO’s—both consciously and unconsciously functions to disempower Haitians. Every page confirms what almost any Haitian will tell you: politics and “aid” are a rich man’s game which mocks the lives, interests, and dignity of Haiti’s 99 percent.

Haitian young professionals searching to be of service to their country would have been militants of national liberation organizations in decades past. Today, much of this homegrown talent is compelled to follow the lure of some 10,000 NGOs that can pay salaries in U.S. dollars the Haitian left does not have access to. “Soft imperialism” contributes to an internal brain drain that discourages the upcoming generation from struggling for true Haitian sovereignty.

Johnston shows how the Republic of NGOs—one accurate nickname for both pre and post-earthquake Haiti—is not organized to respond to everyday people’s needs.

​The product of years of investigative journalism, Johnston shows how the Republic of NGOs—one accurate nickname for both pre and post-earthquake Haiti—is not organized to respond to everyday people’s needs. Thoroughly researched chapters show how donors responding to the 2010 earthquake, including the Clinton Foundation, Citibank, and an entire cast of neocolonial characters, squandered $10 billion dollars, $1 billion of which was from the United States, constituting the “largest ever international mobilization to respond to a natural disaster.” A high percentage of that money was pilfered by Western companies who created fraudulent paperwork and looked out for corporate bottom lines, not the needs of the Haitian people. 

The chapter “The $80,000 House” explains with painstaking detail how Haitian Martelly’s government and his cronies, such as his childhood friend Harold Charles, worked with USAID and their U.S. contractors—including Thor Construction, Tetra Tech, and the CEEPCO company—in the wake of the earthquake to swindle Haiti’s population in the north. The Caracol-EKAM village was supposed to provide $8,000 homes for workers displaced by the earthquake who were the rank and file of the Clinton-USAID free trade or sweatshop project. After the vultures divided up the booty, each house turned out to have “cost” $88,000. What was supposed to be a community of 15,000 “culturally appropriate” homes for survivors of the earthquake ended up being 750 homes with major construction and sewage problems. This malfeasance was “the perfect encapsulation of everything wrong with our foreign aid system: the favoritism and corruption, the reliance on expensive foreign ‘experts,’ the lack of community consultation. Most of all, the houses stood as proof of how difficult it was to hold anyone accountable for their actions in Haiti.”

Johnston, a Senior Research Associate at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, provides the necessary global—or more accurately U.S.—geostrategic context that explains how political unknowns like Martelly, Moïse, and Henry became the leaders of the nation, despite enjoying very little popular support. Johnston shows that the PHTK, the party of the U.S.-backed former president Martelly, is the principal Haitian actor at the center of the Guns, Gangs, and Neocolonialism drama that continues to play out. Interviews with former president René Préval, the head of the scaled-down UN mission Susan Page, and musician, hotelier, and former Martelly ambassador Richard Morse add to the entertaining, easily-digestible chapters. Aid State is further bolstered by chapters covering the theft of billions of dollars in Petro Caribbean funds by the Haitian state from Venezuela, and the 628,000 “zombie votes” from people who did not exist in 2016 that guaranteed victory for the PHTK and the United States’ man in Haiti, Moïse. Aid State ends with explosive new plot twists that help explain who was behind the July 7, 2021, assassination of Moïse that will shock even seasoned followers of all things Haiti.

The Only Solution: Haitian Self-Determination

The myriad threats and doxing to which the author has been subjected are the clearest proof he has exposed and touched the sensitive veins of colonial rule in Haiti.

Like Jeb Sprague’s Paramilitarism and the Assault on Democracy in Haiti, Mark Schuller’s Humanitarian Aftershocks in Haiti, Dada Chery’s We Have Dared to Be Free: Haiti's Struggle Against Occupation, and a phalanx of others, this is a book that belongs in every library of Haitian and anti-colonial studies. Johnston has been a valuable witness to an important chapter in the ongoing Haitian national liberation struggle. His lucid pen does justice to the continued mobilization of millions of Haitians against the Aid State. The myriad threats and doxing to which the author has been subjected are the clearest proof he has exposed and touched the sensitive veins of colonial rule in Haiti.

I am an ethnographer who has filled up notebooks with notes on Haitian Kreyòl and culture for almost three decades. Since 2021, I have been following the paramilitary gang war on the long-peaceful and stable ghettos of Port-au-Prince. Jake Johnston’s rigorous research over the course of fifteen years has helped me better understand the present brutality that neocolonialism has produced. Johnston’s book is a necessary read for any friends and supporters of Haiti seeking to contextualize what is playing out in the korido (alleyways) and katyè popilè (oppressed communities) of Port-au-Prince as you read this article.

Upon finishing this political science and journalistic gem, the reader wonders how, nearly one quarter of the way through the 21st century in the era of social media and identity politics, Haiti can so clearly remain a colony of the United States. Every U.S. government move in Haiti, from appointing prime ministers to organizing the next invasion, reflects their desire to maintain hegemonic control over Haiti. The years 1492 and 1697—the year of the “Peace of Ryswick” treaty which defined colonial ownership of the island the Taino natives called Ayiti—hemorrhage into 2024 as the masses of hungry and humiliated Haitians continue to dream of and fight for the Second Haitian Revolution. Until then, Haitian communities stand like David before Goliath, erecting their barricades to resist the onslaught of the paramilitaries and their foreign masters.

Author

Danny Shaw teaches Latin American and Caribbean Studies and International Relations at the City University of New York. He holds a master’s degree in International Affairs from the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University. As the Director and professor of the International Affairs Department at the Midwestern Marx Institute, he works to build unity and anti-imperialist consciousness. He is fluent in Spanish, Haitian Kreyol, Portuguese, Cape Verdean Kreolu and has a fair command of French, and works as an International Affairs Analyst for TeleSUR, HispanTV, RT and other international news networks. He has worked and organized in eighty-one countries, opening his spirit to countless testimonies about the inhumanity of the international economic system. He is a Golden Gloves boxer, fighting twice in Madison Square Garden for the NYC heavyweight championship. He teaches boxing, yoga and nutrition and works as a Sober Coach. He is a mentor to many, guiding them through the nutritional, ideological, social and emotional landmines that surround us. He is the father of Ernesto Dessalines and Cauã Amaru. He has also authored articles on Latin American history, boxing and nutrition, among other topics. You can follow his work at @profdannyshaw

Republished from NACLA

​The traditional Marxist critique of ideology has understood both the functional and epistemological dimensions of bourgeois ideologue’s claims. This tradition has always emphasized how ideas are both conditioned by the historical conjunctures and class positions of the people and institutions that materially embody them, but also – and equally important – how, under class societies, the economically dominant class, in whose control the rest of the political, juridical, and ideological institutions are under, has to necessarily distort the world’s understanding of itself so that the vast majority of people, whose class interests are diametrically opposed to theirs, can consent to this topsy turvy image of the world. As Marx and Engels noted early on in their theoretical development,

If in all ideology men and their circumstances appear upside-down as in a camera obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life-process as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their physical life-process.

This structurally necessary ideological inversion will later be labeled by Engels false consciousness, a condition where the people are unaware of the “real driving forces which move [them], [instead] imagin[ing] false or apparent driving forces.” This prevents bourgeois ideologues from properly understanding the world – it subdues their ability to obtain truth in their work. However, this is far from being only a question of errors in thinking, that is, the problem of ideological false consciousness, contrary to popular belief and those of the post-modernized Western “Marxist” specialists, is far from being merely one of consciousness. The inverted character of ideologue’s ideas is a reflection of an objective social order that requires its inhabitants to think of it in deliberately inverted ways. In short: the ‘error in thinking’ is an objective necessity for our social order, a social order that requires the generalization of mistaken views of itself for its own reproduction.

The conventional bourgeois-imperialist narratives on migration and migrant labor, a phenomenon which affects around 3 billion people (approximately 40% of the world), is filled with these ideological inversions. Immanuel Ness’s book, Migration as Economic Imperialism, does an exceptional job at exposing how these ideas emerge of out the capitalist-imperialist system (and not out of some mythical disinterested and bias-free scientific observers). He shows us how these ideas distort reality, providing us with an upside-down image of the real world. And finally, he shows us who benefits, i.e., what class and social system is upheld by the systematization of these ideological contortions. The book is, in short, a quintessential example of what Marxist scholars should be doing in the battle of ideas: exposing the hollow falsity of bourgeois narratives, and replacing these with the truth – which, as we know well, is always on the side of the revolutionaries. While this last point might seem swaggering, it is not our fault, as Che Guevara is often attributed to have said, that reality is Marxist.

The conventional imperialist narrative on migrant workers holds that they benefit the global economy, the global north countries of destination, and the global south countries of origins. Through remittances and the skills migrant workers obtain in the global north, so the imperialist narrative goes, they can help develop their countries of origin. Remittances are painted as “a leading form of economic development for poor countries” by International Development Agencies, the World Bank, and other imperialist institutions.

After the migration boom of the 1990s that followed the overthrow of the USSR, the increased flow of remittances led bourgeois specialists to hold that this was a far more preferrable alternative to the old school ‘foreign aid’ that kept poor countries dependent on rich ones (the system that devised mechanisms of debt trapping and structural adjustment programs that kept global south countries poor and indebted, of course, was never questioned).

In addition to remittances, the conventional imperialist narratives held that a stratum of higher skilled migrant workers were capable of developing new skills in the global north. These skills, so the myth goes, are taken back to the origin country and used to fuel their development and fight poverty.

Are these narratives true? Do they actually correspond to the reality they attempt to explain? As you could’ve guessed it, they are about as true as any of the other capitalist myths. Which means, from the standpoint of a comprehensive analysis of the world as it actually exists, these claims are not true at all. In fact, their conclusions turn reality upside down; as the Athenian oligarchs once wrongly accused Socrates of doing, they are the ones that make “the worst appear the better cause.” They make migration, which benefits almost exclusively the elite of the imperialist countries, appear as a beneficial phenomenon for those poor souls forced into it by the conditions their countries have been subjected to after centuries of imperialist plunder and colonial and neocolonial domination.
​
In reality, as Manny eloquently demonstrates, “remittances do not improve the standard of living for most inhabitants living in poor countries and do contribute to economic imbalances which engender higher levels of crime and violence.” “Remittances themselves,” as Manny shows, contribute to the erosion of the agrarian sector in southern economies as they constitute a form of rent for many residents in origin countries who are dependent on the continuing flow of remittances… [an] unreliable source of income.”

Additionally, even when certain migrant workers obtain new skills in the global north, many of them do not return home – skilled migrant workers, as Manny notes, “are more likely to be provided with legal status than low-wage workers.” This leads to what some scholars have called ‘brain drain,’ the systematic flight of skilled workers, scientists, and technicians from their countries of origin in the global south (where they often got their education) to the countries of the imperialist global north. However, even when these skilled workers do go back, Manny demonstrates that they often end up working in “niche economies which do not contribute to improving the lives of most residents there but are directed to building networks with international business … that benefit a small fraction of elites as the majority of inhabitants remain mired in poverty.”

So, for the imperialized countries of origin, where exactly are the benefits of migration? Besides the outliers in the elite that are benefited, the reality is that there are none. “If migration were beneficial to development [in countries of origin],” as Manny notes, “then countries with high migration would not be suffering the highest poverty rates, or would at least be seeing improvements outstripping those countries that were not following a migration-development strategy.” The evidence shows that the opposite of the conventional migration-development paradigm is true – migration helps to keep poor countries poor while enriching rich countries with a pool of cheap labor that they can superexploit. “The ten-leading remittance-receiving nations,” for instance, “are amongst the poorest states in the world.”

“The primary dynamic of migration,” as Manny shows, “is rooted in the political economy of imperialism, which subordinates poor regions of the Global South.” Contemporary migration is, therefore, a product and central component of imperialism. It provides for imperialist countries, whose rates of profits with their national working class have been on a steady decline, a cheap pool of labor to superexploit. These are workers, many undocumented, who are forced to break with their families by the hundreds of millions in search for jobs that pay them pennies on the dollar of the already exploited global north workers. They frequently take up the most dangerous jobs and are forced to do these under the most precarious conditions, with very little bargaining power. They are often the recipients of xenophobic attacks and derogatory racist remarks, a phenomenon produced by the elite of the global north to convince their native workers (themselves struggling to get by), that their enemy is the migrant, not their boss.

An interesting paradox arises here: while migrant workers have become an indispensable component of the imperialist economies for which they provide a cheap pool of labor to superexploit, these same workers are treated with the utmost expendability – evidenced in their working conditions and racist treatment. This is a phenomenon some scholars have called the ‘dialectics of superfluity,’ where human life and labor becomes simultaneously indispensable and expendable for capitalism. It is a condition that, while general in the working class, is intensified in migrant workers and oppressed peoples. 

Things don’t have to be this way. In fact, it is impossible for them to continue this way forever. The world and everything in it are in a constant state of flux, where all is interconnected to all and contradiction functions as the engine of historical motion. These objective contradictions in the global capitalist-imperialist economy contain the kernels for their own supersession. The interests of migrant workers and workers in the global north are the same. Both are fighting against the same global capitalist elite. It is this same elite that exploits and oppresses them both, even if it does it to one with more intensity than the other. The interests of workers of all countries, migrant or not, are found in uniting with their class against the parasitic rulers of the world – those who destroy humanity in their pursuit of profit. As time passes and these contradictions intensify, we are seeing workers coming together to fight. We are seeing the embryonic development of class consciousness – and sooner or later – we will see in mass the moderate demands James Connolly heralded in 1907: “We only want the earth.”

​Author

Carlos L. Garrido is a philosophy teacher at Southern Illinois University, Director at the Midwestern Marx Institute, and author of The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism (2023), Marxism and the Dialectical Materialist Worldview (2022), and Hegel, Marxism, and Dialectics (Forthcoming 2024).

Author

Edward Liger Smith is an American political scientist (with a focus on Geopolitics, Socialist Construction, and U.S. health care), wrestling coach, and Director of the Midwestern Marx Institute for Marxist Theory and Political Analysis. 

​Culture is an “exceptionally complex word”, says Terry Eagleton, and as constant agents who interact with it in our daily affairs, we know how complex it is to write a book about culture, that too in less than 200 pages. Terry Eagleton, in his book 'Culture', puts forth a similar attempt, and one can easily say that he has succeeded.
 
Eagleton starts his book with a brief preface where he lists out his intentions, that this book in its totality "sacrifices any strict unity of argument to approach its subject from several different perspectives." Terry Eagleton's central argument is that Culture is a "social unconscious", and to cement this argument, he takes the help of thinkers like Edmund Burke, Johann Gottfried Herder, T.S. Eliot and Raymond Williams. The author also takes an anticipatory bail in the preface itself about the overwhelming amount of "Irish motif" running throughout the book, in his attempt to build this central argument.
 
The book is divided into five chapters, with each chapter dealing with a different aspect with which Eagleton wants his readers to engage. The first chapter titled 'Culture and Civilisation' talks about how culture is an integral part of human civilization, and further about the contrasts and similarities between the two. Eagleton makes a pertinent observation about how the usage and the meaning of the two words - Culture and Civilization - have changed starting from the premodern times to our modern age. The author then elaborates on his view about the dual nature of culture and civilization; that is, how both seem to be normative and descriptive at the same time. Eagleton also makes some interesting remarks about the links between the origins of the notion of 'culture' as such and the onset of industrialization.
 
The second chapter, 'Postmodern Prejudices' is a precise commentary on the intricacies caused by the interaction of postmodernity and culture. Eagleton uncovers how the postmodern slogan of ‘inclusivity’ masks differences, and argues that rather than inclusivity, what we need is ‘unanimity’. "Different viewpoints," Eagleton writes "are not to be valued simply because they are different viewpoints." Postmodernity's "self-appointed censors," who are ignorant of how political opinions are formed, readily remove all discussions of political movements from the forefront and replace them with just political correctness arguments, which tend to diffuse conflicts and frame economic and political issues as cultural ones alone. Eagleton also concludes that contrary to the claims of culturalists, "Culture is not identical with our nature" but it is of our nature.
 
Eagleton's main cultural theories and findings are largely contained in the third chapter, "The Social Unconscious." He writes "This social unconscious is one thing we mean by culture". With references to Freud and Lacan at the beginning of the chapter, the reader might assume that Eagleton is aiming to develop his arguments from a psychoanalytical standpoint. However, it was only a viewpoint the author was attempting to implant in the readers' brains. The chapter heavily relies on the ideas and teachings of two thinkers - Edmund Burke and Johann Gottfried Herder - who were both vocal critics of colonialism and for whom culture is more essential than politics. Eagleton finds that Burke "prizes order" while Herder "values freedom". The author says that the "unfathomable specificity of human affairs" is what we know as culture and juxtaposes Antonio Gramsci's hegemonic power with Burke's view on culture. In the later parts of the chapter, he elaborates on the evolution of language and culture. If, till now, the chapter mainly depended on conservative thinkers to make the case of 'social unconsciousness, Eagleton goes to Raymond Williams towards the end of the chapter to explain the radical version of it. He notes that, unlike Elliot, for Williams, culture essentially is unplannable and "always a work in progress".
 
Up until this point, the book dealt with issues related to the theory of culture. In the fourth chapter, suitably titled "An Apostle of Culture," Eagleton shifts his focus to the "summary of the thought" of Oscar Wilde. Eagleton notes that both Wilde and Burke were Irish, which made them vocal critics of Britain's colonial aspirations, and "ended up biting the hand that fed them". Unfortunately, the author didn't touch the realms of dependency theories which almost and mostly deals with similar complexities. Eagleton cites that being Irish necessarily contributed to the formation of Wilde’s career and his openness to the idea of modernism; “To be marginal to a language and culture” he writes “is also to be freer than the natives from its ruling forms and conventions, and thus to be less hamstrung by them”.  For Wilde a known proponent of ‘art for art sakes’, notes Eagleton, art wasn’t a “question of fleeing from life into art” but on the contrary a “question of turning one’s life into a work of art”. Eagleton also put forth a striking comparison of Wilde with Marx, even though there was a fundamental difference in their end goals. Wilde sees individualism as the goal of socialism which is diametrically opposite to Marx’s views. But what Eagleton finds is that the “Romantic sense of the richness and diversity of individual lives” seen in Marx is similar to Wilde, and both of them aspired for a world without labour so that people have “time for the more vital business of self-development”.
 
The last and final chapter 'From Herder to Hollywood' talks about the evolution of culture through modern times. Culture, Eagleton notes, came to prominence as a "critique of industrialism, but also as a rebuke to the notion of revolution." He further writes that "it became a key concept in the language of Romantic nationalism."  This form of romantic nationalism can be traced to the works of D. H. Lawrence and Friedrich Schiller. This recent development can be seen in Jane Austen's writings, where 'politeness' emerges as a substitute for 'culture.' Over this period, Eagleton observes that art also found a new audience, the common people, and can be attributed to the 'new array of social institutions' that rose post the industrial revolution. This form of romantic idea, warns Eagleton like any other brand of ethics pave the way for the dogmatic version of cultural nationalism. Also, during this time, poets and artists took centre stage in recently evolved concepts of liberalism and democracy. He finishes with a critique of the latest addition to capitalist modernity in the form of cultural industry. The book ends with a brief concluding chapter 'The Hubris of Culture', which neatly sums up all arguments presented over the last five chapters. To tie things up, Eagleton warns that the central question that confronts the new millennium is not cultural but a political one.
 
The compounded nexus of culture is not fully explored in Eagleton's book, nor does he make a similar claim in his book. However, what distinguishes Eagleton's study of culture from that of other cultural critics or postmodern thinkers is that the core of Eagleton's criticism revolves around labour, which, according to Karl Marx, is the only "progenitor" of civilization. A great deal of his analysis deals with the origin of the notion of culture and its relationship between colonialism, and its subsequent evolution into an academic discipline that was "contaminated to its core by racist ideology". Like an ethnographer, Eagleton transcends back into time and age, and studies literature, theory and thought to demonstrate this "unholy alliance between colonial power and nineteenth-century anthropology". Although he is conscious of the cultural industry's power, he does not respond in a puritanical manner and sees the widespread popularization of literature and art as a negative development. He acknowledges that modern industry also made it possible for millions of people to consume what was prohibited to them, however, the only objection to this industry phenomenon is the profit motivation that drives this cultural upsurge. And the remedy he offers is the collective consciousness that relies majorly on strong radical political movements. At a time when we are overwhelmed by advertising brands and dopamine inducing Instagram content, Terry Eagleton's short book provides us with a lot of insights and perspectives to tackle this critical juncture of human civilisation, and must be read by any student of social sciences to grasp and overcome this harsh reality.

​It’s a new era. One tweet-turned-Twitter-game-of-telephone can ruin a comrade’s life.

How does the state operate online? How do anarchists operate online? When do they intermingle? Any anonymous account can start a smear campaign against any public figure.

This book invites us to ask: If we cancel every last screw-up, addict and lumpenized scroundrel, who will absorb the body blows needed to bob and weave forward in the class struggle?
​
When in history has another social class organized, led and defended a revolution? The petite-bourgeoisie blows with the wind. Who will be left? Who is willing to put in that work? Who knows hell well enough not to fear it? Nicaraguan national hero Augusto Sandino said, “Only the workers and peasants will make it all the way.” Kovalik is not turning his back and giving up on the potential cadre of the future. Will you?

CHINA looms large in today’s world. Its economy is predicted to exceed the US’s in size within the decade; by purchasing power parity, it is already larger.

It is racing ahead too in diplomacy and trade: it has now replaced the US as the country with the most diplomatic missions overseas, and is the biggest trading partner of a majority of countries globally.

This very success — China’s status as the United States’ only acknowledged “peer competitor”— could be the reason China is now routinely depicted as a menace.

Britain’s BBC dutifully takes up scares over weather balloons and breathless reports on Chinese aircraft or ships’ “aggressive” conduct in encounters with US counterparts — which for some reason always take place just off the Chinese, not the American coast.

Projects like the Belt & Road Initiative, which overtook the World Bank as the biggest development finance lender in 2019, are seen as evidence of a sinister new imperialism.

Understanding China could hardly be more important for today’s left.

The “China threat” is a key justification for a major plank of British state policy: huge increases in arms spending and the first “east of Suez” military deployments in many decades.

This could mean World War III: a serving US general predicts that happening the year after next.

Armageddon could result from current China policy in other ways: sanctions and economic “decoupling” are cutting us off from the world leader in renewable technology and undermining scientific co-operation on global warming or pandemics.

Socialists need to know how we respond to these challenges. Carlos Martinez’s new book The East is Still Red is an excellent guide.

Whether China is socialist, as its ruling Communist Party argues, is a divisive topic but with an eye on history Martinez draws out the consistencies in the country’s course since 1949.

Chapter 1, No Great Wall, looks at how the “reform and opening up” period begun by Deng Xiaoping from 1978 built on achievements of the Mao years, without underrating the huge policy differences that did occur, or whitewashing either era. Later, in Will China Suffer the Same Fate as the Soviet Union, Martinez contrasts the two and points both to underlying strengths in China’s model and the lessons its party leadership has learned from the Soviet collapse.

Many are familiar with impressive headline figures such as China lifting 800 million people out of poverty — but Western accounts tend to imply this is the undirected result of introducing “the market,” though capitalist market economies such as India or Brazil cannot point to similar achievements. Martinez delves into the details and looks at the targets, the plans, the actual measures taken to deliver the greatest improvement in human welfare in recorded history.

For a Western left audience, key chapters are those on how China is making progress towards “ecological civilisation” — and why a “plague on both your houses” position dubbed Neither Washington Nor Beijing is untenable in a context where the US is unambiguously the aggressor in the new cold war while China’s rise is widely welcomed in the global South.

Later, he adopts Noam Chomsky’s famous phrase “manufacturing consent” while looking at the media’s coverage of China and how issues are distorted to build support for our own ruling class’s hostility to it: essential reading here is a demolition of the wild claims made about alleged abuses in Xinjiang and their less than objective origins.

Developed from articles written on different aspects of China and its revolution — many originally published in the Morning Star — this is a highly readable narrative that doesn’t presuppose detailed knowledge of Chinese history or politics.

The thematic character means many chapters work well on their own, and will make it a handy reference point for anyone wanting to brush up on specifics like the anti-poverty campaigns or China and climate change. It’s extensively referenced, and welcome in quoting more Chinese than foreign sources on the country.
​
Highly recommended.

Imagine if you will, that we lived in a country in which TV and movie scripts were produced for merit and not edited and censored to ensure compliance with capitalist ideology.
​
Imagine that in this fictitious USA, it were possible to make movies celebrating heroic leaders of the struggles for working people, Black people, and immigrants.

Imagine that those films could be financed, promoted, and viewed as widely as the mindless tripe we are currently subjected to that encompasses all sorts of idiocy from vampire scripts, to “reality” TV, or films making heroes of CIA agents or as forces for good in an evil world.

In such a world, a movie maker would go to unimaginable lengths to obtain the rights to Working Class Giant, the Life of William Z. Foster, written by his former aide, Arthur Zipser. This 215-page offering from International Publishers screams to be made into an epic work on the life of a man for whom the term giant is no exaggeration.

Foster was born in 1881 in Taunton, Massachusetts but moved to a tough, ramshackle neighborhood in Philadelphia known as Skittereen when he was seven. His is truly a story of a man from humble beginnings achieving remarkable goals, all to further the interests of working men and women. He fought for racial equality. He opposed efforts to split up  workers through ethnic division.  He championed equal pay for women,  international solidarity of workers and socialism.

His accomplishments are far too long to list here but some of his roles included teacher, organizer, author, strike leader, reporter, editor, theoretician, US Presidential candidate, worker, diplomat, and husband and father!

Foster was so feared by the capitalists that he was twice seized and kidnapped by them, in Johnstown, Pennsylvania in 1919 and Denver, Colorado 1922 to keep him away from the striking steelworkers and railroad workers he was supporting. He was shot at, beaten, arrested numerous times, smeared, condemned from the floor of the House of Representatives. He served two prison terms and was indicted under the Smith Act.

Foster joined the Communist Party in 1921 and was a tremendous asset in a time of factional struggles and attempts to destroy the party from within. The young  party resisted the efforts of the most powerful government on earth to crush it.  He served in leadership and ran for US President three times on the party ticket receiving 102,991 votes in 1932.

He did all this and more, but most of all, he was revered by working people everywhere because he shared their pain and aspiration for a better life for themselves, their families, their neighbors. He was profoundly moved by their suffering describing the 1931 coal strike as, “one of the severest strikes I’ve ever went through. ………. it was heartbreaking to see starving miners being cut to pieces by the ruthless operators.”

in 1941 Theodore Dreiser on Foster’s 60th birthday declared “To me he is a saint-my first and only contact with one……..a leader among leaders who has always kept faith with the working man.”

Gus Hall wrote, ”He was the very best that the U.S. working class has produced.”

Foster’s sixtieth birthday party at Madison Square Garden attracted 18,000 people. Paul Robeson sang!
Despite being initially published in 1981, the now reprinted book is as timely as ever as the country begins to see an organizing and strike upsurge. Its historical accounts cannot be retold often enough. If you have not read it, do so now. If you have read it, relive the story of a titan.

The latest edition includes a very fine introduction by a passionate disciple of Foster, Chris Townsend, former Legislative Director for the United Electrical Workers and former Organizing Director for the Amalgamated Transit Union.

​One of the most crucial tasks in the movement for socialism and the general liberation of the proletariat is to hold a proper understanding of capitalism. How the system functions, its history, the arguments in its favor perpetuated by the ruling class, a strong grasp on these concepts works to ensure that we as socialists and communists are duly prepared to fight against the reactionary, hegemonic forces of capitalism on a global scale. Without such knowledge, without a solid understanding of the theoretical and historical foundations of capitalism, our fight is faulty and ultimately incomplete.
           
The writings of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, and numerous others throughout history have provided integral analyses of capitalism, imperialism, and similar reactionary isms that stand in the way of constructing socialism. These are essential for all of us within the socialist movement to study, however, there do exist some challenges that may make studying these texts more difficult for someone. The density of the work (especially some of Marx’s writings), the lack of historical context, or even something such as having a learning disability can make studying these works a more difficult task for several people. Socialist economist Robert Lekachman’s 1981 book Capitalism for Beginners, with illustrations from Borin Van Loon, serves as a potential secondary tool in strengthening how capitalism is understood and what can be done to address the inherent issues within the system.
           
Capitalism for Beginners provides a critical lens in the pursuit of educating readers on the ins and outs of capitalism from its historical foundation onward. The first third of this book is used as a platform to discuss, how capitalism has managed to maintain such a stranglehold on American economics, politics, and culture as it developed within the United States. In providing a brief overview of capitalism, Lekachman utilizes this brief description as a segway into addressing why socialism had not been able to muster a strong position within the US. Comparing the conditions of the United States and Europe, the myth of class mobility was born into the US, with the myth in question alongside the lack of a peasantry and other similar class positions being listed as some of the factors for the entrenching of capitalism into the roots of American society. The so-called “Invisible Hand” of capitalism is also touched upon.
           
Lekachman continues with a more robust historical recap of capitalism’s formation within the USA. Beginning with an explanation of the mercantile system that capitalism sprouted from, moving on to the concept of the “free labor movement” along with the free market in general and acknowledging the influence of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, Lekachman continues by providing some poignant critiques of the free-market structure and practices. Though figures are dated given the time of publication, with many of these numbers coming from the late 1970s, the statistics provided regarding the various forms of inequality under capitalism provide a historical lens into the perpetual, inherent contradictions of the system. When speaking on the issue of income, Lekachman writes;
           
“There are two ways of looking at the inequality of economic reward. The capitalist says that unequal income is essential to an efficient economy. Self-interest is an important impetus to effort, saving and investment. Besides, some people are brighter, more imaginative or energetic than others, so it’s only fair that their rewards should be higher. A socialist would argue that inequality reflects the power relationships of capitalism. Either way, inequality under capitalism is taken as necessary and inevitable.”
           
Other contradictions addressed by Lekachman include the problem of inheritance, in addition to the reactionary gendered and racially driven inequalities promoted and perpetuated by the capitalist apparatus. The self-destructive nature of capitalism is further analyzed within this book, leading into further analysis of the development of 20th century capitalism surrounding the emergence of the theories of one John Maynard Keynes in the 1930s following the advent of Great Depression. Detailing the limited successes of Keynesianism, in addition to the goal of Keynesian economics of countering the influence of Marxism, Lekachman highlights that amid World War II and in its aftermath, Keynesian theory would introduce an economic boom period, especially in the first decades following the end of WWII.
           
This boom, for both the US and much of Western Europe, proved to have limitations, though these limitations were on display more so in the United States. Keynesian theory and practice, in addition to western efforts such as the Marshall Plan and the establishing of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, allowed for countries such as Britain to enact an economic and governmental shift into a form of social democracy. The US, enjoying similar economic developments, lagged and continues to lag behind other developed countries in the construction a legitimate safety net in regarding to healthcare, social services, and other infrastructural aspects associated with the welfare-state of social democracy. Likewise, the instability of capitalism in all its forms became more apparent as economic growth remained uneven, and the strains of the illegal war in Vietnam allowed for the cracks in Keynesian to emerge.
             
As contradictions became more and more apparent, Lekachman’s focus shifts from the rise of the Keynesian model to its fall, subsequently moving into the rise of neoliberalism, monetarism, and the mass privatization and austerity measures that came with it in the US, the UK, and elsewhere as a result of the recession of the early 1970s. Highlighting the era of Milton Friedman, Ronald Reagan, and Margaret Thatcher, we see a brief explanation of monetarism, shedding light on the vastly more prominent negatives of the system, particularly the promotion of austerity measures that lead to the privatization of necessary services and industries. In addition, we see the issue of people conflating something that has even the slightest resemblance to a welfare state with full on Soviet style socialism, using the monetarist, anti-Labour Party crusade in Britain after Thatcher’s election as an example. Other negative effects and falsehoods perpetuated by the system are likewise touched upon.
           
Lekachman, although a socialist in his own right, provides a weak conclusion in addressing the neoliberal age of capitalism. At the end of this book, he states that the way to properly defeat capitalism is by replacing with a form of democratic socialism. While this is by no means an attack on those who consider themselves democratic socialists, the lack of adherence to historical conditions and contexts in his conclusion is not sufficient in truly addressing what needs to be done in successfully overthrowing the capitalist state apparatus. Gains can be made through the ballot box even if only incremental, but history and even modern conditions have proven that working solely or at least primarily through the electoral process as a means of building socialism will be likely met with more difficulties, setbacks, and unfortunately, failures in the attempt of socialist construction.
           
Additionally, Lekachman inadvertently points out one of the flaws in his own goal. Prior to proclaiming the need for democratic socialism, Lekachman acknowledges the very possibility of corporations and other agents of capitalism turning to means in line with that of fascism and other more aggressive forms of the dictatorship of capital as a means of safeguarding their economic interests and swiftly curtailing the influence of unions, socialists, and other such demographics. That the capitalists would have such power in their inherent collaboration with the bourgeois state only shows that the difficulties of building socialism only or even primarily through the bourgeois democratic process are more apparent, with the strategy of democratic socialism having no real preparation for when the capitalist class triples down on the oppression of those fed up with the cycle of capitalism.
           
Despite the faulty conclusion in how to counter the mechanisms of capitalism, Capitalism for Beginners does ultimately serve a good purpose in educating people on the history and inner workings of capitalism and its agents. Lekachman’s explanations of the various stages and aspects of capitalism from its rise out of mercantilism to the era of neoliberalism are informative while not being dense or explained in an overly complicated fashion. The visuals in this book also serve a multipronged purpose of being informative, driving a point forward with additional comments, and even just being mildly humorous. For instance, there’s an illustration of Milton Friedman as a scarecrow, a tongue-in-cheek way of calling Friedman a literal strawman. We also F.A. Hayek portrayed as a 1920s style gangster, a way of displaying how the monetarist, neoliberal system works in tandem with criminal or near-criminal acts committed often in line with the workings of the bourgeois government.
             
​Faulty conclusions and some dated figures aside, Capitalism for Beginners is a very thorough but easy to understand book that may serve as both an introductory piece and a refresher course for those aiming to garner a solid comprehension of capitalism.

The TLS of February 27, 2009 has a review of an important philosophy book--  After Finitude by Quentin Meillassoux-- translated from the French by Ray Brassier [i.e. "Back to the great outdoors" by Simon Critchley]. The title of the article is due to Meillassoux's desire to get directly back to nature. The following are some Marxist impressions on the philosophical issues raised by  this review especially with regard to materialism and idealism in contemporary philosophy.

We are told that one of Meillassoux's targets is Kant who maintained that we have knowledge of the world as it APPEARS to us. Meillassoux wants to show that we can access "the world as it is in itself without being dependent on the existence of observers." So far so good.

It is interesting to note that Science Daily online posted an article stating that physicists have demonstrated that we can know that there is a world independent of our observation-- but it is very weird [“Scientists Say That Reality Is Real”].

The problem seems to be with the phrase, vis a vis the world, to access "the world as it is in itself" independent of the observer. Critchley explains that Kant thinks there is a real world independent of us but that it is mediated through our perceptual apparatus. "The external material objects that I experience in perception are nothing but "mere appearances" or "representations". But, perhaps Critchley goes too far, or is it Meillassoux as well?, in saying for Kant "the outside world exists but is only the correlate of the concepts and categories through which we conceive it." At least "outside" is not the right word to use for Kant since both space and time are for him the a priori preconditions for human experience-- the independent world does not exist in space or time as these are human ways of perception and we don't know how else to explain the world.

We are told that Meillassoux considers all this (i.e., The Critique of Pure Reason) a "catastrophe" because it has led to "correlationism." What it has actually led to is the thought that the world-- both physical and social-- is not necessarily 100% just as it appears to be to any of us. That creatures with different perceptual apparatus will see it differently and experience it differently. If there was a "catastrophe" it would have been due to Hume whose philosophy led to the skeptical positions regarding humanity's ability to know anything at all that drove Kant to write the Critique. But neither were "catastrophes." Both were milestones on the road of human self awareness which have contributed to the growth of our self knowledge.

Critchley tells us that Melliassoux's target is the form of correlationism associated with Husserl's phenomenology which "is based on the idea of a correlation between the intentional acts of consciousness and the objects of those acts...." What does this mean? Husserl uses the Greek term NOEMA to refer to an object as it is in-itself and NOESIS to refer to our thinking about it.

We take the natural standpoint in everyday life-- i.e., we are dealing with externally existing objects in a real world. For the purposes of phenomenology we abandon this standpoint, bracket the object, and just study the way it appears to our consciousness. OK, this doesn't deny the existence of the material world but it correlates the object in this way-- the thing- in- itself and the thing-for- us.

Husserl's student Heidegger is more subjective. For him the external object is determined by the noesis-- the human world is a by-product of consciousness-- so, as in Kant, we can't know the thing-in-itself. So what is the problem with this way of thinking?

There are two, says Critchley. First, since it keeps reason away from the things-in-themselves, it opens the door to non reasonable explanations and theories about them (i.e., irrationalism and religion) Second: "it is wrong." Well, that is being blunt!

Meillassoux thinks correlations are wrong because they can't say anything about the universe before the evolution of humans. But this is only true of the most rigid subjective idealists. Hegel (also mentioned as a correlationist) certainly believed the world to have had an objective existence before there were any people around. I can say that I think I only know the thing-in-itself indirectly by means of my perceptual apparatus and my experiences with it and yet still believe my perceptual apparatus is the product of the evolution of my species which is a recent event in the history of the universe. I neither have to "disavow" the existence of the material world nor be "an intellectual hypocrite" as Meillassoux seems to think. 

So now the question is--- if we reject correlationism do we have to go back to pre-Kantian "dogmatic" metaphysics? Meillassoux proposes what he calls SPECULATIVE REALISM. Critchley says, consider the metaphysics of Leibniz. Leibniz defended THE PRINCIPLE OF SUFFICIENT REASON. For every thing that exists there must be a reason why it, rather than some other thing, exists. He ends up proving the existence of God with this [a philosopher's God, not necessarily anything anybody else would use the word "God" to describe].

This is no good, thinks Meillassoux. Speculative Reason demands an absolute notion of an independently existing reality that we can have direct knowledge of and this "God" is an untidy remnant of pre-Kantian metaphysical mumbo-jumbo. Leibniz had asked, "Why is there something rather than nothing." Meillassoux dumps the principle of sufficient reason and answers "For no reason." There is no reason why there is something rather than nothing, it just is that way. Who is it now who is cutting off reason from the origin of the universe before man?

The subtitle of the book is "An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency." The universe is not the result of necessity, but of a "brute contingent chaos," according to Critchley. Even though the principle of sufficient reason is not operative, human reason can explore the chaos and try to understand what is going on. But don't we need to believe in "reasons" to find out what is going on? Is it not just a dogmatic assertion to say that contingency is a necessity and fail to give a sufficient reason why this is so? 

We have now arrived at the "most speculative claim of the book", says Critchley. And that is that mathematics is the only method we have to find some stability and truth within the chaotic contingency of reality. Critchley writes that "his book is essentially a defense of the project of the mathematization of nature that one can find in Galileo and Descartes." We are told this reflects the mathematical ontology of his teacher Alain Badiou. So reality is a chaotic contingency but it follows mathematical laws. Hmmmm.

Even if this may be fine for the physical sciences it will never due for the human sciences. Meillassoux is essentially a throw back to seventeenth century mechanical materialism. Human reality, history, psychology, the social sciences can only be understood by means of the hegelio-marxist dialectic which views this reality as in constant movement and change brought about by an inherent negativity which prevents its reduction to rigid mathematical formulae.

According to Critchley, Meillassoux accepts Hume's view of nature (including man) as "a brute contingency that cannot be rationally explained", so how then can he use mathematics to explain it. How can you explain what cannot be explained? When it is rationally explained you get (non-academic) Marxism. Yipes! Critchley fears that this "mathematical romance" has seduced its author to attempt doing what Hume's philosophy "perhaps rightly prohibits." It was Hume's philosophy that generated the line Kant to Hegel to Marx, so it looks like Meillassoux should be looking forward not backward for the solution to his problems.

Regardless of this caveat, Critchley finds the argument "absolutely exhilarating" as well as "brilliant." And while he finds the author "at his best when showing the complacency of contemporary Kantians and phenomenologists" I found myself wondering how widespread was the kind of "correlationism" Meillassoux objects to. All those in the Marxist tradition, Positivist tradition and Analytic tradition don't seem to be affected. He objects to an early work of Wittgenstein which Wittgenstein rejected and has now only historical interest. I think he has set up a lot of straw men to knock down.

Critchley is also impressed by Meillassoux's SPECULATIVE REALISM which upholds nature as "cold and indifferent to humans." But this idea is as old as the hills. Hume held that nature cares as much for oysters as for humans, so there is nothing new here. Meillassoux promises another book to elaborate on his ideas on Speculative Reason. I hope it doesn't have "the fine-grained logic-chopping worthy of Duns Scotus" found by Critchley in After Finitude.

Critchley himself makes three criticisms of the book. First, if we accept the view that "the world as it is in itself is the same as the world for us" and it is mathematics and science that reveals it "then philosophy becomes totally useless." Second, Meillassoux's model of science is physics which can describe the world before life, but what role is there for sciences like biology, psychology and economics"? Third, if physics reveals the world as it really is, how do we account for ethics and relative value systems? Should not the one real world be reflected in every cultural understanding?

Critchley thinks it ironic that while advanced analytic thinkers, he mentions John McDowell and Robert Brandon, are incorporating the insights of Kant, Hegel and Heidegger into an update of the Anglo-American tradition, Meillassoux is moving backwards to Cartesianism [mechanical materialism--tr].

Critchley tells a story of a 1951 meeting between A.J.. Ayer and Georges Bataille. Ayer said he thought the Sun existed before man appeared, and Bataille thought the question meaningless since he was "more versed in Hegel and phenomenology" so as a correlationist he thought that "physical objects must be perceived by an observer to be said to exist."[Which, at least, is not Hegel's view at all.] Shocked by Ayer's attitude, Bataille is quoted as saying, "There exists between French and English philosophers a sort of abyss."

The abyss, however, is between those educated in philosophy and a scientific world view and those innocent of science. Bataille's views were those of Mach and Avenarius and the Russian thinkers who Lenin criticized in his work Materialism and Empirio-Criticism. Marxism and the philosophy of Dialectical Materialism would certainly have sided with Ayer on this issue and seen Bataille as a representative in philosophy of an outmoded subjective idealism and the thinking of the declining bourgeoisie.

The present time, when the bourgeois world is once again in crisis and manifesting symptoms of decline and decadence, is not a world where philosophers need to spend their intellectual energy in trying to refute a moribund French philosophical culture that was effectively exposed as meaningless by Lenin as well as Marx and Engels many generations ago. But if that is what Meillassoux wants to do, carry coals to Newcastle, who is to gainsay him?

This book by Aristotle A. Kallls is an interesting book on the state of bourgeois  research and theories about fascism.  It is doubtful if Marxists, especially those familiar with the works of Georgi Dimitrov, will learn much from it. Although in recent years some Marxists {MINOs) and even some Marxist parties have begun to use the term “fascism” indiscriminately and in ways foreign to Dimitrov.

Kallls informs us that there is still no “lasting consensus about what ‘fascism’ reality represents.” His purpose is to analyze fascist expansionism as ideology and as action That is, his book seeks to tell us how “domestic and international factors” affected the ability of German and Italian fascism to carry out their ideological goals and expansionist policies.

But lacking “a consensus about what ‘fascism’ really means” Kallis can only discuss his subject in the abstract theoretical terms of bourgeois scholarship. 

He appears unaware of one of the major discussions on the nature of fascism — namely, Georgi Dimitrov’s report to the Seventh World Congress of the Communist International given on August 2, 1935.

For Marxists, the class character of fascism — “what it really represents” — is not an issue . Dimitrov’s definition  of fascism “as the open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic and most imperialist elements of finance capital,” applies  to “classical” fascism (Italy and Germany) but also to such recent fascist regimes as Suharto’s Indonesia and Pinochet’s Chile, as well as Franco’s Spain.

Lacking a Marxist understanding of the nature of fascism and its role in maintaining a crisis ridden capitalism, Kallis is often reduced to trying to explain events by reference to the “personalities” of Hitler and Mussolini rather than seeing them as class responses to the growth of revolutionary class consciousness  within the working class. In the US this is manifested in blaming Trump as a person rather than a cog in a system.

As Dimitrov points out, fascism comes to power when the bourgeoisie is “no longer in a position to maintain its dictatorship over the masses by the old methods of bourgeois democracy and parliamentarism." 

Kallls, however, never mentions the central role of finance capitalism in the workings of fascism. He writes that “personal charisma remained the most powerful unifying force” of the Italian and German regimes.

Some on the left should keep this in mind before throwing around the term “fascism” with respect to the Republicans (Trump was a close call) and other right wing, reactionary, racist authoritarian movements. Finance capital has chosen Biden as its leader and is quite content to run its terroristic foreign policies offshore through imperialist channels using the Democratic Party (and the Republican as need be) and those who support it and the bourgeois democracy the capitalist ruling class uses to maintain its control over the working class.

Another aspect of Kallis theory is that fascism is just a special case of the generic tendency of monopoly capitalism and its financial component (“Imperialism” and “Globalization”). Research is being done to determine if fascist expansionism was due to “generic fascist values” or developed out of the pre-fascist tendencies of Italian and German historical development. With qualifications, he concludes that “the notion of generic fascist expansionism can be a valuable tool for analysis.”

Be that as it may, such a generic notion of fascism can obscure that it is finance capital’s “innate tendency” to expand its economic and political control in order to dominate the world’s markets, and that fascism is simply a special case of the generic tendency of monopoly capitalism and its financial components (‘Imperialism’ and ‘Globalization’).

German Finance capital, for example, attempted to dominate central and eastern Europe from the mid-nineteenth century on. World War II, as World War I before it, was the action of a weak financial capitalism that could only see itself expanding by means of military force. (This is not to endorse the view that Germany alone was responsible for either WWI or II.)

The same expansionist goals are pursued today by German capital and its Social Democratic allies. One has only to look at its role in the breakup of Yugoslavia, the stationing of German troops outside its borders (as junior partner — but for how long — of US imperialism), the destruction of the the German Democratic Republic (DDR) and the expansion of the euro  (the reincarnation  of the Deutsche Mark).  All this points to the conclusion that fascist  expansionism was not so much generic in the nature of fascism as in the nature of capitalism.


Kallis’ book would have been more useful for present day activists and students of fascism if its subject matter had been presented in light of the Marxist theory of the state in relation to imperialism and war, especially as found in the works of Lenin and Dimitrov, But then Fascist Ideology would not just be another tome in the library of bourgeois historiography. 

We often hear the United States compared to ancient Rome – usually negatively. Critics of US foreign policy refer to a new Roman Empire and to Paul Bremer as a proconsul in Iraq. These references are comprehensible because Rome and its institutions, both religious and secular (especially Roman law) are part of the foundations on which so-called Western civilization is based. The founders of the United States used many Roman symbols in representing the new republic (res publica). The imperial eagle, the arrows of war, the olive branch, the idea of a Senate – even the classical architecture of Washington, DC is based on the public buildings of Rome (and Athens). Now that many elements of the right see this country as the dominant world power, the analogies with ancient Rome as a universal empire are becoming more numerous even in the popular media.

Michael Parenti’s  People’s History of Ancient Rome is thus both timely and relevant. Written in his usual popular and accessible style, this book will make available to a wide working-class audience an easily understandable and reliable portrait of Rome at one of its most important historical junctures: the transition from an oligarchical republic to a full-blown imperial system.

The life and death of Julius Caesar is the focal point of this work. Departing from the consensus of classical scholars who refer to Caesar as a tyrant who trampled on the personal liberties and freedoms of Republican Rome symbolized by the rule of the Senate, Parenti marshals convincing evidence to support what has been the minority view – that Caesar was actually a representative of popular democratic tendencies among the Roman people and that his enemies and assassins really stood for the interests of a small elite portion of the ruling class who used the power of the Roman state for personal enrichment and the exploitation of the masses.

The class struggle in Rome was basically between the optimates (the best) who represented the wealthy latifundistas (plantation owners) and the popularis (relating to the people) who tried to improve the living standards of regular citizens of the republic. 'As a popularis, Julius Caesar introduced ‘laws to better the condition of the poor,’ as [the ancient historian] Appian wrote,' Parenti points out. This is what ultimately cost him his life on March 15, 44 B.C.

The optimates were also the creditor class, and Parenti remarks that their policies created 'penury and debt' that crushed average citizens. It was Caesar who tried to alleviate this suffering and prevent the loss of freedom for the debtor, actions 'upon which today’s bankruptcy laws are based' – a citizen’s freedom was to be 'inborn and unalienable.'

Caesar has also been blamed for the destruction of the great library at Alexandria. Parenti shows, however, that the destruction of ancient culture, the burning of books and the closing down of libraries and educational institutions was done by the 'Christ worshipers' when they came to power. 'Though depicted as an oasis of learning amidst the brutish ignorance of the Dark Ages, the Christian church actually was the major purveyor of that ignorance.' Parenti even suggests that Caesar’s rule was 'a dictatorship of the proletarii' since he ruled against the 'plutocracy on behalf of the citizenry’s substantive interests.' And, he says Cicero, one the most dedicated of the optimates, is quoted as lamenting the fact that Caesar wanted to bestow Roman 'citizenship not merely on individuals but on entire nations and provinces.' It is no surprise then to discover that even to this day people leave flowers at the site of Caesar’s murder every March 15.

Parenti also criticizes contemporary classicists who ignore the class struggles of the ancient world – seeing the masses as rabble and expressing sympathy for ancient ruling-class elites and their treatment of the common people. Parenti says he has 'tried to show [that] what we know of the common people tells us that they displayed a social consciousness and sense of justice that was usually superior to anything possessed by their would-be superiors.'

Parenti lists four tenets of the ideology of the optimates which he says characterize 'all ruling propertied classes.' Namely, 1) the ruling class treats its interests as the general interest; 2) social welfare programs are bad for those who receive them as they 'undermine the moral fiber' of the poor; 3) the redistribution of wealth at the expense of the wealthy is detrimental to society as a whole; and 4) attacking the reformers and their characters is a better way to defeat reform than attacking the particular reform itself.

This is an excellent book and a good read. By understanding the class struggle in ancient Rome, as presented by Parenti, we will better understand the struggle being waged in the world of today.

​The Assassination of Julius Caesar: A People's History of Ancient Rome By Michael Parenti New York New Press, 2003.

A headline in the Harrisburg, Pennsylvania newspaper the Daily Item reads, “Man Charged with Stealing 3,000 Tons of Coal.”[2] According to the article, “The surveyor told police when he conducted the inspection, he used a known survey point that dated back to the 17 and 1800s, according to court documents. The surveyor told police Four Vein Coal Company was mining coal off of Reading Anthracite property, police said.”[3] Mitch Troutman’s Bootleg Coal Rebellion The Pennsylvania Miners Who Seized an Industry started with curiosity regarding contemporary examples of coal bootlegging such as this one. This curiosity led Troutman to discover the long ranging, often militant history of the practice of coal bootlegging in the anthracite coal region of Northeastern Pennsylvania. The result was Bootleg Coal Rebellion, a regional history brimming with passion and pride for the radical legacy in Troutman’s home state. Troutman traces the region’s history of contradiction between the workers’ desire for a decent way of living and the coal bosses desire for greater and greater profits from the Molly Maguires of the 1870s to contemporary reports of coal bootlegging in an attempt to answer the question, “How did we start treating coal company property like it belonged to us?”[4] Troutman’s passion for local history comes through in his writing. Discovering revolutionary elements in his own area’s past inspired Troutman to look deeper into the radical history of the region. The researcher’s quest is invigorating. The “Eureka!” or “Aha!” moment when you discover a connection that nobody else has identified before is ethereal and sublime. Researchers are addicts, chasing that first big high. This spirit is palpable in Troutman’s writing, resulting in a compelling narrative and a stimulating read.

Troutman’s approach is historical materialist. He starts by discussing the land, the differences between bituminous and anthracite coal and the differences, both cultural and geographical, between the bituminous regions of Northern Appalachia and the anthracite region of Northeastern Pennsylvania. He then breaks radical and bootlegging activity in the anthracite region down town by town.

Bootlegging was the practice of building small “coal holes” near mining company property that allowed unemployed miners access to mines that the company had closed. The practice is as old as the collieries themselves, but coal bootlegging hit its peak during the Great Depression of the 1930s. “Coal holes” were dangerous and whole families, including children, often worked them. Truckers got the illegal coal to markets. Breakers were black market businessmen that set up bootleg coal operations. The consumers were often shop owners that were aware the coal was bootlegged, but were happy to buy the product at a price lower than the official collieries. The coal monopolies’ and the states’ attempts to stop bootlegging led to an alliance between working class miners and truckers, and petit bourgeois breakers and even retail merchants, despite their reliance on the Reading Railroad monopoly who had an interest in preventing bootlegging since they leased land to the colliery companies. The interdependent web of complicity held this illegal economy together.

Mutual aid and democracy were also key values that held bootlegging communities together. The rank and file workers fought with both the official United Mine Workers union leadership and the company bosses over the issue of “equalization.” Trautmann describes equalization as, “the spreading of available working hours among all employees, so as not to lay anyone off.”[5] Clearly workers’ communitarian faith in mutual aid trumped selfish desires. Bootlegging, despite its dangers, was a communal activity. Neighbors agreed to be silent around Iron and Coal Police while whole families of bootleggers mined “coal holes” for use and sale in the community. Troutman describes the spirit of anthracite region families in hard times: “A family with more eggs than it could eat might trade with a neighbor for tree fruit, for a visit from a neighborhood healer, or for harvest-time crops that could be preserved or pickled. Additionally, many had the crafting skills necessary to create anything from baskets to clothing.”[6] Strikes were often called in defiance of the UMW. The United Anthracite Miners of Pennsylvania (UAMP) formed in defiance of the UMW’s anti-equalization policies and struck on their own. Unfortunately, the UAMP’s leader Tom Maloney was murdered on Good Friday 1836, vanquishing the more radical wing of the miners’ movement. The companies’ and moderate unions’ attempts backfired, resulting in a coal bootlegging boom. The illegality of the industry solidified communitarian bonds. The complex networks of families, miners, truckers, breakers and consumers softened racial and gender boundaries as well.
​
Troutman argues coal bootlegging was both a means of subsistence during hard times and a radical rebellion against the coal monopolies. Miners bootlegged out of necessity to survive the severe times, but the practice also made it clear to the coal bosses that without the workers there would be no coal. Most interesting is Troutman’s description of Communist Party (CPUSA) run Unemployment Councils in the anthracite region. CPUSA assigned organizer Steve Nelson to move to Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania to set up Unemployment Councils in the anthracite region. Nelson explained how communists had to be sensitive to the culture and people of the region, “[T]he old sectarian approach, with its emphasis on abstract theory and rhetoric, constant adulation of the Soviet Union, and a hostility toward all radicals outside the Party, would not work. We concentrated instead on issues of vital concern to working people.”[7] Troutman describes the Shamokin Unemployed Council as a case study:

​Anti-communist and communist miners worked side by side. Often their lives literally depended on each other. They made jokes about their differences, and there were certainly tensions, especially between Irish Catholics and atheist communists for example, but at the end of the day, they were ready to risk their lives to save their fellow miners.
           
​Troutman’s Bootleg Coal Rebellion is a compelling story and a lesson for socialists and organizers today. Through his focus on the rebellious, democratic and communitarian elements of the coal bootlegging movement and the ways that radicals adapted their message to appeal to these pre-extant sentiments in the anthracite region, Troutman gives us hope that those same rebellious, democratic and communitarian spirits, ever present in the proletariat, can still be nurtured into revolutionary potential today. More importantly, Troutman’s book turns our attention to the Unemployed Councils of the 1930s and the work of communist Steve Nelson in the anthracite region. Nelson and the Unemployed Councils’ example is a blueprint for organizing and mutual aid in the future as the volatile neoliberal economy heads into another period of crisis and workers are already once again turning to desperate measures to survive.

​
​[1] By Jasontromm, CC BY-SA 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=29221915

​[2] Francis Scarcella, “Man Charged with Stealing 3,000 Tons of Coal,” Sunbury Daily
Item, September 24, 2016

[3] Scarcella, “Man Charged with Stealing 3,000 Tons of Coal.”

[4] Mitch Trauttman, The Bootleg Coal RebellionL The Pennsylvania Miners Who Seized an Industry 1925–1942, (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2022), 5.
 
[5] Troutman, The Bootleg Coal Rebellion, 48

[6] Ibid., 45.

[7] Ibid., 130.

​[8] Ibid., 131.

Marcello Musto’s anthology of Karl Marx’s Writings on Alienation[1] is both comprehensive and concise, containing within the span of 100 pages the three decades long development of the theory through more than a dozen published works and posthumously published manuscripts. Additionally, Musto’s introduction to the anthology exceptionally captures: 1) the deviations the concept suffered in its 20th century popularization (both by friends and foes of Marxism); and 2) the bifurcation in Marxism which was depicted in the 1960s debate around the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 (EPM), which created what Musto rightly depicts as “one of the principal misunderstandings in the history of Marxism: the myth of the ’Young Marx’” (20).[2]
​
The concept of alienation can be traced back to G.W.F. Hegel’s 1807 text, The Phenomenology of Spirit, where the terms entäusserung (self-externalization) and entfremdung (estrangement) are used to describe the moments wherein spirit’s “essential being is present to it in the form of an 'other.'”[3] After Hegel’s death, the concept retained vitality through the Young Hegelians, who shifted its focus to the realm of religious alienation.[4] A leading text in this tradition is Ludwig Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity (1841), where alienation depicts the process through which the human species essence is projected onto God.[5] While shifting the focus from religion to political economy, it is from this tradition from which Marx and Engels would blossom in the early to mid-1840s.[6]

However, since the concept rarely saw the light of day in their published work, it was “entirely absent from the Marxism of the Second International,” and from general philosophical reflection in the second half of the 19th century (4). In this time, concepts that would later be associated with alienation were developed by Émile Durkheim, Georg Simmel, and Max Weber, but in each instance they “thought they were describing unstoppable tendencies, and their reflections were often guided by a wish to improve the existing social and political order – certainly not to replace it with a different one” (4).[7]

​Stemming primarily from Marx’s analysis of the fetishism of commodities in Capital Vol I, Georg Lükacs’ 1923 text, History and Class Consciousness, reintroduces the theory of alienation into Marxism through his concept of ‘reification’ (verdinglichung, versachlichung). For Lükacs, reification described the “phenomenon whereby labour activity confronts human beings as something objective and independent, dominating them through external autonomous laws” (4-5). However, as Musto notes, and as Lükacs rectifies in the preface to the 1967 French republication of his text, “History and Class Consciousness follows Hegel in that it too equates alienation with objectification” (5).

The equation of alienation and objectification is the central philosophical error which creates the grounds for the ontologizing of alienation. For Marx, objectification is simply “labor’s realization,” the process wherein labor gets “congealed in an object.”[8] When human labor produces an object, we have objectification. Only under certain historically determined conditions does objectification become alienating. As Marx writes in the EPM,
​

​​This distinction between objectification and alienation is retouched more thoroughly in the Grundrisse, where Marx says that 
​

As I have argued in relation to the fetishism of commodities, alienation is also not simply a subjective illusion which one can overcome through becoming conscious of it. It isn’t merely a problem of how one observes the world. Instead, in a mode of life wherein the relations of production are necessarily governed by this condition of estrangement, alienation sustains an objective, albeit historically bound, existence. The ontologizing and/or subjectivizing of the theory of alienation purport key philosophical and political deviations from how Marx conceived of the phenomenon. These deviations naturalize the phenomenon and blunt the revolutionary edge in the Marxist analysis of how it can be overcome. 
​
Musto wonderfully shows how the 20th centuries’ popularization of the term resulted in Marxist (Marcuse, Adorno, Horkheimer, Fromm, Sartre, Debord, etc.) and Non-Marxist (Baudrillard, Arendt, Melman, Nettler, Seeman, Blauner, etc.) deviations along the lines of an ontologizing or subjectivizing of the phenomenon of alienation. In some instances (e.g., US sociologists), even the critical spirit with which the theory of alienation was formulated was removed and “skillfully dressed up… by defenders of the very social classes against which it had for so long been directed” (28). In the case of the ‘Marxist’ deviations of the theory, these often ended up in a pessimism and utopianism foreign and at times antagonistic to the writings of Marx and Engels. As Adam Schaff argued in Marxism and the Human Individual, these classical forms of revisionism “lead in fact to an elimination of everything known as scientific socialism.”[12]

From this historical and objective understanding of alienation, Marx formulates in the EPM four ways in which alienation occurs in the capitalist form of life: 1) alienation of the product, wherein the object of labor confronts the laborer as something hostile and alien; 2) alienation in the process of production, i.e., in the social relations through which the work takes place; 3) alienation from the ‘species-being’ of man as an animal with the unique ability to consciously, creatively, and socially exert mental and physical labor (as a homo faber and sapien) upon nature to create objects of need and aesthetic enjoyment; and 4) alienation from other humans and their objects of labor. Apart from the Feuerbachian essentialism in the language of number 3 (e.g., species-being, species-essence), the pith of this 1844 formulation of the theory will be enriched in his later work, especially in the Grundrisse, where it is given its most systematic consideration.

Along with what Kaan Kangal has called the ‘Engels debate,’ the 1960s debate around the EPM depicted the great bifurcation that existed in Marxism.[13] On the one hand, the Western humanist tradition “stress[ed] the theoretical pre-eminence” of Marx’s early work. On the other, the Eastern socialist (and Althusserian) tradition downplayed it as the writing of a pre-Marxist Marx, still entrapped by Hegelian idealism or a Feuerbachian problematic (18).[14] Both of these traditions create an “arbitrary and artificial opposition” between an “early Marx” and a “mature Marx” (15). Those who held on to the early writings as containing the ‘key’ to Marxism were, as Musto rightly argues, “so obviously wrong that it demonstrated no more than ignorance of his work” (16). However, those who dismissed these early writings often landed in a “decidedly anti-humanist conception” (e.g., Althusser’s theoretical anti-humanism) (ibid). These two sides mirror one another on the basis of an artificial and arbitrary division of a ‘young’ and ‘mature’ Marx.

Musto rejects this dichotomy, and in line with the Polish Marxist Adam Schaff (along with Iring Fetscher, István Mészáros, and others), provides a third interpretation which identifies a “substantive continuity in Marx’s work” (20). This continuity, however, is not based on a “collection of quotations” pulled indiscriminately from works three decades apart, “as if Marx’s work were a single timeless and undifferentiated text” (ibid). This tendency, which dominated the discourse around the continuum interpretation, is grounded on a metaphysical (in the traditional Marxist sense) and fixated understanding of Marx’s life’s work. It finds itself unable to tarry with a difference mediated understanding of identity, that is, with the understanding that the unity of Marx’s corpus is based on its continuous development, not an artificially foisted textual uniformity. It would be a Quixotic delusion to read the youthful Manuscripts of 44 as identical to the works which were produced as fruits of Marx’s laborious studies of political economy in the 1850-60s. The comprehensive, concrete, and scientific character of Marx’s understanding of political economy and the capitalist mode of life achieved by the 1860s makes the indiscriminate treatment of these works seem all the more foolish.

Instead, the continuity interpretation sees what a careful reading of Musto’s anthology shows, namely, that the theory of alienation constantly develops, sharpens, and concretizes beyond the limitations inherent in the ”vagueness and eclecticism” of its initial stages (21). As Schaff and Musto argued, “if Marx had stopped writing in 1845-46, he would not – in spite of those who hold the young Marx to be the only ‘true’ one – have found a place in history,” and if he did, it would probably be in a demoted “place alongside Bruno Bauer and Feuerbach in the sections of philosophy manuals devoted to the Hegelian Left” (ibid).[15]

It is impossible to stamp out hard and fast ‘stages’ or ‘epistemological breaks’ in Marx’s thought; he was constantly evolving his thinking according to new research and new concrete experiences.[16] Such a stagist approach can only lead to a confused nominalist reading of Marx, for every time he read or wrote something new, a ‘new’ Marx would have to be postulated. Marx’s life work must be understood as a dynamic, evolving unity, wherein, as Schaff argued, “the first period is genetically linked to the later ones.”[17] The same could be said, in my view, of his theory of alienation. As his understanding of political economy and the capitalist mode of life concretizes, his understanding of the phenomenon of alienation does as well.

Concerning the global split in Marxism manifested through these debates on alienation, I would like to add that although some prominent ‘orthodox’ or ‘official’ Soviet thinkers dismissed the theory of alienation, we cannot synecdochally apply the flaws of these on all Marxist thinkers in the Soviet Union, or on Marxism-Leninism in general. For instance, in the Soviet tradition of creative Marxism, the theme of alienation is not so easily dismissed as in Althusser or the more orthodox Soviet Marxists. Evald Ilyenkov, one of the prominent thinkers in this tradition, says in 1966 that he “personally approves” of the EPM’s theory of alienation and sees it as “a healthy and fruitful tendency in Marxist theoretical thought.”[18] In addition, his reading of the EPM and the theory of alienation with respect to the rest of Marx’s life’s work falls in line with Musto’s and Schaff’s continuum interpretation. As Ilyenkov argues,
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Concerning the relation of EPM to Capital Vol I Ilyenkov adds that 
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​This tendency, however, is not limited to the tradition of Soviet creative Marxism. Even in famous manuals such as the Konstantinov edited Fundamentals of Marxist-Leninist Philosophy, the theory of alienation is treated with great care, and critiques akin to Musto’s and Schaff’s are provided for the 20th century revisionist formulations of the theory.
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It is also important to note that Schaff himself was largely aligned politically with Marxism-Leninism, and when criticizing the Soviet dismissals of the theory of alienation he emphasizes his political proximity to those Marxist-Leninists he is arguing against.[21] Additionally, he openly criticizes those in the West which have weaponized the theory of alienation to attack socialism, and which have reduced Marxism, through their interpretation of alienation, to moralistic discourse devoid of its scientific core.[22] There is nothing, in my view, incompatible about a non-dogmatic Marxism-Leninism and the militant humanism of the early Marx’s theory of alienation, or of this theories’ further concretization throughout his life.

​To return to the continuity thesis, Musto’s selection of Marx’s writings eloquently demonstrates the theoretical superiority of this third interpretation. Musto classifies the writings into three key generations: 1) from 1844 to 1856; 2) from 1857 to 1863; and 3) from 1863 to 1875. What becomes clear in these selections, especially in the transition from the first to the second generation, is the immense development in the categories of political economy which would ground Marx’s discourse of the phenomenon of alienation (which, as occurs throughout his work, sometimes takes place without using the term ‘alienation’ itself). By the time the Grundrisse is written (1857-58), it is as if the 1844 EPM’s theory of alienation returned with theoretical steroids, “enriched by a greater understanding of economic categories and by a more rigorous social analysis” (30). In this second generation, the two  manuscripts Marx writes after he publishes A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859), namely, On the Critique of Political Economy (1861-63) and Theories of Surplus Value (1862-63), will also elaborate and sharpen the understanding of the categories developed in the Grundrisse, subsequently enrichening the theory of alienation as well.
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The third generation consists of Capital Vol I, its preparatory manuscripts, and the manuscripts of Capital Vol III which Engels would edit and publish after Marx’s death. Of specific importance here is the famous “Results on the Immediate Process of Production,” also known as the “Unpublished Chapter VI.” This 1863-4 manuscript was omitted from Capital Vol I for largely unknown reasons. Ernest Mandel, who wrote the introduction to the 1976 English publication of Volume one, which included this manuscript as an appendix, said that 
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​Nonetheless, as Musto notes, this manuscript enhances the theory of alienation by “linking [Marx’s] economic and political analysis more closely to each other” (126). Beyond this manuscript, the theory of alienation takes on a new shape in the formulation of the fetishism of commodities in section four of Capital Vol I’s first chapter. The fetishism of commodities is a new term, but not a new concept, it describes a phenomenon which the theory of alienation already explained. For instance, as stated in Capital, the fetishism of commodities describes the conditions wherein “definite social relations between men” assume “ the fantastic form of a relation between things.”[24] This same wording is used in one of the Grundrisse’s formulation of alienation:
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​Besides section four of chapter one, Capital Vol I is scattered with commentary on the inversion of dead and living labor (especially in chapter 11 and 15), a theme which is central to the theory of alienation. These themes are also present in various passages from Capital Vol. III (1864-75), which is the last text Musto pulls from for the third generation of writings on alienation.
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Lastly, the theory of alienation has always been inextricably linked with how Marx conceived of communism. As the theory concretizes, the idea of communism does as well. Under a communist mode of life, the conditions which perpetuated an alienated form of objectification would be overcome. Here, the “social character of production is presupposed” and makes the product of labor “not an exchange value,”  but “a specific share of the communal production.”[26] The mediational character of commodity production and the exchange value dominated mode of life would be destroyed. Production and the mode of life in general will be aimed at creating the conditions for qualitative human flourishing. As Marx writes in Capital Vol. III,
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If I may add something to Marcello’s superb analysis in the introduction, it would be the ecological dimension the theory of alienation acquires in Marx’s analysis of the metabolism between human society and nature, and subsequently, of the alienating ‘rifts’ capitalist production creates in this metabolic relation. The quote referenced above shows how a rational governance of the human metabolism with nature is central to Marx’s idea of communism.
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As John Bellamy Foster has argued, “the concept of metabolism provided Marx with a concrete way of expressing the notion of alienation of nature (and its relation to the alienation of labor) that was central to his critique from his earliest writings on,” and in so doing, it “allowed him to give a more solid and scientific expression of this fundamental relation.”[28] Hence, if the alienation of labor is tied to the alienation of nature, a non-alienated communist mode of life must necessarily seek to overcome this alienation of nature through the aforementioned rational governance of human society’s metabolism with nature.
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Although grounded scientifically on Justus von Liebig’s work on the depletion of the soil, this ecological dimension can be traced philosophically to the EPM and the central role nature has in the alienation of labor. Faced with the existential crisis of climate change, this ecological dimension in Marx’s theory of alienation and critique of capitalist production acquires a heightened sense of immediacy.

Additionally, if we consider Marx’s concept of the metabolic rift within the theory of alienation, then its rediscovery did not have to wait until Lükacs’ 1923 History and Class Consciousness, for a part of it could be seen in the ecological dimension of August Bebel’s 1884 text Women Under Socialism, in Karl Kautsky’s 1899 text on The Agrarian Question, in Lenin’s 1901 The Agrarian Question and the “Critics of Marx,” and more directly in the work of Bukharin, Vernadsky, and others in the 1920/30s tradition of Soviet ecology.[29]

In sum, Musto’s anthology is an essential requirement for all interested in Marx’s theory of alienation, and his introduction to the selection displays that great erudition of Marxist history and theory which those that are familiar with his work hold in the highest esteem.
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Notes and References


[1] The parenthetical numbers which appear throughout this review refer to pages from Musto’s book.

[2] For a more detailed assessment of this ‘myth’ see: Marcello Musto, “The Myth of the ‘Young Marx’ in the Interpretation of the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844,” Critique 43, no 2 (2015)., pp. 233-60.

[3] G.W.F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, Oxford University Press, 1977., pp. 114.

[4] For more on the Young Hegelians see: Lawrence S. Stepenlevich, The Young Hegelians: An Anthology, Humanity Books, 1999.

[5] My video for Midwestern Marx, “Alienation – Feuerbach to Marx,” describes the concept’s transition from Feuerbach to Marx’s Manuscripts of 44.

[6] The Feuerbachian influence which the younger Engels was under is usually understated. I would direct the reader to Engels’ 1843 review of Thomas Carlyle’s Past and Present (written before The Conditions of the Working Class in England), where this influence is as, or if not more, evident then than in the writings of the younger Marx.

[7] I would add to the list Max Scheler’s 1913 book Ressentiment and Edmund Husserl’s 1936 book, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, which expands on the arguments of his 1935 lectures on “Philosophy and the Crisis of European Man.”

[8] Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, Great Books in Philosophy, 1988., pp. 71.

[9] Ibid., 72.

[10] The Grundrisse is an unfinished manuscript not intended for publication, in passages like these, where editing could’ve improved what was said, its manuscript character shines forth. 

[11] Karl Marx, Grundrisse, Penguin Books, 1973., pp. 831-2.

[12] Adam Schaff, Marxism and the Human Individual, McGraw-Hill, 1970., pp. 16. I was excited to see Musto’s frequent usage of Schaff, a thinker far too undervalued in our tradition.

[13] I use ‘depicted’ instead of ‘produced’ because the split originated well before the 1960s debate, the debate simply manifested what was already a previous split. For more on this split see Domenico Losurdo, El Marxismo Occidental, Editorial Trotta, 2019.

[14] ‘Feuerbachian problematic’ is how Althusser describes it in his essay “On the Young Marx.” For more see Louis Althusser, For Marx, Verso, 1979., pp. 66-70.

[15] Schaff, Marxism and the Human Individual., pp. 28.

[16] To see how this was done in his later years see: Marcello Musto, The Last Years of Karl Marx, Stanford, 2020. For a shortened version of some of the points made in this text, my review article might be helpful.

[17] Ibid., pp. 24.

[18] Evald Ilyenkov, “From the Marxist-Leninist Point of View,” In Marx and the Western World, ed. Nicholas Lobkowicz, University of Notre Dame Press, 1967., pp. 401.

[19] Ibid., pp. 402.

[20] Ibid., pp. 404.

[21] Schaff, Marxism and the Human Individual., pp. 21.

[22] Ibid., pp. 15-16.

[23] Marx, Capital Vol 1, Penguin Books, 1982., pp. 944.

[24] Ibid., pp. 165.

[25] Marx, Grundrisse., pp. 157.

[26] Marx, Grundrisse., pp. 172.

[27] Karl Marx, Capital Vol III, Penguin Books, 1981., pp. 958-9.

[28] John Bellamy Foster, Marx’s Ecology, Monthly Review, 2000., pp. 158.

[29] For all the flaws Bukharin’s Historical Materialism textbook has, chapter five on “The Equilibrium between Society and Nature” provides a laudable reintroduction of Marx’s concept of metabolism and metabolic rifts.