The decade of 1980s in the U.S.A is remembered, among other things, for its rightward political shift. The eighties were marked by Ronald Reagan’s term as President, his staunch concern for ‘traditional family values’, and his hostility towards even the tiniest of social-welfare programs. The previous government of Carter had played the role of ossifying public opinion and presenting a certain softness in foreign policy, in order to reassure a citizenry that had grown bitter after the Vietnam war. Unlike the Democrat Carter, the Republican Reagan had no need to hold back. He went on to dissolve the ‘Fairness Doctrine’ of the Federal Communications Commission, which had earlier posed some requirement for broadcasters to air dissenting political views. U.S hegemonism and aggressive foreign policy would be obscured by a sense of ‘super-patriotism’, and the President’s humour and aura would be sufficient justification. From the Sandinista revolutionaries of Nicaragua, to the progressive government in Afghanistan, none would be spared from the outreaches of the U.S.A that would culminate in the Reagan Doctrine (Zinn, 2009).
           
​In the same decade a text would be written, which would later go on to capture the nerve of left-leaning realpolitik in the U.S.A and beyond. The text was an academic paper titled ‘Demarginalising the Intersection of Race and Sex’, written by academic-lawyer Kimberlé Crenshaw. This was the text that led to the escalation of the term ‘intersectionality’ from obscure jargon to everybody’s woke watchword. The paper inspects certain cases of legal battle, which involve racial and sex discrimination. Crenshaw argues that socio-economic and legal systems are not neutral, but designed to uphold and multiply bias against marginalised identities, in this case women and people of colour. She noted that by looking at women (sex identity) and POC (racial identity) in a way that is mutually exclusive, is harmful and will inevitably ignore the conditions of oppression where both the identities ‘intersect’. Whatever the merits of its original implications, the text would go on to become the manifesto for the divisive, hateful, self-obsessed, identitarian politics that is dominant in the left today. We may view the text as a mirthful reflection and product of the political and ideological contradictions of the times, which I described at the start (Crenshaw, 1989).
           
In the same decade, another text was published – which is the subject of this essay. Alice Walker’s epistolary novel ‘The Color Purple’. The book would go on to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (1983) and the National Book Award for Fiction. It would be met with a film adaptation, directed by Hollywood’s Steven Spielberg (1985). Recognising the appeal and positive reception of the novel, it would be no exaggeration to argue that it captured the sentiments of its time, and reflected the zeitgeist of its time. By inspecting and resolving the contradiction posed in the novel, some assessment can be made of the political scenario in which it was written, read, appreciated and adapted.

‘The Color Purple’ is set in Southern U.S.A, in the early 1900s. The story revolves around African-American families. The novel is written in an epistolary form, primarily as letters that the protagonist Celie writes to ‘God’, where she describes her everyday life and tribulations, in gruesome detail. Celie is sexually abused by her ‘father’ and later married off to a man referred to as Mister __, who had originally desired to marry Nettie, Celie’s 12-year old sister. Unable to bear with her abusive ‘father’, Nettie makes her run to Celie’s dwelling at Mister __’s house. She reunites with her sister, but only to be chased away from there (Walker, 1992).

Mister __’s son Harpo marries a woman called Sofia. Mister __’s male-chauvinism compels Harpo to exercise domination over his wife, Sofia. Harpo’s attempts are overpowered by the outspoken Sofia, who ultimately leaves the house having grown weary of it. Some time then, a jazz-singer Shug Avery (who was also Mister __’s long time mistress) finds her way into his house. Initially hostile to Celie, she soon befriends her. The novel has vivid descriptions of the homosexual relationship that Celie and Shug develop, which have not passed without controversy.

Celie and Shug discover, that Celie’s sister Nettie is indeed alive and has been writing letters from Africa. The letters had been confiscated by Mister __, without Celie’s knowledge. Nettie reveals in the letters that she travelled to Africa with a missionary couple, Samuel and Corrine. She writes of her experiences with tribal groups there. The letters also reveal that Alphonso, the man Celia and Nettie had thought to be their father, is actually their step-father. Reading those letters, Celie discusses her rising scepticism towards ‘God’. Shug explains to her that God isn’t a white man in the sky, but something more sublime. Shug’s affirmation towards Celie, has a profound impact on the latter who eventually musters the courage recognise how she has been wronged and  decides to leave Mister __.
Other complications arise and slowly resolve. Celie inherits a house after Alphonso’s death. Shug and Nettie come to Celie’s new home. Mister __ (Albert) returns as a changed man, and is forgiven.

The theme of injustice dominates the novel. Different characters experience injustice in different forms, and find different ways to ‘overcome’ it. At many instances, characters are presented as helpless, almost as victims of their destiny, condemned to suffer at the hands of the inhumane who have power. Injustice manifests through verbal and sexual abuse, violence and mistreatment, subjugation and control. Male dominance runs at the vein of it, and so does the reality that the characters are African-American. Therefore injustice and justice here, are not abstract concepts. Idea of justice is rooted in the material reality and determined by social and economic conditions, and also the realities of male-dominance and racial subjugation. Somewhat of an ‘intersection’, many would instantly remark.

From Plato and Aristotle, all the way to John Rawls, justice has been understood in a desertist sense (i.e. desert theory of justice.) This means that justice is understood as the delivering of rights and material goods that an individual deserves. Injustice, therefore, is the situation where individuals get what they don’t deserve, or don’t get what they deserve. Plato elucidates his idea of justice in Republic, as intrinsically linked to virtue – justice is delivered when the virtuous individuals are rewarded, and the vicious are punished. Aristotle drew a distinction between distributive justice and corrective justice. During the Enlightenment, philosophers appealed to ‘reason’ and ‘human nature’, and called for extending political rights to all individuals. As the dictum went, “All men are born equal.” Today, there is no reasonable objection to the idea that everyone deserves equal political rights. There is still debate about the just distribution of material goods (Xinsheng, 2015).

It is vital to recognise that all hitherto existing theories of justice make no remarks whatsoever about property relations and ownership. Even with the evolving understanding of justice, the concept of desert continues to underlie all of them. Each must get his due. An individual’s due (or desert) is implicitly assumed to be the due that he is entitled to because of his existing social position, and ownership of property. There is the assumption that the economic relations are themselves just, in the way that they exist, therefore justice is to be delivered over and above those economic relations, and without striving to change those relations. Private property is deemed to be just and imagined as eternal, and not as something that has been appropriated historically over years through primitive accumulation in the hands of the already advantaged mercantile classes. Desert theories of justice take private property and ownership as the premise of the argument for what is deserved in terms of income and wealth. Private property is just and eternal. This assumption is usually implicit and not conscious, but has began to grow more explicit with the rise of neoliberalism, one of whose pioneers was President Reagan.

​In ‘The Color Purple’, Celie finds ultimate freedom and independence when she inherits private property from her step-father. This reinforces the same desert theory of justice. Celie has overcome her emotional subjugation, and has been empowered to stand up to her abuser simply by being more confident in herself. It seems as though that there is no need to fight the material basis of patriarchy and male-dominance, and trying to overthrow existing patriarchal systems, family institutions or property relations. Celie is now an independent woman who will not have anyone put her down. She is now a property owner.

The notion of ugliness is repeated at several instances in the novel. Celie is deemed as ugly, at least in comparison to her sister, by their step-father Alphonso. The main reason that Celie is married off with Mister __, is because she is considered the uglier of the two sisters, and Alphonso refuses to let go of Nettie, who is deemed pretty. There should be no doubt here, that the abstract notions of beauty and ugliness, have nothing to do with aesthetic or intrinsic beauty. They have more to do with what is known in sociology as ‘sexual capital’ or ‘erotic capital’. The phrase was first used by sociologist Catherin Hakim, adding upon Bourdieu’s  concepts of economic, cultural and social capital. Erotic capital is subversive, and can be used for upward social mobility. Therefore, there is always an attempt from the powerful, to suppress an individual’s erotic capital, lest they rise up the social ladder (Hakim, 2011).

​Since beauty is subjective, not much can be commented on the precise ways in which this works in the novel. It can surely be added that even here, injustice that both the sisters (Nettie and Celie) suffer, are intrinsically linked to property relations, in this case through the means of erotic capital. Celie is repeatedly deemed ugly by her male subjugators and at one instance by Shug Avery. This can be understood as a reflection of the need to suppress her potential erotic capital, using which she could rise above her subjugators.

‘Class’ in the social sciences, is understood differently by different schools of thinking. Socio-economic class, when the term is ordinarily thrown around, is understood in a gradational sense: lower, middle, lower-middle, upper-middle, the list is endless. Otherwise it is seen as a marker of occupation: the managerial class, business class. What is often lacking, is a relational understanding of class. Class is to be understood as the relation an individual or group has with the productive mechanisms of the economy. Do they own the mechanisms of productions as their property, or do they work for someone who owns it? Understood in this way, class is linked to the economic base and is much more than a social identity. This is where intersectionality fails. It sees class merely as an identity that intersects with other identities, such as racial identity and gender identity. Thus, even an intersectional understanding of justice, does not challenge the assumptions of ‘desert’ which assume entitlement of justice to those that own property. Instead, intersectionality merely calls for various identity groups to enter the propertied class. It calls for more women CEOs, more LGBTQ+ military commanders or more African-American Presidents, but the core property relations are not altered at the slightest. This is the zeitgeist of resistance politics that have become persistent from the times of Reagan. The same zeitgeist reflects in Crenshaw’s paper and Alice Walker’s novel.

​Let us take a close look at the events surrounding Sofia, the outspoken lady who marries Harpo but leaves him, having become deterred by his attempts at subjugation. In a later segment of the book, Sofia is seen to be enjoying an afternoon in a street, with her children and boyfriend. Miss Millie, the wife of the mayor, speaks to Sofia in an insulting way. Sofia gets into a physical altercation with the mayor himself, and injures him. She is immediately arrested and imprisoned. Sofia is eventually released, and starts to work for Miss Millie.

It is not difficult to see the question of race in this segment. The immediate police action and arrest of Sofia, is largely due to her racial identity. What must also be noted, is the question of class, which operates here as a relational economic reality and not merely a social identity. One can draw a modern parallel with the recent BLM protests against the police-murder of George Floyd. While the mainstream discourse very rightly was about racial disparity and mistreatment of African-Americans by a white-dominated police system. There was little talk about the economic reality of class and property relations involved. If the issue is entirely about race, then it can perhaps be solved by sensitisation programs in the police and employment of more African-American officers. But if the issue is about material economic relations, then the solution involves the complete overturn of the existing system, if not some radical police-reform.

​It is not merely social identity, but his position in economic relations that compelled George Floyd to pass off a ‘counterfeit’ twenty dollar bill, which was to be the end of him. It is the need to feed a hungry stomach and a hungry family. It is the same need that compels Sofia to serve, albeit resentfully, the mayor’s wife after the former’s release from prison.

​Various contradictions such as the ones mentioned in this essay, can be found in ‘The Color Purple’. They all lead to some important questions about the political shift over the years. However, a contradiction is not hypocrisy. Alice Walker’s novel is great literature, and at least part of the appreciation must be due to its literary excellence. An attempt to resolve contradictions, is not to say that the novel is a piece of postmodernist propaganda. Far from it, the novel has themes that go against the grain. An example could be the segment where Nettie’s letter mentions the state of the Olinka tribe, which prohibits girls from getting an education. “They’re like white people at home who don’t want coloured people to learn,” says a witty character. The novel refrains from any form of relativism here.
           
The novel is born out of lived-experience. Individual experiences and their most beautiful literary expressions can only be translated to political change if they are placed in larger analytical frameworks and within broader political contexts. As lines from the book read:

​“I think us here to wonder, myself. To wonder. To ask. And that in wondering about the big things and asking about the big things, you learn about the little ones, almost by accident. But you never know nothing more about the big things than you start out with. The more I wonder, the more I love.”

​References

Crenshaw, K. (1989). Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex. Unversity of Chicago Legal Forum , 139-167.

Hakim, C. (2011). Erotic Capital: The Power of Attraction in the Boardroom and the Bedroom. Basic Books.
Walker, A. (1992). The Color Purple. Women's Press: London.

Xinsheng, W. (2015). A Fourfold Defense of Marx’s Theory of Justice. Social Sciences in China , 5-21.
​
Zinn, H. (2009). A People's History of the United States. New York: HarperCollins.

​If we are meant to imagine new worlds to come, as anyone who believes a better one is possible does, it follows that the new cannot be achieved with the same tools which made the old world. Just as we seek to disengage with the more obvious structures of capital, so must we depart from a pedagogy that mechanizes and moderates learning in service of valorization. In his new book, Derek Ford offers a sharp account of the current knowledge economy. First offering a history of its development, then an analysis of its structures, Ford incisively critiques both the right and the left for the pedagogical orientation they’ve adopted. While offering significantly more criticism for the right, his analysis of the left as inadvertently adopting a value of learning only for productive purpose is remarkably incisive, a form of learning solely as a means to generate profit or generate value for collective development.
           
However, his account falls short in the final movement of the text, where he offers his diagnosis for the problems he deftly describes. Ford proposes, as an alternative to this knowledge-above-all-else orientation: stupidity. There is some vague gesturing towards a sort of theoretical understanding of stupidity, where it resists definition and organizes without thought. Much of that account is also interesting, the ways the stupidity allows marginalized groups to deny the legitimacy of the orthodox pedagogy they live under. Still, the fundamental mistake he makes is that Ford too seems to lose perspective of pedagogy. It seems he can only see learning as innately tied to capitalist production. So he rejects learning as such for an anti-pedagogy, that of stupidity. In doing so, he mistakes current pedagogy for all pedagogy, and argues for a total rejection of such form, despite the ahistoric nature of learning.

To begin, Ford defines the changes which took place in the post-Fordist era, moving from industrial capitalism to cognitive capitalism’s knowledge economy. The name refers to a new privileging of knowledge production, in contrast to more literal production, like manufacturing, which was declining among previously industrial countries in the post-war years. As Ford states, “the claim is rather that the role and status of knowledge—including the conditions and results of its production, distribution, and utilization—have increasingly taken on a determinant function in economic, social, and political development” (Ford 2). In other words, in a knowledge economy, profit was no longer primarily being produced in the factory, but the university, in the R&D lab, or the think tank (notably, even if such organizations receive public funding their innovations will likely find their way to private corporation’s control). “What matters above all else,” in cognitive capitalism, “is that knowledge and learning are measured or measurable,” (59). As a result of this shift, a valid pursuit of knowledge is one linked exclusively to that knowledge’s potential productive capability. This is not knowledge for its own sake but for the sake of the shareholder.
 
For Ford, “the primary problem turns on the private ownership and enclosure of knowledge and the goal is an elimination of both” (28).  The resulting system, which is one of competition, is inefficient even in its stated goal to generate economically valuable knowledge.  The current capitalist framework is one that encourages the binary of professional/amateur, expert/ignorant, and so forth. This limits who may participate still further. But a problem arises: despite how useful the knowledge economy has proven for capital, knowledge has an inherently destabilizing effect that opens up new possibility, due to: “the collective, nonrivalrous, easily duplicated, and immaterial nature of knowledge—as well as the collaboration and openness required for knowledge production— [which] makes it unwieldy for capital,” (31). And so, Ford moves on from discussing the right’s knowledge economy and turns towards its opposition.

In contrast with the primacy of the patent in the existent knowledge economy, Marxists value what Ford terms, “the commons”, particularly the notion that “knowledge production relies on common knowledge to cooperatively produce new knowledge” (30).  And an environment of access and openness in a knowledge economy of the commons has obvious benefits. Is innovation encouraged by collaboration or secretive competition? Are paywalls good for the general education of the public? Ford observes the great inefficiency of a profit motivated system: “they redefine research and knowledge production in the service of capital accumulation, or, in the words of the development agencies, in the numbers of citations and patents they produce.” But is an economy of the commons possible? Ford suggests they are, even under existing material conditions, using projects like Wikipedia and the movement for Open Education Resources (OERs) to show the potential of collective intellectual organizations (33).  Note that the distinction between professional/amateur or expert/amateur dissolves under these frameworks. Your Wikipedia contribution doesn’t require you to have a doctorate in the subject, just a proper citation. So, when information is commonly held and anti-hierarchical, knowledge production accelerates; thousands of minds are better than ten expert ones, no?

Yet there is an issue that arises. Ford makes his sympathy with Marxists evident because they’re receptive to less overtly profit motivated pedagogy. “The marxists want to win this struggle because they recognize the centrality of knowledge as an expression… of an immanent alternative world emerging in the present one,” Ford argues (3). Despite that wider openness to learning, Marxists have inadvertently absorbed that same tendency to admire knowledge for its utility. Though profit motive may not be directly present, the same mindset which treats knowledge as a commodity remains. In his view, “both [left and right] view knowledge as a raw material, means of production, product, and subject that is created, distributed, and consumed in a ceaseless demand to produce…” (Ford 9). Treating knowledge as a commodity makes little sense, not least because “knowledge doesn’t obey the same laws of scarcity or rivalry as physical commodities” (26). There is no limit to how many times a book may be read or an algorithm shared. Even this, however, misses the wider problem, which is that every side of the political spectrum believes, “that the knowledge economy is significant because knowledge is a productive force” (emphasis mine, 63). Specifically, the problem is that each side believes development of knowledge to be “an undeniable good” (65). This is a mistake, for it perpetuates “circuits of capitalist production” and “reinforces the systems of oppression and domination” that Marxists want rid of (Ibid.). What does Ford propose as an antidote?

He offers a theoretical form of resistance: stupidity. His positioning of stupidity can feel disorienting and vague; Ford acknowledges this but attributes that to the ineffable, elusive nature of resistant stupidity. Discussions of this kind, about abstract concepts and envisioned worlds-to-come will, by their very nature, bump into the limits of language, brush up against the edge of syntax. Much of Ford’s prescriptive section of the text exists in this realm. Many generative thoughts are here, and yet, I was left wondering if there wasn’t a better, more accurate word he could use. Language will always struggle to contain theory like this, but you must use the words that get you closest to that which is beyond description; it feels as if the concept’s relationship to the label of the stupid is imperfect and that makes any conclusion hard to reach. “Stupid” as a term is already laden with meaning and so, without more clear description of stupidity as something to pursue, I found myself working off the popular waning of the term. If that is the case, why pursue it, why not clarify the phrase until it can be parsed accurately?

​Because it doesn’t fit with the normal definition of stupidity — but rather a kind of inverting of the hyper-knowledge present — so much of the description of this anti-pedagogy/pro-stupidity argument relies on negations of the current state instead. “Stupidity is not the opposite of knowledge, nor is it its absence or lack.  Defining stupidity is, by its very nature, impossible (76). Note how this “impossible” definition is told in negation, in absence; by telling us what it is not we are meant to understand what it is. Ford even notes his concept’s definition via negation, calling it “an anti-value” (82).  His more developed version still relies on antithesis, but with little gesture towards a praxis of stupidity:

Still, despite stupidity's sketchy nature, Ford argues it is necessary to pursue, as it provides “an alternative pedagogical motor for an exodus beyond” our current era (79). Ford qualifies these claims, writing that this wasn’t “an uncritical celebration of stupidity and a rejection of knowledge or knowledge production,” and yet that is how it can be read (15). There is no coexistence of revolutionary stupidity and pursuits of knowledge for the commons (which replicates capital logics and are thus tainted). And, more practically, what would adopting this anti-pedagogy look like? With a definition that primarily rests on negation and inversion there’s not much direction about how to develop stupidity. Ford writes, “stupidity is not a refusal of production but an inability to produce” (original emphasis, 82). How can you cultivate an inability? Even if the reader entirely accepts Ford’s solution, I did not conclude with a sense of how it would actually work, or what organized stupidity-as-resistance might look like.

It is also not clear why the very idea of pedagogy has been so sullied by capital as to demand its total rejection and an embrace of its antithesis. While Ford’s description of  the left and right’s shared problem — thinking of knowledge as a commodity to be produced — is entirely accurate, he appears to make the same mistake those he critiques make: he cannot peer out of the superstructure and is blinded by current conditions. Ford has mistaken the specific conditions he lives in, which are objectionable, for something problematic about the nature of pedagogy itself; thus, his solution is the complete rejection of learning. That is quite an extreme position to take. If pedagogy has changed as eras changed (and it has) what makes the current position so inescapable? Pedagogy no doubt has changed as society has transformed, so why does this particular set of material conditions demand adopting an “anti-value”, instead of an adjustment? This is a mistake that Marxists need to be cautious of generally: mistaking the historically produced, material conditions we live in with an eternal state of being. While he is correct that the pedagogy adopted on the left can reproduce a similar emphasis on productivity as the ultimate good, he seemingly forgets that capital (and its accompanying logics) has existed for some few centuries, where learning has been an innate part of humanity since it has existed. Personally, I’d rather attempt to get away from this relatively new pedagogy of cognitive capitalism, change material conditions, and develop something different, rather than invert pedagogy and seek out stupidity as a form of resistance.

​There are many strengths in the text which deserve comment: Ford deftly intertwines disability justice with anti-capitalism in an intuitive way, his analysis of the history of the knowledge economy is concise and informative, and his diagnosis of the problem on both left and right side feel very cogent. In a world where no one understands the zeitgeist, where the absurd becomes the real everyday, it is difficult to fault such a careful academic because he doesn’t have a fully developed answer to address the problems of the knowledge economy. Ford’s analysis is clear and serves as a strong introduction to understanding cognitive capitalism. It also offers fair critiques of right and left pedagogical practices. That he gestures vaguely for another way that remains undeveloped is a frustration but no reason to reject the text writ large. Hopefully, Ford will continue to develop this anti-value as a concept; I’m interested to see where else it might take him. Whether we pursue the commons and proletarian general intellect or embrace stupidity, a better world is possible and can be built on the backs of new pedagogical orientations.

​Morris Berman is recognized as a major still active left (bourgeois) American culture critic. He is a prolific author of many books but they are, I fear, very similar to the style of thinking found in The Twilight of American Culture. This “Blast from the Past”  is still contemporary, US capitalism is still an existential threat, and the solutions such as as they are in this book, are still typical of those writers who fail to factor in the necessity for revolutionary Marxist approaches

According to the dust jacket this book is "brilliant", has "uncommon insight," is "trenchant" and in the words of one writer the author is "one of the most creative and original thinkers of our time." Having read the book, I can only shudder to think this collection of puerile nonsense and ignorant rambling could have been taken seriously by any publisher. That it was published at all is a sure sign that we are indeed in the twilight of our culture.

In this book Berman proposes to diagnose what is wrong with our culture (it is too commercial, people only care about money, and big corporations control everything) and to propose a solution by which our cultural heritage can be restored (intellectuals should become monks, stay out of mass movements to avoid "groupthink," and individually try to preserve cultural values so that in one or two hundred years when our current civilization collapses the monkish works of preservation will emerge back into the open).

It seems that all his ideas and inspiration come from reading science fiction. He is especially inspired by Walter Miller’s A Canticle for Liebowitz, Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 and Ira Levin’s This Perfect Day.

I can’t fault Berman’s critique of modern American life. It has been taken over by the large corporations, it is a cultural wasteland in which the poor get poorer and the rich richer (there are no "workers" in Berman’s critique--just "poor" and "rich" and a shrinking middle class) but his historical analysis and solutions are so off the wall as to be comical--as is his knowledge of Marxism. He confuses Marx’s views of history with Adam Smith's "invisible hand" and thinks Lenin had no ideas on how to replace capitalism. He is fond of using examples from Roman history to make comparisons with the US but doesn’t seem to have any real knowledge of the ancient world. He mistakenly thinks classical civilization was deliberately preserved in the monasteries of the middle ages without realizing that the monks also destroyed the classics, washing them off parchments so that Bible stories and lives of the saints could be written over them.

In Berman’s own words--the current crises in American culture "began in Europe at the end of the Middle Ages, expanded during the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions and finally climaxed in our own times." This crisis is "corporate hegemony" which will break down "forty or fifty years down the road as of this writing" [good--just in time for the bicentennial of the Communist Manifesto--t.r., reviewer’s comments in brackets]. Berman informs us that "This type of breakdown, which is a recurrent historical phenomenon, is a long-range one [I should think so--we have been waiting since "the end of the Middle Ages"] and internal to the system." That is the extent of the social analysis and it’s a lot shorter than having to read Das Kapital.

Berman’s ignorance of his subject matter is so extreme as to defy belief. Here are some samples:

"Hegel...saw history as a kind of spiritual journey [New Agers listen up!] in which Geist ("spirit") moved around the globe, generating the Renaissance in fifteenth-century Florence, and sowing the seeds of decay when it subsequently departed." Spirit for Hegel is not a globe-trotting phenomenon sowing seeds of decay--it's a progressive activity that advances, it doesn’t decay, and it's the German Reformation not the Renaissance in which Hegel is particularly interested. Later on he informs us that the "dialectics" of Aristotle and Hegel have much in common--seemingly unaware that Hegel’s dialectical logic is based on the opposite assumptions from those of Aristotle.

Berman on Marx: "’Men make their own history,’ he [Marx] wrote, ‘but they do not make it just as they please....’"[Marx means that they are constrained by historical circumstance]. But Berman thinks that Marx is Adam Smith because he, Berman, writes: "They each have individual intentions, he [Marx] says, but the final outcome is something that no particular person expected or planned." The individual calculus is perfectly Smithian--the "invisible hand" and has nothing to do with the class based analysis undertaken by Marx.

Berman on Lenin [I note that Lenin is not listed in the index, but Jay Leno is]: "What is to be done?" Berman is referring to the fact that capitalists are responsible for so much misery and environmental destruction. "Lenin’s answer to this question was to kill these jokers in tailored suits who are literally murdering our communities. As they build financial capital, they destroy cultural capital, human capital--the true assets of a nation [India thus has more assets than the US]. The problem--since the dilemma is structural--is that there are plenty of other such entrepreneurs in the wings, ready to replace them." [I can hear Lenin saying "Doh! Why didn’t I think of that?"] "No," says Berman, "something much more long-range is needed at this point." So Berman thinks Lenin had no other plans than just killing bad guys!

In another place Berman makes reference to the "fetishism of commodities" another idea from Marx--only Berman thinks it means a desire to accumulate goodies in a shopping mall thus completely missing Marx’s meaning, viz. that the commodity economy created by humans is seen as a natural force to which humans are subject. All this only shows that Berman hasn’t read or hasn’t understood Hegel [he might be forgiven this] or Marx or Lenin.

What is the root cause of the recent wars waged by US Imperialism [not Berman’s term]? The answer is cultural "anomie"--"the culture no longer believes in itself, so it typically undertakes phony or misguided wars (Vietnam, or the Gulf War [forget oil] of 1991, for example)...." This is certainly "trenchant." [The wars of the last twenty years as well as MAGA are also all due to misguided cultural anomie it seems.]

As for his "monastic option"--forget political struggle or labor unions--Berman thinks our cultural heritage must be saved by special individuals: "Today’s 'monk' is committed to a renewed sense of self, and to the avoidance of groupthink, including anticorporate or anti-consumer culture groupthink.... The more individual the activity is, and the more out of the public eye, the more effective it is likely to be in the long run" [that’s the long run in which we are all dead].

So Berman’s book is a capitulation to the very forces of decay and degeneration that he is ostensibly combating. There is nothing our corporate masters would like better than for the opposition to go into its shell and be individually dedicated to cultural preservation while "globalization" recklessly indulges in "anomie" and wages its mistaken wars. The "groupthink" of the peace movement, civil rights movement or labor movement, to say nothing of the socialist movement, is the last thing it wants to confront.

And this may well be why mainstream publishing companies publish books like Berman’s.

The Twilight of American Culture
by Morris Berman
New York, W.W. Norton & Co., 2000.

Terry Pinkard’s Hegel is one of the best introductions available to the philosophy of Hegel. We often hear that Hegel is the éminence grise  standing behind Karl Marx and that the Hegelian dialectic is the basis on which Marx and Engels developed materialist dialectics. Lenin even says that it is impossible to understand Capital without reading and understanding Hegel’s Logic.
    
The problem with Hegel is his forbidding style which drives many readers to distraction. He seems to be incomprehensible. Pinkard's book overcomes this difficulty. It is clearly written in an enjoyable style and covers both Hegel's life and philosophical development as well as providing easily digestible summaries of all the works--especially The Phenomenology of Mind, The Logic, The Encyclopedia of The Philosophical Sciences, and The Philosophy of Right.
    
For those who want to know what all the fuss is about,  this is a highly recommended first book on Hegel from which one can graduate to the original works.
    
Hegel's politics were progressive and humanistic. Pinkard points out that he supported the American and French revolutions and rejected as "degrading" the type of newly developing capitalist division of labor touted by Adam Smith.
    
Hegel thought that modern individualism [i.e., entrepreneurial capitalism] must be harmonized with the interests of the people [people before profits]. Pinkard suggests that his philosophy was based on three components.  The three component parts of Hegelianism being 1) a blend of representative government with "Germanic" freedom; 2) Scottish commercial society; 3) French revolutionary politics.
    
This may remind readers of Lenin's Three Component Parts of Marxism -- namely British economic theory, French socialism, and German philosophy.
    
Perhaps one of the most trenchant points Pinkard makes in his chapter on The Phenomenology is the following on the French Revolution (The Phenomenology discusses the development of human consciousness from its origins up to Hegel's time): “The Revolution, under Rousseau's influence, had culminated in a vision of ‘absolute freedom’ as determined by a ‘general will,’ which in the development of the Revolution became identified with the ‘nation.’ Kant saw that what was required had to be a self-determined whole that made room for the individual agent and neither swallowed him in abstractions such as ‘utility' nor reduced him to moral insignificance as merely a cog in the machine of the ‘nation’."

Replace "nation" with "class", "general will" with "the party", "absolute freedom" with "socialism" and "Rousseau" with "the cult of the personality" and maybe we can begin to see why Hegel and Kant are still relevant.
    
The following Hegelian observations are still meaningful (properly updated): the first with respect to how communist and workers parties were sometimes  perceived to have operated, the second on the role of the press.
                          
“Without an anchoring in social practice, in the self-identity of the people in the reformed communities, the reforms could have no authority;[Reference is to German communities in Hegel's day that progressive government ministers were trying to liberalize] they would only appear, indeed would only be, the imposition of one group's (the reformers) preferences and ideals on another. Without the transformation of local Sittlichkeit [ethical life] of collective self-identity, the reformers could only be the "masters" and the populace could only be the ‘vassals.’”’

Pinkard continues: “In their reforms there was no ‘dialogue’, there was instead only administrative fiat in which, even in those cases where the ‘right’ thing was being decreed, the self-undetermining nature of decrees that seem to come from ‘on high’ was evident. The press plays its proper role when it serves as a mediator for the formation of such public opinion; when the press serves to mediate things in the right way, it thereby serves to underwrite the process of reform.”

In studying Hegel it has often been the rule to start with The Phenomenology of Mind, but Pinkard points out that Hegel, late in life, did not consider that work, interesting as it may be, a proper introduction to his system. One should begin with reading the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences.
    
I think we should note that there has been a dialectical reversal in modern life from the times of Hegel. Pinkard notes: “The problem of modern life [ in Hegel's time] was that its rationality was not immediately apparent to its participants; for that one required a set of reflective practices that could display and demonstrate the rationality of modern life, namely, those involved in modern art, modern religion, and, most importantly, modern philosophy.”

However, now it is, I think, just the opposite. The irrationality of our world system is what is not immediately apparent. As it was the task of Hegelianism at the beginning of the nineteenth century to demonstrate the rationality of the world, especially the world resulting from the French Revolution, so the task today is to show, by means of Marxism, the irrationality of the new world order. This is another way of saying that whatever progressive role the bourgeoisie played in Hegel's day is long over. Rationality now requires socialism.
    
Pinkard's discussion of The Philosophy of Right is also important. It centers on Hegel's "core idea" that "what counts as 'right' in general is what is necessary for the realization of freedom."
    
How much Hegel's views on freedom can be adjusted to Marxism is a matter of debate. This problem is too complicated to go into in a review, but a hint to its solution may be found in Hegel's view that the opposite of freedom is "to act in terms of something one cannot rationally endorse for oneself, that is, ultimately to be pushed around by considerations that are not really one's own but come from or belong to something else (for example, brute desires, or social conventions." Or. I might add, an economic system based not on humanistic (working class) socialist principles but on the drive for profits whatever the human cost. An economic system that controls us instead of being controlled by us makes a mockery of all bourgeois claims to "freedom."
    
The following observations by Hegel-- on religion and the state-- are relevant not only to our own situation (Fundamentalist dogmatic religious position pushed by Republicans, as well as Zionism and political Islam). Again, summarizing Hegel's views, Pinkard writes: ” Letting religious matters into state affairs only leads to fanaticism; when religion becomes political, the result can only be ‘folly, outrage, and the destruction of all ethical relations,’ since the piety of religious conviction when confronted with the manifold claims of the modern political world too easily passes over into ‘a sense of grievance and hence also of self-conceit’ and a sense that the truly faithful can find in their ‘own godliness all that is required in order to see through the nature of the Laws and of political institutions, to pass judgment on them, and to lay down what their character should and must be.’”

Although there is no space here for the attempt, Hegel's philosophy may also be useful in trying to explain the collapse of European socialism. His doctrine that "world history is the world court" has much to recommend itself for a hard nosed analysis. I also pass over the chapters on The Logic with reverential silence.
    
This book is a work of important philosophical as well as historical analysis. The Hegel described by Peter Gay ("a disembodied spirit who oracularly pronounces on deep matters") becomes a living and easily comprehended human being in Pinkard's handling of him. Anyone who wants to know what Hegel had to say, and why it is still important, could do no better than begin with this biography.

Introduction: This book review is from the Political Affairs (CP theoretical journal of 15 years ago) before the magazine was liquidated by the revisionist Sam Webb clique controlling the CP. It is for newer comrades interested in the historical background to the present U.S. hostility to the Maduro government.

​Kozloff's book is a good introduction to Chávez and is generally positive in its treatment of the man and his movement. Unfortunately, Palgrave Macmillan has chosen to market it as if it were a series of exposes in the tradition of the National Enquirer. The book jacket asks "Is Hugo Chávez the Messiah?" "Is George W. Bush afraid of him?" The publisher's press release tells us that Chávez is moving to "control post-Castro Cuba" and this book will give us an "expert analysis of this complicated and dangerous man."

After that come on, I was prepared for a right wing assault on Chávez and his policies. The book, however, turns out to be a reasoned historical presentation of Chávez's rise to power and the social context which produced him-- i.e., the racist pro-US Venezuelan elite and its alliance with US imperialism in an effort to keep the vast majority Venezuelans in poverty and substandard living conditions so that it can live a privileged first world life of luxury and comfort while the people struggle in third world conditions of squalor.

"A damning United Nations report in the early 1960s concluded," Kozloff writes, "that Venezuela has one of the most unequal income distributions in the world." The publisher's marketing department should not have promoted a scholarly book this way, especially as there is nothing in the book that resembles the statements and claims I quoted above from their promos.

Chávez believes one of the reasons for the poverty in his country is the implementation of the Washington Consensus by the IMF and the World Bank. "The consensus," the author states, " stressed deregulation, privatization of state industries, implementation of austerity plans and trade liberalization." In other words, it was a major instrument of class warfare utilized by US Imperialism and its allies in the Venezuelan ruling class.

It should also be noted that the people are supposed to just passively accept the consensus, but if they don't the US provides training and support for the military (the School of the Americas is just one example) to be used to repress any social movements that threaten US hegemony.

Chávez came to power as a result of elections in 1998 in which he won "56.2 percent of the vote, the largest margin won by any candidate in the nation's history." If the word "democracy" refers to anything at all then it refers to what the Chávez government represents in Venezuela. Yet, as we all know, the Bush administration and the US media constantly treat Chávez as some sort of authoritarian undemocratic tyrant. Bush can only dream of having the type of popular support for his policies as Chávez has for his.

Kozloff recounts the now familiar story of the 2002 coup attempt against the Chávez government, carried out by business interests and elements of the military close to the US, and how massive public demonstrations, as well as loyalist military factions, restored Chávez to power after two days. He and his party the MVR (Movimiento Quinta Republica) then consolidated power through national and regional state elections that left him with a solid majority.

A new popular constitution was adopted which has an article (115) that states that "private property must serve the public good and general interest." The government can give compensation and then expropriate any company that violates this article. This article has been used against both foreign companies and members of the Venezuelan elite and is one of the most progressive, and most hated, laws enacted by the Chávez government.

One of the reasons for Chávez's success is the support he has in the military. The Venezuelan military is unique in South America in not having an officer caste made up almost exclusively of upper class elements from the ruling elite. "Indeed," the author points out, "in Venezuela most of the senior officers come from poor urban and rural backgrounds." They are sympathetic to Chávez both because he shares their social background and because his policies are popular with the people.

Another source of Chávez's success and popularity is due to the oil riches for which Venezuela is justly famous. The high oil prices since Chávez took office has allowed him to fund many programs to help the poor. "Oil wealth" has been "channeled into social programs for education, healthcare, and job creation."

Chávez has been greatly influenced by the thought of Simon Bolivar and even calls his project the "Bolivarian Revolution." Bolivar, the great South American liberator who led the struggle for independence from Spain, envisioned a large republic made of what are today Venezuela, Columbia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia and Panama. Chávez wants to bring about closer alliances with this block, both economically and politically, as a way to counterbalance U.S. domination in the region. Needless to say, the U.S. considers this to be a real threat to its "national interests" (code for U.S. corporate interests).

Another ideal Chávez has picked up from Bolivar is concern for the well being of the indigenous peoples of the area. Having effectively destroyed the independence of indigenous cultures and peoples in its own territory the US now exports its anti-Indian policies to South America where it colludes with both local and international capital to oppose the rights of the indigenous peoples. Indian's demands for autonomy and respect for their native territories and land and mineral rights pose problems to big American multinationals and their plans to exploit the oil and other natural resources of the region.

Kozloff writes that, "Washington views the Andean region as the 'hottest' area in Latin America, because of emerging indigenous movements in Bolivia and Ecuador." The author also reports that "In the post- 9/11 world, the United States has equated indigenous movements with terrorism."

This is an amazing statement. That the U.S. government considers the local Indian peoples in Latin America as "terrorists" when they resist oil drilling by American companies in their forests and agricultural areas is truly outrageous and is a cynical and hypocritical use of 9/11 in support of corporate greed.

Kozloff cites the following as evidence: "In a December 2004 report issued by the U.S. National Intelligence Council entitled "Global Trends 2020-- Mapping the Global Future," the government depicts both indigenous activism and Islamic radicalism as threats to U.S. national security." The common link between Indians and Islamicists is, of course, the presence of oil in the regions where they live.

Are Latin American indigenous people really a threat to U.S. interests? Only if "threat" means democratic control of their own lives and "interests" mean "corporate interests." An indigenous legislator from Bolivia, Ricardo Diaz, is quoted as saying, "It's true that indigenous peoples are a threat, from the point of view of the political and economic powers-that-be but we aren't because our struggle is open, legal and legitimate." Anyway, how could open and legal struggle be a "terrorist threat" to the U.S. How can anyone take the pronouncements of our government seriously when it makes such claims?

Pedro Ciciliano, an anthropologist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico says that the U.S. intelligence report is "exaggerated and fraught with errors typical of U.S. intelligence based on biased information. Indigenous people can be considered a threat, because they are poor and are pressing for their rights, but they don't represent a terrorist threat." I think both Diaz and Ciciliano give away too much by using the word "threat." I, at least, want to claim that no one, and certainly no people, asserting their legitimate rights can pose a threat to U.S. interests. U.S. interests are the interests of the American people and only a U.S. government that has abandoned those interests can assert that it is "threatened" by the rights of others.

This book documents many other struggles besides those going on in Venezuela. There are sections dedicated to the revolutionary movements and people's fight backs in Columbia and Bolivia, as well as progressive developments in Brazil and Argentina. If you only have time to read one book on Hugo Chávez this one would be a good choice.

That we have all evolved from the monkeys is not a new thought for Marxists. When Darwin first suggested this with the publication in 1859 of The Origin of Species Marx and Engels were quick to give their support to his ideas. They hailed his book as a great scientific advance. A few years later Engels wrote about human origins himself, in an unfinished essay called "The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man" and now included in his The Dialectics of Nature.

What Engels had to say, while technically out of date, is not so far off the mark as many people might think. For example, in Engels’ day the Earth was thought to be about 100 or so million years old not the 4.5 billion years we think today. Thus Engels’ writes:

“Many hundreds of thousands of years ago, during an epoch, not yet definitely determinable,... the Tertiary period... a particularly highly-developed race of anthropoid apes lived somewhere in the tropical zone-- probably on a great continent that has now sunk to the bottom of the Indian Ocean..... They were completely covered with hair, they had beards and pointed ears, and they lived in bands in the trees.”

German (in which Engels wrote) uses the same word for "monkey" and "ape." Engels is basing himself on Darwin and is describing the early anthropoid ancestors of what we now know to be the great apes and humans. The Tertiary period is today measured in millions not hundreds of thousands years, and there is no lost continent on the bottom of the Indian Ocean. Engels wrote before we knew about continental drift. These bands did live in a tropical environment only it was in Asia, more specifically in places such as China and neighboring areas.

Engels further says that "Hundreds of thousands of years.... certainly elapsed before human society arose out of a troupe of tree climbing monkeys. Engels’ is correct if we substitute "tens of millions" for his "hundreds of thousands." Engels was definitely on the right tract, but we have learned a great deal more about this monkey troupe, these dawn monkeys, since the 1870s when his essay was written. It would be nice to have some updated information.

This has been done for us by Chris Beard notably the winner of a MacArthur "genius grant" but who makes his living by being the curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History.

The vertebrates he is especially interested in are us, or more particularly our relatives and fellow primates the apes and monkeys-- both the quick and the dead. His book is a well written, minimally technical, popular account of the most recent discoveries, many made by Dr. Beard himself, and theories concerning our origins and evolutionary development.

What we want to know is, who are these "dawn monkeys" and what have they it to do with us? Early on we are informed that "virtually all paleoanthropologists" believe that the lineage leading to humans developed in Africa between five and seven million years ago. It was in this two million year fuzzy time period, between the 7 and 5, that the animals that eventually became us split off from the common ancestor that we share with the chimpanzees. In other words J. Fred Muggs and Donald Trump had the same great, great, etc., for many more greats, grandparents (as do we all).

Beard is interested in pushing back the knowledge of our origins to even more remote time periods. If human primates diverged from apes, where did those apes come from? Have we found enough fossils to answer this question? Not only the "where" question but how long ago as well-- certainly the apes and their ancestors must have developed many millions of years before we and the chimpanzees separated and went our different ways.

A little time perspective is needed here. The dominance of the Age of Dinosaurs ended about 65 million years ago (mya) at the end of the geologic period called the Mesozoic. The period called the Cenozoic (Recent Life ) then began. This period is divided into seven divisions: the Paleocene, Eocene, Oligocene, Miocene, Pliocene, Pleistocene, and Holocene. The Eocene (dawn period) beginning about 55 mya and lasting until about 35 mya is where we are headed, incidentally, as the name of Beard’s book indicates.

There are around 35 species of living primates and the Eocene fossil primates mostly look like the "primitive" primates of today (the prosimians). But today we also have a group that, since it includes us, we like to call the "higher primates"-- these are the "anthropoids" and includes the monkeys, apes, and humans.

Now since we humans came from the apes, we have found that the apes came from the monkeys, so if we find the earliest monkey, that is if we find the earliest anthropoid we will push our family tree back to that point. Beard writes, "one of the most controversial issues in paleoanthropology today is how, when, and where the first anthropoids-- the common ancestors of monkeys, apes, and people-- evolved."

Beard has a "bold new hypothesis," based on recent fossil discoveries he has made in China, that will upset the hitherto existing scientific consensus regarding anthropoid origins. His theory moves the origin of the anthropoids from Africa to Asia and adds tens of millions of years to the age of this lineage. These new ideas all depend on the fossils Beard has called "the dawn monkey" (Eosimias) and how they are to be interpreted.

It appears that it won’t be an easy task that Beard has set himself since, as he says, for "the past several decades, all undisputed early anthropoids had been discovered in Africa" mostly due to the work of Dr. Elwyn Simons of Duke University working in the Fayum oasis in Egypt. So, a revolutionary new paradigm is afoot!

Beard says that his views are in the minority (this is because all new theories start out this way) but he gives three solid reasons to support his views. First, there is a small prosimian (pre-monkey like primate such as the lemur of today) known as a tarsier which seems to be closest in evolution to the first anthropoids. Beard thinks that their geological range points to an Asian origin for the first anthropoids. Based on the most recent DNA evidence he concludes that "the simplest hypothesis requires us to view tarsiers and anthropoids as descendants of a common ancestor." No tarsier or tarsier relatives "have ever been found in Africa. Second, there are fossils from Burma, found decades ago, which appear to be primitive anthropoids, and finally, Beard’s own discovery of Eosimias in China which he says is definitely a primitive anthropoid and is older than any African anthropoid discovery(except for one, as we shall see)..

The African anthropoids date from the next geological era, the Oligocene, while Eosimias dates from the Eocene era, many millions of years earlier. The dawn monkey’s remains show that it is intermediate between the prosimians of today and the modern monkeys. It is thus a real candidate as the ancestor of all modern anthropoids-- i.e., all living monkeys, apes, and humans.

After several chapters in which Beard discusses the ways in which primate fossils are classified and also their distribution in Asia, Europe, North America and Africa, he concludes that the African Oligocene anthropoid remains are too modern to represent the originating ancestors of modern anthropoids. Therefore we "have no choice but to plunge back into the mysterious void known as the Eocene." The void is "mysterious" because of the paucity of primate fossils in this era as compared with the Oligocene. Nevertheless, if the Oligocene remains are too advanced to represent transitional forms between the prosimians and the anthropoids, then it is to the Eocene that we must turn to look for such transitional forms. Here we should be mindful of a basic evolutionary rule, namely, "that similar features indicate descent from a common ancestor." This is a rule not a law but, except for examples of convergent and parallel evolution, it generally holds.

In two very interesting chapters ("Received Wisdom" and "The Birth of a Ghost Linage"), Beard discusses three of the most influential theories of anthropoid origins as well as more techniques used by paleontologists and paleoanthropologists in sorting out and classifying fossils. This is all very interesting and very nontechnical. A "ghost lineage" is a hypothetical set of fossils that should be intermediate between a "primitive" and an "advanced" form. This lineage gives us some idea of what we should expect to find in the deduction is correct. If we find such fossils-- very good-- it is evidence that our theory may be correct.

Beard claims that the tarsiers and the ur-anthropoids (ur= first) branched off from each other (that is from a common ancestor) at least 50 million years ago. So he needs to construct a ghost linage-- say from some early tarsier like creature to the Oligocene type monkeys and then see if he can find a fossil to verify the lineage. This is where Eosimias comes in.

It was in China that Beard and his associates and Chinese paleoanthropologists all working together came upon the fossil remains of a small marmoset sized primate with the distinctly hypostisized anthropoid characteristics they were on the lookout for. The remains predated the oldest African remains from the Fayum by at least 10 million years.

Beard waxes, I think, a little too poetically over this discovery:

“China’s historic role as the cradle of one of the world’s great and enduring civilizations might now be extended tens of millions of years back in time, to an interval when the earliest members of the most diverse and successful branch of modern primates-- the anthropoids-- were just beginning to evolve the diagnostic features (like bigger brains, robustly constructed jaws, and associated changes in behavior and ecology) that would ensure their biological success.”

In the world of the Eocene, when Africa, Europe, Asia, and India were separated from one another by water, the world of 50 million years ago, it doesn’t make much sense to talk of "China." Be that as it may, in today’s world, Chinese scientists can be proud of the essential role they played in this discovery-- which was actually made by Chinese members of the team.

Beard’s theory, however compelling, was not supported by a sufficient range of fossil evidence to convince the majority of scientists working in this field. Therefore, after its initial presentation, he and his collaborators and Chinese associates spent four years doing intensive field work in China. The result of this activity was the discovery of many new fossil primates, including anthropoids and different species of Eosimias. Now Beard had the evidence he needed to shore up his hypothesis of anthropoid origins.

"Our knowledge of Eosimias-- an animal that I had only recently ushered onto the scientific stage," he writes, "had improved rapidly and immensely. Eosimias had been introduced to the paleoanthropological community as a humble waif of a fossil whose claim to anthropoid status dangled by the thread of two scrappy jaws. Now, its place near the base of the great anthropoid branch of the primate family tree rested on a firm anatomical foundation.... No other fossil bearing on the very root of the anthropoid family tree can marshal such an extensive litany of anatomical features to support its pivotal evolutionary position."

This information, according to Beard, overthrows the heretofore established orthodoxy regarding the origin of the anthropoid line. The orthodox theory, based on the theories of Le Gros Clarke a generation ago, held that the anthropoid line (and the hominid line eventually arising out of it) arose in Africa some 34 million years ago at the Eocene/Oligocene border. The ancestral ape that gave rise to gorillas, chimpanzees and humans dates from the Miocene, the next geological age. Beard’s evidence, however, transplants the origin of anthropoids in both time and place: to the Paleocene/Eocene border around 55 million years ago-- 20 million years earlier than previously thought. Now that several species of Eosimias have subsequently been discovered, Beard can confidently assert that eosimiids  are "the most primitive anthropoids currently known."

Nevertheless, we should remember that while our ancestors originated in Asia, these "Asian anthropoids remained persistently primitive, while their African relatives evolved into increasingly advanced species" including us.

Now there is a fly in this ointment. Namely, the remains of an even older anthropoid than Eosimias have been found in Morocco. This is Altiatlasius koulchii from the Paleocene. How can Beard maintain that anthropoids originated in Asia if the oldest anthropoid remains ever discovered (Altiatlasius) are actually from Africa? The chapter "Into the African Melting Pot" deals with this problem. The short answer is that primitive anthropoids migrated from Asia to Africa earlier, by a factor of millions of years, than anyone had previously thought. Beard bases this on the fact that while Asia can show the development of the anthropoid line from the split with a common ancestor of the tarsiers, i.e., out of a tarsiod line, Africa not only doesn’t have any fossil tarsiers, it doesn’t have any primates at all antecedent to Altiatlasius. "Accordingly, Altiatlasius does not indicate that anthropoids originated in Africa. Rather, it signals that Asian anthropoids arrived there at a surprisingly early date."

Beard’s last chapter ("Paleoanthropology and Pithecophobia") reminds us that even though the anthropoids may have arisen first in Asia, our own branch of the anthropoid line has distinctly African origins. In this chapter the author recounts the history, basically in the early 20th Century, of trying to prove that humans evolved independently of the great apes, the early culmination if you will of the African anthropoids.

Because of DNA analysis the scientific consensus today is that humans and chimpanzees branched off from a common ancestor about seven million years ago. This would be just around the Miocene/Pliocene border-- the Pliocene would have begun about five or six mya and ended about 1mya with the start of the Pleistocene.

All of the early 20th Century programs to establish a non-ape ancestor for humans, Beard points out, were mostly motivated by racism, commitments to theories of eugenics, religious prejudices, and human arrogance. In a final coda Beard laments the fact that "pithecophobia" is still a force to be reckoned with. He suggests it may be behind the continuing human attitude of absolute superiority to and difference from all other animals. One of the negative attitudes resulting from this is that there are not enough serious attempts being made to prevent the extinction of gorillas and chimpanzees in the wild (their numbers had declined by 50% from 1980 to 2000  — mostly killed by humans for the "bushmeat" trade). This decline is accelerating due to climate change. It is estimated that by 2060 80% of the present populations (2021) will  be gone. I will quote Beard’s parting words: "Humanity as a whole is embedded within a rich biological tapestry. The living legacy of that common evolutionary journey deserves to be celebrated rather than despised. Pithecophobia in all of its manifestations conflicts with our own deep roots." The only salvation is to create the world Marx, Engels and Lenin told us was possible.

The Hunt for the Dawn Monkey: Unearthing the Origins of Monkeys, Apes, and Humans, Chris Beard, University of California Press, 2004.

Postscript: Beard’s book was published 17 years ago. Wikipedia 2021 says:”Most eosimiid species are documented by unique or fragmentary specimens. This, as well as the strong belief that simians originated in Africa has made it difficult for many to accept the idea that Asia played a role in early primate evolution. Although some continue to challenge the anthropoid resemblances found in Eosiimidae, extensive anatomical evidence collected over the past decade substantiates its anthropoid status.” Engels was right.

You might think the Ancient Egyptians too remote in time to be anything other than intellectual curiosities. Jan Assmann, the great German Egyptologist, thinks otherwise. Early on in his masterful reconstruction of the Egyptian mind set, he tells us that "ancient Egypt is an intellectual and spiritual world that is linked to our own by numerous strands of tradition." A brief review can only barely touch on the topics discussed in this book, but I will try to give some examples of Assmann’s conclusions with reference to our links to the Ancient Egyptians--they may be more extensive than you might think.

Take for example the ancient work "The Admonitions of Ipuwer" from the thirteenth century B.C., (around the time of Ramesses II,  c. 1303–1213 BC) which describes "the nobles" as "full of lament" and the "lowly full of joy." Bertolt Brecht was so impressed by this work that, Assmann says, "he worked part of it into the ‘Song of Chaos’ in his play ‘The Caucasian Chalk Circle.’" Ipuwer was lamenting the overthrow of established order by the lower classes-- so long has the specter of Communism been haunting the world (not just Europe) that Brecht could sense the presence of comrades over three thousand years ago! Brecht made a few slight changes, Assmann says, and the Egyptian sage’s lament became "a triumphal paean to the Revolution.

A useful Egyptian concept to know is that of "ma’at" which Assmann defines as "connective justice" which "holds for Egyptian civilization in general." Basically "connective justice" is the idea that all actions are interconnected with those of others such that it "is the principle that forms individuals into communities and that gives their actions meaning and direction by ensuring that good is rewarded and evil punished."

Assmann likens this concept to what he calls the "connection between memory and altruism." Looking at our own times, he says this Ancient Egyptian concept is manifested in the ideas of Karl Marx (and also in Nietzsche’s "Genealogy of Morals"). He quotes Marx who wrote that [Private] "Interest has no memory, for it thinks only of itself." This is a quote from issue 305 of the Rheinische Zeitung, Nov. 1, 1842 (not as cited by Assmann issue 298 Oct. 25, 1842).

The point being that the State should look to the collective good of all citizens and not be used to further private or individual interests. It must have "memory" directed toward the general good. This is also the point of ma‘at. The Egyptian Middle Kingdom work "Tale of the Eloquent Peasant" makes this point. This implies that we could find basically "Marxist" social values being discussed in Egypt!

As Assmann points out, "Ma‘at is the law liberating the weak from the oppression at the hands of the strong. The idea of liberation from the oppression caused by inequality is informed at least to a rudimentary extent by the idea of the equality of all human beings." It should be noted that the picture many have of ancient Egypt as a repressive slave state is the result of the Old Testament tradition. That tradition does not represent the actual state of affairs with respect to the functioning of the Egyptian state.

An examination of the literary remains of the Egyptians themselves shows an entirely different society than that portrayed in Biblical propaganda. "The Egyptian state," Assmann writes, " is the implementation of a legal order that precludes the natural supremacy of the strong and opens up prospects for the weak (the ‘widows’ and ‘orphans’) that otherwise would not exist.

Besides Biblical misrepresentations of Egyptian thought there were also the misunderstandings of the classical writers. For example, the Greek Diodorus, who left behind a description of the "Judgment of the Dead", presents the "facts" in contradiction to what we know is described in the Egyptian "Book of the Dead." In fact, Assmann avers that the Egyptian account is similar to the 25th Chapter of the "Gospel According to St. Matthew" where the reward of going to the "House of Osiris" is "replaced by the Kingdom of God." In fact, I think, many so-called Christian values and beliefs actually have their origin in Ancient Egyptian religious and ethical concepts.

We should remember that the first "monotheist," after all, was the Egyptian Pharaoh Akhenaten (r. cir. 1352-1338 B.C.) who stood "at the head of a lineage very different from his predecessors’, one represented after him by the Moses of legend, and later by Buddha, Jesus, and Mohammed," according to Assmann. As a truth seeker he also differs from the three aforementioned in that as "a thinker, Akhenaten stands at the head of a line of inquiry that was taken up seven hundred years later by the Milesian philosophers of nature [i.e., the Greeks] with their search for the one all-informing principle, and that ended with the universalist formulas of our own age as embodied in the physics of Einstein and Heisenberg." Assmann has a very high opinion of Akhenaten!

Unlike earlier Egyptologists who think the ideas of Akhenaten were repressed by his successors (due to their--Akhenaten's ideas that is-- "deism" rather than "theism" characteristics), Assmann maintains that they were "elaborated further and integrated into" the religious teachings of the age of Ramesses and his successors. From here they eventually influenced Plato, and, since Plato was the basis of the thought of Augustine, Christianity. However, Christianity ended up the mortal foe of the Egyptian religion and ultimately destroyed it and the culture that produced it.

Today we know more about the civilization of Ancient Egypt than has been known since its own time. We must come to grips with this new knowledge, and especially with the recovered literature of the Egyptians and "attempt" as Assmann says, "to enter into a dialogue with the newly readable messages of ancient Egyptian culture and thus to reestablish them as an integral part of our cultural memory." This ancient African civilization has more to offer us than the distortions of the Old Testament and Euro-Christianity (imposed on the Americas) present.

This review has only skimmed the surface of this important book. I hope it inspires people to read the book itself.

The Mind of Egypt: History and Meaning in the Time of the Pharaohs
by Jan Assmann (translated by Andrew Jenkins)
New York, Metropolitan Books, 2002.

​This book is one of a kind. Tatakis published it in French in 1949 and it had to wait well over fifty yers before an English edition appeared. The wait was worth it. This is the only book in English that covers the development of the history of philosophy and its intersection with Christianity during the entire course of the history of the eastern half of the Roman Empire from the fall of Rome and the western half of the Roman Empire (476 A.D.) to the fall of the eastern in 1453 A.D.


Americans and Western Europeans are familiar with our local history-- Rome falls, then the Middle Ages dominated by Latin Christianity (Catholicism), the Renaissance, Reformation, and modern times.


Our way of looking at politics and religion was born out of this sequence. Marxism, is in fact, the logical outgrowth of just this history. It is sometimes difficult to understand other types of Marxisms, i.e., I mean those that have developed in the non-Western European context. Think of “Marxism with Chinese characteristics” or “the Juche Principle.”


What we learn from Tatakis’ book is that a different Christianity (Eastern Orthodox) and a different philosophical development was taking place in the Greek speaking half of the Roman Empire surviving in the Mediterranean world throughout the entire period we in the West associate with our Middle Ages. The eastern world, dominated by Constantinople (the second Rome), retained its high level of civilization to the end. Its culture forms the background of Russia and other East European cultures.


If we want to understand Soviet Marxism we may have to look at it through the lenses of Byzantine philosophy rather than just assimilating it to the Western tradition. Even if this turns out not to be the case, this book is still a good read and opens up a world most of us have missed out on with our parochial education.


Tatakis seems not to have a secular outlook, but this rarely intrudes in his history. Early in the book we can see the coming fight between philosophy and religion (Christianity) – that is, between reason and faith. Two great schools of early Christianity were duking it out in the first couple of centuries of the Christian era – one in the great city of Alexandria, the other in Antioch. Alexandria stood for mysticism and a dogma “inaccessible to human reasoning” while Antioch stood for a non-mystical analysis of religious texts just as one “would scrutinize any human text, thus,” Tatakis says, “the reader falls into the trap of scientific rationalism.” Well, we certainly wouldn’t want that to happen! Antioch lost this fight – the eastern Romans remained mystical by and large. (Note: Byzantium was the name of the little town upon which Constantinople was built so the eastern Romans are called, by us, “Byzantines” – they called themselves “Romans”).


In the chapter on the sixth and seventh centuries we come across a bad attitude developing in Christianity that we can see is still with us. This is that “revelation” is better than our human type of “observational knowledge” and therefore “every advance in human thought” is viewed “as promoted by the devil.” Technology was OK (needed for warfare) but science as a way of explaining the world was neglected.


Nevertheless, there were some philosophers who tried to carry on the classical tradition of rational thought while being Christian at the same time (an impossible task). John Philoponos is especially important as his works on Aristotle, along with Aristotle, were translated into Syrian (and later into Arabic) and he was “an important agent in the formation of Syrian-Arabian philosophy.” We all know that the Arabs had a great and flowering civilization while we in the West were flea ridden barbarians – but they got it from (and added to it) the Greeks of the eastern Empire.


The next chapter covers the eighth, ninth and tenth centuries. A new attitude to government developed – called “Caesaropapism” – that is, the emperor, not the pope (or in this case the Patriarch) runs the show. This reversed a 300 year tradition initiated by the thinker Themistios who taught that “virtue and piety cannot be coerced”. He convinced the emperor Valens (r. 364-368) of this and Valens allowed “everyone the freedom of choosing whatever religion he liked.” The good old days.


Caesaropapism was eventually defeated by the Church. A work called “The Epanagogy” was adopted (ninth century) “which stated that the emperor, as the executor of the law, becomes the common bond for all the subjects and distributes rewards to all with perfect objectivity and according to their merits. In the Patriarch [of Constantinople], the image of the living Jesus [the Pope wouldn’t like this], being that he is committed in a profound sense to truth in acts and speech, resides the right of interpretation.”


In later times the Russians adopted this work and “it became the standard from which [they] regulated their political and ecclesiastical life.” Substitute “the party” for “the emperor” and “General Secretary” for “Patriarch” and “Marxism-Leninism” for “Jesus” and maybe we can see the cultural background upon which Soviet Marxism was built-- maybe.


Since the emperor and the Patriarch tell us all that we need to know and do (which self love should make us want to accept) this leads “to the responsibility of not allowing heretics to prevent one’s salvation.” The defenders of the faith are noted for “fanaticism and inflexibility.”


We should note that east Roman philosophers in the eighth century, by concentrating on the study of the classical Greeks and their culture, laid the foundations for what would become the Renaissance in Italy. There was always contact between the Latin West and Greek East and westerners were always coming to study at the great schools and universities in Constantinople. The East was always ahead of the West, however.


In the chapter on the eleventh and twelfth centuries we meet Michael Psellos (1018-1096) who wrote about the philosophy of Plato and became “the promoter of philosophical movement in Byzantium, an initiative that continued from the 11th through the 15th century and was disseminated by Plethon [c.1360-1450] and Bessarion [1403-1472] to the Italy of the Renaissance and then to the rest of Western Europe.” Tatakis ends this chapter by saying, “it is not enough to say that in the 11th and 12th centuries speculative thought in the Latin West runs on the same track as it did in Byzantium. We must acknowledge that in all of the essential points of this intellectual movement, Byzantium led the way.”


We will end this review with the chapter on the last three centuries with some comments about George Gemistos Plethon who came to live in Italy. Plethon was very advanced and definitely put philosophy in the first place ahead of religion. In “his most important work, The Laws,... [he says] philosophical thinking... reveals the naked truth to the spirit that has been liberated from dogmatism and compels the person, every person, to accept it ‘with one accord and with the same spirit.’ The position of the enlightenment philosophers would not be very different.”


We should feel some solidarity with Plethon even 550 years on as, Tatakis says, he believed “happiness emanates from the organization of the state” and in his memoirs, he “emerges... as the forerunner and anticipator of many socialist and other modern concepts.”

Does this sound like “From each according to his abilities to each according to his work”:
​
I mean his view that “the right to wealth is proportional to the services each person renders, a principle that secures social justice and elevates the value of labor.” A fundamental principle of Marxism re the lower stage (Socialism) of Communism.


I certainly hope we won’t have to wait another 550 years to see this come about!

BYZANTINE PHILOSOPHY
by Basil Tatakis
translated by Nicholas J. Moutafakis
Hackett Publishing Co., 2003. 424pp.

​In his book The Palestine Communist Party Musa Budeiri explores the history of the book’s namesake which attempted to unite the Palestinian and Jewish populations in Palestine into a united revolutionary front. Budeiri divides the party’s near 30-year history into three periods mainly based on changes in the party’s policy towards the specific situation in Palestine. Throughout its short history the Palestine Communist Party adopted many different positions regarding the specific situation in Palestine and their successes and failures reflect the difficulties of applying a Marxist analysis in a settler-colonial context.  

The party grew out of the “labor Zionist” movement of the early 20th century in the Jewish community of Palestine known as the Yishuv. Budeiri dates the party’s early period between its creation in 1919 and 1929. The first decade of activity was characterized by varying stances towards Zionism and attempts to work within Zionist labor groups which excluded Palestinian workers. This flirting with Zionism ended in 1924 when the party was expelled from the Histadrut (the Yishuv’s exclusively Jewish labor organization) and accepted by the Commintern as the official communist party of Palestine. With this, the party began to characterize Zionism as a pawn of British imperialism in Palestine and called for a joint Palestinian-Jewish proletarian struggle against their bourgeoisie. Despite this proclaimed internationalism, party membership was nearly entirely Jewish and had little presence among the majority the Palestinian population. Changing this would be a major focus of the party’s second phase between 1930 and 1942.

Under the influence of the Commintern, the party set out to attract more Arab members and become a truly territorial party reflective of the actual population in Palestine. This policy change entailed a greater focus on the Palestinian anticolonial struggle and establishing Palestinian leadership of the party. The party succeeded at this task in many ways becoming an important influence in the Palestinian labor movement and playing a supporting role in the Arab Revolt between 1936 and 1939. However, this stance caused a rift between Palestinian and Jewish communists on the role of the Yishuv which would only widen in World War II. The failure to resolve this question led to the party’s split in 1942 which created separate Palestinian and Jewish communist parties. These parties would continue until 1948 and the nakba which effectively ended any cross-community communist party. 

There are many lessons to be drawn from the experience of the PCP, but I think the most important is regarding its answer to the question of settler-colonialism and the role of the Yishuv in Palestine. The party correctly recognized the policy of the British government to provoke religious and ethnic conflict to prevent united resistance to their colonization. With this, the party initially sought to promote unity between Palestinian and Jewish workers with appeals to overthrow their respective bourgeoisie. Even after the party placed its support firmly behind the Palestinian national struggle, it never came to a final resolution to the Yishuv’s presence in Palestine and many within the party hoped to continue working within it. This strategy, while appealing to Marxist sensibilities of proletarian solidarity, failed to account for the imperial and settler-colonial situation in Palestine. The party failed to recognize the extent of support for Zionism within the Yishuv and its ability to draw thousands of settlers to Palestine. On the other hand, as far as the Palestinain population was concerned the ever-growing Yishuv itself was as foreign entity and an ally of British imperialism. Thus, its constant growth, exclusionary economic policies and constant demand for land represented a threat to Palestinian society. So, while the party’s attempts to peel the Yishuv away from Zionism landed on infertile ground, its appeals to proletarian solidarity failed to resonate among an agrarian Palestinian population resisting colonization which it saw represented in the expanding Yishuv.     
​
In this book, Musa Budeiri ably explains the considerable successes of the Palestine Communist party as a joint Palestinian-Jewish party, it also explores the root causes of their ultimate failure. That was the party’s inability to provide a satisfactory answer to the question of settler-colonialism and truly reconcile the interests of Jewish settlers with indigenous Palestinians. In this book we can see the importance for any communis party in a settler-colonial to provide a solution to these issues and find ways to foster the revolutionary national aspirations of colonized people. 

​Wm. Theodore de Bary (1919-2017) was one the deans of Asian Studies in the United States. Operating out of Columbia University he had edited and overseen the publication of the ubiquitous series of readers Sources of The Indian, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean Traditions.  Sources of the Vietnamese Tradition was produced by others after his death’

In his book, Nobility & Civility: Asian Ideals of Leadership and the Common Good, published by Harvard, 2004, de Bary examines many Asian cultures to see what they may have to offer to the "humanizing" of the march towards globalization. "Nobility" refers to "leadership", "Civility" to "public morality."

By studying the foundational cultural values of the Asian peoples (de Bary primarily discusses China and Japan with a nod to India) he hopes to show the possibility of a civilizational synthesis of western and eastern thought with respect to the future development of globalization. Without knowledge as to how the people of the past have dealt with the political consequences of their value systems "it will be difficult," he writes, "to see how anyone could be expected to recognize and cope with similar problems in the present." Without the humanizing values found in the Asian tradition, especially in Confucianism, becoming a part of the world’s educational background, globalization may become [I would say it already is] "degrading, dehumanizing, and destructive of the earth, beyond anything seen in the past." [The current Chinese promotion of Confucianism is thus part of the socialist humanism that will, hopefully, be the future basis of global culture.]  

He discusses Confucius’ conception of the "noble person" in the first chapter. Of course one cannot mechanically apply the Confucianism of ancient China, developed in a feudal society, to the modern world dominated by monopoly capitalism. Nevertheless, Confucianism is still a living force in Asia. What is still relevant, regardless of economic system, is the Confucian belief that the duty of government is to serve the people and should be consensual.

The rulers have, according to Confucians "responsibilities towards the disadvantaged and uneducated.... noblesse oblige as it would be called in the West." De Bary quotes from a Confucian work from the 4th or 3rd century B.C. (Chronicle of Mr. Zuo) which talks about a ruler driven out by his people (a revolutionary act indeed) and concludes "if he exhausts the people’s livelihood... and betrays the hopes of the populace... what use is he? What can one do but expel him?" 

This is a fundamental Confucian value and is certainly applicable today, think of Trump in exile at Mar-A-Lago. I don’t think, however, that it is congruent with the fundamental values of the globalization process which is driven by the principle that the welfare of the people is always secondary to the need for profit and the financial supremacy of corporations.

Confucianism might be used to try and mitigate the ravages of capitalism by well meaning (but ineffective) idealists, but more than likely it would be used to cover up and mask the social reality of exploitation and human enslavement, much as Christianity is used by the Republican Party and conservative Christians in the United States.

This is not, of course, the fault of Confucianism. It is in its homeland China where it has the best chance to succeed. The basic values of socialism are not at odds with the Confucian ideal.

It should be noted that after initial hostility to Confucianism (more to how it was abused by the ruling classes than to its philosophical content), the Chinese party now has a more positive relationship with Confucians. Under Deng Xiaoping and Jiang Zemin [and now Xi Jinping] de Bary noted that some in the leadership have been led to reevaluate the role of tradition (especially after the excesses of the "Cultural Revolution" under Mao) and he concludes that "it is understandable that the regime might favor a more civil tradition like Confucianism to provide the Chinese content for a Chinese socialism. Thus it has sanctioned a Confucian Association to promote scholarly discussion of the subject and traditional observances of rituals like the celebration of Confucius’ birthday."

Besides Confucianism in China, de Bary also traces the history of the Japanese reception of Confucianism. This is an interesting history and shows how the original pro-people content of this philosophy was corrupted by the ruling classes to justify their privileges and power. There are also chapters on the influence of Buddhism in both China and Japan.

In an epilogue de Bary points out that in a time when people are talking about a "clash of civilizations" and the incompatibility of other cultures with their own it is important that students be educated in the classics of other civilizations. "We owe it to ourselves," he writes, "to make another, more determined effort to understand how the... resources available within these traditions afford the means for a meaningful discourse to take place on each other’s terms."

One of the most important themes that de Bary thinks should be discussed is the Asian view of the status of the person. He attacks the chauvinist view that the value of the individual "is a peculiarly Western or Judeo-Christian idea and that people who do not recognize it cannot be expected to respect human rights."

De Bary maintains that the Asian cultural tradition has always been aware of the importance of the individual and his or her self-cultivation. He quotes the Japanese Confucianist, Nakamura Masanao (1832-1890) who said "As far as individual morality is concerned, regardless of past and present, East or West, the main principle is the one thing of self governance.... This is the central concern of the independent self and is the source and principle of freedom." If we link this with the duty of the government to provide the conditions that best promote the principle of freedom we will find that Confucianism has a natural ally in Marxism in combating the inhumane practices of the movement towards globalization.

This is an important book and should be read by anyone interested in Asian culture.

Nobility and Civility: Asian Ideals of Leadership and the Common Good by Wm. Theodore de Bary, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2004, 256pp.

In his introduction to The Dialectics of Art, John Molyneux presciently notes: ‘the even more rapidly changing material world of economics, politics and nature, means that my reflections at the end of the book on the present situation of art and its immediate prospects may already be out of date by the time they are published’ (xv). Like the rest of us, the author was unaware at that point that the greatest calamity of most of our lifetimes was around the corner. The Covid lockdowns of the past two years have provided unwanted reminders of the value of art for human beings. For long swathes of time, we have been deprived of the opportunity to visit galleries, concert halls, cinemas and other venues of cultural production. The consequent impoverishment of our daily existence has felt palpable to millions.

At the same time, however, many have found much needed psychological comfort in the face of the pandemic from the greater access to culture provided by the internet and smartphones. The whole panoply of Western art, literature and music is available at our fingertips in a way previous generations could never have dreamed of. This is a suitable conjuncture, therefore, for a Marxist re-examination of both the function of art and culture in capitalist society and how it might play a role in the transition to socialism. Even though The Dialectics of Art was written before the pandemic, Molyneux still provides valuable contributions to a discussion of Marxist aesthetics in the era of what may turn out to be even greater capitalist catastrophes. The suggestions he makes regarding the status of art are not always convincing, but his explications of individual artists such as Rubens, Picasso and Pollock are as insightful as anything else available on the left. Most of the analysis here is focused on painting but a lot of Molyneux’s theoretical reflections are equally applicable to a wider definition of art that might include architecture, film, music and other mediums.

Molyneux is a refreshingly clear and fluent writer who thankfully avoids a lot of the over-academic and obscure terminology that bedevils the output of other Marxist theoreticians on art such as Adorno or Horkheimer. This book is written with less emphasis on resolving theoretical disputes in the seminar room and more on the role culture can play in activating and articulating political struggle. The author frequently refers to the scale of the crisis that capitalism is inflicting on us and the urgency of the task of constructing a more sane social order: ‘Until that is achieved, art will take its place in the quest and fight for human freedom, if not on the front line – which will be occupied by the masses in struggle in the workplaces, the streets and on the barricades – then as an important ally and essential supplier of spiritual nourishment, as necessary, in its own way, as boots and medicine’ (238).

Over the last year or so, we have witnessed powerful examples of Molyneux’s point that art is often integral to battles between the elite and the masses. The graffiti portrait of George Floyd painted on a Minneapolis wall became the visual detonator of the global Black Lives Matter movement. The latter also sparked a febrile debate about the relevance of statues of historical figures in our towns and cities, one of the most familiar and previously unquestioned forms of art in our daily lives. For a reader unacquainted with how historical materialism approaches questions of art, Molyneux’s book makes an accessible and lively overview.

There are, however, some anomalous features to the book. One is the curiously conservative nature of subjects covered. The author wears his revolutionary heart on his sleeve so it is odd he is so traditional in his choice of subjects. Most of the artists discussed are shibboleths of the establishment canon; that is to say, largely Western, white men such as Michelangelo, Rubens, Picasso and Pollock. It seems incongruous that in this era of globalised capitalism, a Marxist account of art would sideline the importance of Chinese, African or Latin American contributions. Molyneux does acknowledge this limitation but it does slightly undermine the implied claim of the title to provide an all-encompassing perspective. There is one chapter on a Palestinian photographer, Yasser Alwan, but its inclusion unfortunately creates an impression of tokenism. There is also some inconsistency in the length of some sections. Artists such as Michelangelo and Picasso are favoured with substantive analyses that are worthy of their subjects. Other figures such as Warhol and Francis Bacon, however, barely receive a few pages, which can leave the reader frustrated that intriguing lines of thought are set up but then not fully explored.

The most contentious section of The Dialectics of Art is the opening chapter on the foundational question of ‘What is Art?’ Molyneux proposes a definition that this form of human activity is best comprehended as a form of unalienated labour: ‘As the bulk of production, especially the manufacture of goods, becomes subsumed under wage labour and the rule of capital, so humanity, or rather some humans and overwhelmingly humans from a relatively privileged class position, carve out a sphere of production-art-not performed by alienated labour’ (20). One of the problems with this position is it removes art from the totality of the relations of capitalist production. Molyneux argues that the greatest artists, such as those discussed in the book, possess a degree of creative energy that enables them to somehow resist the compelling power of alienation that frames the existence of virtually all other forms of human labour. This falls back on a conservative notion that an ineffable and transhistorical form of genius is what marks out the creations of the likes of Raphael, Rembrandt and Cezanne. Perhaps it would be more in line with materialist principles to argue great art offers inspired glimpses of what an unalienated existence would look and feel like in a classless society.

The best chapters of Molyneux’s book are the ones where he provides incisive analyses of how earlier waves of class struggle and political turbulence have affected the art of some of the masters of the Western canon. His discussions of how biography, socio-historical context and technical innovations have overlapped in specific cases to produce visual masterpieces are exemplary in terms of Marxist art criticism. Molyneux makes good use of Trotsky’s neglected writings on aesthetics to develop stimulating overviews of iconic figures such as Michelangelo, Rembrandt and Hirst, which do not resort to crass and deterministic correlations between art and politics.

The author’s methodology of artistic evaluation is explicitly guided by the great Russian revolutionary’s finely tuned balancing of individual brilliance and sociological relevance. This is the dialectical interplay of forces implied in the book’s title. Molyneux cites Trotsky’s words on the crucial importance of avoiding readings of paintings that reduce them to mere expressions of class ideology: ‘Art, like science, not only does not seek orders, but by its very essence, cannot tolerate them. Artistic creation has its own laws – even when it consciously serves a social movement. Truly intellectual creation is incompatible with lies, hypocrisy and the spirit of conformity. Art can become a strong ally of revolution only in so far as it remains faithful to itself’ (30).

Molyneux situates Michelangelo, for example, at the turn of sixteenth century when the disparate republics of the Italian peninsula were stumbling towards a cohesive nation-state that would have accelerated the emergence of Europe’s first capitalist state. Powerful and recalcitrant opposition in the forms of the Vatican and the Medici dynasty, however, stalled Italy’s path towards modernity and left the country economically and politically marooned between feudalism and capitalism. The revolutionary humanism on display in Michelangelo’s defining works such as the statues of David and Moses and the Sistine Chapel sublimely express the ultimately thwarted emancipatory impulse that characterised the Cinquecento: ‘Michelangelo expressed, more than any other artist, the hope and the dream of the Renaissance and the despair and misery of the betrayal and rushing of that dream’ (95).

Much of Michelangelo’s art and sculpture, of course, was created in the service of the reactionary forces of the era such as bankers and popes. Other creations, however, were commissioned by progressive currents such as the Florentine republic. The artist found himself being pulled in different directions at different times by competing historical forces. Molyneux usefully highlights how only a Marxist methodology that is alert to the ebb and flow of class struggle can explain this apparent inconsistency in the artistic output of an individual.

Molyneux likewise seeks to make a case for one of the most controversial living British artists being a conduit for the vicissitudes of social and political development. Tracy Emin’s standout artefacts such as ‘My Bed’ and ‘Everyone I Ever Slept With’ have brought her adulation and notoriety in equal measure. Although Emin has not associated herself with a revolutionary current in the same way Michelangelo did at times in his life, Molyneux wants to defend her status as an artist of historical significance: ‘the experiences represented in Emin’s art are not just personal experiences but are common to a wide layer of young women growing up in this time, in this society. […] By making these experiences into art (which is different from just exposing or confessing them), Emin actually engages in a process of democratic sharing with her audience’ (156). Molyneux’s defence of Emin, originally written in 2005, resonates more credibly now with the emergence of fourth-wave feminism and the MeToo movement. A reason to be more sceptical regarding Emin’s status among the greats, perhaps, would be the question of durability. Michelangelo has clearly stood the test of time but will human beings still be discussing Emin in 500 years?

Molyneux rather apologetically adds a coda to this chapter, noting: ‘Tracy Emin’s political response to her success, wealth and celebrity led her to become a Tory’ (189). This unfortunate development does not, in itself, of course vitiate the author’s central claim that art represents unalienated labour – but it certainly makes it harder to sustain. Despite these inconsistencies in terms of argumentation and structure, The Dialectics of Art is a worthy application of Trotsky’s conviction that cultural enrichment ‘will still be needed when Marx’s Capital has been reduced to the status of a mere historical document’ (218).

​18 August 2021

​"I have always heard that a gentleman helps the needy; he does not make the rich richer still."-- Confucius

Daniel A. Bell and Hahm Chaibong have edited a book called Confucianism for the Modern World (Cambridge, 2003). In their introduction the editors discuss the contemporary relevance of the Confucian tradition (the purpose of the book). The question is – is Confucianism a dead tradition or is it meaningful for the contemporary world?

There are five questions which they say must be addressed. I don’t think they are formulated quite rightly so I shall amend them slightly. The first is what Confucian values "should be promoted in contemporary East Asian societies?" This I think is too narrow. The "modern world" encompasses more than just East Asia. I would maintain that Confucianism has useful traditions that societies other than the traditional Asian ones can benefit from studying and applying.

The second question is, "How should this be promoted?" The third is, "What are the political and institutional implications of ‘Confucian humanism’?" Confucian "humanism" can be summed up by saying that for a good Confucian the slogan "People Before Profits," that we on the left are very familiar with, would not sound out of place.

The fourth question is "How do the practical implications of modern Confucianism differ from the values and workings of liberal capitalist societies?" The editors have added "modern" as a modifier for good reason. The values of traditional Confucianism can, I think, be brought into line with those of socialist or communist humanism but they can only be adapted to the values of capitalism, liberal or otherwise, by doing violence to their core ethical commitments. I think this question also reveals one of the purposes of the book is to try and use a warped and mutated "Confucianism" as an apologetic for East Asian capitalism.

The last question deals with the adoption of Confucianism to this project (conformity to liberal capitalism) and if it can "be justified from a moral point of view." I don’t think that it can be, but I think the editors of this book think that it can. Here are two examples.

One of the contributors, Gilbert Rozman, argues that Confucianism can be adapted to support "decentralization," "regionalism" and "localism." But to what purpose? Some of his examples suggest that the purpose is to further the interests of corporate globalization and not Confucian "humanism".

For example, his reading of modern "Confucianism" might convince China to respect "Taiwan’s right to autonomy." He also suggests that it is a good counter- balance to "Anglo-Saxon liberalism" [Rozman’s term for monopoly capitalism] on the one hand, and "Soviet-launched socialism" on the other. The former represents "individualism," the latter "statism." He maintains East Asia has a third system – some type of "familyism." Actually, with the exception of China, Vietnam, the DPRK and Laos [statist in Rozman’s terminology], East Asia is firmly in the control of monopoly capitalism. Rozman thinks attempts to counter "U.S. influence endanger the gains achieved through trans-Pacific economic and security ties," The WTO is cited as a "gain." He forgot the IMF and the World Bank. This is, to my mind, merely using Confucianism as a cover for the trans-national imperialist exploitation of Asian peoples under the guise of "humanism" and decentralization.

Daniel Bell, one of the editors, in his contribution, explicitly states that he assumes "some form of capitalism is here to stay for the foreseeable future and any realistic defense of economic arrangements in East Asia needs to take this fact into account."

Since I am not interested in using Confucian philosophy in order to make a "defense of economic arrangements in East Asia" but rather to see what the logical implications of its humanistic values are, I cannot agree with Professor Bell’s use of Confucianism.

I agree with him that the material welfare of the people is one of, if not the main duty of the state according to Confucianism, but disagree completely when he says, "There is no doubt that Confucians would... oppose Soviet-style planned economies." I say this because the reason he gives for saying that, "Absolute private property rights" might be justified if they provided for "the basic means of subsistence." This argument from instrumental grounds also applies to a planned economy.

In fact, I think Confucian humanism is completely compatible with a Marxist interpretation and totally incompatible with the theoretical and practical functioning of capitalism with the possible exception of some capitalist inspired market reforms guided by a desire to strengthen a socialist state.

​The Cuban Revolution has faced immense hardship since the mid-twentieth century, with the imperialist forces of the United States and its allies constantly attacking and trying to undermine the efforts of building socialism in Cuba. This hardship has only been magnified as the crisis of Covid-19 still looms over our heads, with the difficulties of maintaining public health against a pandemic only exacerbating the shortages and similar issues created by the imperialist crusade against revolutionary Cuba. In true fashion to the capitalist establishment, solidifying his statement that “nothing will fundamentally change,” US President Joe Biden has acted in opportunistic fashion, co-opting and warping the narrative surrounding recent protests on the island as a means of trying to expand western hegemony through an illegitimate color revolution.

The Biden Administration, in contrast to claims made during Biden’s 2020 election campaign that he would reverse some of Trump’s anti-Cuba policies, has placed another selection of sanctions on the socialist country. All the while, at least based on a post on Twitter, Biden claimed to stand with the Cuban people while enacting policy that actively harms them. This contradiction highlights one of the biggest mistakes of those who support such sanctions, amplifying claims of Cuba being a dystopian nightmare as a result of socialism, while completely ignoring the proper context as to why exactly Cuba has faced such difficulty since the beginning of the revolution into the modern day. In revisiting the book Cuba for Beginners by Mexican cartoonist and intellectual Rius, this work proves to have maintained relevancy in regards to Cuba’s development and struggle against colonialist and imperialist aggressors.

As is the standard of the For Beginners series, Cuba for Beginners is presented in an easily digestible format, with simple yet effective language that displays a clear and concise timeline of the history of Cuba. Presented essentially in the style of a comic book or graphic novel, the illustrations and other visuals present in this book serve to keep a reader engaged in the reading, with these visuals being utilized primarily to further explain a concept or event. This simple presentation style ultimately works in the favor of the communist cause, allowing for those unfamiliar with Cuba’s history or caught up in the reactionary propaganda of the imperialist powers that tell constant lies about Socialist Cuba and socialism itself.

Rius spends the early portions of the book explaining how the hands of Spanish colonialism ravaged the island for a great deal of time, that is until the United States began to take a strategic interest in helping liberate Cuba from the Spanish (that interest consisting mainly of sugar, tobacco, and the like). The import of African slaves by the conquistadors, colonialist and imperialist powers fighting over control of Cuba (particularly Spain, Britain, and the US), and the systematic slaughtering of indigenous Cubans being only about a third of pre-socialist Cuban history examined in this book before covering the rise of Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, the 26th of July Movement, and other aspects of the militant struggle against western imperialism and colonialism. The contributions of Cuban hero José Martí are also briefly discussed in this work.

Discussing the struggle against the various US puppet governments installed in Cuba, particularly the exploits of one Fulgencio Batista, and the aftermath of overthrowing the Batista regime allows for a wider perspective in understanding the conditions that Cuba continues to work through to this day. For instance, Rius touches upon the fact that for much of Cuba’s existence, the means of production had remained in the hands of colonial powers and/or assets of such powers. With the expelling of the Yankees and their lackeys, the liberating of Cuba in all forms from the grip of imperialist control, there were blows dealt to the structure of Cuban industry and the economy.
Between page 80 and page 92 of the second edition of Cuba for Beginners, Rius introduces three of the major factors leading to the initial struggle of the Cuban economy; the agrarian reforms, the urban reforms, and the amount of those in connection to western powers that fled the island. A fourth major factor in consideration is the combination of the Cuban Missile Crisis with John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev, and the Kennedy administration’s enacting of the total blockade of Cuba. The ultimate effect of these four factors is then touched upon from page 128 to 132, particularly in regards to industry and production within Cuba. To quote the text;

“The American technicians left… and in the process took along the few Cuban technicians… The factories were without money, formulas and management… the United States quit sending raw materials and prohibited other countries from supplying them to Cuba. And this happened to all the factories the Yankees had there.”

At least in the early stages of the Cuban Revolution, the majority of industry that was at one point controlled by western powers had wound up, for a limited time, completely abandoned, with production effectively halted. Of course a great deal of the Cuban people stepped up to re-engage in factory production, displaying the power of a collective, united people dedicated to the developing of socialism and strengthening Cuba.

The second edition of this book, however, was published all the way back in 1971. One of the issues of this book that does need to be addressed and put into proper context is the fact that at least in some aspects, Cuba for Beginners is noticeably dated. This is particularly highlighted in Rius’s explanation regarding the industrial situation in the early stages of Cuban socialism. Many of Cuba’s most important trading partners came from the Soviet Bloc and adjacent countries. From the Soviet Union to the German Democratic Republic, Cuba relied on importing the fruits of heavy industry from Eastern Europe. Rius claimed that due to such connections, Cuba had no need to undergo a mass industrialization campaign, which in the context of when this book was published indeed makes sense due to Cuba’s utilizing of its rich natural and mineral resources along with the development of light industry. Historically, however, the reliance on heavy industry from the Soviet sphere proved to have disastrous results. This is by no means the fault of the Cuban government, at least not in a major way. The illegal dissolution of one of the biggest trading partners for any government would result in hardship, especially when Cuba in particular has simultaneously been bombarded with sanctions in addition to other attacks on the island’s economy.

Despite some of the more dated aspects of Cuba for Beginners, the book overall gives the reader a greater context to the issues that have been facing modern Cuba by explaining both the difficulties and positive advancements of the political, economic, and cultural structures of building socialism in Cuba on the ashes of western colonialism, not to mention the task of constructing socialism surrounded by the yoke of imperialism. Keeping the historical contexts of Cuban development in mind, along with the time at which this book was published, Cuba for Beginners by Rius allows for those unacquainted with the history of Cuba to (hopefully) garner a stronger understanding of both the historical and modern conditions of socialist Cuba. Strengthening the general understanding of Cuba’s history and advancement outside of the bourgeois sphere is vital in combating the imperialist narratives designed to demonize, destabilize, and manufacture consent for a continued offensive against Cuba.

​In this rather unusual volume edited by Robert Nichols, we find his translations of Bensaïd’s 2007 title essay, as well as new translations of Marx’s five 1842 Die Rheinische Zeitung articles on wood theft, from which Bensaïd draws. Nichols also provides a substantial introduction in which he calls this collection an ‘experiment’ representing ‘a deliberately asynchronic juxtaposition.’ Nichols’ thesis is that the pieces by Bensaïd and Marx each perform an analogous function for their respective temporal and spatial contexts. In an important sense, although his introduction takes up less than a third of the volume, this text belongs more to Nichols than to Bensaïd or Marx. Specifically, he reads the two principle parts of the collection through a conceptual lens which he regards as crucial for understanding our own time, which he calls the ‘crisis of kleptocracy’ (viii). In addition to providing his own commentary on these texts, Nichols provides a helpful, though brief, overview of Bensaïd’s life and works emphasizing both the connection of theory to practice as well as Bensaïd’s evolution over time.

Nichols observes that Bensaïd’s essay arrives on the cusp of the great recession and should be understood as contributing to a cluster of analyses that attempt to conceptualize the events which proceed it, as well as corporate and state responses to it, including trillions of dollars of public funds spent to bail out private banks. Nichols notes that the transfer of public resources to private hands was theorized in a number of related ways, including the ‘primitive accumulation of capital,’ ‘enclosures of the commons,’ or David Harvey’s ‘privatization’ and/or ‘accumulation by dispossession’. As Nichols describes it, ‘each of these frameworks expresses a desire to find a theoretical vocabulary appropriate for naming the enduring (albeit uneven and punctuated) logics of capital accumulation via the coercive seizure of public goods and assets, as distinct from accumulation via the regularized exploitation of waged labor’ (x).

Considering the pairing of texts by Bensaïd and Marx, Nichols reflects on the former’s late interest in Walter Benjamin, particularly the latter’s rejection of linear history. Bensaïd emphasizes the revolutionary dimension of Benjamin’s messianic thinking. History is at every moment open to interruption, to the arrival of a revolutionary event. Nichols’ collection partakes deeply of this Benjaminian sensibility, perhaps even more than he indicates in his introductory essay. For Benjamin, by rearranging historical narratives, unseen possibilities and hidden truths can emerge. Nichols hopes that this volume does more than ‘retrieve’ the writings of Bensaïd and Marx for our time, but instead helps set the stage for contemporary interventions.

In his essay, Bensaïd returns to Marx’s wood theft articles in order to explore both contemporary and possible future dispossessions. What comes to be called wood theft emerges from a period of rural poverty where items such as berries, material necessary for the production of brushes, brooms, fishing rods, material for home repair, basket weaving and food for livestock, i.e. the objects ‘without which life itself could not be secured’, become contested. In this context, the Prussian state intervenes to resolve the conflict between rights of property and customary rights (9).

Bensaïd notes that Marx’s critique is in part aimed at the ontology of private property employed by parliament, whose only unifying concept is what serves the interest of the property owner. Hybrid or uncertain property is abolished to the detriment of the rights of the poor and their access to the common property offered by nature.

On Bensaïd’s reading, Marx’s approach is that of internal criticism, in which he uses the logic of property against the expansion of ownership rights. If an owner claims property rights over trees because they grow on his land or over timber which is transformed by labor, a consistent application of these principles would grant rights to the poor to gather fallen branches. If even this is theft, Marx writes, ‘[b]y regarding all attacks on property as instances of theft without distinction or further determination, would not all private property be theft?’ (11). Marx is here attracted to Proudhon’s What is Property? and will remain so up through the writing of The Holy Family.

Marx also criticizes parliament’s empowering private property owners to enforce and punish wood theft. These punishments included fines paid directly to the owners as well as forced labor. Bensaïd points out that for Marx, this represents public functions being taken over by the private sphere. Marx writes, ‘[t]he wood possesses the remarkable character such that as soon as it is stolen it secures for its owner state qualities it did not previously possess. […] The wood thief has robbed the forest owner of wood, but the forest owner has used the wood thief to steal the state itself’ (25).

Bensaïd interestingly connects these articles to other of Marx’s writings. The loss of traditional rights of the poor, excluding them from all property, Bensaïd states, resembles Marx’s famous formulation in ‘Introduction to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right’ where he first introduces the proletariat, ‘a class with radical chains, a class of bourgeois civil society that is not a class of bourgeois civil society, an estate the dissolution of which would be the dissolution of all social estates’ (14). Though unmentioned by Bensaïd, Marx does not connect this early notion of the proletariat to commodity production and the particularities of profit making under capital, which will serve to distinguish the categories of the poor and the proletariat later on. Importantly, we see in both Marx and Bensaïd that two concepts require attention in this context: ‘dispossession’ and ‘the dispossessed’. As Nichols points out, though Bensaïd’s essay bears the latter title, his focus is on dispossession. We will return to the former concept shortly.

In mapping the history of dispossession both historically and conceptually, Bensaïd pays close attention both to Proudhon and Marx’s criticisms of him in The Poverty of Philosophy, where he derides Proudhon’s notion of fair exchange and fair wage as ahistorical, abstract and moralistic. Marx’s analysis of the commodity form found in Capital is key. As Bensaïd puts it, social relations are not between individual and individual but ‘between worker and capitalist, farmer and landowner, and so on’ (34).

Bensaïd then moves into the twenty-first century with discussions of the privatization of knowledge, the privatization of life (the interpretation of gene sequences) and the possible privatization of everything needed for life and the existence of society. He writes, ‘[i]n this period of market globalization and widespread privatization of the world, Marx’s articles on the theft of wood are of troubling relevance.’ Privatization pushes into all domains of life. Bensaïd refers to education, information, laws, money, knowledge and violence – ‘in short, public space as a whole’ (37). Throughout this discussion, Bensaïd repeatedly matches Marx’s wit and insight. Consider: ‘could one go so far as to patent mathematical equations and subject them to property rights? The socialization of intellectual work begins with the practice of language, which is obviously a common good of humanity that cannot be appropriated’ (43). Reflecting on the operative logic of our times, Bensaïd writes further: ‘If computer science is a language, and if its innovations are patentable, can neologisms of everyday language become so? Concepts? Theories? To what unprecedented neuroses could this compulsion for intellectual property lead?’ (45).

These contemporary ‘enclosures’ are, for Bensaïd, direct obstacles to human growth and wellbeing or, in other words, they are contradictions of capital. Furthermore, he states the ‘ecological crisis has put back on the agenda the idea of inappropriable common goods of humanity’ (47). Water, he notes, is an obvious example with various international bodies declaring water to be a human right.

Returning now to the question of those who are dispossessed, Bensaïd briefly brings forward what amount to questions of the revolutionary or collective political subject. He states that ‘we are witnessing new forms of resistance of the dispossessed – those “without” (without documents, homes, shelter, employment, or rights) – in the name of the defense of public services, in the name of the energy and food sovereignty of countries subject to imperialist looting, in the name of common goods (e.g., water, land, air, life) coveted by cannibalistic companies or pharmaceutical firms on the lookout for new patentable molecules’ (48). Bensaïd’s linking of the category of ‘the poor’ with Marx’s conceptualization of ‘the proletariat’ noted earlier highlights this issue. Importantly, two different categories are operative here, though Bensaïd does not distinguish them in this essay. The dispossessed or those who are ‘without’ is clearly a different category than laborers subject to exploitation through the wage relation. Nichols reads Bensaid’s essay as highlighting the political importance of the former category, claiming that Bensaid’s ‘energy and acumen drive us forward into a future in which the struggle will increasingly be led by “dispossessed”’ (xxii). This is clearly different from the struggle being led by those who are subject to exploitation at the point of production. Nichols argues for the importance of dispossession as a distinctive category of capitalist violence, not reducible to exploitation, nor simply a necessary condition of exploitation. He asks, ‘[w]hen your body is not even wanted as a tool of exploitation, what leverage do you have over the machinery of power?’ The answer is yet to be determined. The concluding sentence of Bensaïd’s essay fittingly points at both elements of capitalist violence, first to exploitation, then to dispossession: ‘Our lives are worth more than their profits: “Rise up, dispossessed of the world!”’ (57).

Bensaïd’s essay, as contextualized in this volume by Nichols, successfully pushes, especially those of a Marxist orientation, to make the idea of dispossession more central to their theoretical and practical work. With regard to Die Rheinische Zeitung articles contained in the volume, they are worth reading or rereading. Marx’s biting analogies and critical, sarcastic style as found throughout his works is in full display here. For example, he writes, ‘[w]e are only surprised that the forest owner is not allowed to heat his stove with the wood thieves’ (94). Finally, Nichols’ translation is a slightly modernized, slightly more readable version of the English translation by Clemens Palme Dutt, though much of the translation is identical.

23 July 2021

The work of Guy Debord has often been associated in the English-speaking world with the ubiquity of some vague menace called “the spectacle,” which amounts to little more than an impenetrable mass of images that paper over the reality of social antagonism. A few recent studies have begun to remedy such misunderstandings of Debord’s central concept by restoring the complexity of its engagement with the Hegelian Marxist philosophical tradition. Spectacular Logic in Hegel and Debord both contributes to this restoration and offers some revisions of the studies that preceded it. But in doing so, it provides far more than a mere analysis of Hegel’s influence on Debord. Having situated Debord’s thought among a range of dialectical thinkers, Russell ultimately shows how Debord’s engagement with Hegel evinces the continuing use of the concept of “appearance” for understanding, as Russell puts it, the “phenomenality of a world that cannot be seen otherwise” (4).

At the heart of Russell’s study is the form of appearances in societies organized by political economy. What Russell means by “appearance,” as his subtitle suggests, is the way in which the world seems to subjects in a broad sense that includes the sort of conceptual immediacy associated with the term “ideology.” In Hegel’s Science of Logic, appearance more specifically denotes how the object reveals itself; there, in a complex dynamic that Russell lays out with refreshing clarity, mere illusion, Schein, unfolds into the more complex Erscheinung, the appearance whose necessity compels the phenomenal world to bear its own truth: as per Hegel’s famous phrase, which Adorno compared to the great climaxes of Beethoven’s symphonies, “essence must appear!”. The category of appearance thus spans the historically determinate meanings of “phenomenology” that each reflect in various ways on how the world ‘reveals itself’ to consciousness. But for Russell, “appearance” is more specifically the concept that renders possible Hegel’s speculative philosophy. The central gambit of Russell’s study hinges on precisely such elective affinities between “the speculative,” as a direct relation between appearance and essence, and “the spectacle,” as a historical manifestation of that relation.

This realm of appearances was likewise the starting point of Marx’s critique of political economy. In Capital, Marx begins this critique not with labor, circulation, the working day, Feudalism, or any of the other possible starting points, but rather with the commodity, the sensible and ubiquitous manifestation of the mode of production whose logic it soon reveals. As for Debord, that the first sentence of The Society of the Spectacle should play on the opening sentence of Capital indexes from the outset the intent to update this analysis of the commodity for his own time: “The whole life of those societies in which modern conditions of production prevail presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles” (Debord, 1995; 12). Not only does the replacement of “commodities” with “spectacles” denote a generalized commodification, but it also encapsulates Debord’s project of updating those forms of appearance that, for Marx, offer a profound view onto the dynamics of capital (if only to give way to other views as Capital progresses). The shift of emphasis from commodity to spectacle does not entail the effacement of the commodity form as a central analytic concept, but rather the commodity’s emerging tendency toward the visual. As the highest form of commodification, the “image” is one of the obvious-seeming manifestations of the spectacle in the age of ubiquitous advertising, celebrity, mind-numbing TV, and so on, but it more importantly indexes a certain encroachment of the commodity form upon the sensory apparatus. While the image is thus an important site for understanding the mutations in the commodity form, the spectacle is not identical with “images,” and its tendency toward visuality in the 20th-century ultimately “refers back to the riddle of the money-fetish” (104).

As a condensed expression of the historical transformation in the capitalist mode of appearance witnessed by Debord, this first sentence of Debord’s Society of the Spectacle also serves as a prime example of the Situationist logic (adopted from the Lettrists) of détournement—the estrangement of old content or an imposition of a new context that makes the old material suddenly give off a flash of relevance. But perhaps another détournement from Society of the Spectacle serves as a better entry into Russell’s erudite study, this time a reworking of Hegel: “In a world that really has been turned on its head, truth is a moment of falsehood” (14). The first chapter of Russell’s book is devoted to working through the development of the Hegelian aphorism from which this sentence is derived: “the true is the whole.” Taken up by Adorno, this aphorism revealed that social totality could only be comprehended at the expense of the very particulars of which it is composed, admitting of a profound reversal: “the whole is the untrue.” Russell draws clear parallels between Debord’s own engagement with this problematic and that of Adorno’s, especially insofar as both take heed of the form of appearances under late capitalism as the true expression of a corrupt world. For Russell, this is the only way to make sense of the concept of spectacle: the spectacle is not the illusion that obscures the way a society really functions; rather, it is that functioning itself. Spectacle is not an obfuscation of class struggle but one of its many facets.

Returning to Hegel’s terminology, Russell argues that many misreadings of Debord ignore this rational kernel in the mystical shell of spectacle and could be remedied by recognizing that the spectacle is not so much caught in the illusory dualism of Schein—illusion and reality, misrecognition and truth—as it is an expression of the internal necessity of Erscheinungen described above. The moments of this paradoxical identity of essence and appearance in the spectacle follow so closely those articulated in Hegel’s Logic that, for Russell, the spectacle can be considered the latter’s manifestation in reality (in much the same way that Adorno considered the culture industry a realization of the most fanciful formulations of German Idealism, industrializing the function of conceptual schematization that Kant had reserved for the individual). As Russell makes clear, this is because the concept of spectacle is not so much concerned with appearances per se as their unity or organisation in a given social formation, aligning the spectacle with the dialectical reversals in use- and exchange-value detailed by Marx. Though Russell ultimately argues that the spectacle should be considered the manifestation of Hegel’s subjective logic, such assertions in large part sidestep the usual thorny disputes as to Hegel’s relationship to the critique of capitalism, insofar as the spectacle names not capitalism in particular but a “critical theory of society” that is better understood alongside the Frankfurt School than the so-called postmodern theorists like Baudrillard. Such disputes return, however, when the contemporary spectacle is considered the self-moving and internally differentiating force that Marx called the “automatic subject” of capital and that bears such a striking formal similarity to the self-movement of Hegel’s world spirit (making it no surprise that Hegel, too, was familiar with Adam Smith’s “invisible hand of the market”).

Another such problem addressed in Russell’s book is that of “separation,” inherited by Debord from Lukács and the early Marx. Like in the studies of Tom Bunyard and Anselm Jappe on which Russell builds, Spectacular Logic gives detailed accounts of the process by which subjects are unable to recognize the products of their labor as their own when the objective social world becomes “separated” from those who have created it, acquiring the status of an inalterable “second nature.” Russell adequately traces this tradition and its problems, revising at times its treatment in recent scholarship—in particular what Russell considers Jappe’s over-emphasis on the value-form and Bunyard’s opposition of Hegel’s speculative philosophy to the real logic of spectacle. Though taking into account the influence of French Hegelians like Hyppolite and Lefebvre, Russell focuses more directly on Debord’s engagement with the German tradition from Hegel to Lukács. But it is only when Russell returns to his sustained reading of Hegel’s subjective logic and of the “Force and Understanding” section from the Phenomenology that this work most starkly stands out from its predecessors’. It is best not to spoil any of Russell’s thorough and idiosyncratic reading of Hegel’s speculative philosophy, except to point out that Spectacular Logic, as Étienne Balibar writes in the book’s foreword, “might very well become one of the best critical introductions to the reading of the Subjective Logic” (xviii).

From the book’s opening, Russell admits that he will somewhat narrowly focus on the logic of appearances in capitalist society, leaving untouched a great deal of material at the margins of this already massive scholarly undertaking. Nonetheless, since Debord’s artistic works constitute in their own right a profound meditation on the social organisation of appearances, one might have expected Russell to extend his own insights into a consideration of Debord’s artistic practice. Despite his limited output, Debord primarily considered himself a filmmaker, even as he made one of the first, but certainly not the last, proclamations of cinema’s end—not to mention the possibility for art to transcend itself in the construction of a new reality (and as for media more generally, Debord could not have more clearly stated that “the media” constitute only the most immediate and particular example of a mode of appearance that extends far beyond them).

Many of the strengths of Russell’s book, however, stem from this decision to bracket such topics within Debord’s thought. Such bracketing allows him to provide much more than a corrective to the reception of Debord in the Anglophone academy, however needed one may still be. Russell goes far beyond such correctives by providing a strong statement about why, to play on a sentence from Oscar Wilde that serves as the book’s epigraph, it is only shallow critics who do not judge by appearances.