​Marcello Musto’s The Last Years of Karl Marx: An Intellectual Biography provides an illuminating glance at the work and life of Karl Marx during the most unexamined period of his life. Musto’s oscillation between Marx’s work and life provides readers with both an intellectual allurement towards research in Marx’s later years, a task facilitated by the 1998 resumed publication of the Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe (MEGA2) (which has sense published 27 new volumes and expects to conclude with 114), and with a warm image of Marx’s intimate life sure to guarantee both laughs and tears.
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The last few years of Marx’s life were emotionally, physically, and intellectually painful. In this time he had to endure his daughter Eleanor’s extreme depression (she would commit suicide in 1898); the death of his wife Jenny, whose face he said “reawakens the greatest and sweetest memories of [his] life”; the death of his beloved first born daughter, Jenny Caroline (Jennychen); and a lung disease which would keep him sporadically, but for substantial periods, away from his work (96, 98, 122). These conditions, among other interruptions natural to a man of his stature in the international workers movement, made it impossible for him to finish any of his projects, including primarily volumes II and III of Capital, and his third German edition of Capital volume I.

The time he spent with his grandchildren and the small victories the socialist struggle was able to achieve (e.g., the more than 300k votes the German Social Democrats received in 1881 for the new parliament) would give him and Jenny occasional moments of joy (98). A facet of his latter life that might seem surprising was the immense enjoyment he took in mathematics. As Paul Lafargue commented regarding the time when Marx had to endure his wife’s deteriorating health, “the only way in which he could shake off the oppression caused by her sufferings was to plunge into mathematics” (97). What started as a “detour [to] algebra” for the purpose of fixing errors he noticed in the seven notebooks we now know as the Grundrisse, his study of mathematics ended up being a major source of “moral consolation” and what “he took refuge in [during] the most distressing moments of his eventful life” (33, 97).

Regardless of his unconcealed frailty, he left a plethora of rigorous research and notes on subjects as broad as political struggles across Europe, the US, India, and Russia; economics; mathematical fields like differential calculus and algebra; anthropology; history; scientific studies like geology, minerology, and agrarian chemistry; and more. Against the defamation of certain ‘radicals’ in bourgeois academia who lift themselves up by sinking a self-conjured caricature of a ‘Eurocentric’, ‘colonialism sympathizing’, ‘reductive’, and ‘economically deterministic’ Marx, Musto’s study of the late Marx shows that “he was anything but Eurocentric, economistic, or fixated only on class conflict” (4).

Musto’s text also covers the 1972 Lawrence Krader publication of The Ethnological Notebooks of Karl Marx, containing his notebooks on Lewis Henry Morgan’s Ancient Society, John Budd Phear’s The Aryan Village, Henry Sumner Maine’s Lectures on the Early History of Institutions, and John Lubbock’s The Origin of Civilisation. Out of these by far the most important was Morgan’s text, which would transform Marx’s views on the family from being the “social unit of the old tribal system” to being the “germ not only of slavery but also serfdom” (27). Morgan’s text would also strengthen the view on the state Marx had since his 1843 Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, namely, that the state is a historical (not natural) “power subjugating society, a force preventing the full emancipation of the individual” (31). The state’s nature, as Marx and Engels thought and Morgan confirmed, is “parasitic and transitory” (Ibid.). The studies of Morgan’s Ancient Society and other leading anthropologist would also be taken up by Engels who, pulling from some of Marx’s notes, would publish in 1884 The Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State, a seminal text in the classical Marxist corpus.

More unknown in Marxist scholarship are his notebooks on the Russian anthropologist Maksim Kovalevsky’s (one of his close “scientific friends”) book Communal Landownership: The Causes, Course and Consequences of its Decline. Its unstudied character is due to the fact that it had, until almost a decade ago, been only available to those who could access the B140 file of Marx’s work in the International Institute of Social History in the Netherlands. This changed with the Spanish publication in Bolivia of Karl Marx: Escritos sobre la Comunidad Ancestral (Writings on the Ancestral Community) which contained Marx’s “Cuadernos Kovalevsky” (Kovalevsky Notebooks). Although appreciative of his studies of Pre-Columbian America (Aztec and Inca empires) and India, Marx was critical of Kovalevsky’s projections of European categories to these regions, and “reproach[ed] him for homogenizing two distinct phenomena” (20). As Musto notes, “Marx was highly skeptical about the transfer of interpretive categories between completely different historical and geographical contexts” (Ibid.).

The study of Marx’s political writings has usually been limited to the 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852), the “Critique of the Gotha Program” (1875), and The Civil War in France (1871). Musto’s book, in its limited space, goes beyond these customary texts and highlights the importance of Marx’s role in the socialist movements in Germany, France, and Russia. This includes, for instance, his involvement in the French 1880 Electoral Programme of the Socialist Workers and the Workers’ Questionnaire. The program included the involvement of workers themselves, which led Marx to exclaim that this was “the first real workers’ movement in France” (46). The 101-point questionnaire contained questions about the conditions of employment and payment of workers and was aimed at providing a mass survey of the conditions of the French working class.

Concerning Marx’s political writings, Musto’s text also includes Marx’s critiques of the prominent American economist Henry George; his condemnations of the Sinophobic Dennis Kearney, the leader of the Workingmen’s Party of California; his condemnations of British colonialism in India and Ireland and his praise of Irish nationalist Charles Parnell. In each case, Musto stresses the importance Marx laid on the concrete study of the unique conditions pertaining to each struggle. There was no universal formula to be applied in all places and at all times. However, out of all of his political engagements, the most important of his involvements would be in Russia, where his considerations on the revolutionary potential of the rural communes (obshchina) would have a tremendous influence on their socialist movement.

​In 1869 Marx began to learn Russian “in order to study the changes taking place in the tsarist empire” (12). All throughout the 1870s he dedicated himself to studying the agrarian conditions in Russia. As Engels jokingly tells him in an 1876 letter after Marx recommended him to take down Eugene Dühring, 
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​Out of his studies, he held the Russian socialist philosopher Nikolai Chernyshevsky[i] in highest esteem. He said he was “familiar with a major part of his writing” and considered his work as “excellent” (50). Marx even considered “’publishing something’ about Chernyshevsky’s ‘life and personality, so as to create some interest in him in the West’” (Ibid.). Concerning Chernyshevsky’s work, what influenced Marx the most was his assessment that “in some parts of the world, economic development could bypass the capitalist mode of production and the terrible social consequences it had had for the working class in Western Europe” (Ibid.).
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Chernyshevsky held that
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​For Chernyshevsky, the development of a ‘backwards’ nation did not need to pass through all the “intermediate stages” required for the advanced nation; instead, he argued “acceleration takes place thanks to the contact that the backward nation has with the advanced nation” (51). History for him was “like a grandmother, terribly fond of its smallest grandchildren. To latecomers it [gave] not the bones but the marrow” (53).
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Chernyshevsky’s assessment began to open Marx to the possibility that under certain conditions,  capitalism’s universalization was not necessary for a socialist society. This was an amendment, not a radical break (as certain third world Marxists and transmodernity theorists like Enrique Dussel have argued) with the traditional Marxist interpretation of the necessary role capitalism plays in creating, through its immanent contradictions, the conditions for the possibility of socialism.

In 1877 Marx wrote an unsent letter to the Russian paper Patriotic Notes replying to an article entitled “Karl Marx Before the Tribunal of Mr. Zhukovsky” written by Nikolai Mikhailovsky, a literary critic of the liberal wing of the Russian populists. In his article Mikhailovsky argued that 
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​This was not, however, a comment from left field, most Russian Marxists at the time also thought the Marxist position was that a period of capitalism was necessary for socialism to be possible in Russia. Further, Marx had also polemicized in the appendix to the first German edition of Capital against Alexander Herzen, a proponent of the view that “Russian people [were] naturally predisposed to communism” (61). His unsent letter, nonetheless, criticizes Mikhailovsky for “transforming [his] historical sketch of the genesis of capitalism in Western Europe into a historico-philosophical theory of the general course fatally imposed on all peoples, whatever the historical circumstances in which they find themselves” (64).
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It is in this context that the famous 1881 letter from the Russian revolutionary Vera Zasulich must be read. In this letter she asks him the “life or death question” upon which his answer the “personal fate of [Russian] revolutionary socialists depended” (53). The question centered around whether the Russian obshchina is “capable of developing in a socialist direction” (Ibid.). On the one hand, a faction of the populists argued that the obshchina was capable of “gradually organizing its production and distribution on a collectivist basis,” and that hence, socialists “must devote all [their] strength to the liberation and development of the commune” (54). On the other hand, Zasulich mentions that those who considered themselves Marx’s “disciples par excellence” held the view that “the commune is destined to perish,” that capitalism must take root in Russia for socialism to become a possibility (54).

Marx drew up four draft replies to Zasulich, three long ones and the final short one he would send out. In his reply he repeated the sentiment he had expressed in his unpublished reply of Mikhailovsky’s article, namely, that he had “expressly restricted… the historical inevitability’ of the passage from feudalism to capitalism to ‘the countries of Western Europe’” (65). If capitalism took root in Russia, “it would not be because of some historical predestination” (66). It was then, he argued, completely possible for Russia – through the obshchina – to avoid the fate history afforded Western Europe. If the obshchina, through Russia’s link to the world market – “appropriate[d] the positive results of [the capitalist] mode of production, it is thus in a position to develop and transform the still archaic form of its rural commune, instead of destroying it” (67).

In essence, if the internal and external contradictions of the obshchina could be sublated through its incorporation of the advanced productive forces that had already developed in Western European capitalism, then the obshchina could develop a socialism grounded on its appropriation of productive forces in a manner not antagonistic to its communistic social relations. Marx would then, in the spirit of Chernyshevsky, side with Zasulich on the revolutionary potential of the obshchina and argue for the possibility of Russia not only skipping stages but incorporating the productive fruits of Western European capitalism while rejecting its evils. This sentiment is repeated in his and Engels’ preface to the second Russian edition of the Manifesto of the Communist Party, which would be published on its own in the Russian populist magazine People’s Will.

​Musto’s text also provides an exceptional picture of the largely unexamined 72 days Marx spent in Algiers, “the only time in his life that he spent outside of Europe” (104). This trip came at the recommendation of his doctor, who was constantly moving him around in search of climates more favorable to his health condition. Eleanor recalled that Marx warmed up to the idea of the trip because he thought the favorable climate could create the conditions to restore his health and finish Capital. She said that “if he had been more egoistic, he would have simply allowed things to take their course. But for him one thing stood above all else: devotion to the cause” (103).
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The Algerian weather was not as expected, and his condition would not improve to a shape where he could return to his work. Nonetheless, the letters from his time in Algiers provide interesting comments about the social relations he experienced. For instance, in a letter to Engels he mentions the haughtiness with which the “European colonist dwells among the ‘lesser breeds,’ either as a settler or simply on business, he generally regards himself as even more inviolable than handsome William I” (109). After having experienced “a group of Arabs playing cards, ‘some of them dressed pretentiously, even richly” and others poorly, he commented in a letter to his daughter Laura that “for a ‘true Muslim’… such accidents, good or bad luck, do not distinguish Mahomet’s children,” the general atmosphere between the Muslims was of “absolute equality in their social intercourse” (108-9).

Marx also commented on the brutalities of the French authorities and on certain Arab customs, including in a letter to Laura an amusing story about a philosopher and a fisherman which “greatly appealed to his practical side” (110). His letters from Algiers add to the plethora of other evidence against the thesis, stemming from pseudo-radical western bourgeois academia, that Marx was a sympathizer of European colonialism.

Shortly after his return from his trip Marx’s health continued to deteriorate. The combination of his bed-ridden state and Jennychen’s death made his last weeks agonizing. The melancholic character of this time is captured in the last writing Marx ever did, a letter to Dr. Williamson saying “I find some relief in a grim headache. Physical pain is the only ‘stunner’ of mental pain” (123). A couple months after writing this, on March 14th, 1883, Marx would pass away. Recounting the distress of the experience of finding his life-long friend and comrade dead, Engels wrote in a letter to Friedrich Sorge an Epicurean dictum Marx often repeated – “death is not a misfortune for the one that dies but for the one that survives” (124). 

In sum, it would be impossible to do justice, in such limited space, to such a magnificent work of Marxist scholarship. However, I hope I have been able to clarify some of the reasons why Musto is right to lay such seminal importance on this last, often overlooked, period of Marx’s life and work. 

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Terry Eagleton’s Literary Theory – An Introduction, in the author’s own words “sets out to provide a reasonable comprehensive account of modern literary theory for those with little or no previous knowledge of the topic.” The stated purpose of Eagleton’s book is to provide introduction to beginner readers. Having read it, alongside a host of other books intended for similar purposes, gives me some hint as to how successful this book has been in comparison to others of its kind.

​Eagleton’s book provides a critical overview of literary theory, while problematizing the very process of categorisation of literature itself and identifying the games of power and their legitimising ideologies involved in the process. He goes on to suggest the role of power structures involved in the rise of English literature in great detail, without glossing over the complex contradictions of political economy. Subsequently, he introduces his readers to some tenets and live debates within and about the fields of semiotics, psychoanalysis, deconstruction and among other things. His most contentious and controversial remarks come in the section ‘Conclusion: Political Criticism’. Here, Eagleton provocatively claims that just as ‘literature’ is not a definable entity, so ‘literary criticism’ is hardly a concrete discipline in itself. He appeals to us to revive some aspects of the archaic study of ‘rhetoric’, which he deems to be broad enough to accommodate cultural practises along with their political and economic context into the grunt of analysis. He clarifies that this call is not reactionary or revivalist, but historically grounded and dialectical. This section also involves some contributions to a critique of bourgeois academic institutions in general, and literary and cultural studies departments in particular (Eagleton, Literary Theory - An Introduction, 2005).

In his review of Eagleton’s book, Philip Corrigan states that Eagleton’s selection of works to criticise the defined canon, ignores a dearth of working-class literature whose existence Eagleton alludes to, only in passing. Perhaps, a detailed overview of those working-class works and the studies about them, would not have changed the core structure of Eagleton’s thought. However, they would certainly elevate the study and assert the presence of a dialog that those works will exist in (Corrigan, 1986).

Jonathon Culler applauds the book’s proficiency and scope, and then sets about on a reactionary polemic about the author’s Marxist predilections (Culler, 1984). Both William E Cain and Priscilla P Clark, in their separate reviews, mention that Eagleton often deserts in-depth understanding and engagement, by resorting to high-headed snobbery and gross oversimplification. For instance, as Cain points out, in Eagleton’s attempt to portray the elitism of academic institutions as embodied by Leavis, he makes no mention of essays such as “Education and University – A Sketch for an English School” where the latter’s nuances can be appreciated. Whereas Eagleton mentions Foucault’s influence on his analysis, he hardly elaborates the claim to any considerable length (Cain, 1986).

Clark makes the point that, throughout the book, the author provides no insight into the Marxist and feminist schools of criticism, to which he claims allegiance in his conclusion. The beginner reader is therefore left overwhelmed by Eagleton’s call to cancel literary theory in favour of ‘political criticism’, and by the author’s half-baked suggestions about what that might even mean. Unlike his earlier works Marxism and Literary Criticism and Criticism and Ideology, his overview of ‘political criticism’ is limited to the recognition of Marxist and feminist schools of literary criticism and nodding at the fact that working-class literature is growing somewhere (Clark, 1984).

In the light of Clark’s review, I could add that Eagleton himself had certain things to say about Marxist literary criticism elsewhere, that clarify that a blanket call for ‘political criticism’ of literature without also adding certain specific features to that criticism, would be to completely miss the point of Marxist criticism and to bastardise it (Eagleton, Marxism and Literary Criticism, 2006). To quote Eagleton from his earlier work:

“The sociology of literature concerns itself chiefly with what might be called the means of literary production, distribution and exchange in a particular society—how book? are published, the social composition of their authors and audiences, levels of literacy, the social determinants of ‘taste’. It also examines literary texts for their ‘sociological’ relevance, raiding literary works to abstract from them themes of interest to the social historian. There has been some excellent work in this field and it forms one aspect of Marxist criticism as a whole; but taken by itself it is neither particularly Marxist nor particularly critical. It is, indeed, for the most part a suitably tamed, degutted version of Marxist criticism, appropriate for Western consumption.” (Eagleton, Marxism and Literary Criticism, 2006)
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In this, I resonate with the old Eagleton of specificity and precision, as opposed to the new Eagleton of high-headedness.

One of the crucial point Eagleton makes, that escapes the succinct attention of the critical reviewers, is his plain and straightforward critique of the bourgeois academia. He is talking in the context of the departments of literary studies. But as he himself asks his readers to extend the boundaries of theory from literature to other things including global political economy, so can his critique be extended to all sections of the academic institutions that exist within the capitalist economic system. In this regard, Eagleton does not replace nuance with whooping generalisations.

Literature departments in higher education, contends Eagleton, embody immensely complex and contradictory structures of thought. So, even if academia is an ideological state apparatus, it is not a reliable one - since the practise of critical research and study that happens in these institutions will posit the tendency to question some of the concealed ideological claims that the academia legitimises. True to the inherent hypocrisy of liberal democracy, these academic institutions do not try to crudely indoctrinate their participants into the mythology of the market. Rather, they imbibe it into the people by subtly safeguarding the discourse, allowing the study of tiny bits of every school, but conflating over those theoretical apparatuses that are capable of truly challenging the system’s very existence.

Eagleton recognises that liberal humanism goes best with these academic institutions as they exist today. He writes, “The truth is that liberal humanism is at once largely ineffectual, and the best ideology of the 'human' that present bourgeois society can muster.” This is because this ideology does the best job at reconciling the potential radicalism that may arise in the academia from critical studies, with the parasitical nature of the academia as it exists within capitalism. This plays an important role in deriving legitimacy for capitalism. We can see this manifest in the flowery CSR organisations and NGOs that university students waste their time working with, to satisfy the questions and guilt that might arise in their minds after some exposure to critical studies.
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Eventually of course, as Eagleton posits, the academia will certify its students not based on what their political inclinations are, but how well the articulate the language of the academia’s ideology. He writes, “Those employed to teach you this form of discourse will remember whether or not you were able to speak it proficiently long after they have forgotten what you said.”

​Terry Eagleton’s Literary Theory – An Introduction is anything but an introduction to literary theory. Perhaps to understand the basics of literary theory, one could refer to a host of other selections. Eagleton’s book is an important, albeit imperfect, reflection on literature, literary theory, and the power structures concealed underneath the snobbish academic discussions about the same. It must certainly be given a read by Marxists interested in the subject.

​Bibliography
Cain, W. E. (1986). Review: Literary Theory: An Introduction by Terry Eagleton. Comparative Literature , 362-366.

Clark, P. P. (1984). Review: Literary Theory An Introduction by Terry Eagleton. Contemporary Sociology , 452.

Corrigan, P. (1986). Book Review: Literary Theory: An Introduction, by Terry Eagleton. Insurgent Sociologist , 75-77.

Culler, J. (1984). Review: Literary Thoery An Introduction by Terry Eagleton. Poetics Today , 149-156.

Eagleton, T. (2005). Literary Theory - An Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.

​Eagleton, T. (2006). Marxism and Literary Criticism. London: Routledge.

Friedrich Engels’ Dialectics of Nature has been arguably the most polemic ‘book’ within the corpus of classical Marxist literature.  It is fair to say that since its initial 1925[1] publication in German and Russian, one can infer a ‘Marxists’ political orientation based on their assessment of Engels’ text. However, the centrality of the ‘text’ in the debate between the artificial bifurcation of ‘soviet’ versus ‘western’ Marxism has been detrimental to a critical reading of the text and its intentions; “dismissive attacks, rather than seasoned arguments, shaped much of the polemical character of this literature” (203).[2] Against this backdrop of readings from pro and anti-Engels Marxists, Kaan Kangal’s Friedrich Engels and the Dialectics of Nature serves as a “prolegomenon for reading Engels anew” (7).
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The ”Engels debate,” as Kangal coins it, has for one of its central questions the relationship of Engels to Karl Marx (17). The anti-Engels crowd, disenchanted by their homogentisic interpretations of the Marxisms that arose in former socialist states (specifically the USSR), hold that “the primary suspect in contaminating Marx’s theory” is Engels (11). Against this ‘Engelsian’ distortion, these theorists postulate that the ‘rational kernel’ of an authentic Marx can be recaptured if only Engels and the Engelsites (those who agree with Lenin on the “full conformity” of Engels and Marx) could be cast aside (13). To borrow from Husserlian phenomenology, if only Marx could be ‘bracketed’ out of Engelsian contamination, then the residuum of this phenomenological reduction would allow us to know the ‘real Marx.’[3]

V.I. Lenin states that “only ‘a sworn enemy of Marxism’ can use philosophical views to open ‘a direct campaign against Engels’” (Ibid). Further, Teodor I. Oiserman argues that “no true scholarship but a hidden anti-communism is behind those who come up with charges against Engels and separate him from Marx” (Ibid). Critics like Herbert Marcuse, Tom Rockmore, Terrell Carver, Leszek Kolawoski, Alfred Schmidt, Frederic Bender, Norman Levine, and others who purport the Engels ‘betrayal’ thesis have the burden of proof on their side, they are the ones that “need to demonstrate convincingly, [in the face of overwhelming textual evidence for the contrary], that Engels’ ‘going beyond’ and ‘following’ were not encouraged, supported and enabled by Marx” (15).[4] If unable to do this, there is little reason to believe, like Lenin and Oiserman, that they are anything more than a political version of little red riding hood’s false grandmother – an anti-communist wolf wrapped in Marxist clothing.

As Kangal’s research shows, the critics have been unable to provide anything close to substantial proof to back their preposterous declarations. In the case of Carver and Levine, their argumentative poverty reaches the level of speculating on the psychological reasons why Marx and Engels maintained their relationship. This amounts to little more than the anti-communist projection of their evidence-less hypothesis onto the psychology of Marx. As Kangal amusingly states, “pretending to have a privileged access to author’s subconsciousness from an Archimedean point of view is not a very modest way to make a point” (34).

Considering that Marx and Engels collaborated on more than 100 texts; that regarding Engels’ positions in philosophy and natural science Marx told him “I invariably follow in your footsteps;” and that Marx praised, promoted, and wrote a chapter for Engels’ Anti-Dühring (a text whose first part on philosophy greatly overlaps with Engels’ positions on dialectics in Dialectics of Nature), the Leninist collaborationist perspective is virtually indubitable from the standpoint of any honest assessment of the available textual evidence (16, 30-31). Carver, Levine, and the other Marx-Engels bifurcators must admit that “all the problems [they] associated with Engels may be found within Marx and Marxism rather than between Marx and Engels” (19).

In addition to demolishing the ‘Engels contamination’ thesis of the contextual Engels debate, Kangal also provides a genealogy of the debate itself, and shows that the “controversy over natural dialectics is much older than the posthumous publication of Dialectics of Nature or even the publication of Anti- Dühring in 1878-1879” (198).

​For most Marxist scholars, the ‘break’ between ‘western’ and ‘soviet’ Marxism (and hence, the beginning of the ‘Engels debate’) occurs first in Georg Lukács’ famous sixth footnote of the first chapter in his 1923 History and Class Consciousness. Here, Lukács states that “Engels – following Hegel’s mistaken lead – extended the [dialectical] method also to knowledge of nature” (43). Instead, argued Lukács, the dialectical method should be limited to “historical-social reality” (ibid).
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What those who bank on this footnote forget, or are unaware of, is that Lukács comes to reject his own position to the point of “[launching] a campaign to prevent the reprints of his 1923 book” (55). Lukács had argued that his book was ‘outdated,’ ‘misleading,’ and ‘dangerous’ because “it was written in a ‘transition [period] from objective idealism to dialectical materialism’” (ibid). Additionally, he was quite explicit in arguing that “’[his] struggle against… the concept of dialectics in nature’ was one of the ‘central mistakes of [his] book’” (56). Further, in the posthumously published A Defense of History and Class Consciousness: Tailism and the Dialectic, Lukács says that “the dialectic could not possibly be effective as an objective principle of development of society, if it were not already effective as a principle of development of nature before society” (Ibid).

Lukács’ rectification should also show that he was the one that was following G. W. F. Hegel’s lead, for Hegel held that “organic nature has no history” (162). Therefore, “contra Hegel and Lukács, Engels is on the right track because he advances the view that nature has a history, and that it is a self-grounded totality,” i.e., that “dialectics applies to nature” (201-2).

Notwithstanding, Kangal argues that “the novelty of Lukács’ claim is overrated” (44). Before, during, and after the lives of Marx and Engels, debates concerning dialectics in general, and dialectics in nature in particular, had already been taking place in socialist theoretical circles across Europe. Instead of the orthodox origin story of the debate in Lukács’ footnote, Kangal “offer[s] an alternative history of the origin” of the debate which “goes back to the critical readings of Hegel among his pupils, most notably Adolf Trendelenburg and Eduard von Hartmann” (44). 

​After situating the origin of the Engels debate in the Hegel debate of the early 1840s with Trendelenburg, and the late 1860s with Hartmann, Kangal shows how this debate was rekindled during Marx and Engels’ lives in their debates with Eugen von Dühring and their friend Friedrich Albert Lange. Concerning the former, Engels “jokingly complained” to Marx while writing Anti-Dühring that
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​Marx appreciatively noted in a letter exchange with Wilhelm Liebknecht the “great sacrifice” Engels made, “[postponing] an incomparably more important work [i.e., Dialectics of Nature],” to provide a comprehensive criticism of Dühring (31).
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Concerning their friend Lange, he argued in 1865 that the “Hegelian system [was] a step backward towards scholasticism,” and that Hegel’s views on mathematics and natural science were a substantial “weak spot” (47). In the same year Engels sent him a letter defending “the titanic old fellow” and argued that Hegel’s “true philosophy of nature is to be found in the second part of the ‘Logic,’ in the theory of essence, the authentic core of the whole doctrine” (ibid). To this he added that the “modern scientific doctrine of reciprocity of natural forces [was] just another expression or rather the positive proof of the Hegelian development on cause & effect, reciprocity, force, etc.” (ibid). Kangal notes that Lange’s latter work shows he took “Engels’ comments on Hegel seriously,” to the point of having developed in the posthumously published Logical Studies a “dialectical theory of probability” (48).

In addition to the debates during the lifetime of Marx and Engels, Kangal also covers the debates that took place in the interlude between Engels’ death and the Russian 1917 revolution. For instance, he presents the arguments of the Russian Khaim Zhitlovskii (1896), who was the first to attempt a divide between Marx and Engels on the subject of natural dialectics; the arguments from the German revisionist Edward Bernstein (1921), who argued that “the great things which Marx and Engels achieved, they accomplished in spite of, not because of, Hegel’s dialectics”; the critical reply from the Austrian Marxist philosopher Karl Kautsky (1899), who in seeing and affinity between Bernstein and Dühring rhetorically asked (quoting Engels), “what remains of Marxism if it is deprived of dialectics that was its best ‘working tool’ and its ‘sharpest weapon?’”; and lastly, the debates between Austrian-Marxist Max Adler (1908) and the Russian Marxist Georgii Plekhanov (1891) over the former’s attack, and the latter’s defense, of philosophical materialism and dialectics (49-52).

Kangal also provides a thorough study of the debates and contradictions that arose in the Soviet Union concerning the relationship of Marxism to Hegel, Marxism to philosophy, and of dialectics to nature. Focusing on the debates between the Deborinites and the Mechanists, Kangal brilliantly shows the plurality and heterogeneity of Marxist thought that existed in the Soviet Union. He says, “it is no exaggeration to say that the Soviet debates accumulated an astonishing variety of contradictions, even if some figures embodying those ambiguities, or later historians narrating them, would not openly admit this” (60).

In journals like Pod Znamenem Marksizma (“Under the Banner of Marxism”), Vestnik Kommunisticheskii Akademii (“Bulletin of the Communist Academy”), Bolshevik, and Dialektika v Prirode (“Dialectics in Nature”) these debates would openly take place between scholars and party theoreticians (ibid). The research Kangal does of these Soviet debates lucidly depicts the monumental ignorance of ‘western’ Marxists’ dogmatic critiques of what they labeled as ‘Soviet Marxism.’ Such homogeneity never existed, plurality and debate were always present. Only in the anti-communist plagued minds of western Marxists did such homogeneity exist in Soviet philosophy.

​One of the novel points Kangal stresses is that the “197 manuscript fragments” contained in the “four folders” that would be made into the book we now know as Dialectics of Nature (or Dialectics and Nature for the 1927 German edition), has its “completeness and maturity… editorially imposed” (58, 3). This is something that has been mostly ignored by both sides of the Engels debate, each which assumed that, although incomplete, the book had a single and consistent intention it aimed to carry out. In response to this historical misreading of Engels’ intentions, Kangal states that,
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​Considering the former, Kangal argues that Engels’ “work in progress… remained incomplete” (124-5). This “incompleteness theorem,” as Kangal names it, states that “it is by no means self-evident that Engels’ project was ‘not finished’” (125). As he notes, a work can be “completed without being published” (ibid). A good example of this is The German Ideology, which although left to the “gnawing criticism of the mice,” nonetheless completed its “main purpose – self-clarification.”[5]

One must ask, then, – why did Engels embark on such a momentous project? After providing a magnificent Marxist analysis of the function of theory and its relationship to practice, of the role of intellectuals in the workers’ struggle for socialism, and of the role of philosophy in relation to theory and practice, Kangal postulates four main motives behind Engels’ project: 1) “the political goal was to win over all (potentially) progressive forces, including natural scientists, to the socialist cause”; 2) to provide the natural sciences – who although think themselves to be free of philosophy are actually, according to Engels, always “under the dominion of philosophy” – the “methodological indispensability of philosophical dialectics”; 3) to consciously incorporate into the theoretical sciences the only method capable of comprehensively understanding the results derived from scientific studies – the Marxist materialist dialectics; and 4) to move beyond Ludwig Feuerbach’s insufficient discarding of Hegel, and instead sublate Hegel by showing that his revolutionary method is confirmed in nature and its historical development (something which Hegel rejected) (111-13).

In addition, after Marx’s death, Engels realized that Marx had never written the “2 or 3 sheets” he promised to him and Joseph Dietzgen where “the rational aspect” of Hegel’s method would be made “accessible to the common reader” (108). This, argued Kangal, was also an “occasion” (instead of a “direct reason”) for Engels’ undertaking in Dialectics of Nature (110).

After covering the Engels debate both contextually and genealogically, and providing a textual history of Dialectics of Nature and the multiple purposes behind it, Kangal dives into the most philosophically dense part of the book – his critical assessment of dialectics in Engels’ text. It is important to remember that although the critiques are directed at Engels and his Dialectics of Nature, the flaws Kangal points to are in Marx as well, for their perspectives on these were waged jointly. Here are some of the most important critiques Kangal provides of Engels’ “philosophical ambiguities” (125).

1- There are quite a few ambiguities and loose ends with Engels (and Marx’s) treatment of Hegel. First, Engels incorporates Hegelian categories (primarily from the first two sections of Hegel’s Science of Logic and Shorter Logic –  the “Logic of Being” and the “Logic of Essence”) without an explanation for the differences in order and prioritization in how they appear in his and Hegel’s work. In Engels’ treatment, for instance, the categories from Hegel’s chapter “The Essentialities or Determinations of Reflection” (quantity/quality, identity/difference and its development into the categories of opposition and contradiction), are conjoined with the category of sublation (aufhebung) which Hegel introduces at the beginning of the “Logic of Being”, and are raised to the status of being ‘dialectical laws,’ that is, “the most general laws” of the “history of nature and human society.” These are, of course, the famous three – the “law of the transformation of quantity into quality and vice versa, the law of the interpenetration of opposites, [and] the law of the negation of the negation.”[6] 

Why he chooses these to be ‘laws’ over other Hegelian categories he uses throughout his work (like force/manifestation, coincidence/necessity, causality/reciprocity, shine/essence, nodal line, etc.) is unclear. Similarly, why some of Hegel’s categories are fully discarded with is also left unexamined. In addition, the treatment of Hegel’s Logic (which he primarily uses the Shorter Logic for) contains no consideration for Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, which Hegel argued his Science of Logic was the “first sequel” of.[7] With the exception of his critiques of Hegel’s philosophy of nature (which is part two of the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences), Engels leaves what comes before and after the first division of Hegel’s Logic[s] (the sections in Objective Logic) largely unexamined.
 
The problem here is that it was Engels who, against Feuerbach, argued that Hegel couldn’t just be discarded, that his philosophy had to be “sublated in its own terms” (113). By discarding such a large amount of Hegel’s work, and further, by leaving largely unexplained the reasons for using those parts of Hegel which he does, Engels replicates (in a more advanced form) the Feuerbachian discarding of Hegel and fails to fully meet his own standards.  

2- There are two central bifurcations Engels is engaging with in this text: dialectics and metaphysics, and idealism and materialism. As every Marxists knows, dialectics and materialism are supposed to be the ‘good guys’ and metaphysics and idealism the ‘bad guys.’ However, as Kangal shows, what allows for this neat separation is a synecdochal understanding of idealism and metaphysics on the part of Engels. Contrary to the common Marxist understanding, Kangal shows that there is a “compatibility rather than divergence between materialism and ‘a specific sort of) idealism, and between dialectics and (a specific sort of) metaphysics” (6).
 
Surely, Engels rejects Hegel’s depiction of the “realization of Spirit” or the “externalization of the Idea” by postulating the “primacy of nature over logic.” But this ‘inversion’ of what Hegel calls in his Philosophy of History a “true Theodicy” is not in itself a rejection of idealism en toto, but of a specific aspect of a particular philosopher’s (Hegel) objective idealism.[8] As Kangal states,
​

​​This wholesale discarding of idealism is shown to be even more absurd by the fact that part of Engels’ critique of the natural sciences, specifically his appeal for a conceptually realist understanding of ‘real infinities,’ is itself an argument for what Hegel would call ‘idealism’ (126). Idealism (in Hegel specifically) argues that,
​

​​With this Hegelian definition of idealism Engels would be in full accord. The only thing he would disagree with is the characterization of the above mentioned as ‘idealism’. However, “the infinite stands and falls within the area of idealist investigation insofar as it is not subject to finite empirical observations of particular natural sciences” (194). Hence, it would be superfluous to come up with another term for the investigation of the infinite. The term ‘idealism’ is sufficient here.
 
Engels’ unorthodox and synechdochal understanding of idealism (as it appears in the Hegelian tradition at least) is at the core of his (and Marx’s) artificial bifurcation of materialism and idealism. Instead, Kangal argues, we must realize that a “local materialism” and a “global idealism” are perfectly compatible (195). Kangal adds that he “wouldn’t be surprised if it had been a similar conclusion that prompted Lenin’s emphasis on the ‘friendship’ between materialism and idealism” (205).

3- Engels’ treatment of metaphysics suffers from the same setbacks as his treatment of idealism. For instance, in Anti-Dühring he argues that “to the metaphysician, things and their mental images, ideas, are isolated, to be considered one after the other and apart from each other, fixed rigid objects of investigation given once for all.”[9] However, this definition of metaphysics synecdochally depicts what Immanuel Kant and Hegel would call ‘old metaphysics’ as metaphysics en toto. As Kangal notes, “Kant and Hegel famously attack the flaws of ‘old metaphysics’, but Engels takes the anti-dialectics of the old metaphysics to represent the defects of metaphysics as a whole” (195).
 
Metaphysics, in the Hegelian tradition specifically, understands that,
​

​Once again, Engels’ text is littered with examples which depict his agreement with the above-mentioned propositions. The only disagreement here is terminological, that is, Engels would only reject the term metaphysics being used to describe the former perspective. This rejection, however, is grounded on his stinted understanding of metaphysics qua old metaphysics. There is, then, no contradiction at all between dialectics and metaphysics as described above. In fact, as Kangal rightly states, “Engels’ defense of philosophy against positivism is a defense of ‘metaphysics’’’ understood in these terms (195). For Hegel – who Engels and Marx praise and consider as the point of departure for Marxist materialism – one cannot escape metaphysics, human beings are “born metaphysicians”; all that matters is “whether the metaphysics one applies is of the right kind” (161).[10]

​Kangal’s text also explores how the ambiguities present in Engels’ understanding of the relationship of idealism and materialism, and metaphysics and dialectics, are reflected and refracted into further confusions and knots concerning his association with Aristotle and his disassociation and critique of Kant. His text additionally traverses how these ambiguities are intensified by the variances between Engels’ Plan 1878, Plan 1880, and his four folders for Dialectics of Nature (165-176).

It is impossible to do justice, in such limited space, to such a wonderful work of Marxist scholarship. What I can say is this, any reader of Kangal’s book will surely appreciate its abundance of letter references and its resuscitation of texts which have been largely obscured in anglophone Marxist scholarship over the last half a century. Even in the most philosophically muddy places of Kangal’s text, he does an exceptional job at clarifying things for the reader. In contrast to what a recent critical reviewer of Kangal’s text argued, the difficulties found in the philosophically densest section of the text are not the fault of Kangal, but of Engels (and Marx, who shares Engels’ flaws), who uses unorthodox and synechdochal definitions of idealism and materialism, and dialectics and metaphysics, to position himself in relation to Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel. If anything, Kangal must be thanked for untangling, in his comparative and critical analysis of the aforementioned thinkers, knots set by Marx and Engels’ philosophically unorthodox usage of the previous concepts.
​

Notes


[1] Two essays withing the Dialectics of Nature manuscript collection had already been published before by Eduard Bernstein, “The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man” (1895/6) and “Natural Science in the Spirit World” (1898).

[2] All numbers cited in the review article come from Kangal’s text: Kaan Kangal (2020), Friedrich Engels and the Dialectics of Nature, Palgrave.

[3] Edmund Husserl (1913), Ideas I, Hackett (2014)., pp. 109.

[4] Paul Blackledge article for Monthly Review (May 2020) “Engels vs. Marx?: Two Hundred Years of Frederick Engels,” also does a splendid job at countering the ‘betrayal’ or ‘corruption’ thesis of the Marx-Engels bifurcators.

[5] Karl Marx (1859), A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, International Publishers (1999)., pp. 22.

[6] Friedrich Engels (1964), Dialectics of Nature, Wellred Books (2012)., pp. 63.

[7] G. W. F. Hegel (1812), The Science of Logic, Cambridge (2015)., pp. 11.

[8] G. W. F. Hegel (1837), The Philosophy of History, Dover Publications (1956) ., pp. 457.

[9] Friedrich Engels (1879), Anti-Dühring, Foreign Language Press (1976)., pp. 20.

[10] It is also important to note that this ‘throw the baby out with the bathwater’ approach taken to idealism and metaphysics was never applied to the flaws they both saw in various parts of the materialist and dialectical tradition. 

It is not every day that one comes across a brand-new review of a book that was published almost forty years ago and still demands further scrutiny. The Dialectical Biologist by Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin is one such book.

One reason why this review came to be decades after said book’s publication involves the loss of Richard Lewontin, the great American geneticist and evolutionary biologist, who passed away last July at his home in Cambridge at the age of 92. Lewontin was a truly towering figure, one of the greatest thinkers in evolutionary theory and responsible for some of the earliest work in population genetics. He was also a long-standing critic of sociobiology, and did not shy from social and political critique, both in his written works and in public lectures for a wide audience (such as the Santa Fe lecture series from November 2003), discussing topics ranging from genetic determinism, research on IQ, ‘scientific’ racism, to the politics of agricultural research. In his writings and lectures, Lewontin comes across as opinionated and unapologetic, sharp-witted and often sharp-tongued, a man with as much sense of humour (exemplified by the writings of Isidore Nabi) as full of conviction. During his long and fruitful career, most of which was spent at Harvard, Lewontin surrounded himself with scholars from diverse disciplines, and was much admired and beloved by many of his students and colleagues –even if there were, of course, others like Edward O. Wilson who admired him somewhat less. André Ariew, one of the last associates in Lewontin’s lab, describes Lewontin as an excellent philosopher of biology, part of whose lasting legacy is the way he collaborated, mentored and communicated, together with the fertile atmosphere he fostered in his lab. Lewontin was, in his words, very generous with his time, non-hierarchical, inexhaustible, kind and, above all, a mensch.

The news of Lewontin’s passing shook me deeply, surprisingly so considering both his advanced age and the fact that I have never even met him. As a first-year doctoral student, struggling to make sense of my very rudimentary ideas and the sea of literature sprawling in front of me, I came across the brilliant Biology as Ideology. The effect which that little gem of a book had on me and my work I can only attempt to describe as my own personal paradigm shift. Considering the book was hardly fresh from the shelves –and was, in fact, first published a year before I was born– makes this experience even more noteworthy. It can only be seen as a testament to the book’s sharpness, originality and enduring relevance that the ideas I encountered on those yellowed pages had such a mesmerising effect.

Published seven years before Biology as Ideology, The Dialectical Biologist, co-written with the late ecologist Richard Levins, discusses many of the same topics. The latter is comparably more technical, not to mention more than twice as thick. Rather than presenting us with a strictly coherent whole, the book is a representative collection of essays on various topics, all of which illustrate doing biology in a self-consciously dialectical way, which the authors claim has been ignored and suppressed for political reasons.

Levins and Lewontin diagnose the dominant view of nature as a reflection of the nature of social relations in the last six centuries, or ‘the social ideology of bourgeois society,’ according to which individuals are ontologically prior to the social, have their own intrinsic properties, and create social interactions as they collide (1). Thus, to understand society it is necessary to analyse the properties of individuals, since, after all, the society is taken to be just the outcome of the individual activities of the individuals that are taken to make it up. The claim is that this ‘bourgeois view of nature’ was explicitly formulated in Descartes’ Discours, making the science we practice therefore ‘truly Cartesian’ (1). While this Cartesian method of reduction has been successful in various sciences, including physics, chemistry, and several areas of biology, this should not be taken to imply that it truthfully describes the whole of reality. Indeed, the commitment to this method also leads one to overlook the problems and phenomena which do not yield to it easily, such as the structure and the function of the central nervous system and various aspects of development (2-3).

Levins and Lewontin describe four ontological commitments of ‘Cartesian reductionism,’ which all affect knowledge creation (269-70). These amount to the claim that there is a natural set of homogenous parts of which any system is made up, that are all ontologically prior to the whole –that is to say, they all exist independently and come together to make the whole– with their intrinsic properties, which they hold in isolation. Additionally, causes and effects are separate, with causes being the properties of subjects and effects the properties of objects. The world described by these Cartesian principles Levins and Lewontin term the alienated world, ‘in which parts are separated from wholes and reified as things in themselves, causes separated from effects, subjects separated from objects,’ and which ‘mirrors the structure of the alienated social world in which it was conceived,’ according to which individuals are social atoms colliding in the market (269-70).

Levins and Lewontin criticise contemporary science as blind to the fact that social forces influence, and often even dictate, the scientific method, theories and facts (4). Levins and Lewontin ascribe this to the Cartesian social analysis of science which, much like the Cartesian analysis of science, alienates science from society, making scientific method and fact objective and free from social influence (4). In contrast, Levins and Lewontin see science as a social process both caused by and causing social organisation: in their eyes, science is fundamentally political for it is the dominant ideologies that ‘set the tone for the theoretical investigation of phenomena, which then becomes a reinforcing practice for the ideology itself’ (268). In fact, to deny this interpenetration would itself be political, since it would give ‘support to social structures that hide behind scientific objectivity to perpetuate dependency, exploitation, racism, elitism, colonialism’ (4). This line of thought is vividly illustrated by the example of deciding on the cause of tuberculosis (270):

The tubercle bacillus became the cause of tuberculosis, as opposed to, say, unregulated industrial capitalism, because the bacillus was made the point of medical attack on the disease. The alternative would be not a ‘medical’ but a ‘political’ approach to tuberculosis and so not the business of medicine in an alienated social structure. Having identified the bacillus as the cause, a chemotherapy had to be developed to treat it, rather than, say, a social revolution.

Levins and Lewontin are aware of the fact that they too, like other scientists, are not free of preconceptions. However, the authors aim to make their pressupositions explicit, which is why their essays are written from an openly Marxist perspective. In contrast with the Cartesian worldview, Levins and Lewontin present a dialectical world, in which things are ‘assumed from the beginning to be internally heterogeneous at every level’ (72). One way the authors suggest to liberate ourselves from the hold of Cartesian science is to take a better look at our concepts of part and whole (3). Importantly, parts and wholes cannot exist without each other. Parts are defined by the whole and they generally acquire their properties as a consequence of being parts of that particular whole (273), that they would not have on their own or as part of a different whole. In other words, ‘[i]t is not that the whole is more than the sum of its parts, but that the parts acquire new properties’ (3). The other side of the coin is that, as parts acquire new properties, they also impart new properties to the whole, which then affect changes in the parts themselves, and so the process continues. In other words, parts and wholes both evolve as a consequence of their relationship, as does the relationship itself (3). This makes them dialectical: they cannot exist with one another, they acquire their properties from their relation, which evolves due to their interpenetration. In this view, change is central: ‘Because elements recreate each other by interacting and are recreated by the wholes of which they are parts, change is a characteristic of all systems and all aspects of all systems’ (275).

The book is divided in three parts. The first part comprises three essays on evolution, as both a theory and ideology, as well as the question of adaptation and the organism as its subject and object. The three essays in the second part all concern analysis, while the final part illustrates that science is a social product which in turn results in social product. Essays here discuss topics such as the political economy of research in agriculture, pesticides, community health and human nature.

While several of the essays in the collection retain a primarily historical relevance, such as the essays on Lysenkoism and doing applied biology in the ‘Third World,’ most remain socially relevant today. These include the analysis of the penetration of capital into agricultural production (ch.9) and of the myopic and reductive approaches to public health (ch.12), but maybe especially the account of the commoditization of science (ch.8) which rings just as, if not more, true today. Levins and Lewontin describe how research has become a business investment (200) with scientists ‘scientific manpower’ (202) that is ‘increasingly proletarianized’ (202) in the name of cost management. The relation between grants and research has been reversed: ‘whereas initially the grant was a means for research, for the entrepreneurs of science, the research has become the means to a grant’ (204). Scientific publishing has come to depend ‘on the publisher’s and editor’s need to fill the journal and the author’s need to be published in time for tenure review, a job hunt, or a raise,’ while the necessity of publication is rarely questioned (205). Furthermore, Levins and Lewontin characterise a coherent implicit bourgeois ideology among scientists, which is individualist, asserting that ‘progress is made by a few individuals (who just happen to be “us”)’ (205), as well as elitist in a profoundly antidemocratic way, ‘encouraging a cult of expertise, an aesthetic appreciation of manipulation, and a disdain for those who do not make it by the rules of academia’ (206).

​On the whole, the reason for The Dialectical Biologist’s ongoing relevance is not primarily the particular sample of the themes that the essays explore, but rather its radical approach, which remains as disregarded today as in the time of its publication, making the book all the more exceptional and significant. It is this distinctive approach that merits reassessment in the light of the problems we face today in our alienated world.

​I would like to thank André Ariew for sharing with me his memories of Dick Lewontin.

​2 February 2022

If ‘the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles’ (Marx, 2004: 137), then Revolutions constitutes a major work of history. Two decades after its original publication, Löwy, along with six other historians, presents a photographic account of all the major revolutions in modern history, from the Paris Commune in 1871 up to the Cuban Revolution of 1959, from suppressed uprisings to liberatory movements across the globe, from the imperial core of Western Europe to the peripheries of China, Russia, and Mexico. Each of these revolutions, given a short overview to preface its photo collection, has been a subject of scrutiny, each has a wealth of historiography attributed to it, but this book takes a different approach, placing the masses – frozen in time – at the centre of how we view such movements. Why this approach? Löwy asserts that photos can ‘capture what no text can communicate’, and, taking it further, states that ‘a photograph allows us to see, concretely, what constitutes the unifying spirit and singularity of a particular revolution.’ (11)

What is the significance of photography in revolutions? What can photography do that lengthy histories, academic volumes, and historiographical bookshelves cannot? According to Löwy, photographs of revolutions ‘reveal […] a magical or prophetic quality that renders them permanently contemporary, always subversive. They speak to us about the past, and about a possible future.’ (17) Houzel and Traverso take this further; they assert that viewing these historical events through images, through mere fragments of time, allows us to study the events as they are, without the burden of subsequent historiography. Indeed, they believe that it allows us to ‘strip away a thick layer of retrospective projections, first hagiography and later demonization.’ (109)

This is a fascinating point; it is certainly true that these photographs somewhat remove the decades of analysis and revisionism, adulation and defamation, and leave us with the intimacy of agents of history. The harsh colds of winter that characterise the Russian revolution, the solemn recognition of imminent change, and the realisation of those who have driven it, the acceptance of death before the executioner’s gun – facial expressions reveal to us the realities of these movements in ways that transcend nuanced analysis. They isolate movements from future projections, and what is left, for a time, is a measure of historical objectivity.

History, however, can never truly be objective. If captions are integral to the meaning of photographs (and the author agrees with Walter Benjamin that they are), if each photo is ‘profoundly subjective because it bears, in one way or the other, its author’s mark’ (13), if text is the ‘fuse guiding the critical spark to the image’ (14) – then that is how we should read Revolutions – not as an objective chronology of images providing an exhaustive, neutral account, but a selection of photographs alongside their own ‘captions’, in this case their accompanying analyses and observations. Therefore, to echo Löwy’s introduction, Revolutions provides both the objective (photographs of reality) and the subjective (analysis of these photos).

Formed in chronological order, the way these events are depicted evolves with the development of photographic technology; earlier depiction was far more forced, almost semi-staged, as the time taken to capture an image was extended, and the equipment required bulky and inconvenient. However, much of the way these photos are captured, and indeed the major themes of revolution, remain consistent throughout the last 150 years. One of the first examples of the revolution photographed comes from the barricades of France, 1848, a ‘material symbol of the act of insurrection’ (p.11), and a tactic reemployed throughout future radical movements. The use of barricades coincides with the first evidence of photographed revolution, but 1848 marks the beginning of this account for another reason too; as Löwy asserts, after that year the way ‘revolution’ is understood changed significantly. ‘Revolution’ before 1848 had largely simply suggested a transformation of the state structure, but now denoted ‘an attempt to subvert the whole bourgeois order’ (10).

From the barricades of Paris, then, to the brutal repression of the 1905 Russian Revolution, an uprising described as ‘a bolt of lightning that precedes a crash of thunder, which was not long in coming’ (69), where moderate, peaceful demands for civil liberties, land, education and assemblies were met with extreme violence and murder. And the visual representation of this brutality emphasises the scale of violence inevitable in class struggles. It is a theme that occurs throughout history and as such throughout this book; decapitated heads of Chinese rebels, executed workers, and mass graves are explicitly shown, more striking in photography than any academic statistic of death and injury can evoke. The photography of 1905 Russia indicates not only violent repression, but, according to the author, defiance: ‘they don’t appear defeated; on the contrary, their faces display great dignity. This is a sign that the 1905 Revolution, although it was aborted, left an indelible mark on the consciousness of the masses’ (79).

Revolutions does not deny the limits of photographical enquiry; how can black and white imagery capture something so colourful as the Mexican Revolution? As Rousset asks, ‘how can one visually do justice’ to intellectual shifts between the Chinese revolutions? (330) And, clearly, photography is restricted by its singular and immortalised focus. Despite this, even in the Mexican Revolution, the contradiction between city and countryside, as ‘urban and rural mexico stood face to face’ (274), is made indisputably clear by photography. The clothes, facial expressions and the unfamiliar, out of place look of rugged, rural Mexicans in the urban centre reveal this phenomenon, one that persists across the world today. Indeed, one of the book’s strongest aspects is its refusal to present the best-known actors and leaders as the centrepiece of revolution – instead, the bulk of photography is dedicated to the real drivers of social change: the masses. As Houzel and Traverso remark, ‘as in all revolutions, the masses – a human sea – are at the center of all events and invade all spaces.’ (114)

A striking image of ordinary Cubans at Playa Girón, prepared to give everything to defend their revolution, to defend their sovereignty, is instructive of the popular revolution and represents an unprecedented event: ‘for the first time in the twentieth century, an intervention planned and armed by Washington had been defeated’ (461). Ordinary, unnamed people, women and workers, children and peasants, people forgotten to history are in this volume accentuated as central figures in extraordinary events.

This account chronologises the different major revolutionary movements, but it is not simply time that connects them – the photographs of the first Russian Revolution help to explain the conditions and lessons of the successful Revolution just 12 years later. Emiliano Zapata lives on through his eponymous revolutionary descendants decades later, whose own role in history has been guided and shaped by the Mexican Revolution of 1910-1920. The actors of revolution in these photographs are changing the future; they are shaping what will be photographed in later chapters, through the demolition of the old order and in the surreal manner of historical repetition. This is in part explained by Traverso, in his analysis of the failed German revolution of 1918-19: ‘Photography […] revealed that the protagonists know perfectly well that they were living through an extraordinary event, something out of the ordinary, which was breaking up linear time, confounding regular chronology, and marking the eruption of a qualitatively different temporality.’ (212)

The photographs in this book constitute memories of won and lost futures – structural ruptures, successful class struggles, as well as repressed uprisings and the killing of revolutions, each movement of which has shaped the next. But they also represent future building, inspiration, and icons who transcend time to play roles in movements long after they have died. It is difficult not to see the similarities within these revolutions, and while barricades evoke the uprisings of the past, no discussion of revolution is complete without its martyrs. Three heroes – Karl Liebknecht, Emiliano Zapata and Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara, complex individuals who played major parts in three very different revolutions, become unified through the manner of their downfall, and crucially by the depiction of their deaths through the lens. The photos of their corpses are strikingly similar; upright, vivid, present in their surroundings, alive in all but breath. No image inspires more than that of someone who fell in the midst of attempting the nearly impossible feat of revolution.
​
Revolutions is a major contribution to our understanding of the principal social movements which shape our modern world. It brings us closer to the participants of history, it provides imagery beautiful and haunting, inspiring and brutal. It binds together the unknown agents of history, the ordinary people achieving the extraordinary, and the immortalised heroes of revolutionary movements. The ‘magical or prophetic quality’ attributed by Löwy to this photography is significant here. Iconic revolutionary photography continues to inspire historical movements, and in this sense, Revolutions adds to the existing revolutionary nostalgia. Indeed, if nostalgia is the memory of lost futures (Fisher, 2013:36), much of that which is depicted in this book constitutes the memory of won futures, and the ordinary people who won them. And to again echo Löwy’s introduction, it is in this way that revolutionary photography can both depict the past, and shape a possible future.

13 January 2022

References

• Marx, K. and Engels, F. 2004 The Communist Manifesto London: Penguin
• Fisher, M. 2014 Ghosts of my Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures London: John Hunt Publishing

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”:
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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.