Much has been written about History and Class Consciousness (henceforth HCC); it is hard to imagine that anyone could come up with a substantially original interpretation. Richard Westerman has done so in his daring and surprising book, Lukács’s Phenomenology of Capitalism. Reification Revalued. Lucien Goldmann said that Lukács was a Kantian, who became a Hegelian, and then a Marxist. According to Westerman, Lukács in HCC was in fact a Husserlian.

Rejecting a century of interpretations of HCC, Westerman views Hegel as an influence on Lukács – but only the Hegel of the Science of Logic, not that of the Phenomenology of Spirit. Lukács proposed a phenomenology of creative and receptive attitudes toward the work of art in his Heidelberg manuscripts (1912-1918), which he wrote with a view to obtaining his ‘habilitation’ in German universities. In them, Lukács wrote: ‘In the interest of terminological clarity, and unless the contrary is explicitly stated, it must be said here once and for all that the expression ‘phenomenology’ refers to Hegel’s and not Husserl’s use of the term’ (Lukács 1974: 37, n. 10). Indeed, the unfolding of proletarian class consciousness in HCC has mostly been read as structured along the lines of Hegel’s phenomenology. Westerman, however, claims that phenomenology in the manuscripts and in HCC is in fact strictly Husserlian, not Hegelian, and that the philosophies of Edmund Husserl and Emil Lask (as well as the writings of art historians Alois Riegl and Konrad Fiedler), offer the key to understanding both the Heidelberg manuscripts and HCC – Westerman does not cite Lukács’s own statement in this regard, but mentions (55) that Agnes Heller refers to such a passage, but that she also ‘concedes’ that Lukács’s interpretation of Hegel was very ‘idiosyncratic.’ Ultimately, Westerman concludes not only that Lukács rejects the notion of identity in Hegel, but that ‘Lukács’s solution, in contrast, eschews both identity and essence’ (168). Yet, Lukács’s whole argument aims to demonstrate that the proletariat will become ‘the identical subject-object of history’ (Lukács 1971: 197).

Most readers of HCC believe that it is a work of Marxist philosophy. That is not the impression one gets from Lukács’s Phenomenology of Capitalism, which claims that Lukács ‘transfers Husserl’s account of the intentional structure of the mental acts and the phenomena of consciousness to the practical acts and phenomena of social being’ (127). The rehearsal of the Marxist sources of HCC is a well-trodden path; one can understand that Westerman should have chosen not to repeat common interpretations, but to outline a fresh one. However, he seems to be at pains to ignore the influences of Hegel and Marx on Lukács’s book (something he attempts to justify in his book’s conclusion). For example, in order to account for the relational character of Lukács’s approach, he invokes Georg Simmel. He does not see relationality here as stemming from the writings of Marx, who famously defined the human essence as the ‘ensemble of the social relations’ (Marx 1976: 3).

In general, Westerman does not display great knowledge of Marx’s theory. He seems to believe that Marx had an economistic and class-reductionist approach, a rather debatable proposition. He claims that alienation ‘is the result of a dichotomy produced by the commodity structure’ (278) between form and content. But Marx did not aim to be a theorist of commodity exchange as such; his purpose was to theorize a very specific relationship, the sale of labour power in the relationship of capitalist and wage labourer. The issue was not commodity exchange, which has existed in many modes of production, but capital.

Westerman regards as a sign of art historian Riegl’s influence the idea that ‘each type of society has a different “structure of objectivity”’ (102). One is tempted to reply: they are called modes of production (a notion that encompasses much more than economic relations). Westerman questions whether Lukács was an orthodox Marxist, arguing that Lukács’s theory of capitalism is based on reification, but does not deal with surplus value or the tendency of the rate of profit to fall – as if these were the touchstone of Marxist orthodoxy. The publication of the 1844 Manuscripts, but also of the Grundrisse and of the full version of German Ideology, revealed the extent to which HCC paralleled Marx’s thought in so many ways. Indeed, Westerman himself notes that Lukács in 1967 stressed the salience of the concept of alienation in twentieth-century thought and how HCC was centered on this problem.

Westerman constructs a straw man he repeatedly knocks down throughout his book. He accuses a variety of interpreters of Lukács of believing that the latter ‘treat[s] the relation of subject to objectivity as the interaction of two mutually external entities’ (4). No such interpretation of Lukács should be taken seriously, because it completely misunderstands his concept of reification.

For Westerman, ‘subject and object are treated [by Lukács] as structurally defined parts of a meaningful totality of consciousness’ (16). The key word here is ‘meaningful’: ‘Consciousness’ in HCC coincides with social being, writes Westerman. He writes that Lukács ‘interprets social being through a formal semantics of practices and the meaning of objects […] it is the logic of these meanings that drives social practice’ (277-278). On that view, it would seem that Lukács was an idealist after all, as critics of HCC in the Communist movement claimed!

Westerman suggests that the young Lukács oscillated between two positions: a mystical, messianic one, expressed in Soul and Form, The Theory of the Novel, and Lukács’s political writings between 1919 and 1921; and a rigorous philosophical one stated in the Heidelberg manuscripts (1912-1914, 1916-1918) and the chapters of HCC written or rewritten in 1922. Westerman attributes this to Lukács’s return in 1922 to ideas inspired by Lask, Husserl, Riegl and Fiedler. This begs the question of why his early revolutionary writings were not inspired by them. Why, in 1919, 1920 and 1921, would he ‘forget’ about the views developed in the Heidelberg manuscripts, only to rediscover them in 1922? Is there not a simpler explanation?

Ultimately, Westerman is not able to establish the unity of HCC. He proposes in his account to discard the two chapters on Rosa Luxemburg, as well as those on class consciousness, on legality and illegality, and on the changing function of historical materialism, and to focus only on the chapters ‘What Is Orthodox Marxism’, ‘Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat’, and ‘Towards a Methodology of the Problem of Organization’.

Westerman cites approvingly Lukács’s notorious comment that the sole criterion of Marxist orthodoxy is the adherence to the method of Marxism, rather than to this or that theory or concept, or even to all or any of Marx’s individual discoveries. It is easy to point out that Marx’s ‘method’ could surely not so easily be abstracted from his discoveries, and that any rejection of the latter would surely imply a real indictment of the former. Yet when Lukács speaks of ‘method’, he means the practice of grasping events and processes as aspects of totality, in other words in the light of the actuality of the moment of proletarian revolution.

Lukács’s Phenomenology of Capitalism is a very academic volume; it treats HCC as one might a work by Aquinas or La Mettrie, not as an eminently militant, communist book. Seeing it as principally influenced by Husserl, Lask or Riegl is also a way of making it a safe object of academic research in conservative universities. The publisher’s web site says that Lukács’s Phenomenology of Capitalism ‘offers a radical new interpretation of Georg Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness, showing for the first time [emphasis added] how the philosophical framework for his analysis of society was laid in the drafts of [his] “Heidelberg Aesthetics”’ and ‘reveals for the first time a range of unsuspected influences on his thought, such as Edmund Husserl, Emil Lask, and Alois Riegl’. This is simply untrue (and Westerman himself is much more careful in his utterances on this subject). Ernst Bloch (1923), Rosshof (1975), Rochlitz (1981, 1983) and Kavoulakos (2018) all noted or explored Lask’s influence on HCC. Agnes Heller wrote: ‘[The Heidelberg Aesthetics] constitutes the bridge between Soul and Form and History and Class Consciousness. One could even indulge in the dangerously unhermeneutical idea that there is no possible understanding of Lukács without the Heidelberg Aesthetics.’ (Heller 1989: 206) Miguelez wrote a doctoral thesis (published in 1973) supervised by Lucien Goldman, comparing Husserl and Lukács; Vajda (1978-79) compared them in a similar way. There is no doubt that Westerman goes much further than they did in reading Lukács’s work in the light of Husserl’s phenomenology. Lukács learned much from Kierkegaard, Husserl, Lask, Riegl and Fiedler; it is also evident that he was very deeply influenced by Marx, Luxemburg, Lenin, Hegel, Kant and many others.

The aim of HCC was not to propose a phenomenology of capitalism, as in the title of Westerman’s book, but to shed light on the development of proletarian class consciousness, and, on this basis, to give an account of the proletarian revolution within the context of a theory of history. Why did Lukács call his book History and Class Consciousness? Westerman’s account provides no sense of this. Because he does not believe in the relevance today of class struggle or proletarian revolution, Westerman has, often ingeniously, tried to provide a new meaning for HCC, by reinterpreting it completely as a work of Husserlian phenomenology, rather than of historical materialism. The result no longer resembles History and Class Consciousness.

​For at least a year now a bitter online feud has played out between Marxist-Leninist activist Caleb Maupin, and the group of online content creators known as BreadTube. Breadtube creators such as Ian “Vaush” Kochinski have grown large online followings for giving political and cultural commentary from the left. Ideologically Vaush claims to be both a socialist and a dialectical materialist, while the name “BreadTube” is derived from famous anarchist Peter Kropotkin’s text Conquest of Bread. Caleb Maupin has repeatedly criticized BreadTube as an entity since doing an online debate with Vaush over a year ago. Caleb’s new book BreadTube Serves Imperialism attempts to systematize his argument that BreadTube creators are overall harmful to the movement for socialism. Maupin suspects that there may be direct ties between the US State Department and BreadTube. Since there is no incriminating evidence of this the book sets out to prove that regardless of whether Vaush and other creators are tied to US intelligence or not, they serve the same purpose of propping up the American ruling class and American Imperialism by extension.
 
While BreadTubers have mocked Caleb for even taking the time to write a book about them, a systematized formulation of these arguments is welcomed by those of us who have watched this conflict play out exclusively online. The online culture around politics is notoriously toxic and ideas are usually debated publicly through 280-character tweets or live-streamed online debates. The idea that anyone would write a book engaging with the ideas and tactics of their intellectual rivals is foreign to this online political climate, despite the fact that for years political theorists engaged with each other through publishing written material. Bad Empanada (a BreadTube figure not mentioned in the book) proudly declared in his original video response that he would not be reading the full book. Perhaps when Marx responded to Proudhon’s Philosophy of Poverty with a book titled Poverty of Philosophy, Proudhon should have simply refused to read the book, and challenged Marx to a Twitch debate instead.
 
To make the argument that BreadTube is ultimately harmful to left politics Maupin draws comparisons between the online creators and the cold war counter gangs funded by the US State Department. These gangs masqueraded as advocates for socialism whilst purposefully acting in a way that is harmful to the movement and distorting the meaning of socialism. For example, Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge in Cambodia was propped up by the United States from the beginning. Pol Pot claimed to be a Marxist who could raise the Cambodian peasantry from poverty. In reality, the Khmer leadership knew nothing of Marx. Philip Short’s Pol Pot Anatomy of a Nightmare says for Pot and the Cambodian leadership “Marxism signified an ideal, not a comprehensive system to be mastered and applied.” Pot’s Government committed horrific genocides in the name of Marx and seemed committed to building a form of socialism that left everyone in Cambodia equally impoverished. Pot was not someone who sought to construct a socialist mode of production, but rather a tool of Western imperialists who had no understanding of Marxist economics. With the CIA’s help Pot capitalized on the popularity of Marxism to bring himself into a position of power. 
​
It’s hyperbolic to imply Vaush and other BreadTubeers are the modern-day equivalents of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. It seems that Maupin’s personal dislike for the BreadTube personalities may have influenced his choice to compare them in the book to some of history’s most despicable enemies of socialism. Gangs funded by the American empire purposely fill people’s heads with wrong ideas about Marxist economics. Caleb’s accusations of State Department connections is almost surely a retaliation against some BreadTubers habit of publicly smearing him as a Fascist. BreadTuber Thought Slime introduced Caleb in one video as “a crypto-fascist posing as a leftist, because it allows him to condescend to people more often.” A completely disingenuous description of someone who has been an active communist for almost 20 years after getting involved with politics through Iraq war protests. Understandably, Maupin is upset that after years of organizing with the belief that he was fighting against fascism, someone with very few organizing credentials can smear him as a fascist to an audience of nearly 200,000 people who consider themselves leftists. He even claims to have recently been kicked out of an organizing event for supposedly being a fascist. The allegations from both sides are unprovable and non-materialist. Caleb Maupin is not a fascist, and we can’t know if BreadTube is a psyop similar to the Congress for Cultural Freedom. However, it’s worth noting that Maupin’s accusations here seem to be in retaliation to having his reputation smeared for over a year by people who call themselves socialists.
 
So the origins of BreadTube and CIA counter gangs can’t be materially compared, but do they have similar practical effects on the overall struggle for socialism? The bulk of BreadTube Serves Imperialism is dedicated to making this argument. Of course, BreadTube is not a homogenous way of thinking, but rather a collective of various online personalities with many young and intellectually curious viewers who tune in to watch their content. So, while the BreadTube left is not a hive mind, the sheer amount of anti-Marxist and pro-imperialist rhetoric from some of BreadTube’s major figures should be concerning to anyone who is serious about seeing socialism in the United States or bringing about an end to capitalist imperialism.
 
The root of BreadTube’s most imperialistic rhetoric is their misunderstanding or refusal to understand production. That which Marx called ‘the anatomy of civil society” in Capital Vol 1. When a Libertarian tells you to “study economics” they actually want you to accept the dogmatic belief that market forces are inherently rational. When a Marxist says “study economics” they mean to understand that production, and the relations by which it is carried out, are at the root of the evils and triumphs of society. Because socialists understand this, we see changing the relations of production as the key to changing the form of society. Maupin’s book goes into great depth explaining the relation between production and imperialism, explaining that capitalist imperialism is not defined by war and military action, but is an economic system allowing capitalists to expand their profits through setting up capital to steal resources from poorer nations. Only once this all-important process of production is threatened or interrupted do the western capitalists begin asking their buddies in Washington to destabilize another nation. BreadTubers are often missing this key concept at the core of their analysis.

I’ll give an example separate from the many which are described in the book.  In a response to one of my own videos critiquing him for labeling anyone who supports existing socialist countries as a “tankie,” Vaush appeared shocked that in my video I had accused the United States of keeping the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea in a state of constant warfare and economic hardship. In an exasperated tone, he asked “Wait! Hold on! Are you suggesting America is responsible like currently… for North Korea’s Political isolation? They (The DPRK) maintain it deliberately.” He then goes on to say the DPRK purposefully isolates themselves so that they may be propped up by China. This is a misunderstanding that is rooted in idealist thinking. Vaush’s analysis begins with the cultural, political, and legal superstructures of the US and DPRK. By rooting his analysis in politics rather than production, Vaush made the common mistake of pinning the socio-political problems of Korea on the country’s political structure itself.
 
While the political structure of the DPRK is certainly not beyond critique, someone like Vaush who claims to be a dialectical materialist should see the political arena as a reflection of the productive one. The DPRK was formed in the context of a bloody anti-imperialist struggle against the Japanese who’s ruling class enriched themselves using the raw materials and productive forces of Korea. Once the Japanese had been expelled, capitalists in the United States immediately realized that profits could be made if they were able to make Korea a colony of their own. Less than a year after gaining their independence in a bloody struggle the DPRK was at war once again. This time against the United States and their far-right Korean ally Syngham Rhee, who would go on to become the first President of South Korea, ruling as a brutal dictator. Rhee’s forces would commit massacres in the war, filling the city of Pyongyang with the dead bodies of communists. The US indiscriminately launched bombing campaigns decimating civilian areas. When all was said and done 20% of the DPRK’s population had been killed in the war. One person for every family of five. While the US claims to this day that the war was an effort to prevent the North Korean political structure from committing human rights abuses, any socialist should know the real goal is always to maximize profits through controlling production in as many places as possible.
 
Now consider the state of Korean Production after the war. The country’s production had been dominated by the Japanese for years, and as happens in all colonized nations, this prevented the Korean productive forces from developing in a diversified way. Then, after finally gaining their independence, the United States leveled their countries infrastructure with bombs, and a United Nations manufactured voting plan split the country in half. At that point, it became the task of the DPRK’s Political structure to effectively manage the nation’s production and rebuild their country after it had been leveled by three years of continued bombing. It was at this point that the US surrounded each of the DPRK’s borders with troops, besides the border that touches China. They then put the country under a brutal sanction regime, hoping to prevent the productive forces of the DPRK from increasing and starve their people into submission. The sanctions have only intensified as capitalism shifts to the domination of Western-backed financial institutions like the IMF and World Bank. Marxist academic Vijay Prashad identifies this as the longest hybrid war carried out by the US in its history as they have now kept the DPRK relatively economically isolated for almost 70 years since slaughtering 20% of the population.
 
Despite these sustained attacks, the DPRK has been able to maintain its independence (with the help of nuclear deterrents), and create a sustainable living situation for its people. Vaush’s claim that the country purposefully isolates itself in order to trade with China is an absurd lie, made even more absurd when you know that the country Vaush is sitting in has banned the DPRK from trading at every border except the one they share with China. Even former US President Jimmy Carter said, “the North Koreans have suffered because the United States has done everything we possibly could to destroy the economy of North Korea.” (Loyal Citizens of Pyonyang). Vaush’s analysis is simply based on a surface-level overview of the North Korean political system, which Vaush labels as “authoritarian” and therefore not worthy of defense from Imperialism. Despite claiming to be a dialectical materialist, his analysis is neither dialectical nor materialist. He does not view the Korean Political structure as something which arose from the relations of production. If he did he would see that in 1910, when the independence struggle was starting, the political structure was forming itself in relation to the conditions of production, that is, in opposition to the Japanese and American capitalists who sought to dominate Korean land and people in order to enrich themselves.
 
 Of course, there are human rights abuses in Korea committed by the State. However, it is truly harmful for a prominent socialist living in the United States to lie to his audience about the DPRK in a fashion which encourages them to believe the US State Department’s narrative. Imperialists do not care about defending people from the human rights abuses of foreign governments. They care about controlling production and selling what they produce. This is the nature of capitalist imperialism which stems from the productive relations at the root of capitalism itself. While socialists have historically understood the true character of imperialism and organized against it, BreadTube’s Vaush lends credence to the simplified narratives the US empire gives about the countries they seek to colonize.
 
While writing a book about rival internet personalities may seem like a silly endeavor, BreadTube Serves Imperialism at least helps to identify trends on the left that are worth fighting back against. While I am unconvinced that BreadTube is funded by the CIA, it does appear to be middle-class radicalism masquerading as socialism. Political and Cultural analysis is often divorced from any analysis of class, and fighting imperialism becomes secondary to fighting reactionary anti-SJW trolls on the internet. Achieving political power for the working class no longer seems to be the goal. In a video detailing how he plans to build socialism, Vaush claims that a President implementing socialist policy via executive order would be questionable to him as it sets an authoritarian precedent. This kind of thinking is entirely at odds with Marxism, which encourages the working class to smash the capitalist state apparatus and use the State's power to seize the means of production from the capitalist class, eventually changing the relations of production, and therefore subsequently the whole of society.
 
It seems to me it’s less likely that BreadTube is CIA funded than it is that they are middle class people who have figured out a financially lucrative way to play video games while giving surface level political and cultural analysis. Similar to Pol Pot, many of them seem to believe in socialism as an ideal, or worse, a popular online trend to be exploited for profit. Vaush’s socialism abandons the working class because he is not a worker and cares more about protecting his own class position than moving society towards a more humane mode of production or combatting capitalist imperialism.
 
Vaush says that the first step in his plan to construct socialism is to change the cultural values of society. He says his job as a socialist commentator is to change the culture of society so that people will become more accepting of socialist values and eventually socialism can be implemented through the ballot box. This is undeniably a distortion of what socialism has meant even before Marx. In the BreadTube conception of socialism the principal contradiction is not between the class who works and the class who owns, but between those who agree with the cultural values of BreadTube and those who do not. In this explanation Vaush reveals that he does not share Marx’s view of the working class as the revolutionary agent of society, who’s position in the economy allows them to wrest societies productive capacities from the hands of capital.
 
In Vaush’s conception of socialism the revolutionary agent is no longer the working class, but Vaush himself. His goal is not to organize the working class so that they can fight for better conditions, but to procure a large audience who can be convinced into sharing his cultural values. The focus is no longer on the relations of production which are the anatomy of society, but the culture and politics which spring from it. This conception strips socialism of its core principles, and replaces it with a toothless version of itself, which is incapable of even recognizing the core contradictions in capitalist society.

In a beautiful contrast to the synthetic socialism of BreadTube Maupin ends the book with a "four point plan to rescue the country" from his socialist think tank, the Center for Political Innovation. 

1. A mass mobilization to rebuild the country
2.Public Ownership of Natural Resources
3. Public Control of Banking
4. an economic bill of rights

Included in these plans are specific proposals such as building a rail between the Midwest and more prosperous regions of the country, or creating a mass mobilization of workers to create jobs and rebuild our crumbling public infrastructure. As someone who has spent their entire life around Midwestern Workers, I can tell you that this is the kind of political plan that will appeal to the American working class. Midwestern workers want jobs, stability, and peace. They will only struggle for a socialism that will make their lives better, not one which seeks to deprogram them and their children from ideas that online twitch streamers deem to be incorrect. The working class is not stupid as they're often made out to be. They simply understand their own interests. And the plan put forth by CPI is exactly the kind of socialist agenda which is needed to convince workers that socialism is the path forward if they want to improve their conditions.
 
While I think Caleb Maupin is early to jump to conclusions of CIA backing, BreadTube Serves Imperialism does thoroughly expose the anti-Marxist- and pro imperialist leanings of many prominent BreadTube creators. These are trends on the left which need to be criticized and struggled against. The purpose of Marxism is to give socialism a scientific base upon which it can be built. BreadTube’s distortion of socialism’s meaning and the history of existing socialist states is incredibly harmful to the overall struggle for socialism. I commend Caleb Maupin for his continued activism in the face of relentless smear campaigns and harassment, and for attempting to present systematic arguments against what he believes to be a harmful trend within left wing politics. Hopefully the Bread Tube creators will give it a read in the spirit of being self-critical, however, I won’t be holding my breath.

What is most remarkable about Nietzsche’s post-war ascendancy in the philosophico-cultural field is that it emerges out of a prior history of his philosophy’s use in legitimating the Nazi and fascist regimes of Europe in the 1930s. Unlike Heidegger, whose Nazism has certainly impacted his readership, Nietzsche’s reputation was able to attain an efficacious divorce from his Nazi appropriation. This was due in part to Walter Kaufman’s ‘rehabilitation’ of Nietzsche for Anglo-American readership after World War II, with his updated English translations and commentaries that cited Nietzsche’s correspondences that contained critical attitudes to anti-Semitism. It has now become nearly almost commonplace that Nietzsche is innocent not only of any association with Nazism, but that any view of him as conservative, reactionary or proto-fascist, because those interpretations were always based on a selectively biased or distorted reading of his work. This legacy is an effect of what Domenico Losurdo calls the ‘hermeneutics of innocence’ – not simply propagated by theorists and commentators, but also editors and translators of the complete works and Nachlass. Losurdo’s epic historiography of Nietzsche’s philosophy extensively exposes the ‘hermeneutics of innocence’ for failing to attend to the historical-social origins and wider context of Nietzsche’s thought. For this reason, Losurdo’s book is long overdue in the English scholarship where ‘innocent’ or trusting readings of Nietzsche have arguably prevailed and become ‘canonical’ (734), and where there is a need for a more ‘critical balance sheet’, especially amidst the rise of the far-right in recent decades that continue to feed on Nietzsche’s work.

What emerges from Losurdo’s reconstruction effort of ‘unifying’ Nietzsche’s thought in its various stages (e.g. ‘Young Nietzsche’, ‘Solitary Rebel’, ‘Enlightener’, ‘Mature Nietzsche’) is a core central argument that there exists from beginning to end in Nietzsche’s prolific output, a politics of ‘aristocratic radicalism’. That is, the seeds of a political ‘movement’ or ‘programme’ to counter ‘two millennia of history’ that has led to a crisis of civilisation in the West (862). The importance of this term ‘aristocratic radicalism’ – a term Nietzsche himself accepted as a legitimate description of his philosophy by friend Georg Brandes (355) – is that it helps Losurdo bridge Nietzsche’s wide-sweeping radical critique of metaphysics and modernity with a specific political project that animates or motivates it. Whereas the ‘aristocratic’ aspect of Nietzsche’s thinking has been noted before, it has often been so from an ‘apolitical’ or anarchistic context from Nietzsche’s assumed descriptive or amoralistic ‘genealogy’. In one sense, Losurdo recognises that Nietzsche is psychologically penetrating in his critique of bourgeois (liberal) society on the basis of a ‘tragic disposition’ and ‘crisis of culture’. And furthermore, that his critique of revolution – which Losurdo analyses in terms of Nietzsche ‘four stages’ – exposes a metaphysical faith in historical progress or objectivity. However, understood under the thread of aristocratic radicalism, Losurdo argues Nietzsche’s form of critique is a ‘metacritique’ that offers no progressive possibilities with modern civilisation. Whilst metacritique adopts and even mimics the ‘nonconformist flag’ of socialism, it does so for the sake of a ‘singular revolution’: the use of genealogical destruction of democratic-slave ideology underpinning modernity and revolution as a ‘precondition for aristocratic social engineering’ (355-56, 979). And it is on this point where Losurdo disturbs the assumed ‘postmodern’ narrative that Nietzsche’s genealogical method was the critique or deconstruction of power itself.

It is not until Part Three of the book that Losurdo elaborates in detail on how aristocratic radicalism equates to a praxis or political programme of ‘social engineering’. The first thing to note about Losurdo use of a ‘wide-context’ method for a reconstruction of Nietzsche’s thinking is that it subtly shows how Nietzsche formulated reactionary ideas without being under the influence of the German nationalism characterised by Bismarck’s term as Chancellor of the Second Reich (‘Germomania’, ‘national liberalism’) and its extension in anti-Semitism (Wagner-Förster-Dühring). For in comparison to these trends, Nietzsche self-consciously distances himself from historical influences, presenting himself as ‘European soul’ and ‘untimely’ or politically ineffectual figure watching events from above with the ‘pathos of distance’ (a la his protagonist Zarathustra). However, to glean from this distance that Nietzsche was a deeply ‘antipolitical’ philosopher because there was no timely political project fit for his vision, is for Losurdo simply perpetuating Nietzsche’s self-mythmaking. The nuances of Nietzsche’s political project for Losurdo can be identified by way of a closer study of how Nietzsche re-theorises a set of reactionary tropes in a radical modern mode rather than in terms of classic conservative counter-revolutionary mode of a ‘return’ to the past. The central tenets consistently crossing over Nietzsche’s stages that outline such a program concern the real meaning of the last stage of his planned but unfinished project of ‘the revaluation of all values’, which Losurdo reconfigures in terms of Nietzsche’s ‘alternative’ revolution (alluded to in The Gay Science) of aristocratic radicalism that becomes defined by the call for a ‘new slavery’, ‘new nobility’ and a ‘new party of life’ (352-57).

In terms of a new slavery, Losurdo compares Nietzsche’s thinking on the topic of slavery via the views of other groups, such as the Junker class in Germany, the American slave-owners and the Czarist monarchy in Russia. Core to all of them was their support of the institution of slavery and aristocratic values of otium et bellum (672-91) – which Losurdo underlines as a ‘watchword’ throughout Nietzsche’s writings. As Losurdo recounts, Nietzsche had formed in his early writings (e.g. ‘The Greek State [1871]’), a view that ‘slavery was the essence of culture’ (678). This view becomes the basis for Nietzsche’s later use of otium et bellum, where war is represented as an aristocratic ‘virtue’ and leisure is characterised by activities exclusive to the aristocracy that also are the source of higher culture (art, music, literature). What the phrase consciously excludes, as Losurdo notes, is labour as the source of virtue or culture – yet paradoxically, Nietzsche acknowledges that otium et bellum will always depend upon the institution of exploited labour of slave-classes in freeing the higher classes from having to work themselves. Therefore, any recovery of aristocratic virtues in a new age of ‘free spirits’ would require a new slave-class rather than the further democratisation of societies. For Losurdo, these links help explain why the crisis of culture was intrinsically connected by Nietzsche to the expansion of otium to the workers that would reduce it to values of peace, pleasure and commodification (929-30).

The key for this project of recovery Losurdo claims is in finding a ‘new nobility’ or model of ‘rank-ordering’ for future societies. In his ‘mature’ period, Nietzsche himself reflected that the problem and aim of his philosophy had always been ‘rank-ordering’ (339, 966). Losurdo refers to Nietzsche’s sought-after model of social hierarchy as a form of ‘transversal racialisation’ (760-62, 780-85), where a social division is always marked between masters and servants and results from the expression of ‘noble’ (well-formed) and ‘base’ (malformed) natures or instincts that in turn determine the meaning of ‘race’. Losurdo distinguishes such a form of ‘rank-ordering’ from the fascist ‘horizontal racialisation’ of biological racism or white supremacy (783). This further explains the peculiarity of Nietzsche’s ‘anti-anti-Semitism’ that in effect even supports the idea of future society ruled by aristocrats and Jewish ‘Big Capital’ (543-45). However, how the noble natures or virtues are generated is an issue in the writings of the ‘mature’ Nietzsche as he refers to aristocratic societies (‘master moralities’) and caste orders of the past (‘Code of Manu’, cited at 793) – which all were ‘corrupted’ by Judaeo-Christianity. Here, Losurdo argues Nietzsche’s transversal racism adopts the caste distinction of ‘Aryans’ and ‘Chandalas’ because it can be applied within one nation or race and thus potentially undermine the modern egalitarian value-base of nation-states.

In seeking to establish a clearer outline of Nietzsche’s ‘political programme of aristocratic radicalism’ that would base it in the socio-political circumstances of his own times, Losurdo compares Nietzsche’s ideas within the horizon of eugenic discourse of the mid-to-late nineteenth century (582-600, 692-710). Here, the later or ‘mature Nietzsche’ (from the Gay Science [1882] to 1889) is central to the comparative argument – given that his concepts of the will to power, eternal return and Ubermensch emerge in this period. Whilst there are some cited exceptions in the published texts of this period, ultimately, the posthumously published fragments of The Will to Power underline much of the source material used by Losurdo to discuss Nietzsche’s thoughts on a ‘new Party of Life’. This phrase affirmatively used by Nietzsche, as Losurdo cites, originates from the social Darwinist (and eugenicist) Frederic Galton (699). In Nietzsche’s hands, the ‘party’ will be of an intellectual vanguard of free Spirits and Übermenschen who will be unafraid to advocate (not necessarily employ) eugenic measures, for in Nietzsche’s own words, ‘the annihilation [vernichtung] of the millions of malformed’ (596-601). Despite the harshness of Nietzsche’s language in these kinds of passages, left-Nietzscheans such as Gianni Vattimo and Gilles Deleuze have attempted to allegorise or metaphorise these radical concepts on life and their relation to the will to power and the eternal return. Losurdo reveals the absurdity of such an approach that would discount any historical-social origins to the theory and ignore the brutality and danger with which Nietzsche seeks to shock his readers. Hence, the usual interpretation of Nietzsche as a ‘life-affirming’ philosopher is brought to bear on a darker political implication by Losurdo’s rendering here, knowing that where Nietzsche says life, he also states ‘the great majority of men have no right to existence’ (Nietzsche 1967: 464).

Bearing on these sections of the book that dare to go into the eugenic question, the issue of the Nazi ‘appropriation’ is also inevitably addressed by Losurdo. He argues that the rehabilitative work of Nietzsche’s postwar editors (namely, Kaufmann and Colli and Montinari) was successful largely due to their attribution to Nietzsche’s sister, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, as the key instigator in rendering a Nazi-friendly Nietzsche in her assemblage and ‘forgery’ of the posthumous editions of The Will to Power (1901-06). However, Losurdo argues such defences of Nietzsche discount several important historical details. Firstly, he claims the official account of Elisabeth’s role in creating Nietzsche’s anti-Semitism is an ‘unsustainable conspiracy theory’ (711-15). Nietzsche’s defenders on this front never address Elisabeth’s own distancing of Nietzsche from anti-Semitism in her biography of him (Förster-Nietzsche 1895-1904). Furthermore, there is never any discussion of the fact that Nietzsche was attracting a right-wing audience of his published works before The Will to Power was released (566, 720-22). Whilst this does not necessarily resolve the issue of Nietzsche’s influence on Nazism, it does reveal something arbitrary about the ‘hermeneutics of innocence’ when it comes to the distinctions it makes over the ideological precursors to the Third Reich.

With 1000+ pages critically re-examining the Nietzsche legacy, can Losurdo claim posthumously himself (having sadly passed in 2018) to have settled the ‘critical balance sheet’ on Nietzsche? Nothing of course written on Nietzsche has ever been settled, and Losurdo himself avows as much, following Gadamer’s own assessment (1001). Whilst Losurdo, of course, was never going to wait on deconstruction or hermeneutics to work out the questions of interpretation by way of their ‘speculative connections’, he makes a point that a gap steadily widens vis-à-vis Nietzsche between the defence of interpretation or theoretical licence and the historical research or record (726-27, 730-33). One of the risks of any unifying method, especially as politically applied, is what it leaves for future readers of Nietzsche. Throughout his account of Nietzsche’s intellectual history, Losurdo continues to remind us that to extract or ignore these unpalatable aspects of Nietzsche’s writings or his influence on the political right, would not actually ‘save’ Nietzsche, nor would it provide a more consistent method for understanding him. For Losurdo, a ‘theoretical surplus’ can only be recognised in Nietzsche’s work from seeing the whole of his philosophy as ‘totus politicus’ (827-28, 949). But it is this premise of unifying a thinker’s philosophy, via an ‘aristocratic’-political project, that would itself be contested by the hermeneuts of innocence. And as Losurdo notes, his contribution here exposes how deep a ‘conflict of the faculties’ exists, between history and philosophy departments who begin, at least in the case of Nietzsche, from different pages.

​This year marks the 57th anniversary of Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man (1964). This text, although plagued with a pessimistic spirit, was a great source of inspiration for the development of the New Left and the May 68 uprisings. The question we must ask ourselves is whether a text that predates the last 50 years of neoliberalism has any pertinent take-aways for today’s revolutionary struggles. Before we examine this, let us first review the context and central observations in Marcuse’s famed work.

Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man[i] (ODM) describes a world in which human rationality is uncritically used to perpetuate the irrational conditions whereby human instrumental ingenuity stifles human freedom and development. In the height of the cold war and potential atomic devastation, Marcuse observes that humanity submitted to the “peaceful production of the means of destruction” (HM, ix). Society developed its productive forces and technology to a scale never before seen. In doing so, it has created the conditions for the possibility of emancipating humanity from all forms of necessity and meaningless toil. The problem is, this development has not served humanity, it has been humanity that has been forced to serve this development. The instruments humans once made to serve them, are now the masters of their creators. The means have kidnapped the ends in a forced swap, the man now serves the hammer, not the other way around.

The observation that our society has developed its productive forces and technologies in a manner that creates the conditions for more human freedom, while simultaneously using the development itself to serve the conditions for our un-freedom, is not a new one. The Marxist tradition has long emphasized this paradox in the development of capitalism. Marcuse’s ODM’s novel contribution is in the elucidation of the depth of this paradox’s submersion, as well as how this paradox has extended beyond capitalism into industrialized socialist societies as well. Let us now examine how Marcuse unfolds the effects of modern capitalist instrumental rationality’s closing of the political universe.

Whereas the capitalism Marx would deal with in the mid-19th century demonstrated that along with clearly antagonistic relations to production, the working and owning class also shared vastly different cultures, modern one-dimensional society homogenizes the cultural differences between classes. Marcuse observes that one of the novelties of one-dimensional society is in its capacity to ‘flatten out’ the “antagonisms between culture and social reality through the obliteration of the oppositional, alien, and transcendent elements in higher culture” (HM, 57). This process liquidates two-dimensional culture and creates the conditions for social cohesion through the commodification, repressive desublimation, and wholesale incorporation and reproduction of these cultural elements into society by mass communication. In essence, the cultural differences the working and owning class had have dissipated, both are integrated in the same cultural logic. This does not mean there is no cultural opposition, but that the cultural opposition is itself “reduced” and “absorbed” into the society. Today, this absorption of the opposition is more visible than ever. Companies that donate millions to police departments post #BLM on their social medias, repressive state apparatuses who assaulted homosexuals in the 60s lavender scares now wave the LGBTQ+ flag, billion-dollar companies like Netflix who take loopholes to not pay taxes make a show on ‘democratic socialist’ Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, etc. All throughout our one-dimensional culture we experience the absorption of an ‘opposition’ whom in being absorbed fails to substantially oppose. This could be reformulated as, ‘all throughout our one-dimensional culture we experience the absorptions of any attempts at a great refusal, whom in being absorbed fail to substantially refuse.’

How did this happen? Well, in a way that paradoxically provides the material confirmation of Marxism as a science (according at least to Popper’s falsifiability requirement), while disconfirming one of its central theses, modern capitalism seems to have mended one of its central grave digging contradictions, the antagonistic contradiction between the proletariat and the owning class. According to Marcuse, modern industrial society has been able to do this because it provided the working masses (and society in general) a “comfortable, smooth, reasonable, democratic unfreedom” (HM, 1). It superimposed on the working masses false needs which “perpetuate [their] toil, aggressiveness, misery,” and alienation for the sake of continuing the never-ending hamster wheel of consumption (HM, 5). In modern industrial society people are sold a false liberty which actively sustains them in a condition of enslavement. As Marcuse states,

In essence, that which has unnecessarily sustained their working life long, exploitative, and alienating, has made their life at home more ‘comfortable.’ This consumerist, Brave New World-like hellish heaven has perpetuated the prevalent ‘happy consciousness’ present in modern industrial society, where your distraction, comfort, and self-identification with your newly bought gadgets has removed the rebellious tendencies that arise, in a Jeffersonian-like manner, when the accumulation of your degradation reaches a certain limit where revolution becomes your panacea. The phenomenon of happy consciousness, says Marcuse, even forces us to question the status of a worker’s alienation, for although at work alienation might continue, he reappropriates a relation to the products through his excessive identification with it when purchased as a consumer. In this manner, the ‘reappropriation’ of the worker’s alienation to the product manifests itself like Feuerbach’s man reappropriating his species-being now that it has passed through the medium (alienated objectification) of God – the commodity here serving the mediational role of God.
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The working mass, as we previously mentioned, is not the only one affected by the effects of one-dimensional society. Marcuse shows that the theorists are themselves participatory and promotional agents of this epoch. Whether in sociology or in philosophy, the general theoretical trends in academia are the same; the dominance of positivist thinking, and the repression and exclusion of negative (or dialectical) thinking. This hegemonized positivist thought presents itself as objective and neutral, caring only for the investigation of facts and the ridding of ‘wrongful thought’ that deals with transcendental “obscurities, illusions, and oddities” (HM, 170). What these one-dimensional theorists do is look at ‘facts’ how they stand dismembered from any of the factors that allowed the fact to be. In doing so, while they present their task as ‘positive’ and against abstractions, they are forced to abstract and reify the fact to engage with it separated from its context. By doing this these theorists limit themselves to engaging with this false concreteness they have conjured up from their abstracting of the ‘fact’ away from its general spatial-temporal context. Doing this not only proves to be futile in understanding phenomena – for it would be like trying to judge a fight after only having seen the last round – but reinforces the status quo of descriptive thinking at the expense of critical and hypothetical thought. As Marcuse states,

Given that “operationalism,” this positivist one-dimensional thought, which in “theory and practice, becomes the theory and practice of containment,” has penetrated the thought and language of all aspects of society, is there an escape to this seemingly closed universe (HM, 17)? As a modest dialectician, Marcuse denies while leaving a slight ‘chance’ for an affirmation. On one end, the text is haunted by a spirit of pessimistic entrapment – not only has the logic of instrumental rationality that sustains one-dimensional society infiltrated all levels of society and human interaction, but the resources are vast enough to quickly absorb or militarily “take care of emergency situations”, viz., when a threat to one-dimensional society arises.
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On the other end, he says that “it is nothing but a chance,” but a chance nonetheless, that the conditions for a great refusal might arise (HM, 257). Although he argues dialectical thinking is important to challenge capitalist positivism, he recognizes dialectical thinking alone “cannot offer the remedy,” it knows on empirical and conceptual grounds “its own hopelessness,” i.e., it knows “contradictions do not explode by themselves,” that human agency through an “essentially new historical subject” is the only way out (HM, 253, 252). The contingency of this ‘chance’ is dependent on the contingency of the great encounter between the “most advanced consciousness of humanity” and the “most exploited force,” i.e., it is the ‘barbarians’ of the third world to whom this position of possible historical subjectivity is ascribed to (HM, 257). Nonetheless, Marcuse is doing a theoretical diagnosis, not giving us a prescriptive normative approach. The slight moment where a glimpse of prescriptive normativity is invoked, he encourages the continual struggle for the great refusal. This is how I read the final reference to Walter Benjamin, “[critical theory] wants to remain loyal to those who, without hope, have given and give their life to the Great Refusal” (Ibid.). Even if we are hopeless, we must give our life to the great refusal. We must be committed, in Huey Newton’s terms, to “revolutionary suicide”, to foolishly struggling even when no glimpse of hope is to be found, for only in struggling when there is no hope, can the conditions for the possibility of hope arise.

There are very few observations in this text to which we can point to as relevant in our context. The central thesis of a comfortable ‘happy consciousness’ which commensurates all classes under a common consumerist culture is a hard sell in a world in which labor has seen its century long fought for gains drawn back over the last 50 years.[ii] Neoliberalism has effectively normalized what William L. Robinson calls the “Wal-Martization of labor,”[iii] i.e., conditions in which work is less unionized, less secure, lower paid, and given less benefits. These conditions, along with the growing polarization of wealth and income, render Marcuse’s analysis of the post-WW2 welfare state impertinent. I lament to say that the most valuable take-away of ODM for revolutionaries today is where it failed, for this failure continues to be quite prevalent amongst many self-proclaimed socialist in the west. This failure, I argue, consist of Marcuse’s equating of capitalist states with socialist experiments.

Marcuse’s ODM unites the socialist and capitalist parts of the world as two interdependent systems existing within the one-dimensional logic that prioritizes “the means over the end” (HM, 53). For Marcuse, the socialist part of the world has been unable to administer in praxis what it claims to be in theory; there is effectively a “contradiction between theory and facts” (HM, 189). Although this contradiction does not, according to him, “falsify the former,” it nonetheless creates the conditions for a socialism that is not qualitatively different to capitalism (Ibid.). The socialist camp, like capitalism, “exploits the productivity of labor and capital without structural resistance, while considerably reducing working hours and augmenting the comforts of life” (HM, 43). In essence, his argument boils down to 20th century socialism being unable to create a qualitatively new alternative to capitalism, and in this failure, it has replicated, sometimes in forms unique to it, the mechanisms of exploitation and opposition-absorption (through happy consciousness, false needs, military resistance, etc.), that are prevalent in the capitalist system.

There are a few fundamental problems in Marcuse’s equalization, which all stem, I will argue, from his inability to carry dialectical thinking onto his analysis of the socialist camp. In not doing so, Marcuse himself reproduces the positivistic forms of thought which dismember “facts” from the factors which brought them about. Because of this, even if the ‘facts’ in both camps appear the same, claiming that they are so ignores the contextual and historical relations that led to those ‘facts’ appearing similar.

For Marcuse to say that the socialist camp, like the capitalist, was able to recreate the distractingly comfortable forms of life that make for a smoother exploitation of workers, he must ignore the conditions, both present and historical, that allowed this fact to arise. Capitalism was able to achieve this ‘comfortable’ life for its working masses because it spent the last three centuries colonizing the world to ensure that the resources of foreign lands would be disposable to western capital. This process of western capitalist enrichment required the genocide of the native (for its lands), and the enslavement of the African (for its labor) and created the conditions for the 20th century struggle between western capital for dividing up the conquered lands and bodies of the third world. But even with this historical and contextual process of expropriation and exploitation, the fruits of this were not going to the working classes of the western nations because of the generosity of the owning class, regardless of how much they benefited from creating this ‘labor aristocracy.’ Rather, the only reason why this process slightly came to benefit the popular classes in the US was a result of century long labor struggles in the country, most frequently led by communists, socialists, and anarchist within labor unions.

The socialist camp, on the other hand, industrialized their backwards countries in a fraction of the time it took the west, without having to colonize lands, genocide natives, or enslave blacks. On the contrary, regardless of the mistakes that were made, and the unfortunate effects of these, the industrialization process in the socialist camp was inextricably linked to the empowering of the peripheral subjects, whether African, Asian, Middle-Eastern, or Indo-American, that had been under the boot of western colonialism and imperialism for centuries. The ‘third-world’ Marcuse leaves the potential role of historical subjectivity to, was only able to sustain autonomy because of the solidarity and aid – political, military, or economic in kind, it received from the socialist camp. Those who were unable, for various reasons, to establish relations with the socialist camp, replicated, in a neo-colonial fashion, the relations they had with their ‘previous’ metropoles. In fact, history showed that the ‘fall’ of this camp led the countries in the third world that sustained an autonomous position (thanks to the comradely relations they established with the socialist world), to be quickly overturned into subjected servitude to western capital.

By stating that the socialist camp was unable to affect a materialization in praxis of its theory, and as such, that it was not qualitatively different from capitalism (making the equating of the two possible), Marcuse effectively demonstrates his ignorance, willful or not, of the geopolitical situation of the time. Socialism in the 20th century could not create its ideal qualitatively new society while simultaneously defending its revolution from military, economic, and biowarfare attacks coming from the largest imperial powers in the history of humanity. Liberation cannot fully express itself under these conditions, for, the liberation of one is connected to the liberation of all. The communist ideal whereby human relations are based “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need,” is only realizable under the global totalizing disappearance of all forms of exploitation and oppression. It is idealist and infantile to expect this reality to arise in a world where capitalism exists even at the farthest corner of the earth, even less in a world where the hegemonized form of global relations is capitalistic.

Nonetheless, even Marcuse is forced to admit that the socialist camp was able to create a comfortable life for its working masses. But, unlike Marcuse argues, this comfort in the socialist camp cannot be equated with comfort in the capitalist camp. Not only are the conditions that led to the comfort in each fundamentally different (as just previously examined), but the comfort itself, as a fact, was also radically different. In terms of job security, housing, healthcare, education, childcare, and other forms of government provided social securities, the comfort in the socialist camp was significantly higher than the comfort experienced by the working masses in the welfare social democracies in Europe, and tenfold that of the comfort experienced by the working masses in the US. When to this you add the ability for political participation through worker councils and the party, the prevalent spirit of solidarity that reigned, and the general absence of racism and crime, the foolishness of the equalization is further highlighted. Nonetheless, the comparison must not be made just between the capitalist and socialist camp, but between the conditions before and after the socialist camp achieved socialism. Doing so allows one to historically contextualize the achievements of the socialist camp in terms of creating dignified and freer lives for hundreds of millions of people. For these people, Marcuse’s comments are somewhere between laughable and symbolic of the usual disrespect of western intelligentsia.

Although Marcuse was unable to live long enough to see this, the fall of the socialist camp, and the subsequent ‘shock therapy’ that went with it, not only devastated the countries of the previous socialist camp – drastically rising the rates of poverty, crime, prostitution, inequality, while lowering the standard of living, life expectancy, and the opportunities for political participation – but also the countries of the third world and those of the capitalist camp themselves! With the threat of communism gone, the third world was up for grabs again, and the first world, no longer under the pressure of the alternative that a comfortable working mass in the socialist camp presented, was free to extend the wrath of capital back into its own national popular classes, eroding century long victories in the labor movement and creating the conditions for precarious, unregulated, and more exploitative work.

​Works like One-Dimensional Man, which take upon the task of criticizing and equating ‘both sides,’ do the work of one side, i.e., of capitalism, in creating a ‘left’ campaign of de-legitimizing socialist experiments. This process of creating a ‘left’ de-legitimation campaign is central for the legitimation of capital. This text (ODM) is the quintessential example of one of the ways capitalism absorbs its opposition by placing it as a midpoint between it and the real threat of a truly socialist alternative. It is because the idealistic and non-dialectical logic of capital infiltrates these ‘left’ anti-communist theorists that they can condemn and equate socialist experiments with capitalism. If there is a central takeaway from Marcuse’s text, it is to guard ourselves against participating in this left-anticommunism theorizing that prostitutes itself for capital to create the conditions whereby the accidental ‘faults’ of pressured socialist experiments are equated with the systematic contradictions in capitalist countries. In a world racing towards a new cold war, it is the task of socialists in the heart of the empire to fiercely reject and deconstruct the state-department narratives of socialist and non-socialist experiments attempting to establish themselves autonomously outside of the dominion of US imperialism. Acknowledging how Marcuse failed to do this in ODM helps us prevent his mistake.

In his book, “The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity” the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek puts forth the view that Marxists can no longer make a frontal attack on the institutions of imperialism, thus a feint under the cover of Christianity is necessary. Zizek calls himself "a materialist through and through" and believes that Christianity has a "subversive kernel" which can only be demonstrated by a materialist analysis. But he also holds that the relationship is so intimate that "to become a true dialectical materialist, one should go through the Christian experience."

Zizek maintains that for "intelligent Marxists" the most interesting questions are not those about change and development – but about permanence and stability. Why has Christianity persevered from ancient times? We "find it in feudalism, capitalism, socialism..." etc. The clue is to be found in the writings of the Catholic writer G.K. Chesterton who wrote that despite the rigid ethical and moral demands of the Church and its priests, an inhuman "outer ring" it actually protected the masses of people where one would find "the old human life dancing like children and drinking wine like men; for Christianity is the only frame for pagan freedom." Pagan freedom is another term for joy in living.

This may explain the persistence of Christianity, but why must Marxists have the Christian experience? This is too unrealistic a claim. Do Asian Marxists from non-Christian cultural backgrounds have to convert to Christianity in order to have the "Christian experience" before fully understanding dialectical materialism?

Other religions have also been persistent. Hinduism, for example, is older than Christianity, as is Buddhism, and has adapted to the modern world. Zizek does discuss some of these other religions but is on shaky ground. He seems to think, for instance, that Bodhisattva is the name of a person rather than being a title used to describe Mahayana Buddhist “deities”.

Zizek’s "materialism" or at least his "Marxism" is also all mixed up with categories borrowed from Lacanian psychoanalysis. And here is a digression based on W.L.Reese’s work Dictionary of Philosophy and Religion: Eastern and Western Thought: Jacques Lacan (1901-1981) was a French psychoanalyst who thought the unconscious Id expresses itself in language because it is structured like a language. The Ego should recognize the depth and plurality of meanings of the Id. This is hard to do as the Ego = our personal identity, our conscious self which is only composed of the info allowed through by the Censor. Lacan wants to subvert not strengthen the Ego. The Ego is a mess due to problems in infancy and it is this screwed up infantile Ego, surviving into adulthood, that must be subverted by the usual psychoanalytic methods.

Using this Lacanian world view plus "Marxism," Zizek decides that by using a "perverse" version of Christianity leftists can smuggle in, as it were, progressive ideas and put them into play in our society. Having concluded that Marxism cannot get a hearing in our culture this is really the only way that we can advance the revolutionary cause. Marxists in Christian clothing.

No doubt that because Christianity originated among oppressed national minorities and slaves there are many features of progressive social justice that can be deduced from it. The battle against the Christian right could be more easily waged by showing that its political and social formulations are contrary to Christian teachings and the logic of Christianity.

In this respect Zizek has a point. But it is not necessary for Marxists to go through a Christian moment themselves. By the way, the "puppet" in the book’s title is Christian theology – we (the “dwarf”) will use theology to forward our secular ends – the dwarf will use the puppet.

People interested in philosophy and religion may  want to read this book. I have only scratched the surface in this brief article. At the end, Zizek says the point of his book is to show that Christianity at its core reveals the secret of the passion of the Christ (one that Mel Gibson missed).​

When Christ dies after asking his Heavenly Father why He has abandoned him, the historical secret is that there is no Heavenly Father. So is “Christ” just hallucinating? There is no "Other" to judge us. We are responsible. This is the perverse core of Christianity and Zizek takes us on an interesting tour of the history of Western thought to get there. You might not like all of the stops along the way, or even the final destination, but you may well enjoy the trip. Nevertheless, I don’t think we will ever start preaching Marxism-Leninism-Jesus Christ Thought.

In Socialism Betrayed, Keeran and Kenny discuss the collapse of the Soviet Union (SU). While I think they fail to accomplish their aim they have produced a narrative history of the last years of the SU. Their thesis is, the SU collapsed "because of the policies that Mikhail Gorbachev pursued after 1986." This is reminiscent of the Great Man Theory of history put to rest by Plekhanov’s "The Role of the Individual in History."

The book relates the Byzantine intrigues of the Politburo and a dozen or so men in the leadership. The authors’ heroes are Stalin (some qualifications are offered for his darker policies), Molotov, Malenkov and the early Brezhnev (who in his last five years "played no active part in state or Party life") and Andropov and finally Yegor Ligachev. The "axis of evil" that betrayed the SU runs from Bukharin through Khrushchev to Gorbachev.

These two trends were representative of two trends in the economy. The authors’ heroes represented the first economy – i.e., the state-controlled industrial economy. The "axis of evil" represented the illegal second economy, which was a black market in consumer goods: articles of clothing, household articles, sunglasses, rip-offs of Western "pop music" and knickknacks. How the knickknack market found representatives on the Politburo and was able to overcome the socialized industrial sector makes up a large part of the book.

This struggle is reduced to rivalries among the Soviet elite. The working class is barely mentioned in the recounting of events. Why does this emphasis on individuals rather than historic forces always take a back seat to great personalities? Why hasn’t the Soviet working class more voice or participation in this book?

Economic problems, political and ideological stagnation and imperialist pressure did not cause the collapse, the authors say. That was the result of "the specific reform policies of Gorbachev and his allies" (as if the problems and stagnation were not the cause of the reform policies). They hold this view because they believe "the subjective factor is vastly more important in socialism than in capitalism." Elsewhere in discussing the economic problems of the Brezhnev era they write: "Even more important than the objective problems were the subjective ones: the problems of policy...." But policy is a reflection of objective reality. Policies are the result of objective circumstances and can never be "more important." In fact, "wrong" policies themselves have an objective basis.

The authors end by discussing six alternative explanations of the collapse and then their own. The six explanations they reject are 1) flaws of socialism, 2) popular opposition, 3) external factors, 4) bureaucratic counter-revolution, 5) lack of democracy and over-centralization, and 6) the Gorbachev factor. Most agree that one and two were not factors. The remaining four, I think, should not be approached as independent categories. All four of these explanations should be seen as a dialectical unity. The external factors (imperialist pressure) plus the backward initial economic conditions led to a lack of democracy and over-centralization which resulted in an isolated Party leadership: a leadership that became bureaucratic and ultimately counter-revolutionary. The seeds of the collapse do not just go back to the Khrushchev era (or to Bukharin), but are to be traced back at least to 1919 and the failure of the revolutions in the West.

The authors maintain they have a different explanation. But the thrust of the book places it in category six – the Gorbachev factor. They write: "What caused the Soviet collapse? Our thesis is that the economic problems, external pressures, and political and ideological stagnation challenging the Soviet Union in the early 1980s, alone or together, did not produce the Soviet collapse. Instead it was triggered by the specific reform policies of Gorbachev and his allies."

The last pages of this book reveal a deeper cause in the bureaucratic counter-revolution theory. The authors maintain the collapse was not inevitable but was the result "of a triumph of a certain tendency within the revolution itself. It was a tendency rooted at first in the peasant nature of the country and later in a second economy, a sector that flourished because of consumer demands unsatisfied by the first economy and because of the failure of authorities to appreciate the danger it represented and to enforce the law against it." They end where one must actually begin. Why couldn’t the first economy satisfy the need for consumer goods, why did the bureaucracy foment counter-revolution? These are the important unanswered questions the international movement is still grappling with. I would also add that one of the weaknesses of this book is that there is no reference to the views of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation. In any event the discussion of why the SU collapsed has not been put to rest by this book.

Socialism Betrayed: Behind the Collapse of the Soviet Union.
By Roger Keeran and Thomas Kenny
New York, International Publishers, 2004.

​A common line of argument from the contemporary American left is that “socialism has never been tried.” It’s understandable that Western socialists would make this argument to members of the US proletariat, who have been deeply affected by years of red scare propaganda. This argument however, ignores the millions who have struggled and died in an effort to move beyond the contradictions of capitalism. It diminishes the herculean effort which was needed to transform Cuba from an agrarian society, managed by Western multinationals and their dictator Batista, into its current form, a Nation who recently sent an army of doctors all around the globe to fight Covid. Most importantly, this argument that socialism has never been tried, ignores the role played by Western imperialism in destroying, or attempting to destroy,  any and all attempts at building an alternative economic system to capitalism. What Vijay Prashad does in Washington Bullets, is concisely detail just how the US and their allies go about crushing economic and political enemies. The book serves as a guide for a younger generation of socialists to understanding the tools and techniques of the imperialists, which have for years been used to maintain what US officials have called  ‘Preponderant Power’, or in other words, economic, political, and military domination of the entire planet.
 
As Karl Marx wrote his theories on capitalism in the 19th century, he predicted that capitalism would take hold globally, the productive forces of Nations would increase, and eventually workers revolutions would sweep the old system aside, replacing it with communism. While Marx was not dogmatic in this view, and became more critical of colonialism and imperialism later in life, it is safe to say he did not predict the level of capitalist imperialism which would emerge, and be analyzed by Vladimir Lenin in the early 20th century. Rather than the productive forces of all nations increasing as capitalism developed, Lenin found that Imperialist Nations actively halt the development of productive forces in the country's they exploit. Take for example Venezuela, who for years saw their most abundant natural resource, oil, extracted by British Dutch Shell and Rockefeller Standard Oil. The profits from this oil flowed to Western Private interests, while Venezuela was left with underdeveloped industry, and an entirely oil dependent economy. It was in this context that Venezuela sought to build socialism through reclaiming their natural resources, while simultaneously facing an all out assault of sanctions and coup attempts from the US. The role imperialism plays in the present struggle for socialism is immense. Prahsad’s book analyzes both the impact of imperialism, as well as its changing forms, with the explicit goal of giving socialists a better idea of how to combat it.
 
In Part One of Three, Prashad talks of Imperialism’s change of form, which was seen after World War II. Following the war, national liberation movements swept across the global south, primarily in Africa and Southern Asia. The Japanese empire and European powers, weakened from the destruction of the Second World War, began losing their grip on their liberation minded colonies. Vietnam, Korea, Syria, Algeria and many more would declare independence following the war, with most only doing so after years of organized struggle. These national liberation movements created a shift from traditional colonialism, to what is usually called neocolonialism. Many nations did achieve their national independence and legal recognition as a nation, what Prashad calls ‘flag independence’. However, the economic and political systems of these nations remain largely under the control of Western private interests. The events of the war, and the National liberation movements, forced a change in form of Western Imperialism. The United States was now the dominant empire, and their primary goal was ‘preponderant power’. A phrase Prashad takes directly from State Department documents, which essentially means the US will seek to be the world’s sole superpower, and enforce their own preferred political and economic systems wherever is seen fit.
 
The United Nations was created following the war in 1945, with the publicly stated goal of maintaining world peace, and preventing any one nation from acting belligerently. However, in the founding charters of the UN, Prashad finds Western Nations had already crafted the legal framework to justify imperialist aggression. Article 41 allows for sanctions and economic disruption by UN member states, and Article 42 explicitly allows for the use of armed force against sovereign nations. Despite this, the UN security council, made up of France, UK, China, USSR, and the US, held the power to veto acts of unwarranted aggression by fellow member states. The first 56 vetoes were made by the USSR in an effort to protect liberation movements, which often had socialist tendencies, from Western aggression. Later in the book, Prashad describes how Saddam Huessein wondered why the USSR hadn’t come to his aid as the US bombed Iraq to a pre-industrial state in 1990. He was unaware that the USSR had already begun its collapse, and smaller nations like Iraq would no longer have a shield from Washington’s aggression.

​Part Two of Washington Bullets begins with a nine point manual on how the US goes about enacting regime change against those who defy their interests. Prashad uses the events of the 1954 CIA backed coup of Jocobo Arbenz in Guatemala, and a myriad of other examples, to describe the repeated strategies used by the CIA, and other regime change arms of the US State Department. There are patterns of imperialism which play out again and again. Understanding these patterns is vital when analyzing what the State Department is currently looking to do to their enemies such as China, Venezuela, and Iran.
 
The first step in any US regime change effort is to manufacture public support for intervention. This involves a propaganda campaign not just at home, but also within the target Nation. Prior to the coup in Guatemala, journalists from NYT, Chicago Tribune, and TIME all received payments from the United Fruit, the multinational company which dominated Guatemala. In reality Arbenz was a popular leader who sought to enact minor land reforms. In the media he was portrayed as a dangerous communist, drunk with power. As the US corporate media fell in line, the CIA filled the streets of Guatemala with anti-Arbenz propaganda. This strategy of propagandizing both the American Public, and the people of whatever country the US is targeting, has been repeated again and again. Libya, Syria, and Venezuela have all seen money from the West used to bolster right wing media campaigns inside their borders. Control of public opinion has been one of the most vital components to US regime change efforts from the beginning.
 
Step four in Prashad’s manual of regime change is to “Make the Economy Scream.” A reference to directions given by Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon to the CIA in 1970, as the US looked to overthrow the Democratically elected Salvadore Allende in Chile. Here we see a vital component of what Prashad calls ‘hybrid war.’ Isolating from the world those Nations who seek to develop themselves, and reclaim their own natural resources. Sanctions and blockades are used to starve smaller nations of financing and trade, as corporate media outlets point and say “look. Don’t you see socialism clearly doesn’t work?” US sanctions recently led to many deaths in Venezuela and Iran during the Covid-19 pandemic, as the US has continued their murderous regime change efforts, with techniques they designed almost 70 years ago.
 
All these strategies of the empire, which Prashad lays in the manual for regime change, have the shared goal of destabilizing target nations. If the State Department thinks that starving Venezuelan civilians via sanctions will increase political unrest, they will not think twice about enacting those sanctions. There is no consideration given to human rights, democracy, or whatever it is that corporate media claims to be the goal of US foreign policy. The true goal is destabilization of the target Nation, and the replacement of their government, with one which will favor the interests of Western multinational corporations. Prashad uses the term ‘hybrid wars’ to describe the sustained regime change efforts enacted by the US around the world to achieve these goals.
 
In Part Three Professor Prashad gives a short history of imperialism’s change in form following the collapse of the Soviet Union, and some analysis of US regime change efforts since that time. Without the Soviet umbrella of protection, Prashad says  “interventions from the west came like a tsunami.” He writes of the aforementioned bombing campaign against Iraq, which would have previously been strongly opposed by the USSR. Following their ruthless bombing of Iraq, the US went on to sanction the country for 13 years, before launching a full scale invasion, killing millions of people, before occupying the country where they remain today. The collapse of the Soviet Union increased the US capacity for achieving Preponderant Power. By the early 2000s Western Propagandists had coined the term “war on terror” which took the place of the “cold war” as the justification for invading a smaller country, and killing hundreds of their people.
​
In this section Prashad also covers the current global financial system, which was essentially hand crafted by the US, and Western private entities. Global financial organizations, such as the IMF and World Bank largely control which countries will receive financing. IMF financing to Chile was halted after Allende’s rise to power, only to be increased again when the despotic dictator Agusto Pinochet seized control of the country with a great deal of help from the CIA. In addition, the financial institutions have become notorious for their structural adjustment programs. Promising to finance only Nations who promise to cut social spending, and implement other neoliberal economic reforms. Countries who accept these deals often see the interest on their loans hiked to absurd levels, leaving them trapped in debt, and at the mercy of the Western dominated global financial system. This debt trapping technique is one of the many issues socialist leader Thomas Sankara railed against as President of Burkina Faso, prior to his being murdered by French backed forces in 1987.
 
Given the level of corporate dominance in the global economic and political systems, Western interests have developed more covert methods of regime change, which they employ when possible. Non Governmental Organizations (NGOs) have long played a role in regime change efforts, posing as unbiased observers, while doing all they can to destabilize target Nations and promote Western media narratives. Prashad focuses on Haiti, who have more NGOs than any country on Earth. When priest and socialist Jean Bertrand-Aristide became the first democratically elected Haitian leader in history, he was quickly ousted by what essentially amounted to a coup by NGO. After a struggle for power, and a second coup of Aristide in 2004, Haiti became a “republic of NGOs.” A country with no real state, essentially being directly governed by Western Interests. To this day Haiti remains one of the poorest countries in the world.
 
In addition to coup by NGO, Prashad touches on what he calls ‘lawfare’ or the use of the legal system to dismantle left wing movements. For US based socialists the FBI and Police crackdown on the Black Panther party should come to mind. Intellectual leaders such as Fred Hampton were murdered, while many others were sent to jail on trumped up charges. Prashad uses the example of Brazil, where the left wing Lula da Silva was put in jail on charges of corruption by a judge who would later be a member of the far right Bolsonaro Government, who took power in Lula’s absence. Under Bolsonaro’s Western backed leadership, multinationals have been given free reign to pillage the Amazon rainforest of resources.
 
Professor Vijay Prashad is one of the most well read Marxist intellectuals alive today. The fact that his books are published in english should be considered a gift to those of us living in the heart of the US empire. In a country where we find ourselves surrounded by imperialist and anti-communist propaganda, a book like Washington Bullets cuts directly through the bullshit. Prashad often says that he writes not to simply explain history, but to discover how it can be changed. This book is a concise history of US imperialism and regime change since the second world war, and paints a clear picture of how these things are carried out.
 
American socialists who read this book should keep in mind the recent actions of the State Department, and look for patterns in their actions. My upcoming essay on US imperialism in 2021 seeks to identify the current targets of regime change, and the specific strategies being used against them. To recognize the patterns of imperialism which we’ve seen time and time again. US State Department representatives now tell us Iran seeks to proliferate nuclear weapons, as they wrongfully accused Iraq of doing before launching a murderous invasion that costs trillions of dollars. Blurry satellite images of human rights abuses in China are being used to call for increased sanctions and military presence. How quickly we have forgotten the fake satellite images used to justify bombing Iraq to a pre-industrial state in 1990. Western backed NGOs in Venezuela cry fraudulent elections, and beg the US to restore Democracy, as the US crushes the country under embargo, and launches coup attempts through Colombia. Each of these situations echo the past regime change efforts carried out by the Western imperialist powers.
 
Washington Bullets is a book that every US socialist should read carefully. It is high time we recognize the lies of our ruling class, and refuse to send any more of our children to fight and die in their wars for profit. To do this we must understand the tools and tactics of the deceitful imperialists, so that we may know how to fight them. Vijay Prashad’s Washington Bullets is a wonderful tool for doing just that!

​In her 2020 text Marxism and Intersectionality: Race, Gender, Class and Sexuality under Contemporary Capitalism, Ashley J. Bohrer sets out to demystify the erroneous conception that the traditions of Marxism and Intersectionality are incompatible. In finding that in academia the interactions between these two traditions have been “grounded more in caricature than in close reading,” Bohrer sets out to expose and correct what she calls the “synecdochal straw person fallacy” present in the way each tradition has interacted with the other (AB, 14, 20). In noting that both traditions represent active ways of “reading, understanding, thinking, and dreaming beyond the deep structures of exploitation and oppression that frame our world,” her starting point is historical, i.e., she begins by outlining the historical precursors of the intersectional tradition (AB, 21). In doing so, she situates the origins of intersectional thought in spaces inseparably linked to communist and socialist activism, organizations, and parties. Nonetheless, it is important to note before we continue that her goal is not to ‘synthesize’ the two traditions, or to subsume the one under the other, but to articulate a ‘both-and’ approach, in which the conditions for the possibility of “theoretical coalitions between perspectives, in which the strengths of each perspective are preserved” arises (AB, 23).
           
​Bohrer sets the groundwork for her project by situating the historical unity of the intersectional tradition and socialism. She begins by examining the 19th century thinkers Maria Stewart, Sojourner Truth, and Ida B. Wells-Barnett. Bohrer argues that these three central foremothers of the intersectional tradition had concerns not limited to the dynamics of race and gender, i.e., the three understood that concerns of “labor, class, capitalism, and political economy” were inseparable from concerns of race and gender (AB, 35). In Stewart she demonstrates the presence of an early (1830s) notion of surplus value at hand in the analysis of enslaved black women’s work, who she saw as performing the labor that allowed for the profits of the owner. In Truth she examines her lucid development of the structural role reproductive labor played for capitalism, and more specifically, how the exploitation of this reproductive labor takes a variety of forms according to race. Lastly, in Wells-Barnett she examines how her groundbreaking work on lynching not only demystifies the narrative of the black male rapist, but postulates that “lynching was predominantly a tool of economic control,” used to keep the black community economically subordinated to white capitalist (AB, 40).

Bohrer proceeds to examine the three key intersectional forerunners of the first half of the 20th century: Louise Thompson Patterson, Claudia Jones, and W.E.B. Du Bois, all which were at some point members of the Communist Party. In Patterson we see the development of the concept of ‘triple exploitation’ used to describe the unique position black working-class women have under capitalism, placing them in a context in which they are exploited as workers, women, and blacks. Influenced by Patterson’s notion of ‘triple-exploitation’ and the Marxist-Leninist concept of ‘superexploitation,’ Claudia Jones refurnishes and expands on both – reconceptualizing the former as ‘triple-oppression,’ and redefining the latter to account for the uniquely exploitative position black women occupy under capitalism. In postulating black women’s position as ‘superexploited,’ Jones considers black women, not the white industrial proletariat, the “most revolutionary segment of the working class” (AB, 50). Lastly, in Du Bois we see expressed a profound understanding that race, class, and gender are tied with “simultaneous significance” to the structural contradictions of capitalism (AB, 51). This simultaneous significance of the three requires an individual and systematic understanding of oppression to be fully comprehended.

Bohrer closes out her historical contextualization by looking at the last half of the 20th century. She begins by looking at the three approaches to thinking about the relations of class, race, and gender that arise in the 1960s-80s. These three are: double and triple jeopardy, standpoint theory, and sexist racism. Bohrer argues that although these three played a great role in the development of the intersectional tradition, they are still “distinct from a full theory of intersectionality,” for they contain, in different ways, the reifying, homogenizing, and essentializing ways of thinking of race, class, and gender that intersectionality attempts to move beyond (AB, 35). Bohrer then examines the anti-capitalist critiques present in the intersectional thought of the Combahee River Collective, Patricia Hill Collins, Angela Davis, bell hooks, and Audre Lorde. In the Combahee River Collective, we see the inclusion of class, race, gender, and sexuality as interlocking systems of oppression that “permeate all moments of capitalist exploitation” (AB, 74). The same sentiment, conceptualized in various ways, permeates throughout the work of Collins (matrix of domination), Davis, hooks (white supremacist capitalist patriarchy), and Lorde (white male heterosexual capitalism).

Having contextualized the historical unfolding of the intersectional tradition, Bohrer moves on to examine what she considers to be the best forms of intersectionality, i.e., the ones that do not leave class behind, and the best forms of Marxism, i.e., the ones that do not consider race, sex, and other forms of oppression secondary and epiphenomenal to class-based exploitation. Beyond this, she also examines the disputes each side has with the other, and how these end up being largely based on synecdochal straw person fallacies.

Bohrer begins by attempting to lay out as refined a definition as possible to the question ‘what is intersectionality?’. To get to the refined, Bohrer starts with the general, stating that broadly “intersectionality is a term that brings together a variety of positions on the relationships between modes of oppression and identity in the contemporary world” (AB, 81). From here, Bohrer goes on to postulate five definitions of intersectionality as presented by some of its key theorists: Kimberlé Crenshaw, Leslie McCall, Patricia Hill Collins, Ange-Marie Hancock, and Vivian May. By showing there is disputes between intersectional thinkers on how intersectionality should be thought of, Bohrer breaks the conceptions of intersectionality as a homogenous theoretical approach, and demonstrates that there is plurality, disputes, and discussion actively happening within the tradition. Nonetheless, she marks six central postulates of intersectional thinking that permeate in most intersectional theorists. These are: 1- anti single axis thinking – the various forms of oppression are enmeshed within each other and inseparable; 2- anti ranking oppressions – no one oppression is any more important than another, i.e., being constructed relationally, you cannot solve one without solving the others; 3- Think of oppression in multiple registers – structurally, individually, representationally, etc.; 4- Identity is politically and theoretically important – identity is never pure, it is always “multi-pronged, group-based, historically-constituted, and heterogenous;” 5- Inextricable link of theory and practice – activism and the theoretical are linked; and 6- Power is described and attacked – intersectionality is not neutral, it is both “descriptive and normative,” it describes and critiques power (AB, 93, 95).

Having laid out the plurality of approaches, and also the unifying central postulates of intersectionality, Bohrer proceeds to examine the ways in which some Marxist theorists distort and fallaciously critique intersectionality. I will here lay what I take to be the six (out of eight) most important and frequent critiques of intersectionality, and the responses Bohrer gives to each. The first critique argues that intersectionality is individualistic, and thus, in line with the ethos of capitalism. But, as we saw in the previous postulates, identity for the intersectional theorist is group based and historically constructed. The second critique reduces intersectionality to postmodernism and poststructuralism. In doing so, Bohrer references Sirma Bilge in arguing that what is taking place is the “whitening of intersectionality,” i.e., a framework originated and guided by black women is subsumed under a white man predominated field (AB, 107). The third critique postulates intersectionality as liberal multiculturalism, falling within the logic of neoliberalism. Bohrer argues that although intersectional discourse is whitewashed and misused by neoliberal representationalism, intersectional theorists are ardent critics of this and fight to sustain the radical ethos of intersectionality. The fourth critique argues that intersectionality does not sufficiently account for issues of class. Bohrer contends, through Linda Alcoff, that in order to properly understand class, one must understand it enmeshed in race, sex, and gender. The fifth critique argues that intersectional theorists fail to account for the historical causes of that which they describe and critique. Bohrer responds that the intersectional theorists do account for the historical causes of the matrices of domination, but that instead of attributing the cause to one thing, they take a multi-dimensional approach. The last critique we will examine states that intersectionality multiplies identities and makes it harder for solidarity to arise. Bohrer’s response to this is that we must refrain from thinking of solidarity as the lowest common denominator of sameness, solidarity must be thought of as the building of coalitions of difference, united by a sameness in interest, not identity.

Bohrer now embarks on repeating with Marxism what she just did with intersectionality. She begins by devoting her time to demonstrating that what she calls the reductive ‘orthodox story’ of Marxism, which postulates Marxism “as a fundamentally class-oriented, economically-reductionist, teleological theory of waged factory labor,” is not the only form of Marxism (AB, 124). Bohrer approaches this task by postulating seven assumptions the ‘orthodox story’ makes, and then responds to each in a way that demonstrates how Marx, Engels, and queer, feminist, anti-racist, and anti-imperialist Marxists have addressed these questions free of the reductive assumptions of the ‘orthodox story.’ Some of these non-reductive approaches include: 1- looking beyond waged labor to examine the labor that is structurally necessary but unpaid; 2- looking at how the division of labor is racialized and sexualized; 3- examining the necessary role violence and oppression attendant in colonialism, land expropriation, and slavery played in the development of capitalism, not just as a function, but as an integral structural part of the system; 4- looking at the non-homogeneity of capitalism, i.e., examining how it can take different forms; and 5- looking at the politico-social apparatuses developed to reinforce these practices.

Building on the non-reductive forms of Marxism she just espoused, Bohrer now embarks on the task of showing how many critiques of Marxism coming from the intersectional tradition, like the Marxist critique of intersectionality previously examined, are based largely on misunderstandings or understandings limited to the reductive ‘orthodox story.’ Concretely, Bohrer examines four common criticisms of Marxism from intersectional theorist:

​Bohrer argues these critiques are largely limited in scope to the ‘orthodox story’ of Marxism which she has already established is merely one form out of many in the Marxist tradition. These intersectional critiques of Marxism become unwarranted when the form of Marxism examined is of the non-reductive type she appraised in chapter three.
           
​The theoretically novel portion of her text begins by her looking at the relationship between exploitation and oppression. She argues that instead of reducing one onto the other, like has been done by the intersectional and Marxist traditions in the past, we must conceive of the two as having an ‘elective affinity,’ i.e., a “kind of consonance or amenability.” (AB, 200) This means, she argues, that we must think of the two as ‘equiprimordial’, i.e., related to each other as “equally fundamental, equally deep-rooted, and equally anchoring of the contemporary world” (AB, 199). In order to fully understand a phenomenon in capitalism we must understand how exploitation and oppression “feed off and play into one another as mutually reinforcing and co-constituting aspects of the organization of capitalist society” (AB, 201). Beyond this, she argues that “a full understanding of how class functions under capitalism requires understanding how exploitation and oppression function equiprimordially” (Ibid.). Therefore, four central points must be understood to capture capitalism non-reductively: “1) capitalism cannot be reduced to exploitation alone; 2) capitalism cannot be reduced to class alone; 3) class cannot be reduced to exploitation alone; 4) race, gender, sexuality cannot be reduced to oppression alone” (AB, 204).
           
Although the equiprimordial lens Bohrer introduces for thinking of the relationship between oppression and exploitation may be helpful, the development of the concept is stifled by her limited understanding of the notion of class in Marx’s work. Bohrer argues that instead of limiting class to being constituted only through exploitation, like in Marx, thinking of class equiprimordially allows us to see it constituted through exploitation and oppression. To expand on her point Bohrer references Rita Mae Brown who states that, “Class is much more than Marx’s definition of relationship to the means of production. Class involves your behavior, your basic assumptions about life[…]how you are taught to behave, what you expect from yourself and from others, your concept of a future, how you understand problems and solve them, how you think, feel, act…” (AB, 202). Although Marx never provides an explicit systematic study of class, for when he attempts the task in Ch. 52 of Capital Vol 3 the manuscript breaks off after a few paragraphs, we can nonetheless see his conception of class throughout his political works. Examining how Marx deals with class in his 18th Brumaire on Louis Bonaparte shows the previous sentiment from Brown and Bohrer to be problematic. In relation to the French peasantry, he states that,

​This constitutes a notion of class that although influenced, is not reducible to the group’s relation to the means of production. It would seem then, that Marx’s notion of class is fundamentally relational in two ways, first as a relation a group bears to the means of production, and second as the relation a group’s mode of life and culture bears to another. Thus, unlike Bohrer states, already in Marx’s conception of class, when understood fully and not synecdochally, class can already be constituted through exploitation and oppression.
           
​Bohrer also develops what she refers to as the ‘dialectics of difference’ present in both traditions as the way of understanding capitalism as a “structure and a logic” (AB, 208). In demonstrating how both traditions show capitalism developing contradictions in the real world, Bohrer’s first move is rejecting the reductive Aristotelean binary logic that finds contradiction to designate falsehood and which attributes normative statuses of ‘superior’ and ‘inferior’ to the polarities. Instead, Bohrer argues that in both traditions the world is understood dialectically, i.e., in a way in which the plurality of the ‘middle’ that binary logic excludes is included, and in a way in which the polarities of the binary are taken to be in a dynamic tension, not a static opposition. Dialectics of difference does not ignore or flatten polarities and contradictions but engages with them and resists through the inclusion of the excluded middle. This dialectic has nothing to do with the simplified and progressivist triad (thesis-antithesis-greater synthesis) present in popular conception. Instead of the beaten down reductive triad, Bohrer concludes by offering three metaphors for modeling dialectics: Collins’ matrix, the Frankfurt school’s constellation, and the prism metaphor. These three metaphors, to be effective, must be used together as “overlapping on one another” (AB, 229).
           
Having examined the descriptive potential of a non-reductive dialectic, Bohrer proceeds to espouse its prescriptive implications, i.e., “how do we organize from these contradictions? how do we put the dialectic of difference into transformative practice?” (Ibid.) Bohrer begins by postulating that we must develop a theoretical framework that accounts for the intergroup differentiation logic of capitalist incommensurability (the inconsistent logics of racialization: logic of elimination – natives, logic of exclusion – blacks, and the logic of inclusion – latino/a) and that accounts for the intragroup homogenization logic of capitalist commensurability. Her response is a redefinition of how we conceive of solidarity. Solidarity must not be understood as the lowest common denominator of identity sameness, but as based on coalitions of difference and incommensurability united by mutual interest in transcending a system in which life is suppressed and molded in and by structures of exploitation and oppression. These coalitions, she argues, are to be built from the structural interconnectedness that capitalism already provides. It is, therefore, solidarity based on unity, not uniformity. As she states:

​Reflections on Thomas Nagel's critique (of Michael Sandel's book “Public Philosophy: Essays on Morality in Politics”) “Progressive but Not Liberal," THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS, May 25, 2006.
​
Thomas Nagel entitles his essay on the social philosophy of Michael J. Sandel "Progressive but Not Liberal." Non-liberal progressives are most often to be found in socialist and communist organizations but not Sandel who is a professor of government at Harvard and referred to as a "communitarian" by Nagel. Nagel is happy to be a liberal and takes Sandel to task for having "defective" views about "liberalism." Nagel in fact defends the liberal cause by his critique of Sandel. I intend to analyze Nagel's critique from a Marxist perspective.


Nagel points out that the political system in the US is more volatile and heterogeneous than what one would find in Western Europe. The US is, in fact, "radically divided over issues of war, taxes, race, religion, abortion, and sex." He maintains that these differences are deep rooted and about "ultimate values." Yet these divisions do not threaten the stability of our political system. He says that "the cohesion of American society is stronger than its divisions" can be seen by the fact that people with radically incompatible basic value systems cohabit in a common political system and strive to express those values legally through open political processes. And, he maintains, this can be done "only because of a general commitment to the principles of limited government embodied in the Constitution."


Well times have changed since Nagel penned this. American society is far from the stability outlined above: Après Trump le déluge. The election of Biden and the Republican response shows that the “general commitment” to the Constitution is under extreme duress.


Nagel goes on to divide the US political universe into two broad sections—based on how they respond to the problems listed above-- i.e., war, taxes, race,etc.


The conservatives, we are told, "are more interested in enforcing moral standards [and they think their standards are the only right ones--tr] on the community and protecting private property, and less interested in protecting personal liberty [libertarian conservatives would dispute this--tr] and reducing inequality." It is just the opposite with progressives, he says.


Progressives have to decide how to pursue their principles-- as "first" or "second" order principles. First order principles are those deeply held "fundamental beliefs" or core principles. The second order principles are those "concerning what kind of first order-principles may be used to justify the exercise of political and legal power". For example, should we try and have the state outlaw capital punishment based on the first order principle that all killing by the state is immoral [excluding the military], or should we use a different principle such as the corruption of the legal system or the racism in the sentencing procedures without calling into question the ultimate moral status of capital punishment itself.


Nagel allies himself with liberalism which he identifies more or less with the political philosophy of another Harvard professor, the late John Rawls, author of such books as "Political Liberalism" and "A Theory of Justice." According to Nagel liberalism tends to rely on second order principles and not confront the conservative positions with head on challenges of first order magnitude. Nagel says, for example that gay rights can be defended by liberals on the principle that the government should not be controlling "private sexual conduct" without getting into the issue of the moral status of homosexuality.


The target of Nagel's article, Sandel, represents another school of progressives which Nagel says is "not liberal." These progressives want to argue their positions on first order principles and duke it out with the conservatives on core values. Sandel wants to replace "liberalism" with what he thinks the "communal" republican spirit of the early US was, which he contrasts with the present day liberal concern with "individualism." What Sandel is interested in is (his words) "soul craft." Nagel explains this as "the cultivation of virtue in the citizenry by the design of political, social and economic institutions." 


Wait a minute! This sounds familiar. This sounds like a species of the program of social engineering embarked upon in the Soviet Union in the 1930s and subverted and fought with tooth and claw by the big capitalist powers, first with their rebellious cat's paw Hitler, then continued as the Cold War by Hitler's anti-communist successors. Nagel senses this as well, as we shall see.


More immediately, however, Nagel attacks Sandel for having a "defective" understanding of Liberalism and misinterpreting the social philosophy of John Rawls. Nagel tells us that there are many forms of "Liberalism" but he contrasts only two-- European and American. The former is characterized by "the libertarianism of economic laissez-faire" (which sounds to me suspiciously like current neocon thought) while the latter represents "the democratic egalitarianism of the welfare state" (the owl of Minerva really does take flight at dusk, someone should tell Nagel that the welfare state is history).


But, he tells us, "all liberal theories have this in common: they hold that the sovereign power of the state over the individual is bounded by a requirement that individuals remain inviolable in certain respects, and that they must be treated equally." Basically this means equality before the law and equal political status (one person one vote, unless you are Black or Hispanic and your votes are tossed) and in American Liberalism "equality of opportunity and fairness in the social and economic structure of the society." I don't know what planet Nagel is from, maybe a parallel universe where Sweden is the only superpower, but the US definitely does not fit this description. Well, maybe not, but those are the goals to be reached and John Rawls represents this kind of Liberalism which stresses "distributive justice that combats poverty and large inequalities perpetuated by inheritance and class." Yes, Liberalism wants to combat poverty and inequality based on the observation that "the poor ye shall always have with you" but Marxism, unlike Liberalism which wants to tinker with the bad consequences of Capitalism without ever questioning the system itself, wants to eliminate poverty , not just combat it, by getting rid of the economic system that breeds it, i.e., capitalism.


Sandel rejects Rawls "Liberalism." He has, as Nagel says "spent his career" opposing Rawls and Rawls’ form of "egalitarian liberalism." What he contests is "Rawls’ central claim that individual rights and principles of social justice should take precedence over the broad advancement of human welfare according to some standard of what constitutes the good life." This is wrongly framed from the Marxist perspective. We certainly are in favor of "broad advancement of human welfare" but not based on some bourgeois idealist concept of "the good life" but based on what we claim to be a scientific understanding of the motive force of the capitalist system, its directionality and the real possibility of restructuring of society in such a way that classes are abolished and all people will truly escape from the realm of necessity to that of freedom. This may sound utopian, but it is actually more realistic than the schemes of Rawls, Nagel or Sandel.


Meanwhile, while Rawls subordinates the "broad advancement of human welfare" to "individual rights", Sandel maintains that, in his own words, "Principles of justice depend for their justification on the moral worth or intrinsic good of the ends they serve." Nagel doesn't like this formulation. Sandel would ban Nazis from holding rallies but uphold the rights of people demonstrating for equality and against racism, for example. But, Nagel says, using Sandel's principle, people opposed to homosexuality ought to be opposed to gay people holding rallies. But it is the state that guarantees the rights of citizens and decides which ends are ultimately of "moral worth or intrinsic good." Nazis and KKK folk fail on both counts besides the fact that they would on principle end the rights of others to demonstrate if they could while gay people are not demanding the suppression of heterosexuals they are only asking for civil rights. So, I don't think the analogy a good one to use against Sandel.


What Nagel really objects too is that Sandel thinks "the priority of right as being intelligible only if it serves the good." Liberals would "bracket" the question about if abortion, for example, was "murder" and defend the right to it on the grounds that a woman's right to choose should not be denied because of the "religious convictions of the majority." Sandel thinks that in order to approve of or support abortion we must "first determine that the Catholic position is false." This is a requirement for bracketing the question of its mortal status. 'The more confident we are," Sandel writes, "that fetuses are, in the relevant moral sense, different from babies, the more confident we can be in affirming a political conception of justice that sets aside the controversy about the moral status of fetuses."


Nagel says this is begging the question not bracketing it but this is because of how he has set up the question in the first place. Being a Liberal he is looking for a Liberal answer, based on a second order principle, and Sandel, not being a Liberal, looks for first order principles. I think Marxists are more akin to Sandel than to Nagel. Surely we want to decide if abortion is murder or not before we support it. Do women have a right to commit murder? What are the Catholic reasons for thinking this is murder? When we find out that the reasons are not based on science or an intelligent open minded examination of the evidence but only upon superstition and close minded adherence to dogma this surely must be the basis for our rejection of the anti-abortion viewpoint. This way of thinking does not make Sandel's views of Liberalism "obtuse."


There are many behaviors that can be sanctioned by the state, Nagel says, that the state does not have to have an official position on with respect to their rightness or moral status. The state can be neutral in other words. But Sandel, says Nagel, "thinks justice and rights depend on what is actually good, and what rules and institutions serve those ends; he is not a relativist." This is also good Marxism. Marxists should, to the best standards available, try to determine the actual states of affairs they are dealing with and not bracket truth conditions. This would have prevented many of the catastrophes of the 20th century socialist project.


These different positions lead, as Nagel points out, to a "deep issue." Namely, "Do all moral standards derive from a single principle, or are there different principles for different kinds of entities?" Rawls and Sandel have very different views on this. Rawls does not hold that there is a common moral principle from which both personal rights and public rights derive. Rawls "thought that justice, which is the special virtue of social institutions like the state, depended on the distinctive moral character of the state itself, as an immensely powerful form of collective agency." In a Liberal democracy we are subject to majority rule. Actually, however, this has ceased to be the case in the US. The two elections won by George W. Bush were most likely won as a result of vote fraud consciously carried out in disregard for any moral commitment to democratic values and solely to attain state power for the personal enrichment of corporate class entities at the expense of the majority of the population. This looks like a trend that has further developed. The tactic was also attempted by Trump to stay in power but in his case failed because he had lost the support of the corporate ruling class. Even his legal first victory did not represent “majority rule” because the majority voted for Clinton.


Nevertheless, Rawls thinks in terms of a functioning bourgeois democracy with majority will "coercively enforced." But Rawls also believes in "fairness." This means that in addition to political and civil equalities the state must also "combat racial, sexual, and socioeconomic inequality." With regard to this duty of the state, Nagel says, "This is the fairness that Sandel derides." But I don't think that Sandel is for racial, sexual and socioeconomic inequality, nor do I think his social philosophy (or Marxism) entails any such consequences.


Nagel says that the state has no special moral status for Sandel. Sandel thinks once the people have decided on the ends to be sought (for Marxists this would be the abolition of property, classes and the state as well as the construction of socialism and communism) which for Sandel are ("seems to be" Nagel writes, which shows some confusion on this) "an unmaterialistic culture of closely knit communities and strong family ties" then the state will be used to construct this type of social reality (under socialism being eventually abolished or "withering away)."


But this kind of thinking will also lead, says Nagel, "to theocracy, fascism or communism for those who accept alternative conceptions of the human good." Nagel thinks this is a telling point against Sandel but it isn't. The same thing can happen under the limited constitutional state that Liberals like Rawls and Nagel think can be constructed or maybe is even exemplified by the US today. Constitutions and philosophical models are not what guarantee freedom and rights. Only an informed, educated and alert citizenry can do that, and that is what we currently lack, and lack by governmental and corporate design, in the US today.


Nagel concludes by saying that "A hunger that demands more from the state [than "constitutional patriotism"] will lead us where history has shown we should not want to go." I am afraid we are on that road already and we have got on this road not only by reading direction signs put up by non-Liberal progressives, but by following those posted by Rawls and his followers as well. To halt the current slide towards fascism ("the national security state") we will need the combined forces of the progressive left, the working class, the establishment union movement as well as those in the “center” of the political spectrum(always an unreliable section—i.e., the AFL-CIO leadership) who still believe in democracy and take the Bill of Rights seriously. Rawlsian Liberalism alone will not suffice.

Two books by Slavoj Zizik (“Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism”, 1038 pp., and “Living in the End Times”, 504 pp.) were  reviewed by John Gray ("The Violent Visions of Slavoj Zizek") in the July 12, 2012 issue of The New York Review of Books. Professor Gray is to be commended for wading through 1500 pages of undiluted Zizek (and perhaps saving some of us from having to do so). I propose to review Gray's article and thus give a meta-critique, as it were, of some of Zizek's views as presented by Gray. If anyone is stimulated to go on to read Zizek so much the better, or worse as the case may be. You can find Gray's original article here:The Violent Visions of Slavoj Žižek by John Gray | The New York ...…. My reflections are divided into five parts.


1.) Zizek has produced over 60 books in the last two decades or so and has become one of the most famous public intellectuals in the West; propounding a sort of non-Marxist Marxism. The NY Review article has a picture of the philosopher sitting up in his bed in Ljubljana, Slovenia with a framed picture of Stalin on the wall behind him. New Yorkers may remember that he addressed the OWS movement in Zuccotti Park.


So what is Zizek's message? At one time he was a member of the Communist Party of Slovenia but he quit in 1988 and has since articulated a critique of capitalist society more influenced by a strange version of Hegel than by Marx. Gray says a CENTRAL THEME of ZZ's work "is the need to shed the commitment to intellectual objectivity that guided radical thinkers in the past."  Intellectual objectivity is a BOURGEOIS ILLUSION and most radicals, at least most Marxists, have always been partisans for the working class. Gray should be clearer about what ZZ is trying to express with this criticism.


ZZ wants to, in his own words, "repeat the Marxist 'critique of political economy', without the utopian-ideological notion of communism as its inherent standard." We had better be pretty familiar with, at least, the three big volumes of Das Kapital before we decide on accepting ZZ's "repeat" of Marx's project! ZZ doesn't think the world communist movement was radical enough. He writes, "the twentieth-century communist project was utopian precisely insofar as it was not radical enough." What does this mean? "Marx's notion of the communist society," ZZ writes, "is itself the inherent capitalist fantasy; that is, a fantasmatic scenario for resolving the capitalist antagonisms he so aptly described."


2.) It is all very well for ZZ to put down what he thinks is Marx's notion of communist society, but as a matter of fact neither Marx nor Engels spent much time speculating about a future communist society precisely because they thought such idle speculation unwarranted; they were more interested in dissecting the nature of capitalism and the methods needed to overthrow it. ZZ at least follows their example as Gray points out that nowhere in the 1000+ pages of “Less Than Nothing” does ZZ discuss what he thinks a future communist society would/should be like.


What he does discuss  says Gray (who calls the book a "compendium" of all ZZ's past work) is his new and unique interpretation of Hegel (by way of Jacques Lacan's unscientific reinterpretation of Freud) and its application to a new reading of Marx. In other words, the arch-rationalist Hegel is viewed from the point of view of the irrationalist Lacan and this mishmash of misinterpretation is used to explain Marx to us. 


One of Lacan's teachings is that REALITY cannot be properly understood by LANGUAGE. Which, if true, would make science impossible and bar us from ever understanding the nature of the world we live in. But it is language that Lacan uses to tell us something about the nature of reality, i.e., that language can't do that! Lacan also rejected Hegel's view that Reason is imminent in history. Big deal-- Marx and the entire history of post-Hegelian materialism has rejected this notion of Absolute Idealism for the last 150 years or more and no one needed Lacan to tell us about the outmodedness of this Hegelian notion. 


But ZZ thinks that Lacan has shown more than just that Hegel was wrong to think that Reason Rules the World. ZZ, says Gray, thinks that Lacan has shown "the impotence of reason."  This is a fundamental attack on the legacy of the Enlightenment upon which all attempts to understand the world scientifically and rationally are based; it is ultimately a fascist outlook.


ZZ has also been influenced by the contemporary French philosopher Alain Badiou (who has been himself influenced by Lacan and, shudder, Heidegger and has developed a form of Platonic Marxism).  Using some of Badiou's ideas ZZ constructs his own view of "dialectics" as being based, Gray says, on "the rejection  of the logical principle of noncontradiction." ZZ imputes this view to Hegel and thus claims Hegel rejected reason. ZZ writes  that for Hegel a (logical) proposition "is not  really suppressed by its negation." ZZ credits Hegel with the invention of a new type of logic: "paraconsistent  logic."


This is really confused. We have to distinguish between FORMAL LOGIC where the law of non-contradiction reigns, and Hegel's metaphysics or ontology of Being where there are different sorts of logic at work-- subjective logic (thoughts) and objective logic (the external world). But even here it is not a question of a "proposition" being suppressed. Hegel says neither things nor thoughts care for contradictions and when contradictions appear there is a movement to overcome and resolve them on higher levels of understanding and reason-- this is the inherent motion driving the "dialectic" a motion to overcome and eliminate contradictions.


Despite these considerations, ZZ forges ahead with his ill conceived "paraconsistant logic."  "Is not," he writes, "'postmodern' capitalism an increasingly paraconsistant system in which, in a variety of modes, P is non-P: the order is its own transgression, capitalism can thrive under communist rule, and so on?" 


At this point Gray quotes a long passage from “Less Than Nothing” in which ZZ lays out the main theme of his book dealing with the response needed to "postmodern" capitalism: "The underlying premise of the present book is a simple one: the global capitalist system is approaching an apocalyptic zero-point. Its 'four riders of the apocalypse' are comprized by the ecological crisis, the consequences of the biogenetic revolution, imbalances within the system itself (problems with intellectual property; forthcoming struggles over raw materials, food and water), and the explosive growth of social divisions and exclusions." ZZ misses here the fact that the four horsemen of the capitalist apocalypse are simply four manifestations  of the same fundamental contradiction underpinning the entire capitalist system, namely, the private appropriation of socially created wealth.


At this point Gray launches an unjustified attack on ZZ, accusing him of ignoring "historical facts" such as the environmental damage done by the Soviet Union and to the countryside by Mao's "cultural revolution." You can't just blame capitalism since both the SU and China had centrally planned economies. History, Gray says, does not provide any evidence that replacing capitalism by socialism will better protect the environment. 


What does "history" really show? Just take the case of the Soviet Union. The soviets tried to build socialism but were attacked by the western capitalist powers from day one. They had to take short cuts to industrialize and fend off the Nazi attack, and then the Nazi successor state as US imperialism took up the anti-communist crusade. China has a similar history. All parties in this conflict were societies still under the rule of the law of value, the reigning economic force in commodity producing economies. Socialism did not thrive (nor could it have thrived) in the primitive backward conditions it developed under in the 20th century. If socialist central planning were to replace the social anarchy of capitalism in the advanced capitalist states of the west (including Japan) where production could be based on need not profit (thus overcoming the law of value) we would be able to reign in our four apocalyptic horsemen and literally save the planet. This is what "history" really suggests and Gray's attack on ZZ on this issue is unjustified.


However, his next attack on ZZ has merit. ZZ's "Marxism" lacks any relation to the actual class struggle and does not reflect Marx's commitment to a materialist dialectic grounded in the empirical reality of day to day economic struggle. Here is what ZZ says: "Today's historical juncture does not compel us to drop the notion of the proletariat, or of the proletarian position--- on the contrary, it compels us to radicalize it to an existential level beyond even Marx's imagination. We need a more radical notion of the proletarian subject [i.e., the thinking and acting human being], a subject reduced to the evanescent point of the Cartesian cogito, deprived of its substantial content." 


This is just ridiculous. The worker treated in complete isolation from his/her class and relation to the means of production, treated as an isolated human being, is simply retrograde bourgeois idealism and in no way a more radical conception than that of Marx. It is an abandonment of the concept of the proletariat, or working class, as understood by Marxists.


3.) ZZ in fact abandons objectivity for a completely subjective position. "The truth we are dealing with here," he writes, "is not 'objective truth' but the self-relating truth about one's own subjective position; as such it is an engaged truth, measured not by its factual accuracy but by the way it affects  the subjective position of enunciation." In other words, "truth" is what inspires me to feel good about my chosen path-- my "project" and reinforces me in my actions to attain the fulfillment of my "project." ZZ thinks a communist society would be nice but doesn't think it's really possible to attain but that doesn't mean we should not act up and agitate against the status quo. ZZ also thinks it’s ok to engage in terror if it helps my subjective enunciation. He supports Badiou's position in favor of "emancipatory terror" and lauds Mao's Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.


To top off this witch's brew of petty bourgeois pseudo-revolutionary clap-trap, ZZ, Gray points out, "praises the Khmer Rouge." For all the meaningless killings Pol Pot and his gang indulged in ZZ does not blame their fall from grace as related to their barbarity. "The Khmer Rouge, were," he says, "in a way, not radical enough: while they took the abstract negation of the past to the limit [this is how a "Hegelian" refers to the killing fields!-tr] they did not invent any new form of collectivity." Would a new form of collectivity have justified their actions? [As we shall see ZZ rejects these criticisms by Gray on the grounds that his theory of violence has been misunderstood].


ZZ even goes so far as to call himself a Leninist. Gray gives a quote from a 2009 interview where ZZ remarks that: "I am a Leninist. Lenin wasn't afraid to dirty his hands. If you can get power, grab it." Gray is right to think that Lenin (as well as Marx) would hold ZZ's views in contempt. Lenin recognized the need for violence, it would be forced upon the workers by the ruling class, but he never celebrated it in the manner of ZZ who thinks it should be applied in a terrorist manner as a morale booster for the radical movement even though a successful revolution to get rid of capitalism is impossible. Gray gives another gem from ZZ on this topic: "Francis Fukuyama was right: global capitalism is 'the end of history.'" Very few, if any, people claiming to be Leninists believe that Fukuyama was right; I don't think, based on some of his current writings, that even Fukuyama thinks he was right.


4.) In this section I will deal with some valid points Gray makes against ZZ's fascination with the cult of violence, but points that are tarnished by Gray's own hyper cold war anti-communism and distortion of facts. ZZ does not think class conflict has an objective basis, according to Gray, who produces this quote from ZZ maintaining that class war is not "a conflict between particular agents within social reality: it is not a difference between agents (which can be described by means of a detailed social analysis), but an antagonism ('struggle') which constitutes these agents." It is therefore ultimately subjective-- just the opposite of what Marx and Lenin held.


To illustrate his position ZZ discusses the collectivization of agriculture and the struggle against the kulaks in the USSR in the 1920s and 30s. ZZ makes a valid observation that often non-Kulak poorer peasants  joined with the kulaks in opposing collectivization. This was a case of false consciousness. Americans are familiar with this phenomenon when they observe working people and minorities voting for the Republican Party and conservative candidates. ZZ says the Kulak non-Kulak boundary was often "blurred and unworkable: in a situation of generalized poverty, clear criteria no longer applied and the other two classes of peasants (poor and middle peasants -tr) often joined the kulaks (rich peasants- tr) in their resistance to forced collectivization." 


ZZ goes on to say, " The art of identifying a kulak was thus no longer a matter of objective social analysis; it became a kind of complex 'hermeneutics of suspicion," of identifying and individual's  'true political attitudes" hidden beneath his or her deceptive public proclamations." This is, by the way, the same "hermeneutics" Americans have to use, following the maxim that "all politicians are liars and say one thing but do another," when they try to figure out what candidates are saying and how they will actually behave once in office. 


 ZZ is wrong to think of this as a subjective process of self identification. Cases of false consciousness have objective social conditions (miseducation, prejudicial propaganda, poverty, illiteracy) as their causes. Gray is wrong, I think, to call ZZ's view "repugnant and grotesque" because he appeals to hermeneutics and doesn't criticize Stalin for killing millions of people but for using Marxist theory to try and explain what the actions of the USSR were with respect to collectivization. The idea that Soviet policy was to bring about forced collectivization by killing millions of people is a relic of cold war bunko. I recommend Michael Parenti's “Blackshirts & Reds: Rational Fascism & the Overthrow of Communism”  for a balanced discussion of the role of violence in Soviet history.


However, ZZ is to be faulted for rejecting using Marxist theory to understand and explain political actions. He says that a time comes to junk theory because "at some point the process has to be cut short with a massive and brutal intervention of subjectivity: class belonging is never a purely objective social fact, but is always also the result of struggle and social engagement." But you cannot have a successful people's movement (struggle and engagement) without a correct  analysis of the purely objective  social facts-- otherwise the movement has to rely on spontaneity and no movement has grown and prospered that based itself on spontaneity.


An idea of how far down the wrong road a social theorist calling him/herself a "Leninist" can wander is revealed by ZZ's attitudes towards Hitler and the Nazi apologist Martin Heidegger. Concerning Heidegger, ZZ writes, "His involvement with the Nazi's was not a simple mistake [of course not-- it was the essence of his world view-- tr] , but rather a 'right step in the wrong direction.'" How does ZZ arrive at this? He has a new reading of Heidegger to propose. He says, "Reading Heidegger against the grain, one discovers a thinker who was, at some points strangely close to communism…." Gray points out that ZZ  claims that the radically pro-Hitler Heidegger of the mid 1930s could even be classified as "a future communist."  Indeed. What future does ZZ have in mind? Heidegger died in 1976 without ever, to my knowledge, having become any kind of communist.


ZZ thinks Heidegger was wrong, but also kind of right, in being a follower of Hitler, because there was a big problem with Hitler. Here is what it was, according to ZZ's own words quoted by Gray: "The problem with Hitler was that 'he was not violent enough,'  his violence was not "essential" enough. Hitler did not really act, all his actions were fundamentally reactions, for he acted so that nothing would really change, staging a gigantic spectacle of pseudo-Revolution so that the capitalist order  would survive….  The true problem of Nazism is not that it 'went too far' in its subjectivist-nihilist hubris [ I am tempted to say it takes one to know one- tr] of exercising total power, but that it did not go far enough, that its violence was an impotent acting-out  which, ultimately, remained in the service of the very order it despised."


There is so much wrong with this that I hardly know where to begin. In the first place there was only one socio-economic order at any rate that Hitler "despised" and wanted to destroy-- that was the order represented by the Soviet Union (he also despised and wanted to destroy the Jews.) Hitler used all the power at his disposal to accomplish his aims. It is impossible to conceive of what destruction Hitler could have wrought if had used (and had) the means to wreak even more violence on the world that he in fact did. He would not have destroyed capitalism as that was the economic order he furthered in Germany-- it was socialism, Marxism that he wanted to destroy. The Nazi's also rejected bourgeois democracy-- but because it was too weak to save the West from the hoards of semi-barbaric Bolshevik Untermenshen waiting to burst out of the Soviet Union and inundate Aryan Europe. If World War II was an impotent acting-out, I shudder to think what Hitler could have achieved if he was on ZZ's  political viagra.


But what about the Jews? What about anti-Semitism? Gray suggests that ZZ's attitude towards eliminating anti-Semitism from the world would also involve eliminating the Jews. This may or may not be so but it does not make ZZ an anti-Semite; it only shows, if that is what he means, that he accepts the ultra-right Zionist view that non Jews will always be against Jews and the only solution is an exclusively Jewish state. Well, what does ZZ say about all this?


He states that "The fantasmatic [ZZ's own word for "fantastic"- tr]  status of anti-Semitism is clearly revealed by a statement attributed to Hitler: 'We have to kill the Jew within us.'" He continues: "Hitler's statement says more than it wants to say: against his intentions, it confirms that the Gentiles need the anti-Semitic figure of the "Jew" in order to maintain their identity. [Oh my! I hope Herr Hitler is not the representative spokesperson for the "Gentiles." Hitler's statement doesn't confirm anything other than his own personal anti-Semitism-tr] It is thus not only that 'the Jew is within us'-- what Hitler fatefully forgot to add is that he, the anti-Semite, is also in the Jew.  What does this paradoxical entwinement mean for the destiny of anti-Semitism?" 


Gray admits to having problems trying to figure just what ZZ means (he is too prolix and uses terms out of context from different philosophies to describe his own quite different views) but it seems quite a stretch to suggest that ZZ may be soft on anti-Semitism. ZZ himself has taken great umbrage at Gray's comments in this review and has penned a response that it is well worth reading and claims to set the record straight on this issue.  [“Slavoj Zizek Responds to His Critics”]


5.) An example Gray gives of using terms out of context is ZZ's assertion that one may say that Gandhi was more violent than Hitler. Why would anyone want to say that except for "shock value?" ZZ says, in his reply to Gray, that Gray has misinterpreted him. ZZ believes in a type of violence in which "no blood is shed" and then refers to Gandi's struggles against the British in India-- usually referred to as based on "nonviolence." Since "nonviolence" is a special sort of "violence" it appears that since Ghandi was more nonviolent than Hitler he was more violent than Hitler. This is the "Hegelian" dialectic run amuck.


Here is another example of ZZ, saying nothing according to Gray, engaging in meaningless wordplay. "The … virtualization of capitalism is ultimately the same as that of the electron in particle physics. The mass of each elementary particle is composed of its mass at rest plus the surplus provided by the acceleration of its movement; however, an electron's mass at rest is zero [sic], its mass consists only of the surplus generated by the acceleration, as if we are dealing with a nothing which acquires some deceptive substance only by magically spinning itself into an excess of itself." I'm not sure what ZZ is trying to say here about electrons, let alone capitalism (is surplus value "magical") but I don't think the rest mass of an electron is zero in the first place. For what it is worth Wikipedia says "The electron rest mass (symbol: me) is the mass of a stationary electron. It is one of the fundamental constants of physics….  It has a value of about 9.11×10−31 kilograms or about 5.486×10−4 atomic mass units, equivalent to an energy of about 8.19×10−14 joules or about 0.511 megaelectronvolts." 


Granted it is a very small mass, an electron is, after all, a very small particle-- but it is not zero. ZZ expects us to read 1038 pages of this stuff!  It might be a good reference book to ZZ ideas-- which don't seem to be very Leninist-- the index has 10 references to Lenin while Lacan has over 2 columns devoted to his views! Gray is a hostile reviewer, but he is also hostile to Marxism, nevertheless, his review calls into question ZZ's basic methods of thinking and expressing himself (Gray says he represents "formless radicalism"). To get some idea of where Gray is coming from (I don't think it's a very nice place since it's anti-Enlightenment) check out the following: John N. Gray - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
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"Fr​aught with Ought" reviews two new books concerning the American philosopher Wilfred Sellars (1912-1989). These are a collection of papers about Sellars by Jay Rosenberg (Wilfred Sellers: Fusing the Images, Oxford, 2007) and an anthology (In the Space of Reasons: Selected Essays of Wilfred Sellars, Harvard, 2007). Why all this interest in an academic philosopher, unknown to the general public, and dead for almost twenty years? And what has any of this to do with Marxism?
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Briefly, Sellars was an analytic philosopher, a member of a school stemming back over a hundred years, that grew out of the rejection of the European philosophical tradition growing out of German Idealism, especially Kant and Hegel. Marxism also grew out of this German tradition.

Recently some analytic philosophers have come to believe that the wholesale rejection of Hegel and others in the classical tradition has been a mistake and was based on a faulty understanding of their works by some of the founders of the analytic movement, especially Bertrand Russell.

Sellars' philosophy is being examined in this light and is taken by some to be useful in reclaiming Kant and Hegel, for example, and using them as part of the program of analytic philosophy-- viz., of using the analysis of ordinary language usage and the philosophy of language to find the solution to philosophical problems. Rehabilitating the thinkers from whom Marx and Engels learned so much and whose ideas they grappled with in forming their own is also a way of reminding the contemporary world of the continuing relevance of Marxism.

One of Sellars' most important works was his 1956 paper "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind." Although not in this work, Sellars gives an interesting definition of the aim of philosophy:"The aim of philosophy, abstractly formulated, is to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term."

This really is quite general and could be said of the natural and social sciences as well. The aim of Marxism could be said to be to bring about the end of human exploitation in the broadest possible sense by the most effective means, considered in the broadest possible sense, of eliminating capitalism and abolishing classes.

Marxists also share a common aim with Sellars. He wanted, in his own words. "to formulate a scientifically oriented, naturalistic realism which would 'save the appearances.'" The last expression refers to a desire not to stray too far from common sense. His love of science is the same as that of all true Marxists and is very clearly expressed by him when he writes, "in the dimension of describing and explaining the world, science is the measure of all things, of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not."

In other words, he shares with Marxists the idea, as Crane says, that philosophy's "fundamental task" is "to explain how things seem (in the broadest sense of that term) consistent with what science has told us about the world." The term "scientia mensura" is used by Sellarsians (it could be adopted by Marxists as well)to sum up this view. The job of philosophy is to bridge what Sellars called the "manifest image" of the world [i.e., common sense]and the "scientific image" [we are just a bunch of vibrating strings or atoms, etc.] Crane says Sellars developed his own "systematic philosophy" to deal with this problem. Let us see how far it agrees with Marxism.

Many philosophers such as Sellars have been bothered by three things about the manifest image of the world, according to Crane, namely intentionality or meaning, value, and consciousness. All bourgeois realists, just as all Marxist materialists, accept "that there is a world independent of thought." Bourgeois realists are in fact materialists. Sellars, however, has a problem with how we become aware of the world and how we use language to describe it.

Marxist and non-Marxist realists alike tend to see language as somehow reflecting or referring to the objects of the world. We learn what "cat" means by referring to a real cat. "According to this view," Crane says, "things in the world cause our minds to form certain representations, which is why they represent what they do." This is what Lenin thought when he said consciousness or sensation is a picture of reality. Crane says it is the view of the early Wittgenstein (of the "Tractatus"). But Sellars doesn't buy this. He has his own theory by which he replaces "reference" with "inference." As Crane puts it, "To talk about the meaning of a word is not to talk about the relation it bears to the object it stands for. Rather, it is to talk about what inferences-- what legitimate patterns of thought and reasoning-- that word can be used in."

This is a very dicey development. It seems to grow out of the later Wittgenstein (the "Philosophical Investigations") and his notion of a "language game." Whether this view can be reconciled with materialism is still being debated. What is really distinctive in this view is, Crane says, the role that normativity comes to play in the system. Sellars refers to words as "natural-linguistic objects" and we have to learn the rules (norms) for their use: "they tell us," Crane points out, "how words should and should not be used. Signification and meaning are normative matters." This leads us to a very important key concept of his philosophy-- namely, "the myth of the given." I'm not sure this "myth" is really a myth.

Sellars thinks of thought as "inner speech", as Crane says, "as employing the concepts one has learned in the course of acquiring a language to make inferences which result in dispositions to make 'outer' verbal judgments." So thinking, just as speaking, is subject to rules and norms.

Crane uses the example of a fig tree to clarify Sellars' views. An old fashioned materialist ( such as Lenin ) might say that we have the notion of a fig tree as a result of having learned how to use the words "fig tree" as a result of our early education. Our senses were presented with a particular object, our parents say "fig tree" and we learn that this "given" is to be referred to as a "fig tree."

This is an example (but not a good one) of "the myth of the given." Sellars says "all awareness is a linguistic affair." As Crane puts it "the perceptually given" is not "a mental episode which is prior to thought and language." This has the smell of idealism clinging to it.

Let’s try to be clearer. Crane says Sellars holds, "Every episode of taking something in is really a case of conceptualizing it, and conceptualizing requires being subject to the norms which can only come with the acquisition of a language." Sellars is really saying it is wrong to think there was a "concept of x" in the mind of the child just waiting to be given the name "fig tree". It was only by learning a language that a fig tree could present itself to the child as a fig tree and not just some kind of perceptual static.

Sellars' ideas about sense perception are weak, I think, and I agree with Crane when he says he thinks them "unconvincing." I think, for example, that consciousness and consciousness of objects have evolved from organisms that were precursors of H. sapiens. Other animals certainly have awareness and can even think yet are without "language"-- or least without what we humans think of as "language". Sellars appears to believe that only humans have language. If we grant this and restrict ourselves to "human language" then Crane thinks Sellars' ideas are "clearer and more tractable" if we confine the inferentialist theory to thought and language and leave sense perception out of it.

Now thought, language, meaning, and inference are the result of brain processes that can be studied by science. This is the case even if meaning, thought, and knowledge will not themselves be, as Crane says, part of "the scientific image as such." Why is this so? Sellars writes that it is because "in characterizing an episode or a state as that of KNOWING, we are not giving an empirical description of that episode or state; we are placing it in the logical space of reasons, of justifying and being able to justify what one says." And Crane reminds us, this also goes for saying and thinking. If I say, think or know that e.g., my redeemer liveth, or that workers by uniting will only lose their chains I must give reasons that logically lead to a justification for these statements. I am not just referring to some chemical or neurological activity in my brain.

What is important about this part of Sellars' theory is, according to Crane, that questions dealing with "meaning and significance" are not about facts-- "questions about what is the case" -- they are questions concerning "what ought to be." They are not questions for science. Sellars thinks they are normative because we have to follow rules for justification which are located in "the logical space of reasons." Sellars says. "If they are thinking THIS, then they OUGHT to think THAT too."

What is going on here? It seems natural to distinguish between factual (scientific) statements and value (moral, un- or non- scientific) statements. But, says Crane, Sellars has gone beyond this dichotomy: "not only moral value, but also thought and consciousness, are (in his words) 'fraught with ought.'" There are problems with this I think. If I give justifications for my belief that united workers have only their chains to lose those justifications are intended by me to be true factual statements about the world and thus subject to scientific scrutiny. It is scientific socialism to which I appeal. It is another question, indeed fraught with ought, whether that commitment logically forces me to embrace the dictatorship of the proletariat as well.

Some have come to think that Sellars' views would cause a "sea change" in philosophy. Crain disagrees and thinks Sellars' "inferentialism" with respect to "meaning and thought" can be weaned away from other elements in his system and adopted by those with "more traditional" attitudes towards "the self and the mind." I think that there is no need for Sellarsian extremism on the question of the "scientia mensura." To save the appearances, the "manifest world", we don't have to divorce it so completely from the "scientific world" as Sellars maintains. We only need show there is no manifest contradiction between the two worlds. There is no contradiction between our being human beings running about with "minds" on the one hand, and being ultimately vibrating strings or atoms on the other.

Marxists view the human world of consciousness as a higher level organization of matter (that stuff existing independently of the human mind from which the universe and everything in it derives) and what science ultimately discovers this stuff to be will not be in contradiction to the view that the manifest world is part of the continuum logically derived from the knowledge of the scientific world. Thus, Marxists can adopt some portions of Sellars' inferentialism, especially with regard to the consistency of their thoughts with respect to what they ought to believe and do given what they say they believe and do.

One simply cannot deny the revolutionary legacy of Malcolm X, the man held a charisma and intelligence that transformed him into one of the biggest, most influential leaders of the American civil rights era. There have been several pieces written about the life and actions of Malcolm X throughout the years, with the most iconic being his 1964 autobiography.

    
​The book being examined however is not the famous autobiography. Published by Scholastic in 1994; Walter Dean Myers’ biography titled Malcolm X: By Any Means Necessary is a highly informative and simplistically written glimpse into the life and evolution of the revolutionary civil rights leader and anti-colonial activist.

    
As one would expect, the early years of the man formerly known as Malcolm Little are visited in this book. Myers relives the history of Malcolm’s revolutionary spirit, citing that one of his biggest inspirations was his own father, Earl Little. Earl Little, unfortunately, was murdered by white supremacists for his work in the furthering of black liberation as a part of the Marcus Garvey movement. The look into the history of Malcolm X, along with his own family’s revolutionary activity displays that a revolutionary spirit was embedded into his DNA, with his father’s righteous death serving as one his greatest inspirations for his work later in life.

    
Myers details the development of the ideals of Malcolm X as his life went in Malcolm X: By Any Means Necessary. Beginning with his time spent as a member of the Nation of Islam, as a disciple of spiritual leader and N.I.S figurehead Elijah Muhammad, Myers presents the beginning of Malcolm X’s path towards revolutionary ideals and action in the black nationalist group. Malcolm’s rise within the organization as one of the most well respected and influential members is a testament to his charisma and revolutionary grace. With Muhammad as his mentor, Malcolm X was able to further the Nation of Islam and greatly increase their membership during his time in the organization.

    
While Malcolm X never explicitly referred to himself as a socialist, his later life saw a transition from black nationalism to a more anti-capitalist, anti-colonialist perspective, and Myers details that it was through his departure from the separatist Nation of Islam that Malcolm X began his flirtation with decolonization and in some aspects, socialism. It was in 1960 during the March on Washington that the former Little met with revolutionary communist leader Fidel Castro, then President of Cuba. 

    
When referencing Castro, Myers includes a quote from a Cuban citizen that fled from the Fulgenico Batista regime that speaks highly of the Cuban revolutionary.

    
“He is a wonderful man. When he speaks his strength is in his words, his mouth. He speaks for the little people of Cuba.”

    
A man as controversial and influential as Malcolm X would never be able to avoid creating a few enemies in his pursuit for political, social, and economic justice. His time with the Nation of Islam garnered the attention of the FBI, who began seeing him as a threat and a potential catalyst for violent uprising against the United States government. The meetings held with Fidel Castro in Washington only furthered their suspicion, with the FBI calling him a Communist on his official file. Malcolm X was a force to be reckoned with, and the American government knew this all too well. 

    
    
Malcolm X was and always will be one of the most important revolutionary figures in American history, the history of the pursuit of civil liberties, and the expansion of the African diaspora. There was none other like him, and there may never be again.

    
It is important to note that the ideals of socialism and iconic revolutionaries are treated with respect within this biography. There’s no peddling of tired reactionary propaganda or condescending annotations that attempt to discredit the theories of socialism and communism. There are no attacks on someone’s character or use of slanderous tactics. The effects of the poison that is McCarthyist, Red Scare propaganda were never to be found between the pages of this book. 

    
A quote straight from the mouth of Malcolm X is included in this piece, touching upon the practices and influence of capitalism on both a global scale and how these practices ultimately pose a threat to not only the plight Afro-descendent people but the entirety of the oppressed masses, rather than a solution to the contradictions that afflicted their daily lives.

    
“The newly awakened people all over the world pose a problem for what is known as Western interests, which are imperialism, colonialism, racism, and all the other negative isms, or vulturistic isms. Just as the external forces pose a grave threat, they can see that the internal forces pose an even greater threat.” - Malcolm X
    
    
The Civil Rights Era of the United States was rampant with socialist ideals and other sections of radical ideology, with a vast number of figures within the fight against institutionalized racism and segregation subscribing to the tenants of revolutionary socialism at least at some point in their fight. Names such as Angela Davis, Martin Luther King, Assata Shakur, and Huey P. Newton just to name a few considered revolutionary socialism to be an integral part of their fight against white supremacist capitalism. Malcolm X was perhaps the most powerful, influential, and at least for the institution of capitalism, the most dangerous of the Civil Rights fighters until his untimely death. 

    
This is a piece well worth the read. A factual and accessible account of the development of one of the most significant civil rights leaders in both American and global history. Walter Dean Myers displays a great respect throughout this biography, for both the legacy of Malcolm X, and the radical presence in the fight for Civil Rights..

    
The digestible, simplistic writing style of this biography makes ideal reading for those totally unfamiliar with Malcolm X and the history that surrounds him. Whether you be an anarchist, a Marxist, or some other tendency of radicalism, we should be educating ourselves on the history of decolonization and similar revolutionary movements, from Marx to Malcolm, from Sankara to Newton, we must continue to study. A relatively quick read abundant with information, Walter Dean Myers’s work is second only to the official autobiography. Malcolm X: By Any Means Necessary is an immensely informative and engaging book, for the new and the familiar.

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