The history of Marxism has a parallel history of counter-Marxism — intellectual currents that posture as the true Marxism.

Even before Marxism came into being as a coherent ideology, Marx and Engels devoted an often-neglected section of their 1848 Communist Manifesto to debunking the existing contenders for true socialism.

As the workers’ movement painfully sought a system of beliefs to animate its response to capitalism, the ideas of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels gradually won over workers, peasants, and the oppressed. It was not an easy victory. Liberalism — the dominant ideology of the capitalist class — served workers and peasants in their fight against absolutist tyranny.

With capitalism and liberal institutions firmly established, anarchism — the ideology of the disgruntled petty-bourgeois — rivalled Marxism for the leadership of the workers’ movement. Contradictorily, embracing extreme individualism and Utopian democracy distilled from capitalism, yet voicing a bitter hatred of capitalist institutions and economic arrangements, the anarchists failed to offer a viable escape from the crushing weight of capitalism.

Once Bolshevism seized power in 1917, the workers’ movement found an example of real-existing-socialism led by real-avowed-Marxists, a powerful beacon for the way forward in the struggle against capitalism. The victory of the Russian Revolution established Marxism as the most promising road for an exploited majority, with Leninism the only successful ideology for revolutionary change and socialism. To this day, Leninism has remained the only proven guide to socialism.

Immediately after the revolution, rival “Marxisms” sprang up.

The failure of subsequent European revolutions outside of Russia, especially Germany, sheared away numerous intellectuals, like Karl Korsch and György Lukács,who imagined a different, supposedly better, path to proletarian revolution. Buoyed by material support from benefactors, university appointments, and the many eager sponsors of class betrayal, critics and detractors of Leninism abounded.

Especially in the West — North America and Europe– where the working class was significant and growing dramatically, dissidence, class betrayal, and opportunism proved disruptive forces in the world Communist movement, forces that capitalist rulers were eager to support. Young people, inexperienced workers, aspiring intellectuals, and the déclassé, were especially vulnerable to the appeal of independence, purity, idealism, and liberal values. Money, career opportunities, and celebrity were readily available to those who were willing to sell these ideas.

Indeed, not every critic of Marxism-Leninism — revolutionary Communism — was or is insincere or without merit, but honesty demands recognition that no real advocate for overthrowing capitalism could achieve prominence, celebrity, or a mainstream soap box in the capitalist West. He or she could be a curiosity or a token for the sake of appearances — a stooge.

Conversely, any intellectual or political figure who does achieve wide-spread prominence or influence cannot represent a serious, existential challenge to capitalism when the road to prominence and influence is patrolled by the guardians of capitalism.

Nonetheless, the workers’ movement has been plagued by divisive ideological trends or fads spawned by independent voices who, wittingly or not, are exploited by and render service to the capitalist class.

In the West, it is almost impossible to be a young radical and not be tempted by a veritable ideological marketplace of putative anti-capitalist or socialist theories, vying with one another for allegiance. Since the demise of unvarnished, real-existing socialism in the Soviet Union and the disorientation of many Communist and Workers’ parties, the competition of ideas has created even more confusion.

Clearly, the working-class movement, the revolutionary socialist movement, needs guidance to avoid distractions, bogus theories, and corrupted ideas. The march of political neophytes through the arcade of specious, fantastic ideas is a great tragedy, especially regarding those ideas posing as Marxist.

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Happily, a new generation of Marxist thinkers are challenging the allure of Marxist pretenders, more specifically, those associated with what has come to be called “Western Marxism.” A sympathetic Wikipedia article offers about as accurate a definition of the words as one might want:  “The term denotes a loose collection of theorists who advanced an interpretation of Marxism distinct from both classical and Orthodox Marxism and the Marxism-Leninism of the Soviet Union.” It couldn’t be made clearer: Western Marxism is anything but the Marxism-Leninism that has buttressed worker-engaged revolutionary parties since the time of the Bolshevik revolution!

Marxist historian and journalist, Vijay Prashad, gave a seminar at the Marx Memorial Library on November 21, 2022, in which he excoriated the Western Marxism of the 1980s:

Prashad places the influential works of Hardt and Negri and Deleuze and Guattari in the same post-Marxist mix.

He regrets the multiculturalism turn because it ”basically took the guts out of the anticolonial, anti-racist critique, at the global level you had the arrival of ‘postcolonial’ thought, and also ‘decoloniality’ — in other words, let’s look at power, let’s look at culture, but let’s not look at the political economy that structures everyday life and behavior and reproduces the colonial mentality; that has to be off the table… So, we entered into a kind of academic morass, where Marxism was not, in a sense, permitted to enter.”

Prashad might well have added the intrusion of rational-choice theory into Marxism in the 1980s, an uninvited analysis of Marxist theory through the lens of methodological individualism and liberal egalitarianism. One leading exponent of what came to be called “analytical Marxism” eviscerated the robust Marxist concept of exploitation by proving that if we have inequality as an initial condition, we will quite logically reproduce inequality– a trivial derivation with little relevance to understanding the historically evolved concept of labor exploitation..

Prashad might have noted the continuing influence of postmodern relativism upon Marxist theory in the 1980s and beyond, a denigration of any claim that Marxism is the science of society. For the postmodernist, Marxism can only be, at best, one of several competing interpretations of society, coherent within Marxist circles, but forbidden from making any greater claim for universality. Moreover, the postmodernist denies that there can ever be any valid overarching theory of capitalism, any “metanarrative” that plots a socio-economic system’s trajectory. While its flaws can not be addressed here, the late Marxist historian Ellen Meiksins Wood exposed the academic trend with great clarity.

Another excellent, contemporary critique of Western Marxism can be found in the writings of Marxist author Gabriel Rockhill. Rockhill skillfully and thoroughly discredits the Frankfurt School of neo-Marxism, especially its most celebrated thinkers, Hockheimer, Habermas, Adorno, and Marcuse, exposing their fealty to various sponsors. Those who paid the bills enjoyed sympathetic ideas, an outcome often found with the practitioners of Western Marxism.
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Rockhill also does  a scathing exposé of today’s most prominent Marxist poseur, Slavoj Žižek. I was happy to heap praise on Rockhill’s deflation of Žižek’s unmatched ego in an earlier post. Both Rockhill’s unmasking of the Frankfurt School and his destruction of the Žižek cult are essential reading in contesting Western Marxism.

Western Marxists can conveniently overlook capitalism’s history of genocidal, undemocratic, and exploitative sins while excoriating the Fidelistas for settling accounts with a few hundred Batista torturers. They deplore the sweeping changes that Soviet and Chinese Communists implemented in agriculture to overcome the frequent famines that devastated their countries when the changes unfortunately coincided with severe famines, as though great change for the better could evade natural events and tragedy anywhere but in their imagination.

They turn a blind eye to the human costs imposed on humanity by ruling elites’ resistance to great change, while denouncing revolutionaries for seeking that change and risking a better future. Western Marxism diminishes the great accomplishments of real existing socialism, while relentlessly denouncing the errors incurred in socialist construction. Garrido effectively underscores the necessary pains and errors in realizing a new world, in escaping the clutches of ruthless capitalism.
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As Garrido notes:

He eloquently summarizes:

I might add that it is also a commonplace for Western Marxists to invest heavily in other-people’s-socialism. Rather than engaging their own working classes, Western Marxists fight surrogate struggles for socialism through the solidarity movement, picking and choosing the “purest” struggles and debating the merits of various socialisms vicariously.
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Garrido elaborates on socialism-as-an-investment-in-identity:

The success of socialism would entail a loss of selfhood, a destruction of the socialist-within-capitalism identity. The socialism of the West is grounded on an identity which hates the existing order but hates even more the loss of identity which transcending it would entail.

Garrido’s objectives are not completed with his masterful dissection of Western Marxism. In addition, he devotes great attention to Western Marxism’s critique of the Peoples’ Republic of China (PRC) in a section entitled China and the Purity Fetish of Western Marxism. Of course, he is correct to deplore Western Marxism’s unprincipled collaboration with bourgeois ideologues in attacking every policy or act of Peoples’ China since its revolution in 1949. As with the USSR, any honest, deeply considered estimation of the trajectory of the PRC must — warts and all — see it as a positive in humanity’s necessary transcendence of capitalism.

As anti-imperialists, we must defend the PRC’s right (and other countries’ rights) to choose its own course.

As Marxists, we must defend the Chinese Communist Party’s right to find its own road to socialism.

But Garrido goes further, by mounting an impassioned, but one-sided defense of Chinese socialism. As a militant advocate of the dialectical method, this is an odd departure. As esteemed Marxist R. Palme Dutt argued in the 1960s, the pregnant question for a dialectical materialist is Whither China? not: Does the PRC measure up to some pure Platonic form of socialism? 

A more balanced view of the PRC road would reference the significance of the Communist Party’s overwhelmingly peasant class base in its foundation, its engagement with Chinese nationalism, and the strong voluntarist tendency in Mao Zedong Thought. It would consider the 1960s’ break with the World Communist movement and the rapprochement with the most reactionary elements in US ruling circles in the 1970s, capped by the shameful material support for US and South African surrogates in the liberation wars of Southern Africa. PRC was funding Jonas Savimbi and UNITA while Cuban internationalists were dying fighting them and their apartheid allies. Which suggests the question: Could Peoples’ China do more to help Cuba overcome the US blockade, as did the Soviet Union?

A fair account would address the PRC invasion of Vietnam in 1979 and Peoples’ China’s unwavering defense of the Khmer Rouge. Surely, all these factors play a role in assessing the PRC’s road to socialism.

These uncomfortable facts make it hard to agree with Garrido that the PRC has been “a beacon in the anti-imperialist struggle.”

Of course, today is another matter. My own view is that the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party is “riding the tiger” of a substantial capitalist sector, to use imagery reminiscent of high Maoism. How well they are riding it is in question, but they are indeed riding it. There are many promising developments, but also some that are worrisome.

In any case, the comrades who are critical or skeptical of the Chinese road should not be summarily swept into the dustbin with Western Marxism.

Garrido brings his purity fetish home when he discusses US socialist organizing. He casts a critical eye on the class character of most of the US left, rooting it in the petty-bourgeoisie and the influence of petty-bourgeois ideas. He locates the conveyor for these ideas in academia, the media, and NGOs. Additional material support for petty-bourgeois ideology comes from non-profit corporations and, of course, the Democratic Party.

The petty-bourgeois bias of the US left reinforces its hyper-critical attitude toward movements attempting to actually secure a socialist future. Wherever socialists or socialist-oriented militants tackle the enormous obstacles before them, many on the left will insist that they adhere to courteous liberal standards, an unrealistic demand guaranteeing failure. Garrido mocks the insistence on revolutionary purity: “…the problem is that those things in the real world called socialism were never actually socialism; socialism is really this beautiful idea that exists in a pure form in my head….”

The purity fetish of the middle strata extends to radicals who scorn workers as “backward” or “deplorable.” Garrido counters this purity obsession with a wonderful quote from Lenin: one “can (and must) begin to build socialism, not with abstract human material, or with human material especially prepared by us, but with the human material bequeathed to us by capitalism.”

Regarding the Trump vote and the working class, Garrido scolds the US left:

While not all of the left is guilty of this failure, the charge is not far off the mark.

Finally, Garrido faults much of the US left for its blanket dismissal of progressive trends and achievements in US history. Many leftists debase heroic struggles in US history by painting a portrait of a relentless trajectory of reaction, racism, and imperialism. Garrido correctly sees this as an instantiation of a negative purity fetish– denouncing every page of US history as fatally wanting and inauthentic: “…purity fetish Marxists add on to their futility in developing subjective conditions for revolution by completely disconnecting themselves from the traditions the American masses have come to accept.”

While this is true, it must be remembered that there is always the danger that US history would be celebrated so vigorously that the country’s legacy of cruelty and bloody massacre might be muted by patriotic zeal. During the Popular Front era, for example, Communist leader Earl Browder’s slogan that “Communism is twentieth century Americanism” invested too much social justice in Americanism and too little in Communism.
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US history and tradition is contradictory and Marxists should always expose that contradiction– a legacy of both great, historic social change and ugly inhumanity. The country’s origin shares a tragic settler-colonial past with countries like Australia and South Africa in its genocidal treatment of indigenous people. Those same settlers established or tolerated the brutal exploitation of Africans forced into chattel slavery. While we could lay the blame at the doorstep of the US ruling class, it is US history as well.

At the same time, the US revolution was the most radical for its time and every generation produced a consequential movement to correct the failings of the legacy or advance the horizon of social progress. An emancipating civil war, the expansion of suffrage, workers’ gains against corporations, social welfare and insurance, and a host of other milestones mark the peoples’ history.

While writing and reflecting on the 200th anniversary of the French Revolution (Echoes of the Marsellaise), Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm couldn’t help but be struck by the lesser global influence of the earlier US revolution upon nineteenth-century social change. He thought that reformers and revolutionaries of the time could recognize their point of departure “more readily in the Ancien Régime of France than in the free colonists and slave-holders of North America.” Undoubtedly, the stain of the genocide of indigenous peoples and brutal slavery influenced that disposition.

Indeed, Hobsbawn’s observation underscores the contradictory character of the US past. It is not a “purity fetish” that explains this judgment, but the cold, harsh facts of US history.

Nonetheless, it is appropriate for Garrido to remind us of the many revolutionaries — Marx, Lenin, Mao, Ho Chi Minh, William Z Foster, Herbert Aptheker, Fidel, and more — who have both drawn inspiration and offered inspiration from the victories of the people as well as the fierce resistance to ruling-class oppression contained in US history. He effectively cites Communist leader Georgi Dimitrov who rejects the practice of national nihilism — the denigration of all expressions of national pride and accomplishment. Within every national identity is an identity to be celebrated in its resistance to oppression and its dedication to a better way of life. Workers must draw national humility from the failures of the past, while drawing national pride from the victories over injustice. A left that attends to only one and not both will fail the working class.

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Western Marxism — Marxist scholasticism, disconnected from revolutionary practice — distracts far-too-many well-meaning, hungry-for-change potential allies on the arduous road to socialism. It is heartening to find voices rising to challenge the sterile, obscurantism of this distraction, while defending and promoting the tradition of Marxism-Leninism and Communism. We should encourage and support Marxists like Prashad, Rockhill, and Garrido in conducting this struggle.

Good morning to everybody. We are going to go back to Hegel, but it’s always useful to contextualize the reading of a text like this, and to keep the text itself and our reading of it grounded in the reality that we live, including the ideological reality of this time. And so without going for too long, I just wanted to talk about the Cornel West event that we attended at the University of Pennsylvania, and there were a lot of questions that we had afterwards and perhaps we could even you know go through some of those questions again because they are very fascinating and they are philosophical and they do relate to Hegel, the Science of Logic, the whole concept of a philosophical system which I would wish to explain in a moment. 

And then a little talk about unified theories, and the reason I just wanted to touch on that is because in a certain sense we in the Free School are attempting to forge a unified theory of Lenin and Du Bois, or you know the revolutionary and Marxist tradition of Europe and of the Russian Revolution, and the Black Radical Tradition which is grounded in Du Bois, but I’ll come back to that.

​Just some things before we read – [I want to] talk a little bit about how we should look at this great work. Frankly, as a not yet complete work, and I think Hegel saw it that way himself – a work in progress. But let’s talk about Cornel West. Last Thursday we attended a really, I think important, lecture by Cornel West. You know, the two most important public intellectuals in the United States today are Noam Chomsky and Cornel West. And there are many, many things philosophically that they hold in common, I think. And there are differences, I also think. As you know, Noam Chomsky is more a social scientist, a cognitive scientist, a theorist of language and grammar and semiotics, et cetera. Cornel West is a philosopher, a pure philosopher. It was a very fascinating lecture. I had not seen Cornel West in a couple of years in person and I’ve only kind of kept up with him in relationship to his political commentary, in effect, as you know, his anti-Trump politics and his claim that Trump is a neo-fascist thug and so on. Which then pushes him of course towards Bernie, and I think that’s a real trap given Bernie’s recent political practice relative to Robert Kennedy’s announcement of his presidency challenging Biden from a very progressive point of view, an anti-war, anti-militarist, anti-corporatist state position. 

And Biden could not hardly announce his candidacy before Bernie is endorsing him. I mean in good faith you could have waited at least. I mean, how do you just so quickly and easily jump on the Joe Biden bandwagon, and this is the most dangerous presidency in the history of the country threatening war on two continents just because Trump is an alleged fascist, so I got to go with the guy that’s pushing the world toward maybe a nuclear confrontation. Well it doesn’t make any sense, but it does make a lot of sense if you know that Bernie Sanders is a fake socialist, a fake progressive and a political opportunist of the worst type. And I don’t see any other way to put it. We cannot excuse and we cannot apologize for it. 

Cornel, and this was the sad thing – although Cornel’s lecture stayed at the level of philosophy – and theology by the way – he did say in passing that Biden would be better than Trump without making the argument. I think it was some of that which left most of us, and not quite me – I’m a bit biased for reasons that I’ll try to explain – but most of the people in the Free School who were there found the lecture unfulfilling, I’ll use that language. People can use their own. That Cornel’s brilliance, you know, you get a cat with a huge brain and all of this philosophy and literature and theory packed. A guy who also has, apparently, what is a photographic memory.
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So he’s a formidable thinker, really a formidable thinker with a big heart. He’s not satisfied with confining himself to his academic office or to a university. He goes into the world, engages with the world, and I should tell you, sometimes putting his own life in jeopardy. There was an instance in about 1998 at the Black Radical Convention in Chicago, and he and I happened to be there and together, and a guy stepped to Cornel in a threatening way. And I happened to step to the guy before he could, you know, accost Cornel. And I never forgot, Cornel was a bit shaken I guess you might say. And he said, you know, “I’m a Christian, but I’m not a pacifist,” you know, blasé blasé blasé. But I’m just saying that to say, I’m certain that for all kinds of reasons, a lot of people feel, because he is accessible, he is in the world, he usually travels alone. Although I kind of sense this time he had a security person with him to help him out, just in the event that somebody stepped to him. But I just say all of that to say that the man has a heart and he has a lot of heart. He’s not a punk. He’s not afraid in that regard. And even in my own case at Temple University, he was so gracious to support me and to even come to a rally that we held, and then to appear at the [Free School’s] Black Radical Tradition conference and speak. 

​And so I’m a little biased because of all of that. Although of course philosophically, we’re not on the same page. And just in his lecture, his determining category is the category “catastrophe.” And his narrative is, how do you live a principled life in the face of social catastrophe? And then along with that, a principled moral life in the face of so many people bending to the politics of the dominant class. 

And so he is, when he speaks – and he deploys everybody from Chekhov to William James to Kierkegaard – I mean, I’m sitting there and I’m saying, “Oh, I’m hating, man. I’m never gonna be able to know all of that.” And then I’m saying, “I got to put some respect on your name.” I mean just to have achieved that, you know, is quite a bit. And to have achieved all of that knowledge and not used it for his own academic promotional reasons, as y’all know, he left Harvard in the early 2000’s I think because the then-president called Cornel, and this when Cornel was a tenured professor, a full tenured professor in fact, at Harvard. And Lawrence Summers, who was the president – he called Cornel in to his office and tried to, to say intimidate is not really the word – literally to put him in his place, literally saying, “You should be grateful that you have this position at Harvard, and you should thank us, meaning we the white establishment, every day of your life. And therefore we want you to cease this engagement with the hip-hop generation, with the younger generation and withdraw into doing polite and acceptable academic things.” 

I don’t know what Cornel says but I do know that Cornel can curse. He’s from the hood, you know, Sacramento, so he knows how to curse like I curse. And he may have cursed him out and told him to kiss his behind, and then left Harvard and took a position at Princeton. I don’t know whether Richard Rorty was still around, the philosopher, or who was around but they told him, “Look man, you don’t have to put up with that, come to Princeton.” And then he went to Princeton, and then a few years, maybe ten years later, the black people in particular at Harvard said, “Larry Summers is gone and we want you back here and we will guarantee you tenure, that you will get your tenure back.”

So when he went back to Harvard, everybody said, “Oh, yeah, Cornel’s back at Harvard.” You just assumed he had tenure. But he didn’t have tenure. And I put that on the shoulders of the black professors who told him to come back, and did not do what they needed to do to guarantee tenure. Tenure would give him the protection that a person like him needs because he’s going so much against the grain on so many things.

Then it turns out, about two years ago, it comes out Cornel doesn’t have tenure. And they’re telling him, “Well, we’ll give you a year-by-year contract and don’t worry about it.” And at that point he left Harvard and took a position at Union Theological Seminary. I think that’s where he began his teaching career and that’s where he is today. But you know, with all of that he maintained his dignity and this is important. When you’re betrayed, and he had to be betrayed in that “come back to Harvard” thing. And humiliation in a certain sense, you know ‘cause a lot of people who for jealousy, envy, just don’t like you ‘cause they just don’t like you kind of thing. “You’re too large, talk too much,” all that, were on the sidelines snickering and laughing. You know how that goes, I won’t go into that.

​But he handled himself with dignity, he goes back to Union Theological Seminary and hasn’t missed a beat. He continues to be Cornel West and to do what Cornel West does as an intellectual and a public intellectual and a figure that lives with integrity and creates these wide discursive spaces where people like us can both agree and disagree. You see what I’m saying, by keeping the door to discourse, and serious discourse – you know, not just some Afro-centrism kind of, you know, “We are Africans,” and all of that – but drinking from the deep wells of human knowledge wherever he can find it. And of course no one person in his brain can grasp the totality of human civilizations and knowledge, I mean, when I think about string theories and their claim of ten dimensions of space and time, you know I’m often reminded of the Bhagavad Gita, which talk about seven time dimensions. But anyway, I mean, just to wrap your head around the Bhagavad Gita and Plato’s dialogues and Martin Luther, I mean, come on. You need an army of intellectuals who live monastic lives to grasp all of that. 

But Cornel, unafraid, unashamed, drinks from the wells of knowledge. And of course he could be canceled, just like, you know, “Why are you quoting Plato? He supported a slave-owning society and plus he’s a white man, and a man.” You know, that kind of cancel culture dismissal. Or his thing with Chekhov. But he doesn’t seem to be fazed by it. He continues pushing this high level of discourse, trying to make what is in the end a principled, moral, ethical argument about how to live a life that resists injustice at this time. 

Now, having said all of that, Cornel West is a combination of what we call neo-pragmatism which is a unique American philosophy; pragmatism arose in the United States as a philosophical movement in the middle of the 1800s. It morphed in the 1960s and 1970s into what we call neo-pragmatism. The fundamental argument of neo-pragmatism – first of all it is American but it’s also English, it’s an English American, we call it Anglo-American philosophical move. As you know, the English philosophers going back in many ways to the beginning, we talk about George Berkeley or David Hume, John Locke – the beginning of English serious philosophy – has always staked out its differences with European rationalism. In particular what they call philosophy that attempts to build systems. In our case Kant and Hegel.
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Pragmatism, and usually the founder of pragmatism is usually associated with a man named [Charles Sanders] Peirce, whose work I really don’t know, I have to be honest with you. And then further developed by Du Bois’s mentor at Harvard, William James. But what pragmatism argues is that it philosophizes from the standpoint of the ordinary human being, not from the standpoint of a supposed rational system of philosophy and of knowing. 

Thus it claims to be a democratic philosophy, a philosophy that upholds, I think Cornel has used this word, plebeian democracy, the democracy of the ordinary person. Hence, they often say it is philosophy without foundations, without prior assumptions, without categories. We’ve gone a bit through this, that Kant and Hegel think through categories. For instance the categories of time and space, the category of being, the category of non-being. Each appeals, Kant and Hegel, to logic. Different logics, of course. Hegel, we know, dialectical logic. Kant, more traditional. 

Each, Kant and Hegel, were trying to align philosophy with science, in particular Newton and Copernicus but Newton in particular. And to align science with philosophy, and this is why Hegel said that philosophy is a science. I think Kant would have agreed with that. Hegel said it is the science of sciences; another way of saying that – it is the scaffolding upon which the meaning of scientific experiments and the meaning of scientific discoveries can be elucidated.

This is a huge undertaking by the way, huge undertaking, and remains a part of the way we in the Free School think. We’ll come back to that. But Cornel starts from a pragmatist point of view – that it is the individual seeking meaning in a world that does not in and of itself provide meaning. That is why if you listen to Cornel, there is always on the edge, if you will, or suggesting, that we live on the edge of suicide, of you know, what Jean-Paul Sartre talked, being and nothingness. And how do we realize our being? It is through more moral engagement with a world that will not give us meaning. It is living in good faith, moral good faith in a world where things are commodified, where money trumps principle and hence bad faith. You operate without a moral imperative, without a moral intentionality, you see where I’m coming from. 

So, neo-pragmatists. Richard Rorty is big in Cornel West’s graduate studies at Princeton. Richard Rorty is the famous academic philosopher, a neo-pragmatist at Princeton. He wrote his last book, a small book but I think a very important and should-be famous book entitled Achieving Our Country. The title of the book he takes from James Baldwin. And Rorty attacks the intelligentsia and the academics who have abandoned the working class. It is a great book, a great manifesto which takes, you know, the whole question of the plebeian or democratic thrust in philosophy, I think, to an important place of engagement. But this is Cornel, you know a plebeian – a people’s philosophy, a people’s framing. Framing philosophical and moral issues from the standpoint of the ordinary person.

And that is why I think he has this great fidelity, this great commitment to the blues – with critique, and I didn’t quite agree with his critique. But the blues, which is the narrative of the ordinary people. The blues, talking about navigating the narration of disappointment, but the narration of overcoming, of resilience, of “I’m still here in spite of everything.” He considers the blues to be a very high expression of living morally in a world that tries to undermine your efforts to do that. You know, the pressure is to sell out all the time. But here’s the blues man, the blues woman saying that we can still be principled in spite of the pressure to sell out.

​So Cornel calls himself a blues man of the mind. He has such interesting formulations. But he sees himself as a blues man and as a traveling musician. He also sees himself in relationship to the blues and John Coltrane. And this scaffolding, this architecture of morality coming out of black resistance is so much a part of him and the way he lives. And you know, even as he talked about music you all might remember, and he really digs Philadelphia, loves Philadelphia because of Philly’s music. And he says Philadelphia’s a soulful city. And he mentioned the O’Jays – and his soundtrack by the way, is the same soundtrack as the Free School. The same music that we listen to, he was gesturing to. The Isley Brothers – did he mention “Harvest For the World”? One of those great calls to morality to resistance. And of course he talked about Stevie Wonder’s love song “Love’s in Need of Love.” You know, which is like us. 

And the moderator, who I was not too thrilled by. (‘Cause I know some people weren’t there, so I’m filling in, creating a picture.) But the moderator, when Cornel was talking about the O’Jays and the Isley Brothers, [the moderator] tried to say Meek Mills. Now how do you get from that, to that? I don’t see it. But Cornel resisted it, you know in his generous way of course without saying, “I disagree,” but just saying the music that he stands upon. And he’s absolutely right about this, he’s absolutely right. That blues, jazz and R&B is still the strong hand in our music and poetry. 

But along with neo-pragmatism [for Cornel] is existentialism, a contemporary form of existentialism, and this is again where I would find myself in a bit of a difference with Cornel. For him, the important existentialists would be people like Karl Jaspers and Albert Camus, not Jean-Paul Sartre, the radical, the communist, the socialist, the anti-colonialist. Not Jean-Paul Sartre, but Albert Camus who in fact opposed the Algerian independence movement. Oh by the way this is something that James Baldwin spoke about as well in one of the essays in No Name in the Street, I think the first one entitled “Take Me to the Water.” Jimmy Baldwin did not like Albert Camus either and felt, like Sartre, that Albert Camus was pro-colonialist and operated in bad faith. 

So it is this sense of the absurd, and in philosophical and existentialist terms, the absurd means non-being or no meaning or lack of meaning. You see what I’m saying. And so it is this tightrope that Cornel navigates upon. To me, it is interesting, it is dramatic, it is exciting. Like I said, “I got to put some respect on your name, hometown. You know, you remain so energized, so hopeful, so alive, you know what I’m saying?” Where it would be easy to say, to throw in the towel, “I’ve been doing this for too long you know. Three of my marriages broke up because of this, I’m going to throw in the towel.” But he stays real, he stays alive and he remains who he is. And welcomes difference and critique. That’s the positive thing. 

​Philosophically, and in terms of social theory, I feel that his approach does not account for a big part of human history including the Russian and Chinese revolutions, the revolutionary leaderships of these movements and their philosophies and theories. It does not account for philosophies paralleling science, or philosophies in the Hegelian or Kantian sense attempting to correct science, and to clarify for scientists and non-scientists what the discoveries of science suggest, in scientific terms and in human terms. That tradition is usually associated with what is called rationalism although it’s much, much more than that. Can you see what I’m saying?

Cornel’s position is more in the English American tradition of empiricism, pragmatism and existentialism. There is not … I guess we could put it this way using what we’ve already read in Hegel. There is not, in pragmatism and neo-pragmatism – in fact they reject the whole concept of mediation – it is all resolved at the level of the immediate, and of the individual. And not to mention, that English philosophers – I would say everybody from John Stuart Mill through Bertrand Russell and up to till present, have always smeared Hegel as somehow being the source of authoritarianism and even Nazism. That the rationalist tradition, especially as it crystallizes in Hegel’s philosophy, can only lead to anti-democratic practices and that to return democracy to philosophy, you have to separate philosophy from what is called the rational tradition, or thinking through categories. We can come back to that.

So it is a claim and I think this is a problem for Cornel because it generalizes, in fact reduces the question of democracy to an Anglo-Saxon practice. That everything that is not Anglo-Saxon in its theory and practice of democracy is by definition authoritarianism. Well does that sound familiar? Yes it does, because that’s the paradox that the Biden administration and the US ruling class tries to present us with. Either Anglo-Saxon democracy or authoritarianism. Either John Locke and John Stuart Mill – or Hitler. I won’t say my friend, but a guy that I follow, Lex Fridman is always doing, sadly, this conjunction of Mao, Stalin and Hitler – they’re all the same, you know. But that’s the Anglo-Saxon smearing of human revolutionary aspirations. 

So when you listen to Cornel, he is operating and thinking within the folds of Anglo-American philosophy, and hence the unusual in the political arena that does not fit the narrative of Anglo-American democratic theorizing and narrative is thereby authoritarian and even neo-fascist. And I want to underline the unusual, because the thing of Anglo-American philosophy has become a dogma rather than a project of scientific critique, of democracy and the possibilities of changing it, of advancing it. 

I just want to say a couple of few other things. In this sense, and people who were there, we saw a crescendo in his narrative, and to me it was exciting because I’m trying to, you know – all of these people, you know, I read, I know a little bit about. But he seemed to weave this narrative out of all of these thinkers from Chekhov to Kierkegaard to William James, and just, I mean just unbelievable, man. That’s why I said, “I got to put some respect on your name.” But in the end, he reaches the apogee and he couldn’t go any further. And then it had to be a repeat. It had to be a re-do, re-saying of similar things that he had previously said because he refused to go to the world of contradiction, of possibility, of danger. He stayed within this beautiful narrative, this exciting narrative that he started with.

​The other thing is his constant referencing and gesturing to Christianity, in the sense of liberation Christianity or Black Christianity. No problem. As we all know through our own experiences and observations, that Black religion is a religion of resistance, that being is realized in-becoming as Martin Luther King said in one of his graduate school papers. Being is in-becoming. That for Black Christianity, the end is not an end, it is the beginning of something new. And he’s right about that. But then, to me there’s a paradox between Anglo-American political theory and philosophy, and Black Christianity, which is not grounded in the individual or not grounded as Cornel West suggested, in fake hope in the future. It is futuristic but not this Disneyland futurism of the standard ruling class narrative in this country. 

And just my last point, I think he gets King wrong. King was not a naive pacifist. If you want any evidence of that just listen to the speech “Why I Oppose the War in Vietnam.” King understood St. Thomas Aquinas’s differentiation between just and unjust wars. I don’t think that Cornel understands the actual and practical real-life meaning of that as it relates in particular to the Ukraine War. Is Russia an imperialist nation, as he says? Or is Russia defending itself against the imperialism, militarism and aggression of the United States. Were the Vietnamese waging a just war? Were Koreans waging a just war? Were they waging a war for peace?

King understood that. He understood the difference between just and unjust wars. And I think that rather than pigeonholing King into this nebulous, ill-defined category of pacifism – you know, King was far too philosophically developed to be reduced to that. What Cornel has not considered is that King in fact was a theorist and practitioner of the struggle for democracy. A peaceful means, a political rather than a civil war path to the democratic and political transformation of the American nation; to disarm the ruling elite in its efforts to pit black against white in the struggle to change the country, for black and white people.

That is what King was saying. He was a theorist and a practitioner of the struggle for democracy. The concept of love. You cannot, in King’s sense, appeal to pragmatist or neo-pragmatist philosophers, or to English theorists of liberal theory or society, to understand King’s concept of love and the Beloved Community. It seems that Cornel missed a tremendous opportunity to further develop, to further deepen, to further extend his own theory of moral behavior and moral action. 

How beautiful might it have been if he could have turned or extended that discourse to King’s notion of the Beloved Community, which goes hand-in-hand with his idea of the means to radical transformation as important – this is King – as important as the ends themselves. So King was talking about a democratic path to achieve a new democracy, that unites and transforms the people in the process. I don’t think the philosophies that ground Cornel necessarily predisposed him to that kind of Kingian or even Baldwinian thinking. I’ll stop there and just say that we had a rich discussion for the time that it lasted on Thursday evening.

​Future historians will likely look back at the debt ceiling rituals being reenacted these days with a frustrated shaking of their heads. That otherwise reasonable people would be so readily deceived raises the question that will provoke those historians: How could this happen?
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The U.S. Congress has imposed successive ceilings on the national debt, each one higher than the last. Ceilings were intended to limit the amount of federal borrowing. But the same U.S. Congress so managed its taxing and spending that it created ever more excesses of spending over tax revenues (deficits). Those excesses required borrowing to cover them. The borrowings accumulated to hit successive ceilings. A highly political ritual of threats and counterthreats accompanied each rise of the ceiling required by the need to borrow to finance deficits.

It is elementary economics to note that if Congress raised more taxes or cut federal spending—or both—there would be no need to borrow and thus no ceiling on borrowing to worry about. The ceiling would become irrelevant or merely symbolic. Further, if taxes were raised enough and spending cut enough, the existing U.S. national debt could be reduced. That situation has happened occasionally in U.S. history.

The real issue then is that when borrowing approaches any ceiling, the policy choices are these three: raise the ceiling (to borrow more), raise taxes, or cut spending. Of course, combinations of them would also be possible.

In contrast to this reality, U.S. politics deceives by constricting its debate. Politicians, the mainstream media, and academics simply omit—basically by refusing to admit or consider—tax increases. The GOP demands spending cuts or else it will block raising the ceiling. The Democrats insist that raising the ceiling is the better choice than cutting spending. Democrats threaten to blame the GOP for the consequences of not raising the debt ceiling. They paint those consequences in lurid colors depicting U.S. bondholders denied interest or repayment, Social Security recipients denied their pensions, and government employees denied their wages. The unspoken agreement between the two major parties is to omit any serious discussion of raising taxes to avoid hitting the debt ceiling. That omission entails deception.

Here are some tax increases that could help solve the problem by avoiding any need to raise the debt ceiling. The social security tax could be applied to all wage and salary incomes, not only those of $160,000 or less as is now the case. The social security tax could be applied to nonwage income such as interest dividends, capital gains, and rents. The corporate profits tax could be raised back to what it was a few decades ago: near or above 50 percent versus the current 37 percent rate. A property tax could be levied on property that takes the form of stocks and bonds. The current property tax in the United States (levied mostly at the local level) includes land, houses, automobiles, and business inventories, while it excludes stocks and bonds. Perhaps that is because the richest 10 percent of Americans own roughly 80 percent of stocks and bonds. The current property tax system in the United States is very nice for that 10 percent. Another logical candidate is the federal estate tax which a few years ago exempted under $1 million of an estate from the tax, but now exempts over $12 million per person (over $25 million per couple). That exemption makes a mockery of the idea that all Americans start or live their lives on a level playing field where merit counts more than inheritance. The U.S. could and should go back from that tax giveaway to the richest. There are many more possible tax increases.

Of course, there are strengths and weaknesses entailed in raising every tax, positive and negative consequences. But the exact same is true of raising the debt ceiling and thereby increasing the U.S. national debt. Likewise cutting spending has its pluses and minuses in terms of pain and gain. There is no logical or reasonable basis for excluding tax increases from the national debate and discussion about raising the debt ceiling and thereby the national debt.

It is rather the shared political commitments of both major parties that require and motivate the exclusion. There is no reason for U.S. citizens to accept, tolerate, endorse, or otherwise validate the debt ceiling deception perpetrated against us.

Nor is the debt ceiling deception alone. The previous national debate over responding to inflation by having the Federal Reserve raise interest rates provides another quite parallel example. That debate proceeded by debating the pros and cons of interest rate increases as if no other anti-inflationary policy existed or was even worth mentioning. Once again elementary economics teaches that wage-price freezes and rationing have been used against inflations in the past—including in the United States—as alternatives to raising interest rates or alongside them. U.S. President Nixon in 1971 used wage-price freezes. U.S. President Roosevelt used rationing during World War II. But the government, Federal Reserve, major media, and major academic leaders carried on their recent policy debates as if those other anti-inflationary tools did not exist or were not worth including in the debate.

Wage-price freezes and rationing have their strengths and weaknesses—just as tax increases do—but once again the same applies to raising interest rates. No justification exists for proceeding as if alternative options are not there. The U.S. national debate over fighting inflation was deceptive in the same way that the debate over the debt ceiling is.

Nor is the deception any less if it is covered by a claim of “realism.” Those who grasp elementary economics enough to know that tax increases could “solve” the debt ceiling issue become complicit in the deception by invoking “realism.” Since the two major parties are jointly subservient to corporations and the rich, they rule out tax increases on them. It thus becomes “realistic” to exclude that option from the debt ceiling debate. What is best for corporations and the rich thus gets equated to what is “realistic.” It is worth remembering that throughout history ruling classes have discovered, to their shock and surprise, that the ruled can and often do quickly alter what is “realistic.”

The debt ceiling deceptions favor corporations over individuals and the richest individuals over the rest of us. In our thinking and speaking too, the nation’s class structure and class struggles exhibit their influential power. The mainstream debt ceiling debate deceives by lying by omission rather than commission.

​Author:

​Richard D. Wolff is professor of economics emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and a visiting professor in the Graduate Program in International Affairs of the New School University, in New York. Wolff’s weekly show, “Economic Update,” is syndicated by more than 100 radio stations and goes to 55 million TV receivers via Free Speech TV. His three recent books with Democracy at Work are The Sickness Is the System: When Capitalism Fails to Save Us From Pandemics or Itself, Understanding Socialism, and Understanding Marxism, the latter of which is now available in a newly released 2021 hardcover edition with a new introduction by the author.

​I just wanted to say a few things about why Hegel, why we’re reading Hegel and how we want to read Hegel and the context for our reading of Hegel, and for a reading of Du Bois or anything – what is the ideological and political context? 
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We’re in a moment of what is perhaps the most consequential ideological struggle in the modern epoch and maybe in the ideological history of humanity. In part, this is so because of the sheer magnitude and numbers of people involved, literally billions of people. Now the fact that the masses of humanity are no longer passive, ignorant and unconscious of this great ideological struggle – and they are [conscious], and of course we must begin, unlike let us say, revolutionaries of the past who had to assume that the majority of people were not themselves conscious of the revolutionary struggle. And so the idea that a few people would storm the barricades, or storm the Winter Palace – that approach is radically, even fundamentally different from what must be assumed in these times.

​We must assume, as I think it is a fact, that the majority of humanity – the majority of the eight billion human beings that constitute humanity in one or another way – are conscious of the world that they live in, are conscious of ideas, and are in one or another way conscious of the consequences of ideas and of themselves as agents of history. 
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This has never been the case. Most people lived in isolation from the main currents of ideas up until the present time, and by the present time I’m talking of the last 125 years. 

Why and what brought about this change? There are, I think, two fundamental reasons. A lot of people, you’ll hear talk – “Well it’s social media – oh, it’s the Internet that has awakened the consciousness of the broad masses of people.” And that’s a form of what we would call technological determinism. It is not that. It is the socialist revolutions and the anti-colonial struggles that freed the vast majority of humanity to be makers of history. And by makers of history we mean in the sense of not just acting upon other people’s plans but themselves having a consciousness and understanding and a plan. So it is fatal to assume that the majority of mankind is ignorant and unconscious of where history is and where history might go. 

To put it another way, the majority of humanity has an imaginary, a futuristic outlook that things as they are today can change. If we went back over a hundred years ago, most people believe that the way their ancestors, their great-great-grandparents, their grandparents had lived – they too would live that way. Today people don’t think that way. And while I mentioned the Socialist Revolutions, of course the Russian Revolution, Chinese Revolution and going forward, and the anti-colonial struggles – we must also indicate, and this is the greatest part of the great scientific value of [Du Bois’s] Black Reconstruction – the awakening of the enslaved proletariat who were being told over and over again – and I would say the majority of human beings on the planet to the extent they knew about it, believed that slavery was natural, and that Africans were naturally inferior. 

What Du Bois establishes is that the enslaved proletariat itself, in its consciousness of itself, was in the vanguard of the human struggle for liberation. It is also the black freedom movement that as well awakens humanity not only to the fact that things could change, but that things inevitably will change. As King often quotes from the abolitionist preacher Theodore Parker, “The arc of the moral universe is long and it bends to justice.” The concept of freedom as an inevitable part of the human condition. 

​Most human beings on the planet now would believe that in one or another way. I don’t care where you go. So the ideological struggle is inevitable and central to the radical and revolutionary remaking of the planet. To put it another way, no ruling class, including the ruling class of the United States, can assume that they can just dictate to people what should be and what they should do and what they shouldn’t do. They have to at least make an effort to ideologically win people to their side. 

Well, to say that for today, we also have to say that even the bourgeois democratic revolutions – when the bourgeoisie was weak and a small part of the population of let us say France or Germany or England or of even of the United States, the bourgeoisie had to convince the people that they the bourgeoisie as opposed to the aristocrats and the kings and the landowners and the the popes and the bishops, that they, the bourgeoisie could bring into existence another system that would establish liberty, what we today would call freedom, and  emancipate the masses from the the drudgery, the misery, of the old feudal system. 

We see the same thing in the Indian independence movement where Gandhi took on the garments of the peasantry and lived like a peasant, went among the peasants and day-by-day won them to the struggle for independence from British rule. The same thing with the Chinese revolutionaries, when Mao said we have to go to the countryside ‘cause that’s where the people are. It was a strategy of winning the majority of people to the cause of revolution, not the dogmatic idea that the working class will lead the peasantry, enter into an alliance but lead the peasantry. What Mao ‘n those were saying is that the peasantry on its own is a revolutionary force and the fact is the majority can and should be won to the cause of democratic change in China. 

So today we’re talking about processes, which Hegel could never have imagined – the Hegelian idea that the history of humanity is the history of ideas, that human beings were the manifestation, human societies were the manifestations of great ideas, et cetera. He could have never imagined the majority of humanity being involved, first of all and its own liberation, but also in the struggle of ideas. So again, to understand how we got to a point in a matter of a brief period, I mean we could say 125 years, we could say maybe a little bit longer if you include the civil war and black reconstruction and that kind of thing. 

What we call the ideological struggle, which is maybe not the best way to talk about this thing, the word ideology or ideological comes from the German. And ideology in German philosophy and political theory is what we would call ideas, big ideas. So the ideological struggle is really the struggle over ideas and more importantly, the human future. 

​Therefore the struggle of ideas or the ideological struggle must be broadly conceived and not narrowly, as in a conflict between “left” or “revolutionary groups” about who is more pure in their ideology. That is a superficial way, but it’s really a trivialization of the magnitude of what we’re talking about, and of course it is a throwback to a situation that existed over 150 years, 200 years ago, where the majority of human beings were not involved. So the question of “ideological purity” or “ideological correctness” of a “revolutionary vanguard” is so out of step with where humanity is at this point as to literally be something that would fit more and into a Saturday Night Live, or what we used to call a black exploitation film, it’s a joke. It is not serious. 

What we’re talking about in terms of ideas and the struggle of ideas is ultimately the struggle of the people. Hence, for us we talk about the centrality of the ideological struggle. Now a lot of people would say, and they say it all the time, the so-called left – and whenever you say left you always have to put quotations around it or the word so-called – a lot of this is a joke, frankly. They will say for example, “well, the people are not interested in your ideas – the people are not interested in you reading Hegel. What black people are interested in that?” Well first of all, you don’t know what black people are interested in, and just because you’re not [interested], you might be an outlier. You might not represent black folk or the working class. “They’re more interested in putting food on their tables, and therefore they’re interested in activism, it is the activist that has the greatest appeal to the masses of people.” Well I can tell you from my own experience of course here in Philadelphia, but I think it’s other places, that a lot of people don’t trust activists, especially those who proceed from a “woke” or “identity politics” position. People are interested in a future, hence they are interested in ideas. And they’re interested in ideas in the organic sense. They’re interested in ideas in the same ways that we are interested in ideas. 

The sites of the struggle that we’re talking about, the ideological struggle, are everywheres but some of them – philosophy, art literature and science, often or most times in academic circles, philosophers or professors of literature and art will say that we’re not doing ideology, we’re doing deep readings and deconstructive readings, et cetera. That we’re not bringing any externalities or biases to the question. Most philosophers would say that what we’re doing is a reconsideration based upon our own time and all of that of the great philosophers, and so on. And to claim that, for example, as we claim that philosophy is politics by other means, they would find that not only transgressive but demeaning of the high calling of what they do. And of course all professors think they’ve been summoned by a higher calling, something greater than any of us can understand, and they’re not driven by money and other things, crude things like that. 

​And certainly when you get to science, especially the Natural Sciences, most theoretical or experimental physicists, biologists, chemists, act like and will dispute anyone who would make the argument that science, and especially at the theoretical level, is a branch of philosophy and hence of ideological engagement. In other words the experiments that they do, the instruments that they build, are not the result of just the internal dialectics of their particular discipline and groups of theorists and scientists that they interact with. What we are saying is that as parts of societies, they are as ideologically shaped as anybody else. And so the work of theoretical physics, including quantum mechanics or relativity theory, or string theory, the way these things are thought about, talked about are really philosophical questions, which again are ideological questions. 

Our return to Hegel and philosophy through Hegel – not exclusively Hegel, and I want to underline that – not exclusively Hegel – is our doing in another way what we did with Black Reconstruction, and what we’ve done with so many other things, and what we plan to do going forward with the year of James Baldwin and all of that type of thing. We are doing ideology and in substance doing, or participating, I should say, in the great work of the people to free themselves from a system that has no way out for them. 

Frankly any ethnography, that is to say, the sociological work of going among the people, observing them, talking to them – always shows a profound interest, especially that mature part of the working class – a profound interest in ideas. And always seeking out honest thinkers that are not using ideas to make them themselves the “thinker” – look smarter than everybody else. That’s why people are so interested in a person like Baldwin and wanting to know him better, are so interested in King, and to the extent that we make it available, Du Bois and so on, Gandhi, et cetera.

Being concerned with philosophy brings us into certain areas of knowledge that are central to what philosophy does. Let me just name a few of them: logic, and I want to return to this because that’s a big question as we get into AI and even quantum mechanics. Logic, methodologies, methods. Logic and methodology I don’t think are that separate, at least in Hegel’s sense. They are ways of knowing, of discovering truth.

Phenomenology, and again I find Hegel’s definition of phenomenology to be the best, although it is not the only one – where he defines phenomenology as a science of human consciousness. The existentialist would define phenomenology as the science or study of being, or what they would call existence. We’ll come back to that. And there’s an important separation between existentialist phenomenology and Hegelian phenomenology.

​I would just throw one other philosopher’s name in here when we get to this kind of existential phenomenology and that is Frederick Nietzsche. He could be the start of that kind of phenomenology. But nonetheless, phenomenology. And the other which is bound up with phenomenology and logic and that is epistemology, or theories of philosophies of knowledge, how we know. Epistemology is very connected to so much going on in the fields again of quantum physics and string theory.

String theory is one of those areas that has been mathematized. In other words, physicists that work in string theory talk to each other through mathematical equations, which means the rest of us don’t know what the hell they’re talking about. And I think they like it like that. But string theory is sometimes called a “theory of everything.” 

Can there be a huge theory which unites classical physics? That is, the physics of Isaac Newton  and Albert Einstein, rooted in an understanding of gravity. And for Einstein, a theory of time  really – can that school of physics, the physics of large bodies, be united with a physics of subatomic particles? Thus far, as far as science is concerned to my knowledge, theoretical physics is concerned, the behavior of subatomic particles goes against the theories of gravity that apply to large bodies. 

And so the challenge is, can there be a steering to unite these two apparently disparate, two conflicting things, and thus it is called string theory, or better, a theory of everything, or a unifying theory of Einstein and quantum mechanics? Relativity theory and quantum mechanical theory. This is huge and has gone unsolved since – well, the real great meeting to see if there could be some reconciliation occurred in 1925 in Copenhagen. We talked about that before. Up to this point they have not been reconciled; there has not been a unified theory of everything. In fact, there seems to be among theoretical physicists who deal with particle physics or quantum mechanics, a movement away from a recognition of the existence of a world outside of the human consciousness.

 In other words, there are people in recent times who get Nobel prizes in theoretical physics who have made the claim that subatomic particles do not exist in and of themselves. They exist because our consciousness brings them into existence. This is a huge assertion because it would deny the existence of a world outside of consciousness. The consequences of that, ultimately for the transformation of the world in a sense from the epoch of Western hegemony to the epoch of humanity is not possible and can only be seen as a dead end. I’ll explain that a little bit more. I would say that that type of philosophy – the philosophy of this is not new – the philosophy that they’re asserting – the claims that they are making have a philosophical history going back to what we call British empiricism and the first philosopher Berkeley and then of course the major one in the British empiricist tradition David Hume, who said we can only claim the existence of the world as a result of our consciousness. We’ll come back to that.

​If there is no world outside of our consciousness, then what is truth? This philosophical problem, or as I would say the geography, the structure of this problem of the existence of the world outside of consciousness, has its reflection in the discussion of artificial intelligence.

Again, not a small matter. A very important matter because of the conclusions that they are drawing, because AI through the devices of the internet and iPhones and other things is a greater reality in the lives of everyday people than quantum mechanics – the type of philosophical assertions that they make either openly or as subtext, has greater influence upon the ways that billions of people will view themselves and their futures. 

Our approaches in philosophy and of course Hegel, and again I want to emphasize, not as the last word –  we are not making a god of Hegel the way some people in AI want to make a god of AGI, that is artificial intelligence that becomes God-like, or artificial intelligence which through the evolution of machine intelligence can arrive at absolute truths, a kind of an end game where God-like means all-knowing. But even they in the AI discourse say that in arriving at that civilization itself will be destroyed. We’ll come back to that. A lot of these guys I don’t take too seriously, the chatter as it were. We’ll come back to that. 

We are concerned with logic and phenomenology. We are concerned first of all with Hegel’s assertion and maybe one of the most important claims in the history of modern philosophy,that Aristotle did not have it right, that the substance of the logic of real things in the real world is dialectical and not formal.
Formal logic is that logic associated most with Aristotle. Aristotle established that the laws of logic were laws designed to bring clarity to philosophical and other claims, and to establish what in fact were the logical conditions of truth. No small matter, not to be trivialized. Nor because of Hegel’s dialectic can we dispense with Aristotelian logic. We cannot, for all kinds of reasons, including that science is so bound up with Aristotelian logic. The ways that scientists think, the ways that experiments are constructed, the ways that they evaluate truth, et cetera, are all bound up strongly with Aristotelian logic and not with Hegelian dialectics. 
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There are philosophers of science and of mathematics, for instance Bertrand Russell, who will say – and I think he was all out of school on this one – “I never read Hegel’s Science of Logic and I don’t think it’s worth reading. It’s conflicted and confused.” And then he goes on to attempt to establish a system whereby logic could clarify the statements of philosophy. This is a kind of symbolic or mathematical logic – a lot of people try to replace ordinary language with mathematical formula and therefore you would have a committee of philosophers let us say and linguists who would take all of the statements – I guess this is part of what they think AI will do – take all the statements ever made by philosophy, all the statements ever made by anybody and use a criteria of mathematics to clarify what those statements really meant, to indicate what the contradictions in this statement versus the other statement a person made. In other words, a return to what Aristotle wanted to achieve. Logic as a way of achieving clarity about truth claims.

​Now there are three laws of Aristotelian logic. And it’s very simple, but in its evolution very complex because it relates so much to all fields of mathematics as far as I can see, or can apply to all fields of mathematics, including calculus and geometry and algebra. You know, these simple laws. First of all, the law of identity: a thing is always itself. The second is the law of negation: a thing cannot be itself and its opposite at the same time. And the third is the most fascinating of them, and that is the law of the excluded middle, which is kind of a combination of the two previous ones. Nothing can exist as itself and its opposite at the same time – the law of excluded middle. Which, for Aristotle to base logic on anything but the law of identity would mean to clutter knowledge with other types of claims and contradictions. Remember, logic in this sense is to bring clarity and to eliminate all contradictions. The law of the excluded middle is a denial of the existence of contradiction and statements of truth or methods seeking to know the truth.

However, Hegel in his logic says that in fact, all things exist in a state of contradiction and that the principal law of logic is the law of negation. Or to put it another way, the negation of the negation. That seems so odd or so out of bounds because we don’t talk about things in that way, but that is where Hegel begins and that in the end is the subversive and revolutionary character of his thinking

Hegel is a student of Immanuel Kant – by the way, Immanuel Kant is my favorite modern philosopher. I use my favorite for several reasons, not because I agree with him more than I agree with Hegel. But Hegel comes forward with what in fact is a revolutionary proposition, that the logic of real things, the logic of real ideas, the logic of things that we live with, the logic of what we are is grounded in the unity of opposites. Hegel therefore proposed a logic of things in motion and change, as opposed to a logic of things in a static and lifeless existence

I’ve already mentioned about phenomenology, I won’t go back to that except to say that there is a kind of empty and an infantile, childish, more popular existentialism today associated with the word wokeness, identity, associated with pop psychology, intersectionality. And we should be very clear, intersectional analysis is not a dialectical analysis. This existential phenomenology centers upon the individual, is ahistorical, is unable to deal with the great philosophical questions. In a lot of ways identity politics and the philosophies of it and intersectionality are distractions from the great struggles of this time. It is completely subjective and self-oriented, egotistical in the sense of the self – the individual is the main center of philosophy. Isn’t that a real backward move from Hegel?

​But it is not an unusual evolution in Anglo-American philosophy. I’m of the opinion that people like John Stuart Mill would be very comfortable with this outcome. And there are philosophers who from an “existentialist” point of view analyze everything from hip-hop to gender sexuality, through the lens of identity and frankly of Aristotelian logic. There are so many ironies with this – these people who are so much against white men who said anything in the past are really basing their philosophy, their theories in Aristotle and John Stuart Mill and maybe John Locke if you will.

The other application of phenomenology which is not Hegel necessarily is Immanuel Kant and  I would say even David Hume, who use phenomenon to mean our sensual experiences. Sensual, that feeling, tasting, seeing, etcetera experience. And Kant made a distinction between what he called phenomena: those things that are available to our reasoning process, our logical process. And noumena: those things beyond our feeling or experience.

Phenomena, where all of those things that are available to us through our experience and are available to knowledge, to reason. Noumena is that universe, that world which is beyond anything we can experience, hence beyond anything we can know. So the world of knowledge is the world of phenomena. 
​
Hegel, on the other side, said that because we and all things exist in time. Because of that, and because all things exist in motion, while we might never get to be absolute, i.e. we become God, we can increasingly know not only our experiences but that which is beyond our experience, perhaps in the realm of the abstract. I don’t want to get into that right now, but Hegel excoriated and criticized Kant for limiting the possibilities of knowledge to our immediate experience. We can come back to that.

As I said already, we’re going back into this philosophical thing as a way to engage the ideological struggle and the ideological struggles today. I don’t know how you do it without philosophy. A lot of this is empty, uninformed discourse by poorly educated professors and others. A lot of it wouldn’t be acceptable to Kant or Hegel or Du Bois or Baldwin, or anybody. It’s so empty, so superficial.

To think that you can have a discourse on gender and race over here, and a discourse on quantum mechanics and AI over here, and they have nothing in common. My argument is they have a whole lot in common and each of them in their logics, in their methods, in the phenomenologies weigh in heavily upon humanity’s future, or the majority of humanity’s imaginary of their future. Woke identity politics is a way of in fact taking billions of people out of the struggle for their own future. AI discussions do the same thing – well, what links them? I think there are common philosophical assumptions, whether stated or not. Common philosophical assumptions, and that at one cannot effectively wage the struggle for ideas without getting at the deep structure of ideas. Kant called it a transcendental logic. Aristotle is right – there’s something more to this than just what you say or how you construct your argument. What are the assumptions grounding what you say and grounding your argument?

​​Again, whenever you deal with Hegel, you’re gonna get all the blowback in the world. From every anti-revolutionary force no matter where they are in academic disciplines or in public discourse, they will blow back against Hegel as unrealistic, unworkable and confused. And again it is because of the two things. Time, which is indispensable in Hegel, not just as a structure, but time as inseparable from the existence of things themselves – things exist in time and motion. But also the fundamental law of Hegelian dialectics: the negation of the negation. That just doesn’t sit well with a lot of people. You know, you say “Well it’s a logic based in the negation of the negation.” “Oh there you go again, you’re negative.” “No, I’m not negative at all.” You see what I’m saying?

So, the liberal mind, they have this happy-happy positive thing. No, we’re not talking about your personal feeling, we’re talking about the way things exist in motion. What Hegel said is the logic of actual existing things is a logic based upon negation. The new emergence from the old. And the two become a synthesis. You know, in social philosophy, social theory, revolutionary thinking. If one does not engage that or acknowledge that, one is condemning oneself to dogmatism and repeating over and over and over again formulations that may have applied adequately and scientifically to one set of circumstances but might not apply in this. In the realm of theory and ideas, to deny dialectics in my estimate is to deny the creative potential of all great ideas to birth new ideas. Out of the old comes the new. The old is not completely destroyed, it is synthesized with the new to produce something new. It is a creative process, the unity of opposites leads to a higher synthesis.

We’re reading the Science of Logic in the same way we read Black Reconstruction. We read the Science of Logic the way not that Bertrand Russell read it – or didn’t read it – but the ways that Marx and Lenin, among others, have read Science of Logic. We read Science of Logic and Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind the way Du Bois did, and the ways that Hegel is implemented and deployed in Black Reconstruction. If you know Hegel, you can see Du Bois working through a dialectical logic to explain reconstruction and the anti-slavery struggle. And in fact, reading Black Reconstruction the way we read him, creates creative possibilities to think about the world. We read Hegel the way the now-defunct Soviet Academy of Philosophy did. In other words, we read him in a revolutionary way, and why shouldn’t we? We’re not anti-revolutionary. 

And frankly I don’t think there’s a moral way to exist in the world – and I get this from Baldwin –  if you’re not revolutionary in revolutionary times, that is in times of revolutionary change in technology, philosophy, systems of governance and et cetera. We do not read Hegel in the limited bourgeois way – we do not read Hegel or Black Reconstruction in a way to uphold the rule of the current so-called liberal bourgeois elite. We do not read Hegel the way Bertrand Russell or John Stuart Mill did, or more recently the way George di Giovanni, the translator and writer of the introduction in the current Cambridge edition of Science of Logic. Di Giovanni says in his introduction, “Let’s be real, the Science of Logic is antiquated; it has no relevance to now.”

​Well, if your standpoint is the permanence, end-of-history permanence of liberal bourgeois rule then of course it’s antiquated. Any philosophy that talks about the inevitability of change would not be to your personal liking because you see this system as the best representation of human aspiration. A person like di Giovanni would provide a great deal of argumentation and support to a person like Joe Biden. That seems strange, doesn’t it. Or at least his speech writers, who would say that the struggle on the world scale is between democracies and autocracies, and once you get up off the floor having fell on the floor laughing at such nonsense, and especially coming out of the mouth of a warmonger like Joe Biden, you know, you have to say, well let’s be more sober about this question. Is that, as you stated, Joe Biden, the fundamental dialectic of this time? Since you want to say that there is a dialectic in world history, at least at this time, and if you want to say that – well Joe Biden, are you prepared to embrace the law of the excluded middle? That all things exist as a negation of negation, and is the negation of the current system something completely different from it, leading to a new synthesis?

Hence, even in your broke-down ignorant way, or your speechwriters, you have to acknowledge that history and time compel all matter, all things, including human consciousness, to exist in a state of movement. Why do we have time, anyway? In this sense, I guess it’s fair for us to say that we take a stance against the privileging, without contextualizing, of mathematical and symbolic logics, or linguistic logics. In other words, the great achievements of mathematics and mathematical logic and linguistic theories are undeniable, but is that the end of the story, is that the final say? 

There are those who operate on behalf of, and are themselves a part of the ruling elite who are waging an existential battle for their existence in a time where they have fallen into a crisis of legitimacy – the people don’t believe them and don’t want to hear much that they have to say. That they come forward suddenly with a new technology. That if you think you people are like us, or average people, that you were so smart – we now have technology that will replace you with a quickness. And it’s known as artificial intelligence. And if you think you’re so smart, I’m using their words, if you think you are so smart – this technology can go through its own evolutionary process, on its own, producing a form of superhuman intelligence that is “God-like.” And if you eff with us, the liberal bourgeois elite, we will unleash God-like intelligence on all of y’all and destroy civilization as such. Listen to some of the Lex Fridman discussions with these MIT engineers and tech entrepreneurs and AI experts and all-around near-God intellects. If you can listen to that for any length of time, you will literally hear them literally saying something close to what I’m saying. We got the technology to take most of your fucking asses out of history, and it’s called AI. If you mess with us for too long, we’re going to unleash God-like intelligence on your buns. You think Francis Fukuyama had something to say about the end of history – we can do it now, and it’s known as AGI – artificial general intelligence or otherwise referred to as God-like intelligence.

This is an ideological question. It’s a money question too because Silicon Valley, they have to market themselves and get people to invest in them. But anyway, I’ll just say my last thing. Look, even if you put aside woke and identity politics which is, you know – it’s a weak hand for the bourgeoisie, very weak hand, and the thinkers in that field are so weak that they didn’t stay around too long and almost self-destructed and you don’t really hear too much from them. But it’s a weak hand. The strong hand from the standpoint of the bourgeoisie, of the ruling class which must be concerned with not just ruling the United States, or ruling France, but managing humanity – their strongest hands are in quantum mechanics, string theory, and in artificial intelligence, and this is the context, the framework that shapes and in a sense organizes our approach to the reading of Hegel’s Science of Logic.

Introduction

The planet is experiencing multiple environmental crises: biodiversity loss, deforestation, increased rates of pandemics, chemical pollution, soil depletion, water contamination and shortages, runaway non-renewable energy consumption, and climate change. “Degrowth” is an environmental ideology that arose as a political response to these compounding crises. Degrowth was originally termed by André Gorz in 1972. Gorz argued that global environmental balance, which is predicated upon non-growth (or “degrowth”), is not compatible with the capitalist system, which requires “accumulation for the sake of accumulation” [1]. Degrowth, according to Gorz, is thus a challenge to capitalism itself.

Degrowth has become increasingly popular among many environmentalists and leftists. There are some who even call themselves “degrowth communists” [2]. Thus, it’s important to have a clear understanding of exactly what degrowth is and whether it has the potential to advance or hold back the class struggle.

Jason Hickel, a prominent proponent of degrowth, defines it like this: “The objective of degrowth is to scale down the material and energy throughput of the global economy, focusing on high-income nations with high levels of per-capita consumption” [3]. The degrowth perspective asks why society is so obsessed with “growth” (measured by Gross Domestic Product) and seeks to deconstruct the entire “ideology of growth.” The “ideology of growth” is used by the capitalist class to argue that more and more growth is needed to overcome poverty and to create jobs. This is bourgeois ideology in the sense that capitalism relies upon and produces the artificial scarcity to which we’re subjected.

The reality is that, in developed capitalist countries like U.S., there is an overabundance of material wealth and that scarcity is socially produced by the capitalist market and private ownership. Degrowth is correct on the point that if wealth were redistributed then there would indeed be abundance. However, even though proponents of degrowth are well intentioned and truly want to solve environmental crises, the political-economic methods and solutions that degrowth calls for actually work against creating the critical mass necessary to make a socialist revolution here in the U.S. I address each of these below by showing how 1) degrowth reproduces Malthusian ideas about so-called “natural limits;” 2) it’s anti-modern and anti-technological orientation lacks a class perspective; and 3) there are key practical issues with deploying degrowth ideas in the class struggle itself. 

The Connections between Thomas Malthus and Degrowth

Thomas Malthus was an aristocratic political-economist who did much of his work before the development of industrial-scale agriculture. In his 1798 book, An Essay on the Principles of Population, Malthus argued that in every geographic region there are particular resource limits or “carrying capacities” [4]. Malthus’ so-called “law of population” says that unchecked population growth will outstrip this carrying capacity that eventually leads to a “natural check” in the form of massive deaths from starvation and disease to bring the population back under the carrying capacity. Malthus blamed poor people for “unchecked” population growth and argued against policies to alleviate people from abject poverty because it delayed the inevitable: the “natural check” of overpopulation. Rising wages, Malthus said, led to workers having more children and thereby creating overpopulation. He blamed workers themselves for economic crises, with a convenient argument against rising wages. Marx rebuffed Malthus’ erroneous theories, clarifying that “every special historic mode of production has its own special laws of population,” and that crises were caused by capital, not by workers [5]. (This is also a point on which he diverged from Darwin, who adopted Malthus’ ideas of population).

Much of this same Malthusian discourse continues to exist today as an explanation for problems such as environmental degradation and poverty. However, the development of industrial agriculture and the production of increasingly higher crop/food yields proved much of Malthus’ theories incorrect.

Malthusianism focuses on “overpopulation” as a main cause of environmental degradation. Degrowth actually reproduces this faulty notion through the proposition that once resources and wealth are equally redistributed (which degrowth rightly wants to do), there must be some “check” on population because, as population grows without any added economic growth, people will eventually have access to fewer and fewer resources. For instance, Giorgos Kallis, another major proponent of the movement, says that “degrowth envisions radically reducing the surplus” and advocates so-called “self-limitations” where there are “collective decisions to refrain from pursuing all that could be pursued” [6]. Rather than the typical Malthusian “natural” external limits, degrowth goes a step further: it calls for a collective enforcement of the internalization of Malthusian ideas of limits and constraints.

The target of degrowth, Kallis declares, is “not just capitalism, but also productivism” [7]. Proponents of degrowth argue that any type of “economic growth is ecologically unsustainable—whether it is capitalist growth or socialist does not make a difference” [8]. In doing so they artificially equate the two antagonistic systems and abstract away from the qualitative differences between socialist and capitalist growth. Kallis justifies this claim by arguing that if we did not change consumption levels in a post-carbon energy regime, then nothing would really change in terms of environmental destruction because “the manufacturing of renewable energies requires lots of earth materials. And the fact that they cost more than fossil fuels might have something to do with their lower energy returns and higher land requirements” [9]. Thus, degrowth does not really have an ecological theory of capitalism, but an ecological theory of accumulation. For degrowth, any type of accumulation is bad and requires increased “material throughput.”

False equivalences between different social systems

But do proponents of degrowth know what accumulation entails? Accumulation simply means reinvesting the surplus back into production (either to expand or repair existing means of production). The accumulation of a surplus is necessary in any society. In his discussions of the reproduction schemas in the second volume of Capital, for instance, Marx writes that there has to be some sort of accumulation in order to reproduce existing society, to replace and repair fixed capital like machinery and roads, societal infrastructures, to care for those who can’t work, and so on. There also has to be surpluses for, say, pandemics and droughts.

The difference is that accumulation under socialism is guided by the workers themselves who collectively determine what and how much surplus to produce and how to use it. Under capitalism, accumulation happens for accumulation’s sake, without a plan, and purely in the interests of private profit. Under socialism, accumulation benefits society as a whole, including even the ecosystems we inhabit. When workers are in control of the surplus, will we not develop and grow the productive forces to make life better and easier for ourselves and more sustainable for the earth and its inhabitants? Wouldn’t we especially grow green productive forces to build more (and better) schools, public transportation, etc.? Shouldn’t socialists in the U.S. strive to repair the underdevelopment of imperialism by assisting in the development of productive forces in the formerly colonized world? While there are sufficient surpluses of, say, housing in the U.S., there are certainly not surpluses of housing in the entire world.

Since the rise of neoliberal capitalism, the size of the working-class stratum composing the “labor aristocracy” has substantially reduced. Whom exactly are we telling to “self-limit” what we consume and live at a time when most workers in the U.S. are living paycheck to paycheck, and accumulating more and more debt? Wages have remained stagnant since the 1970s while prices have increased over 500 percent. Who exactly is supposed to limit themselves, and to what? Isn’t the problem that the masses are limited by capitalism?

Degrowth is, in essence, a form of ecological austerity for working-class people [10]. Stated simply, by focusing so much on the consumption habits of workers within capitalism and so little on the conditions and relations of production, proponents of degrowth end up reproducing Malthusian ideas of “natural limits.” 

We must analytically evaluate production and show how production “produces consumption” itself [11]. The wasteful and environmentally unsustainable consumption patterns of the working class are not produced by “personal” choice but are system-induced. Every day, millions of workers in the U.S. commute to work in single occupant vehicles not because we “choose” to drive. It’s because public transportation is so unreliable (if it exists at all), jobs in the labor market are so unstable and temporary that few workers are actually able to live close to work, and the rents around major industries tend to be unaffordable for our class.

Then there is planned obsolescence, such as when commodities like cell phones are produced to break every two years. When capitalism is overthrown and replaced with socialism, we can produce things that are “built to last” because our aim is to satisfy society’s needs and not private profit. Indeed, Marx argues that capitalist production in itself is wasteful, even in its “competitive-stage:”

“Yet for all its stinginess, capitalist production is thoroughly wasteful with human material, just as its way of distributing its products through trade, and its manner of competition, make it very wasteful of material resources, so that it loses for society what it gains for the individual capitalist” [12].

Degrowth is antithetical to Marxism

Proponents of degrowth argue that there are absolute “planetary limits” and a fixed “carrying capacity” that cannot be surpassed by humans if we want to avoid ecological collapse. This is not only pessimistic in that it dismisses the idea that, under socialism, we could figure out new sustainable ways to grow, but it’s also completely devoid of class analysis. There’s no distinction between socially-produced limits and natural limits.

Degrowth is anti-modern, anti-technological, and anti-large scale production and infrastructure. Kallis argues that “only social systems of limited size and complexity can be governed directly rather than by technocratic elites acting on behalf of the populace… Many degrowth advocates, therefore, oppose even ‘green’ megastructures like high-speed trains or industrial-scale wind farms[!]” [13]. 

The same can be said about degrowth solutions to the problems the capitalist agricultural system creates. Proponents of degrowth propose small scale (both urban and rural) methods of agriculture production to replace industrial-scale agriculture. They, in fact, glorify and romanticize “peasant economies.” 

Despite the problems of capitalist industrial agriculture, there are two main benefits of industrial-scale agriculture. First, it has drastically increased yields. At the present moment, there is enough food produced to feed 11 billion people. Second, industrial farming has thoroughly decreased the backbreaking labor needed for agricultural and food production. In 1790, 90 percent of the U.S. workforce labored on farms. In 1900, it was 35 percent At the present moment, only one percent of the U.S. workforce works on farms [14]. 

Certainly, in any just society we would want to spread out food production more evenly amongst the population. But getting rid of industrial-scale agriculture and reverting to small-scale peasant and small landowner agriculture would require massive numbers of workers to go back to the land and perform backbreaking agricultural work. Such a transformation would inevitably reduce agricultural yield substantially, increasing the possibility of food insecurity and hunger among vast swathes of the population. And what would we do with the commodities and infrastructure we’d have to destroy to create such plots of land? Moreover, such a vision necessitates the redistribution of land from private ownership of large landholders. Is this achieved through revolution or through governmental reforms? In either case, if we’re struggling to reclaim land then why not broaden our horizons and redistribute land in the interests of the environment and the people, including Indigenous and other oppressed nations in the U.S.?

Degrowth is, furthermore, idealist and divorced from the material reality within which U.S. workers currently live. Matt Huber, a Marxist environmental geographer, argues that a “truly humane society must commit to relieving the masses from agricultural labor,” and that we cannot act as if “small-scale agricultural systems are much of a ‘material basis’ for a society beyond industrial capitalism” [15]. This is not to say that small-scale and urban farming are undesirable, but that they’re insufficient in a country like the U.S. The Cuban model of urban farming and agriculture–which is a heroic achievement of the Cuban Revolution–can’t simply be mapped onto this country or the rest of the world.

Additionally, we shouldn’t forgo modern technologies that already exist just because they are “large scale” or because they currently contribute to environmental degradation within capitalist society. Doing so would in effect produce more ecological waste!

In an important piece on capitalism and ecology, Ernest Mandel writes: “it is simply not true that modern industrial technology is inevitably geared towards destroying the environmental balance. The progress of the exact sciences opens up a very wide range of technical possibilities” [16]. Increased rates of pollution and environmental degradation occur because capitalists pursue profits at the expense of the environment, not because of the technologies themselves. Socialists have to distinguish between instruments of production and their use under capitalism.

Degrowth and building the class struggle

In the U.S., degrowth remains an ideology that is relatively socially isolated but gaining influence among environmentalists and some on the left. It’s an ideology of guilt rather than revolutionary action. The ideas from degrowth will not appeal to masses of exploited and oppressed people who actually need more, not less. Imagine, for example, canvassing and talking to people in working-class neighborhoods, trying to get them on board with a degrowth political platform. How do degrowth proponents think workers in oppressed neighborhoods respond if they were told they needed to consume less to fight climate change? Many of us already wait as long as possible in the winter to turn on our heat! As organizers, we would not get the time of day, and we wouldn’t even believe ourselves. Can you imagine organizing homeless and unemployed workers around a program of less consumption? Degrowth is an ideology fit for the privileged, and if they want to consume less, they should.

From the perspective of the practical class struggle, degrowth is particularly problematic. Degrowth has a rhetorical strategy problem. In an unequal country such as the U.S., is the discourse of less and “self-limitation” realistic and inspiring? Is this tactic energizing, does it speak to the needs of the exploited and oppressed, can it mobilize people into action?

Rather than limit everything, we actually need to grow certain sectors such as green infrastructures and technologies. Our class doesn’t need a political platform that calls on us to give up the little pleasures we might have–if any at all–for the sake of the environment. Our class needs a political platform that states clearly what the real problem is and how we can solve it to make life will better.

Degrowth takes a non-class approach towards consumption and production. It is true that some of the more privileged sectors of the working class, particularly in imperialist countries, consume excessively and wastefully. Degrowth, however, fails to account for the class that takes wasteful consumption to almost unimaginable levels and the system that produces these production and consumption patterns. An increasing portion of the labor of the working class is wasted on supporting the consumption habits of the numerically small capitalist class. No amount of preaching self-limiting morality is going to convince the capitalist class to consume less, expropriate less, or oppress less. Once we can get rid of the parasitic imperialists, then human needs and desires can be met through a planned economy led by the working class.

Thus, the solution to these multifaceted and compounding environmental crises is not “degrowth”, but rather, as Mandel formulates it, “controlled and planned growth:”

“Such growth would need to be in the service of clearly defined priorities that have nothing to do with the demands of private profit…rationally controlled by human beings… The choice for ‘zero growth’ is clearly an inhuman choice. Two-thirds of humanity still lives below the subsistence minimum. If growth is halted, it means that the underdeveloped countries are condemned to remain stuck in the swamp of poverty, constantly on the brink of famine…

“Planned growth means controlled growth, rationally controlled by human beings. This presupposes socialism: such growth cannot be achieved unless the ‘associated producers’ take control of production and use it for their own interests, instead of being slaves to ‘blind economic laws’ or ‘technological compulsion’” [17].

References

[1]“Accumulate, accumulate! That is Moses and the prophets! ‘Industry furnishes the material which saving accumulates.’ Therefore save, save, i.e., reconvert the greatest possible portion of surplus-value or surplus product into capital! Accumulation for the sake of accumulation, production for the sake of production: this was the formula in which classical economics expressed the historical mission of the bourgeoisie in the period of its domination.” Marx, Karl. (1867/1976). Capital Vol 1 (New York: Penguin Books), 742.
[2] Hansen, Bue Rübner. (2021). “The kaleidoscope of Ccatastrophe: On the clarities and blind spots of Andreas Malm.” Viewpoint Magazine, April 14. Available here.
[3] Hickel, Jason. (2019). “Degrowth: A theory of radical abundance,” Real-World Economics Review 87, no. 19: 54-68. “Throughput” is the flow of energy and materials through a system.
[4] Malthus, Thomas R. (1789/2007). An essay on the principle of population (New York: Dover).
[5]Marx, Capital, 784.
[6] Kallis, Giorgos. (2018). In defense of degrowth: Opinions and manifestos (UK: Uneven Earth Press), 22, 21.
[7] Ibid., 24.
[8] Kallis, Giorgos. (2019). “Capitalism, socialism, degrowth: A rejoinder.” Capitalism Nature Socialism 30, no. 2: 189.
[9] Ibid., 194.
[10] See Phillips, Leigh. (2015). Austerity ecology & the collapse-porn addicts: A defense of growth, progress, industry and stuff (Washington: Zero Books).
[11] See Karl, Marx. 1993. Grundrisse: Foundations of the critique of political economy (rought draft), trans. M. Nicolaus (New York: Penguin), 90-98. 
[12] Marx, Karl. (1991.) Capital Vol 3 (New York: Penguin), 180.
[13] Kallis, In defense of degrowth, 21.
[14] The World Bank. (2021), “Employment in agriculture (% total employment) (model ILO estimate),” January 29. Available here.
[15] Huber, Matt. (2018). “Fossilized liberation: Energy, freedom, and the ‘development of the productive forces.’” In Materialism and the critique of energy, ed. B.R. Bellamy and J. Diamanti (Chicago: MCM’ Press), 517.
[16] Mandel, Ernest. (2020). “Ernest Mandel on Marxism and ecology: ‘The dialectic of growth.’” Monthly Review, June 17. Available here.
[17] Ibid.

​Foot Notes

​‘Nature Nurtured’ in Latin, frequently used in scholastic philosophy, and later, in Baruch Spinoza’s Ethics.

It is well known that in the monument that heads Marx's tomb, in the pedestal under his giant head, there is that thesis that stated that philosophers had only interpreted the world in different ways; when all it was about was to transform it.

Whoever picks up the first volume of Capital and begins to read, realizes, almost immediately, that its author is establishing, on a scientific basis, a colossal body of economic knowledge.

And like any monumental effort, he begins by defining the epistemology that will guide his endeavor. By this, he establishes what are called categories, and that natural scientists speak of variables that will be approppriate to what is being studied.

After the definitions, come the theorems. And Marx did all this on the assumption that objective reality determined the rest of things, and did so, reality, in the ever-changing dynamics of its existence.

We call this dialectical materialism, and if we are consistent with it, we will have to understand that, in science, truth is sought from reality and verified in it, not in more or less enlightened gatherings.

Science is not done like the ancient Greeks, when materialism or idealism, equally, did not go beyond the realm of speculation, and the fate of the debate was determined by the charisma of those who debated there, or by the preparation of the opponents. The truth is that, apart from that, philosophy had not gone much beyond that state of affairs.

Those close to him say that Marx immersed himself day after day, week after week, month after month, in the British library, rummaging through the accounting books of the companies. He sought, as the scientist he was, that objective reality that had been measured and reflected in the books in order to arrive at certainties from its analysis.

And Marx was not a person who withdrew from controversy, but they, in their just social function, served to contrast the hypotheses that emerged and that ultimately had to be confronted again with the data that reflected the reality external to the subjectivity of individuals.

On March 14, Marx was declared dead. Since then, the act of killing him has occurred repeatedly, too many times, too few for his executors.

However, the reality is that, when we stop believing in it, it remains in front of us. The consecutive act of eliminating it only speaks of the systemic failure to achieve it.
​
I dare to assert, against the evidence of the image, that Marx's head on the Highgate pedestal, smiles.
​

I would like to thank the International Manifesto Group for hosting this event, and for inviting me to say a few words about the relevance of that heroic experiment in socialist democracy which took place 152 years ago. 

My discussion of the Paris Commune’s relevance, and of the relevance of Marx and Engels’s reflections on it, will revolve around three key points.

First, the worldview through which Marx and Engels approach the Paris Commune.

Second, the conclusions they derived from their study of the Commune, how the Commune helped them refine and concretize their understanding of the dictatorship of the proletariat, and what relevance these have today.
​
Third, if we are faithful to the worldview through which Marx and Engels approach the Commune – and not limit ourselves to simply accepting the conclusions, we come to see that after 152 years since the birth of the Commune, we have had many socialist experiments from which we can learn in ways similar to Marx and Engels with the Paris Commune. The experience of these offers us many lessons – I would like to mention just two of them: 1 – the necessity of developing the productive forces, the sciences and technologies, and the military capacities of the state to protect its sovereignty from imperialism; and 2 – the necessity of adapting socialism to the conditions of the context it is taking root in.

As I am sure most know, in September 1870, six months before the establishment of the Paris Commune, Marx would say that “any attempt at upsetting the new government in the present crisis, when the enemy is almost knocking at the doors of Paris, would be a desperate folly.”[1] In the coming months, as the antagonism between the bourgeois government and the armed workers developed, an attempt was made in March 18th 1871 to disarm the workers. The workers refused to give up arms, and war between Paris and the French government ensued. The Commune was elected on March 26, and proclaimed on the 28th. As the situation unfolded, Marx was turned from a skeptic to an ardent supporter of the Communard’s actions. Less than a month after the Commune was proclaimed, he would go on to say, “what resilience, what historical initiative, what a capacity for sacrifice in these Parisians!” They were “storming the heavens,” and “History has no like example of [such] greatness.”[2]

I think the significance of this transition in Marx is often undermined. Over the last century, large sections of the Western left have expected the socialist and anti-colonial people’s movements which have arisen in the global South and East to measure up to their standards of what socialism ought to be. If these movements fail to meet the purity with which socialism is treated in their minds, they are condemned by the Western left as ‘authoritarian,’ ‘Stalinist,’ ‘state capitalist,’ or ‘not real socialism’ (which is my personal favorite because of its paradoxical character). The outlook of the Western Marxists is a complete inversion of the one which mediates Marx’s study of the Commune. The Commune was not ‘pure,’ it had its downfalls and contained serious ideological deviations from Marx and Engels’s thought, not least of which is the influence of Blanquism and Proudhonism. This did not prohibit them, however, from supporting the Commune and learning from it.

Lenin, as always, saw this with extreme clarity. He said that “when the mass revolutionary movement of the proletariat burst forth, Marx, in spite of the failure of that movement, in spite of its short life and its patent weakness, began to study what forms it had discovered.”[3] Marx and Engels, Lenin would go on to say, “examined the actual experience of a mass proletarian movement and tried to draw practical lessons from it,” “re-examining [their] theory in light of it.”[4] They did not treat socialism as an abstract ideal they could use to denounce emancipatory movements. Since the middle of the 1840s, Marx and Engels refused to treat communism as a static “state of affairs… an ideal to which reality [would] have to adjust itself.”[5] Instead, their commitment was to “the real movement which abolishes the present state of things.”[6]

Today, many self-proclaimed Marxists in the West prefer to hold on to socialism as a pure unchanging ideal than to have that ideal be desecrated by the lessons which have arisen from the difficulties of constructing socialism in the imperialist stage of capitalism. Instead of learning from the successes and failures of revolutionary movements in Russia, China, Cuba, Vietnam, Venezuela, and so on, many are content with condemning these real movements of history because they don’t measure up to the pure ideal in their heads. Samir Amin put it nicely in respect to China when he said that “China bashing panders to the infantile opinion found in some currents of the powerless Western left: if it is not the communism of the twenty-third century, it is a betrayal!”[7] I think it is clear that the truth of this statement spans well beyond just China. It is grounded in the purity fetish outlook – a form of engagement with the world which couldn’t be any further from Marx and Engels’s dialectical materialist worldview.
​
Where Marx and Engels, as dialectical materialists, emphasize the material movement of history, the purity fetish of the Western left emphasizes a static pure ideal. If we are to celebrate, as we are, the Paris Commune by reflecting on the relevance of Marx and Engels’s insights on it, without a doubt the question of the worldview through which they approached the world is of utmost primacy. Without this, their genuine insights are nothing more than dead conclusions, severed from the form of thinking which would allow us to do today what Marx and Engels did 152 years ago; that is, to learn from the dialectical movement of the working masses towards freedom.

In emphasizing the worldview behind Marx and Engels’s assessment of the Commune I am not saying that the conclusions drawn are unimportant or outdated. Both the worldview and the conclusions must be seen in light of each other, and each in light of their context. Nonetheless, the fundamental lessons of the Commune remain today as relevant and true as ever. In the preface to the 1872 German edition of the Manifesto of the Communist Party, Marx and Engels would make only one correction to that historical document explicit – they said, “One thing especially was proved by the Commune, viz., that ‘the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes.’”[8]
​
Previously, Marx and Engels’s comments in the Manifesto on the working class’s conquest of political power said the following:
​

I will return to the question of the development of the productive forces in the following section, but for now, it is important to note how the Commune helped Marx and Engels refine their understanding of the state itself, and more specifically, of the dictatorship of the proletariat. In a speech given the month the Commune was overthrown, Marx would say that as the antagonism between capital and labor intensified, “state power assumed more and more the character of the national power of capital over labor, of a public force organized for social enslavement, of an engine of class despotism.”[10] It was not simply the case that the modern state was “a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie,” but also that the state institutions and structures through which this aim was achieved – that is, the “standing army, police, bureaucracy, clergy, judicature,” and so on, were designed precisely for the sake of this function.[11]
​
The proletariat could not successfully wield state power through state institutions crafted to keep labor subordinated to capital. For the proletariat, as the Manifesto urges, to be organized as the ruling class, it needed to smash the existing bourgeois state and replace it with working class institutions of “a fundamentally different order.”[12] The Commune showed that the state had to be transformed from being “a ‘special force’ for the suppression of a particular class to the suppression of the oppressors by the ‘general force’ of the majority of the people – the workers and peasants.”[13] Hence, Marx says that “Paris could resist only because … the first decree of the Commune … was the suppression of the standing army, and the substitution for it of the armed people.”[14]

Qualitative changes of this character were found in the Commune’s transformations of public functionaries, which were now paid “workmen’s wages” and “revocable”; in the application of universal suffrage; in the new judicature; in the making of “education … accessible to all,” freeing science “from the fetters which class prejudice and governmental force had imposed upon it;” in short, in destroying the state as a “parasitic excrescence” which represses labor for the sake of capital, and putting in its place a genuinely democratic working class state which would use the general force of society to repress the old exploiting classes and administer state functions in the interests of the mass of people.[15] This is what the dictatorship of the proletariat, as a higher form of socialist democracy, entails.

This lesson is more vital today in our neoimperialist stage of capitalism – as Cheng Enfu and Lu Baolin label it – than it was in 1871, and perhaps even more vital than it was in 1916 at the time of Lenin’s major writing on Imperialism.[16] Today, any revolutionary process which sustains even the smallest space for bourgeois political parties and participation will be leaving a door open for imperialism’s entry through its collaboration with the national bourgeoisie. Since the tragic overthrow of Salvador Allende’s Chile in September 11th 1973; to the lawfare coups against Lula da Silva and Dilma Rousseff from 2016 to 2018; to the astroturfed 2018 protests against Daniel Ortega and the Sandinista revolution; to the propping up of the clownish Juan Guaido as ‘interim president’ of Venezuela in an effort to destroy the Bolivarian revolution; to the fascist 2019 coup in Bolivia which killed dozens of workers and indigenous protesters; it is clear that in so far as bourgeois state structures remain – even if under the control of a worker’s or socialist party – a window will always be open for the national bourgeoisie to collaborate with imperialism in bringing forth what W. E. B. Du Bois called a “counterrevolution of property.”[17]

It is much more difficult to imagine a figure like Guaido or Jeanine Áñez getting as far as they did under worker states like Cuba, China, Vietnam, and the DPRK. Why is this the case? Let us recall the categorial distinction Mao makes in 1957 between political and economic capital. While sustaining that economic capital does not necessarily have to be stripped all at once, that is, as Marx had already noted, that it can be ‘wrested by degree’ from the bourgeoisie, in accordance with the role it plays in developing the productive forces for socialism, “political capital,” Mao says, must be “deprived … until not one jot is left to [the capitalists].”[18] As Domenico Losurdo has eloquently noted,
​

This is where revolutions like the Bolivarian, the Bolivian, the Nicaraguan, and others (for all their successes) have fallen somewhat short – they have not been able to fully expropriate the political capital of their bourgeoisie, and neither have they been able, subsequently, to complete the process of the proletarianization of the state, that is, of the construction of the dictatorship of the proletariat.

This is not a condemnation. I am, like Marx and Engels were with the Commune, an ardent supporter of these emancipatory movements; I consider there to be a lot to learn from them. But as Marx and Engels had already noted with the Commune, in not going far enough in their use of the repressive apparatuses of the worker’s state, the door was left open for counterrevolution. As Engels wrote in 1872, “would the Paris Commune have lasted a single day if it had not made use of this authority of the armed people against the bourgeois? Should we not, on the contrary, reproach it for not having used it freely enough?”[20] Lenin says something similar in 1908, arguing that the Commune, “instead of destroying its enemies it sought to exert moral influence on them; it underestimated the significance of direct military operations in civil war, and instead of launching a resolute offensive against Versailles that would have crowned its victory in Paris, it tarried and gave the Versailles government time to gather the dark forces and prepare for the blood-soaked week of May.”[21]

I think a similar question should, and from what I have seen is, asked by our comrades in Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua, and so on – that is, to what extent can the proletarianization of the state prevent the conditions which gave rise to the disturbances of 2018 to 2020? In other words, how can the interests of the bourgeois and landholding sections of the population, those which have consistently collaborated with imperialism’s hybrid warfare to overthrow popular revolutions, be excluded from power in any of the state’s institutions? These are all complex questions which must be addressed organically as these revolutions develop. It is also clear that, in some of these left-wing governments in South and Central America (especially the more moderate ones), certain biases inherited from the sham bourgeois notion of democracy – which reduces democracy to a parliamentarian game of choosing which flavor of bourgeois rule a people will have for the next few years – must be outgrown and replaced by the concrete question of “democracy for which class?”[22]

Without a doubt, these recent Latin American experiments in 21st century socialism have succeeded in making this transition in many areas. Who can forget, for example, the eight Silvercorp mercenaries caught in 2020 by Venezuelan fishermen and Bolivarian militias in the coastal town of Chuao? What a better example of the general force of the people taking up the role of repressing the enemies of the revolution? However, the threat presented by imperialist hybrid warfare – it seems to me at least – can be better averted as bourgeois state institutions are overcome, and proletarian and popular ones are put in their place.

Since the fall of the Commune 152 years ago we have seen many Socialist experiments arise, some which are still with us, others which suffered the same fate as the Commune. The ‘Marxists’ of the West, in their majority, have been unable to carry forth the legacy of Marx and Engels’s approach to the Commune. The plethora of Socialist experiments which have arisen have been, in one form or another, condemned for their impurities. This has prevented not only a genuine show of anti-imperialist solidarity, but also the ability to draw lessons from the successes and failures of these experiments. The failures have often been magnified, de-contextualized, and synecdochally painted as the whole experience.
​
Against this theoretical current dominant in the powerless Western left, we must bring forth the living spirit of Marxism to our study of 20th and 21st century Socialist experiments – the vast majority of which have been incredibly successful despite being under the boot of constant imperialist hybrid warfare. Out of this study I think two key lessons must be drawn, both of which are found already in Marx and Engels’s analysis of the Commune in a more or less implicit fashion.

First, in the age of imperialism, or Neoimperialism, socialist experiments must focus on developing not only an efficient worker’s state, but also the forces of production, the sciences and technologies, and the securities and defense structures of the state. In China, for instance, these goals were conceptualized by Zhou Enlai as the four modernizations. Without these developments, which are made exceedingly difficult by the reality of imperialism and its global dominance over intellectual property, a socialist project will be unable to flourish. Without these developments, the global inequality between the looting imperialist powers and everyone else – or, to use the despicable metaphor from EU foreign-policy chief Joseph Borrell, the inequalities between the garden and the jungle, will not be bridged, and the imperialist powers will maintain their global position unthreatened.

The success of China, which stands today as the beacon of a new, post-Columbian world, testifies to the immense importance of these developments in the battle against capitalist-imperialism.

The emphasis on developing the productive forces, of course, is seen throughout the whole corpus of Marx and Engels’s work – their writings on the Commune included. For instance, an important critique Engels levied on the Commune was that “in the economic sphere, much was left undone;” they did not take the Bank of France, which could have put “pressure on the whole of the French bourgeoisie [to have] peace with the Commune.”[23] Lenin made a similar critique, saying that the Communards “stopped half-way: instead of setting about ‘expropriating the expropriators,’ [they] allowed [themselves] to be led astray by dreams of establishing a higher justice in the country united by a common national task.”[24]

In our age, after the experience of the Soviet New Economic Policy, Yugoslavia’s socialist market economy, and most importantly, of China’s Reform and Opening up – where socialist markets have been developed and private ownership sustains a large but auxiliary role in the development of the productive forces – we have learned that this development can take many forms. In some cases, such as Cuba, the full expropriation of the expropriators was immediately necessary. In other cases, such as China, the development of socialism has always maintained – since the pre-49 liberated areas – a ‘mixed’ economic form, where private property and markets exist within the centrally planned state economy. Far from using cherry picked comments from Marx and Engels to condemn these developments, we should do with them what they did with the Commune. We should learn from them and attempt to understand how these forms have become necessary for the real movement of history which abolishes the present state of things.

The second important lesson which subsequent socialist experiments have taught us concerns the relationship of socialism to a people’s national history. I think here, again, the failure of the Western and US left is grounded in a problem of worldview. The dialectical worldview (both in Hegel and in Marxism) rejects the idea of an unchanging, pure, ahistorical universal, and instead urges that universals are necessarily tied to historically changing concrete particulars. Universals are always concrete – that is, they exist and take their form through the particular. “The universal,” as Hegel and Lenin emphasized, “embraces within itself the wealth of the particular.”[25] 

What does this tell us about socialism? Well, simply that there is no such thing as abstract socialism. Socialism is the universal which cannot exist unless concretized through the particular. In every country it has taken root in, socialism has had to adapt itself to the unique characteristics of the peoples that have waged and won the struggle for political power. In China this has taken the form of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics; in Cuba this has meant incorporating José Martí and the anti-colonial traditions into socialist construction; in Venezuela this has taken the form of Bolivarian socialism; in the Plurinational state of Bolivia this has taken the form of combining Marxism with the indigenous communist traditions which have been around for centuries; in the continent of Africa this has taken the form of Pan-African socialism, and so on. In each case the struggle has been, as Georgi Dimitrov had already noted in 1935, “national in form and socialist in content.”[26]

In various parts of the U.S. left, the purity fetish outlook has obscured this historical lesson, and made rampant the phenomenon which Dimitrov called national nihilism. Their people’s history is reduced to slavery, settler colonialism, imperialism, and all the evils of capital and the state. In doing so, they reject drawing from their national past to give form to socialist content. Far from the ‘progressivism’ they see in this, what this actually depicts is a liberal tinted American exceptionalism, which thinks that the struggle for socialism in the US will itself not have to follow this concrete universal tendency seen around the world, where socialism functions as the content which takes form (i.e., concretizes) according to the unique circumstances in which it is being developed.[27]

This has prevented the U.S. left from genuinely learning from its progressive history and connecting with its people. A perfect example of this is the fact that, from 1865 to the counterrevolution of 1876, in many previous slave states of the U.S. South, reconstruction developed a dictatorship of labor. This dictatorship of labor was headed by the black proletariat – who had recently freed itself through a general strike that converted the war to preserve the union into a revolutionary war to emancipate slave labor. It was organized by the Freedman’s Bureau and defended militarily by the federal government. It was our Paris Commune; it started before and lasted way longer than the original. Like the Paris Commune, it also fell thanks to a counterrevolution of property. Besides the few on the U.S. left who take the work of the great Dr. Du Bois serious – this legendary experience of a new worker’s democracy, not unlike the Paris Commune, is a largely erased and forgotten period of U.S. revolutionary history, and it has so, so much to teach us, both tactically and theoretically.

I am honored to have had the privilege of discussing this Titanic event in world-history with all of you today.

Whether we consider the Paris Commune the first modern dictatorship of the proletariat, or give that title to the black proletariat in the U.S. South, is somewhat irrelevant. What matters, in my view, is that the Paris Commune, as Lenin argued, by fighting “for the freedom of toiling humanity, of all the downtrodden and oppressed,” is still being honored 152 years after its fall “by the proletariat of the whole world.”[28] This is why, in the words of Lenin, “the cause of the Commune did not die … it lives to the present day in every one of us.”[29]
​

References

[1] Karl Marx, The Civil War in France (Peking: Foreign Language Press, 2021), 35.

[2] Karl Marx, “Marx to Kugelmann,” April 12, 1871. In Marx-Engels Collected Works, Vol 44, International Publishers., pp. 131-132.

[3] V. I. Lenin, The State and Revolution (Peking: Foreign Language Press, 1970), 47.

[4] Lenin, The State and Revolution, 40, 30.

[5] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, MECW Vol. 5 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1976), 49.

[6] Engels, MECW Vol. 5, 49.

[7] Samir Amin, Only People Make Their Own History: Writings on Capitalism, Imperialism, and Revolution (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2019), 110.

[8] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party (New York: Barnes and Nobles Classics, 2005), 45.

[9] Marx and Engels, MECW Vol. 6, 504.

[10] Marx, The Civil War in France, 62, 61.

[11] Marx, MECW Vol. 6, 486; Marx, The Civil War in France, 61.

[12] Lenin, The State and Revolution, 35.

[13] Lenin, The State and Revolution, 36.

[14] Marx, The Civil War in France, 64.

[15] Marx, The Civil War in France, 65.

[16] Cheng Enfu and Lu Baolin, “Five Characteristics of Neoimperialism,” Monthly Review  73(1) (May 2021).

[17] W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction (New York: The Library of America, 2021), 697- 762.

[18] Mao Tse-Tung, “Talks at a Conference of Secretaries of Provincial, Municipal and Autonomous Regions Party Committees,” In Selected Works of Mao Tse-Tung Vol 5 (Peking: Foreign Language Press, 1977), 357.

[19] Domenico Losurdo, “Has China Turned to Capitalism?—Reflections on the Transition from Capitalism to Socialism,” International Critical Thought 7(1) (2017), 18-19.

[20] Engels, MECW Vol. 23, 425.

[21] V. I. Lenin, Collected Works Vol. 13 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1978), 476.

[22] Lenin, Collected Works Vol. 28, 249.

[23] Engels, “Introduction,” in The Civil War in France, 10-11.

[24] Lenin, Collected Works Vol. 13, 476.

[25] G. W. F. Hegel, Science of Logic, Trans. A.V. Miller (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press International, 1993), 58.

[26] Georgi Dimitrov, The United Front: The Struggle Against Fascism and War (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1938), 61-64.

[27] For more on national nihilism and the Western left see my article “The Importance of Combatting National and Historical Nihilism,” Midwestern Marx Institute (February 2023): https://www.midwesternmarx.com/articles/the-importance-of-combatting-national-and-historical-nihilism-by-carlos-l-garrido or my book The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism (Dubuque: Midwestern Marx Publishing Press, 2023).

[28] Lenin, Collected Works Vol. 17, 143.

[29] Lenin, Collected Works Vol. 17, 143.

​It is an imperative that we remember the words of Georgi Dimitrov, a giant of the world communist movement, in his speech to the Seventh World Congress of the Communist International in 1935. Here he would say the following comments on national nihilism, a phenomenon so rampant in American Marxists today:
​

I have quoted this document at length because it magnificently captures one of the central forms the purity fetish expresses itself through in the US: national nihilism. We cannot allow the most reactionary segments of our monopoly capitalist class to win the ideological war over the national history of our people. We must be able to work creatively, to take the progressive elements of our national past – which, although obscured by our ruling class, exist in abundance – and to rearticulate these elements towards socialism. This is what Dimitrov means when he says that we must “enlighten the masses on the past of their people in a historically correct fashion, in a genuinely Marxist-Leninist spirit.”[2] National and historical nihilism must be destroyed. As J.V. Stalin correctly said, “national nihilism only injures the cause of socialism, because it plays into the hands of the bourgeois nationalists.”[3] It is a quintessential manifestation of the purity fetish – because the national past is impure, the purity fetish Marxists reject working with its progressive elements and incorporating these into the struggle for socialism.

Our country’s history, indeed, is a history marked by conquest, enslavement, genocide, exploitation, imperialism, and all the other evils brought by the development of the capitalist era in world history. It is also marked, however, by the struggles against feudal absolutism; by a promise for universal life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness – all demands which are unfulfillable within the capitalist mode of life; by the struggles against chattel slavery, wage slavery, genocidal attacks on indigenous communities; by the struggles, in the 20th century, against fascism, imperialism, for civil rights, for peace, etc. This is a complex, heterogeneous, and impure history. It is, in short, a contradictory history, containing within itself a unity of opposing forces – one which fights for human emancipation, the other which fights for preserving the tyranny of capital. We must learn how to use these objective contradictions to our advantage. The task ahead of us requires aligning our struggles today with the positive elements of the past and connecting the moribund capitalist-imperialist forces of our day with our past’s negative elements.

This is not an easy task. As Mao argued while condemning national nihilism,
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​This difficulty is embedded in the need to develop socialism according to the concrete conditions of a country. As Lenin said, 
​

​This is why, the same Lenin which in one breath condemns Russia’s role as “a prison of nations,” in another says:[6]
​

​With details adjusted to context, we may say something similar about the US today. We, too, could say that we are proud of our revolutionary class and its rich revolutionary history. We, too, could say that precisely because we are proud of this history – and because we are driven by the “great feelings of love” for the people that Che mentions – we wholeheartedly condemn our genocidal, slavish, exploitative, and imperialist past and present.[8]

For Lenin, Mao, Fidel, Ho Chi Minh, Chávez, and other successful socialist leaders, the question they asked themselves concerning their national past was never “is it pure enough?” but “how can we use the national traditions ingrained in our people’s common sense and feelings to fight for socialism?” In China this has taken the form of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics; in Cuba this has meant incorporating José Martí and the anti-colonial traditions into socialist construction; in Venezuela this has taken the form of Bolivarian socialism; in Bolivia this has taken the form of combining Marxism (scientific socialism) with the indigenous communist traditions which have been around for centuries. The same can be seen in the socialist struggles in Africa (Pan-African Socialism), the Middle East (Islamic Socialism), and other parts of Asia and Latin America. One would have to be blinded by a liberal tinted American exceptionalism to think that the struggle for socialism in the US will itself not have to follow this concrete universal tendency seen around the world, where scientific socialism functions as the content which takes form (i.e., concretizes) according to the unique circumstances in which it is being developed.

Dialectics (both in Hegel and in Marxism) rejects the idea of an unchanging, pure, ahistorical universal, and instead urges that universals are necessarily tied to historically changing concrete particulars. Universals are always concrete – that is, they exist and take their form through the particular. “The universal,” as Hegel and Lenin emphasized, “embraces within itself the wealth of the particular.”[9] There is no such thing as abstract socialism. Socialism is the universal which cannot exist unless concretized through the particular. Socialism in the US will have to take form in accordance with the unique history and conditions of the country. By embracing a petty historical and national nihilism, the contemporary American Marxist finds themselves unfit to 1- understand their national past concretely (i.e., dialectically and correctly) and 2- build a successful struggle for socialism. This infantilism is a manifestation of the purity fetish and will be removed when such an outlook is overcome by the dialectical materialist worldview.

Few people have studied the counterrevolution in the Soviet Union closer than the Chinese, who are keen on not repeating the same mistakes as the Soviets. One of the most important lessons the Chinese take from the fall of the USSR is precisely the existential importance of rejecting historical nihilism (lishi xuwuzhuyi), which they describe as the view that “Marxism was outdated and socialism had ‘failed’ (after 1989 in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union); the CPC was an aberration in Chinese history; fawning on foreign powers; and the denial of or ‘farewell’ to the revolution.”[10] As Roland Boer has noted, “the disaster that befell the Soviet Union is seen as a clear example of the effects of historical nihilism.”[11] As Xi Jinping has argued,
​

​Unlike in the USSR, as Carlos Martinez notes, 
​

​As Deng Xiaoping said in 1980: 
​

​Although these comments are specifically made within the context of socialist states, the universal we can observe concretized in the particular is the general condemnation of historical nihilism. Historical and national nihilism share a common logic – a rejection of the past because of its impurity. If the past contains errors, excesses, imperfections, it is nothing. Only that which is pure is salvageable. This manifestation of the purity fetish not only prevents a correct dialectical assessment of the past, but also works as a deadly fetter for the movement towards socialism. In the US, historical and national nihilism are not simply attitudes about the past – they are attitudes about the present and future. Their relevance is far from being merely scholarly. If we are unable to connect our people’s progressive history to our contemporary struggle for socialism, then socialism will be unachievable. The battle against historical and national nihilism is one we must win if we want any chance at winning the class war.
​

References 

[1] Georgi Dimitrov, The United Front: The Struggle Against Fascism and War (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1938), 61-64.

​[2] Dimitrov, The United Front, 62.

[3] J. V. Stalin, Collected Works Vol. 4 (Moscow: Foreign Language Publishing House, 1953), 94.

[4] Mao Tse-Tung, “Chairman Mao’s Talk to Music Workers,” in Selected Works of Mao Tse-Tung Vol. 7, Marxist Internet Archive: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-7/mswv7_469.htm

[5] V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, vol. 28. [In Chinese.] (Beijing: People’s Publishing House, 1990). Cited in Hui Jiang, “The Great Contribution of the CPC to the World Socialist Movement over the Past Hundred Years,” International Critical Thought 11(4) (2021): https://doi.org/10.1080/21598282.2022.1996836

[6] Lenin, CW Vol. 20, 219.

[7] Lenin, CW Vol. 21, 103-104.

[8] Ernesto Guevara, Che Guevara Reader (New York: Ocean Press, 2003), 225.

[9] G. W. F. Hegel, Science of Logic, Trans. A.V. Miller (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press International, 1993), 58.

[10] Roland Boer, Socialism with Chinese Characteristics: A Guide for Foreigners (Singapore: Springer, 2021), 93.

[11] Boer, Socialism with Chinese Characteristics, 10. 

[12] The China Questions: Critical Insights into a Rising Power, edited by Jennifer Rudolph and Michael Szonyi (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018), 23.​
​
[13] Carlos Martinez, No Great Wall: On the Continuities of the Chinese Revolution (Carbondale: Midwestern Marx Publishing Press, 2022), 54. ​

[14] ​Deng Xiaoping, “Answers to the Italian Journalist Oriana Fallaci,” The Selected Works of Deng Xiaoping (August 1980): 
​https://dengxiaopingworks.wordpress.com/?s=Answers+to+the+Italian+Journalist+Oriana+Fallaci&submit=  

Author Bio: Carlos L. Garrido teaches philosophy in Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, where he received his M.A. and is currently finishing his PhD. He is an editor at the Midwestern Marx Institute for Marxist Theory and Political Analysis and the author of Marxism and the Dialectical Materialist Worldview: An Anthology of Classical Marxist Texts on Dialectical Materialism and the forthcoming book, The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism.

​There is a glaring paradox at the core of the American project. On the one hand, it proclaims its national self-determination with the values of life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, right to revolution, and to a government of, by, and for the people. On the other hand, the rights to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness have never been guaranteed for anyone but the white, male, capitalist class (which is slowly being racially and sexually diversified). The leading thinkers of the American project, from Jefferson to Martin Luther King Jr., have warned about the corrupting influence the interests of capital can play in preventing the concretization of these rights.

Thomas Jefferson, for instance, understood that the ‘enormous inequality’ in property relations was the cause of the ‘misery [of] the bulk of mankind,’ and that, as Herbert Aptheker notes, this concentration of capital was ‘the central threat to democratic rights.’[1] In noticing how the interest of capital can turn a government of, by, and for the people into a government of, by, and for big business, Jefferson would go on to draw a distinction between the democratic man and the aristocratic man. The former, he argued, trusts the people’s will, the latter distrusts it and turns towards big business elitism. Jefferson believed the aristocratic man, if he came to dominate the American government, would undermine the ideals of the 1776 anti-colonial revolution. The first generation of home-grown socialists, flowering in the 1820s and 1830s, saw Jefferson’s prediction actualize itself in the embryonic industrialization period of the US. In the face of growing inequalities and disparities, thinkers like Langdon Byllesby, Cornelius Blatchley, William Maclure, Thomas Skidmore and others, developed the ideals of the declaration of independence into socialism, what they considered to be its practical and logical conclusion.

Throughout the ages, generations of American socialists have appealed to the declaration of independence to argue for socialism in a way that connects with the American people’s common sense. Leading historians and theoreticians of the American socialist tradition, thinkers like Staughton Lynd, Herbert Aptheker, W.E.B. Dubois, Eugene Debs, William Z. Foster and others, have elaborated on the subject, noting that regardless of the limitations encountered in the founding of the American experiment, it was a historically progressive event, whose spirit should be carried forth today by socialists and communists.

As the US is increasing tensions against China, leading to what many consider a ‘new cold war,’ it is important to look back at the values the American people accept, to the thinkers the American people consider their own, and to consider how different China’s practices – which our ruling class and its media constantly estrange to the American public – are from the ideals which founded our country. What we will find, I believe, is the values prioritized by the leading thinkers of the American experiment, from Jefferson to Dewey to Martin Luther King Jr., are best embodied today in Chinese socialism. This truth, in my view, should be brought forth to the American people. No longer should their consent continue to be manufactured to fight against peoples whose practices align with our ideals more than those we encounter in our own country.

John Dewey (1859-1952), known as ‘America’s philosopher of democracy,’ wrote that we must stop thinking about democracy as something ‘institutional and external;’ instead, we should treat democracy as a ‘way of life,’ one governed by the ‘belief in the common man.’[2] For Dewey, genuine democracy is a consistent practice; it has less to do with showing up to a poll every two to four years and more to do with the ability of common people – what in Spanish we call el pueblo – to steadily exert their collective power over the affairs of everyday life. Dewey understood that this genuine form of democracy was largely inexistent in the US, where the democratic spirit is reduced to voting every four years in political elections which, as he argued, function more as a ‘shadow cast on society by big business.’[3]

In line with the long tradition of home-grown American socialists, Dewey would conclude that the ideals of the founders – especially the radical flank commonly known as the ‘dissenters’ – would be realized ‘only as control of the means of production and distribution is taken out of the hands of individuals who exercise powers created socially for narrow individual interests.’[4] In the context of the US, Dewey held that this required ‘a radical change in economic institutions and the political arrangements based on them.’ ‘These changes,’ said Dewey, ‘are necessary in order that social control of forces and agencies socially created may accrue to the liberation of all individuals associated together in the great undertaking of building a life that expresses and promotes human liberty.’[5] For Dewey, in short, only socialism could make actual the radical, and for its time, deeply democratic, spirit of the declaration of independence.

A similar sentiment can be found in Martin Luther King Jr., the only American to have his own holiday (every third Monday of January). In one of his last sermons, whilst reflecting on the rights upheld in the declaration of independence, King would note that ‘if a man doesn’t have a job or an income, he has neither life, nor liberty, nor the possibility for the pursuit of happiness. He merely exists.’ America, for King, had desperately failed to fulfill its promise, not just for the black souls it kept enchained for more than two centuries, but for all poor and working people who continued to ‘perish on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity.’[6] This division was representative of what King called the ‘two Americas,’ the America of the poor working majority and the America of the few owners of big capital.[7]

Like Dives in the parable of the rich man and Lazarus, King held that ‘if America does not use her vast resources of wealth to end poverty and make it possible for all of God’s children to have the basic necessities of life, she, too, will go to hell.’[8] The stranglehold monopoly capital has over the American state turned the American dream – that is, the individual’s quest for life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness in harmony with the human community – into the American nightmare. No number of victories in the sphere of civil rights could change, in King’s view, the fundamentally polarizing character of the system. As King would argue years after the victories of the civil rights movement: ‘I have found out that all that I have been doing in trying to correct this system in America has been in vain… I am trying to get at the roots of it to see just what ought to be done… The whole thing will have to be done away with.’[9] For all its claims of being a beacon of democracy, for King, as Cornel West argues, ‘America’s two main political parties, each beholden to big money, offer merely alternative visions of oligarchic rule.’[10] Like Dewey and many others within the tradition of American socialism, King considered the values of the declaration of independence to only be universally applicable if America is able to move beyond the capitalist mode of life.

The American ruling class ignores and/or sanitizes this tradition of home-grown socialism which permeates even through the most universally admired of American figures. It wishes to hide the working class’s and oppressed people’s history of struggle in our country, for only in doing so can it perpetuate the McCarthyite lie that socialism and the values the American people accept are wholly incompatible. The truth is that, on the contrary, it is on the basis of the values the American people already accept that American socialism has developed. By showing the American people the positive role socialism has played in their national past – and how these struggles have seen themselves as continuations of the revolutionary tradition of 1776 –  the similarities in Chinese socialist construction and this unique tradition of American socialism become apparent. 

Martin Luther King Jr., for instance, found it condemnable to sustain poverty amidst material abundance; the rights to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness require the abolition of poverty for their genuine fulfillment. In just 40 years, Chinese socialism has been able to lift more than 800 million people out of poverty, abolishing that horrendous condition the capitalist mode of life makes necessary for the vast majority of people. While building a poverty-free world with common prosperity, China has been able to realize a condition for its people which looks a lot more like what the leading American minds (like Dr. King) stood for than what can be found in America itself.

As we approach the 55th anniversary of King’s assassination (which the FBI helped orchestrate), we should ask: has America – which celebrates King once a year – heeded to King’s concern for poverty and the condition of the working class? The answer is a resolute No! In no state of the US, for instance, is the federal minimum wage ($7.25) enough to survive; even if it is raised to $15 – as the democratic socialists and other progressives have called for – the minimum wage would still not be enough for a working class family to survive anywhere in the country. With stagnant wages and inflation at a 40 year high, almost 60% of Americans are currently living paycheck to paycheck. Many of these people are on the brinks of joining the 600,000 homeless people wandering around in a country with more than 17 million empty homes. It is not surprising, in a country where there are 33 times more empty homes than homeless people, that 34 million people, including one in eight children, experience hunger while 30-40% of the U.S.’s food supply (40 million tons of food) is wasted every year. For all the tokenization of King we find in America’s political circus, we can say that after 55 years since his state-sanctioned death, America has still not listened, and much less realized, the demands of Dr. King. However, China has!

Likewise, Dewey, perhaps the most prominent philosopher America has produced, felt that to carry forth today the democratic creed of the declaration of independence, we must deepen our understanding and practice of democracy. A mode of life where the same small group of monopolists owns most of the property, controls most of the media, and decides who gets elected and what they do when elected, can hardly be called democratic. For Dewey, we are not living up to the democratic creed if ‘democracy’ only matters every two to four years when elections come about and working people are bombarded with reasons why they should vote for one puppet of the ruling class over another. Dewey would wholeheartedly agree with Xi Jinping in asserting that ‘democracy is not an ornament to be used for decoration; it is to be used to solve the problems that the people want to solve.’ As Xi has noted,​

​One could see words like these coming out of the mouths of a John Dewey or a Martin Luther King Jr. These ideas governing China’s socialist whole-process people’s democracy should seem anything but foreign to Americans – it is what our leading democratic theorists hoped the US system would develop into. If Americans are faithful to the democratic creed of the declaration of independence, and to the leading theorists of our country who’ve developed these into notions of socialist democracy with American characteristics, then we should be praising China for how incredibly comprehensive their socialist democracy (which is still humbly considered a work-in-progress) is. Far from thinking about democracy in the reductive, election-only sense, China’s system of socialist democracy is embedded in ‘seven integrated structures or institutional forms (体制tizhi): electoral democracy; consultative democracy; grassroots democracy; minority nationalities policy; rule of law; human rights; and leadership of the Communist Party.’ A comprehensive study of this whole-process people’s democracy would lead any unbiased researcher to the conclusion Roland Boer has (along with a plethora of Chinese scholars) arrived at: namely, that ‘China’s socialist democratic system is already quite mature and superior to any other democratic system.’
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Not only does the US lack this seven-tiered democratic system, but even in the one realm it does have, namely, electoral democracy, the results it produces could hardly be called ‘democratic.’ For more than a decade studies from bourgeois institutions have themselves confirmed what Marxists have known since the middle of the 19th century, namely, that the essence of capitalist ‘democracy’ is ‘democracy for an insignificant minority –  democracy for the rich.’[11] The U.S., which spreads its blood soaked hands around the world plundering in the name of democracy, has been outed as a place where the dēmos (common people) do anything but rule (kratos). As a Princeton study headed by Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page shows,

​In societies divided by class antagonisms we can never talk about ‘pure democracy,’ or abstract democracy in general; we must always ask - as Lenin did - ‘democracy for which class’?[13] The ‘democracy’ and ‘democratic freedoms’ of capitalist to exploit and oppress will always be detrimental to working and oppressed peoples. Only an all-people’s democracy (a working and popular classes democratic-dictatorship) can be genuinely democratic, for it is the only time ‘power’ (kratos) is actually in the hands of ‘common people’ (demos).
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To claim – as American capitalists, their puppet politicians, and their lapdog media does – that the US is a ‘beacon of democracy,’ and China an ‘authoritarian one-party system,’ is to hold on to a delusional topsy turvy view of reality. Only by holding explicitly the idea of democracy as democracy for the rich – an oxymoronic truth which they must continue to conceal from the American public – would any part of their assessment contain truth. If democracy is considered from the standpoint of the capitalist’s ability to arbitrarily exert their will on society at the expense of working people and the planet, then, of course, the US is a beacon of this form of so-called ‘democracy,’ and China an ‘authoritarian’ regime. If instead, democracy is considered from the standpoint of common people’s ability to exert their power successfully over everyday affairs, that is, if democracy is understood in the people-centered form it etymologically stands for, and in the way leading American thinkers like Jefferson, Dewey, and Dr. King understood it, then it would be indubitable that China is far more democratic than the US (and any other liberal-bourgeois ‘democracy’).

As the US increases its anti-China rhetoric and actions – a symptom of its empire’s moribund stage – it becomes an imperative for all sane people to counter the propaganda setting the stage for, at best, a new cold war, and at worst, a third world-war. As Julian Assange – whose treatment reminds us everyday of how much the West cherishes its so called ‘individual rights’ to speech and press – once eloquently stated: ‘if wars can be started by lies, peace can be started by truth.’

It is the duty of American communists, socialists, and progressives, to show the American people the truth; to show them that China is not the enemy of the American people, that the real enemy of the American people are those who would like us to see China as an enemy. It is not China who has our country surrounded by military bases. It is not China who is funding and inciting separatist movements in our autonomous regions. It is not China who is slandering us with baseless accusations of the most heinous crimes of genocide humanity can imagine. It is not China who is creating international military alliances a la global NATO to militarily threaten us. It is the US empire who is doing this to China. The only interests which China threatens are those of our finance capitalists, who have spent the last century impoverishing both our people at home and our brothers and sisters in the global south. China is a friend of the American working men and women; just like it is a friend of the African peoples, and the peoples in the Middle East and in Latin America, whose win-win, mutually beneficial relations in international trade with China have afforded them the ability to turn away from predatory neoliberal debt-trapping loans which have been systematically forced on them for half a century by the capitalist West.

In sum – to be faithful to the democratic creed of the declaration of independence and of the greatest minds our country has produced, we must realize today that China is not our enemy; instead, it is the place wherein the ideals which guide this democratic creed are best embodied. Instead of buying into the easily confuted lies of Western pundits, who hope we are foolish enough to accept them and dance to the drums of a war to sustain Western capitalist-imperialist hegemony, we must learn from China and work together to build a peaceful, cooperative, and ecological shared future for mankind.

References
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[1] Herbert Aptheker, The American Revolution: 1763-1783 (New York: International Publishers, 1960), 105.

[2] John Dewey, The Collected Works of John Dewey, 1882-1953, ed. by Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1967-1990), LW 14:228.

[3] Dewey, LW 6:163.

[4] Dewey, LW 11:28.

[5] Dewey, LW 11:28.

[6] Martin Luther King Jr, The Radical King, ed. and introduced by Cornel West (Boston: Beacon Press, 2015), 246- 247. 248.

[7] King Jr, The Radical King, 236.

[8] King Jr, The Radical King, 248.

[9] King Jr, The Radical King, xi.

[10] King Jr, The Radical King, xiii.

[11] V. I. Lenin, Collected Works Vol. 26 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977) 465. 

[12] Gilens, M., & Page, B. (2014). Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens. Perspectives on Politics, 12(3), 564-581. doi:10.1017/S1537592714001595
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[13] V. I. Lenin, Collected Works Vol. 28 (Moscow: Progress Publishers,1974), 249.

I really cannot overemphasize the significance of this point, which many on the Left—Marxist or otherwise—still fail to comprehend: only prior phases of modern society could accord “a place to new relations within the framework of the old.” For these leftists, similarly to the bourgeoisie within feudalism, it is somehow possible for the proletariat to first develop itself and become socially empowered within capitalism, and when this development is complete and the situation is ripe, only then seize political power. But in capitalism the situation can never be ripe enough for the proletariat, which remains permanently vulnerable to the economic conditions and their crisis. As Luxemburg explains, it’s not the law but rather “poverty, the lack of means of production, [that] obliges the proletariat to submit itself to the yoke of capitalism.” Consequently, if we remain within the framework of bourgeois society one cannot expect the law to be able to give to the proletariat the means of production. Under capitalism, wage slavery cannot be accommodated by existing legal relations, because it isn’t a juridical but an economic relation. As a result, even with the most stringent labor laws, this will not impinge on the extraction of surplus value and the necessity of surplus labor.
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Luxemburg goes on to extract the quintessence of Marxism on this issue, highlighting one of the peculiarities of the capitalist order: ​

These criticisms should be kept in mind because Marx and Engels admired exactly all of the characteristics of the Commune that were more democratic compared to the bourgeois parliaments, not less. Engels summarized Marx’s description of how the Commune was shattering the former state power, that was functioning as the master of society, and was replacing it by a new and really democratic state that was becoming now, for the first time, the servant of society: “It filled all posts – administrative, judicial, and educational – by election on the basis of universal suffrage of all concerned, with the right of the same electors to recall their delegate at any time. And in the second place, all officials, high or low, were paid only the wages received by other workers.”13 Hal Draper,14 in his monumental work on the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat describes an incident during the last days of the Commune: the majority proposed to create a five man uber-authority (a dictatorial committee of public safety) and all those from the minority who were Marxists or influenced by Marx stood against it – not accidentally. The Commune should have exercised its authority more readily and freely, but only if it was legitimized through the extremely democratic institutions of direct control and recallability of representatives that it created. But, crucially, Commune’s legitimization was also stemming from the way it was fulfilling the desiderata of liberalism, not just democracy: 

Draper compellingly shows that by the dictatorship of the proletariat Marx meant the political rule of the proletariat and, more so, a class dictatorship rather than an individual or clique dictatorship (via class representatives that would rule without accountability). Draper exposed how other socialists in Marx’s time, including Blanquists, anarchists and others, were pursuing a dictatorship over the proletariat, or some sort of educational dictatorship: the people, the masses, were assumed to be corrupted by the social order, and they had to be saved despite themselves with the help of the good and wise guys of the revolutionary elite – rings a bell comparing to how large segments of the Left today treat the masses? The term, according to Draper, was more about the class content of a new revolutionary regime, not about the particular type of the new political institutions. It was another way to describe what we would otherwise just call a worker’s state. 

But Draper, in drawing these important conclusions, neutralized Marx’s and Engel’s critical approach to the worker’s state itself. The point is that states are always more or less dictatorial, in a negative sense; and this stands even for the most democratic ones, when they exist within class society, and in conditions of capitalism or conditions still under the influence of capitalism. The state equals use of forcible coercion, coercive rule; it’s an organized machinery of suppression, even if its special bodies of armed men work genuinely in the name of the majority.15 Draper, thus, leaves us rather unprepared to understand why for Marxism the workers’ state is transitory and needs also to be overcome, and why for Marx there is a crucial distinction between a still pathological and problematic “first phase of communist society” and a “higher phase of communist society” emancipated from capital.16

The use of the term “dictatorship of the proletariat” by Marx and Engels wasn’t just a rhetorical device to tactically win over the Blanquists, as Draper suggests (which is unlikely because they kept using the term even after the decline of Blanquism). In my opinion, it was a conscious choice on their part in order to signify the authoritarianism still at play during the revolution and the first phase of communist society, which Marxists needed to be self-conscious of in order to facilitate its possible overcoming in a higher phase of communism. 

Draper also criticizes Lenin for what he considers his confusing and contradictory usage of the notion of dictatorship of the proletariat. So, let’s return to Lenin. Lenin fully endorsed what Marx wrote to Weydemeyer (cited above) and wrote similarly that the distinctive characteristic of Marxism was the extension of the recognition of the class struggle to the recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat.17

The aspect that Lenin was adding to the argument was about the “opportunist distortion of Marxism and its falsification in a spirit acceptable to the bourgeoisie.” So Lenin points out the new context of a new period in history, when Marxists were accusing each other of betraying Marxism and of becoming instruments of the reaction (and when workers were killing each other in the name of their nation-states during WWI): a period of acute and aggressive social malaise, when Marxism found itself to be strong enough in order to not just remain a passive observer of the pathology but an active agent within it and also, of it.

It wasn’t an accident that the dictatorship of the proletariat didn’t exist in any public socialist program before this period (including the ones that Marx prepared himself). And even when they used the term for internal reasons or on theoretical works, the emphasis of the socialists of the pre-war period was on “of the proletariat” part, rather than on the “dictatorship.” The term appeared massively during WWI but initially in the program of Russian social democracy circa 1905. The First Russian revolution challenged what was considered Marxist orthodoxy and its stance towards revolutionary change.18 The newly born problem of opportunism, reformism, and revisionism in the intra-Marxist disputes was starting to become acute, together with the active appearance of the masses in the political scene. The stakes were becoming high, and also the tensions: the Menshevik Martynov, amidst the revolutionary situation of 1905, was insisting that only a bourgeois regime was in the cards. In Lenin’s hands, however, the term began to have some obscure uses as he was trying to avoid a similar path, e.g. in his formulation about a possible dictatorship of the peasantry and proletariat. It wasn’t so much the usage of the term by Lenin that was confusing and contradictory but rather the reality itself was becoming acutely contradictory and Marxism was affected accordingly, reflecting these new conditions and challenges.
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Several years later, in 1914-18, this tension reached a peak. Marxism was split and, while declaring fidelity to the same references to Marx, one camp of Marxists preached revolution and the other became the bastion of counter-revolution. This was the first time after 1848 that a revolution broke out in many countries in parallel and even so under the guidance of Marxists. It was during this time that Lenin offered a definition of dictatorship that is considered by Draper and others (for example by Morris Hillquit) as very problematic:

My counter-argument is that the institutional configuration will be coercive and dictatorial, not because of some who will deny radical change, but because of the majority that will sustain it. The dictatorship of the proletariat has less to do with a dissenting minority, and more to do with a vast majority still enchanted and dominated by the compulsion to labor as the sole (and equal) measure for value. The coercion survives in order to enforce bourgeois right, and only because of that to suppress others and oneself (to keep going to work). Immediately after the revolution, we continue to know ourselves only as workers, as commodities. That’s the pathology that still produces irrationalism that is then translated in the need for special bodies of armed workers to police and balance its problematic outcomes. It’s not as if after the revolution there is a majority fully satisfied and a minority dissatisfied; the majority remains ambivalent about the regime it sustains. The key source of coercion will not be for example the fact that some won’t want to be disciplined and go to work, but the fact that the majority knows no other way to live apart from going to work to produce value. The epiphenomenon is that they will coerce the minority but the problem lies within the majority. According to Ypi we would move to communism as soon as the minority stops the irrational resistance and adopt to the requirements of the new regime, whereas for Marx we would move to communism only if everybody changed and conquered a new way of life, beyond the regime of capital and its expression as bourgeois right that still survives subjectively after the revolution.24 The revolution that results in the political supremacy of the proletariat is a dictatorship because it doesn’t abolish capital as social domination but produces a pure form of its rule over society,25 with less distraction from the problem of its “character masks,” of capitalists who are “mere personifications of the economic relations.”26 The revolutionary potential of such conditions was thematized philosophically from Lassalle in a letter to Marx (12 December, 1851): “Hegel used to say in his old age that directly before the emergence of something qualitatively new, the old state of affairs gathers itself up into its original, purely general, essence, into its simple totality, transcending and absorbing back into itself all those marked differences and peculiarities which it evinced when it was still viable.”27

How can one radically transform the society of which one is also a part? How can one become an agent of change and at the same time be part of that which is changing? How can society be simultaneously the subject and object of revolution? It was these kinds of problems that led Marx and the Marxists to express themselves through seemingly contradictory formulations, such as that of the dictatorship of the proletariat as a precondition of democracy (and vice versa). And that’s also what led Marxists to get involved in the thankless job of party-building: multiple parties and organizations of the working class, before the revolution but even more so after it, are necessary in order to thematize politically the problem of capital, i.e. the problem of worker versus worker (and not just of worker versus capitalist), engage with it in a tangible manner and hopefully overcome it completely (proper democratic party procedures and commitment to principles become also extremely important given the problem of legality described above).

Concerning democracy, we need to be careful not to turn into apologists for anti-democratic authoritarianism, but we also need to be careful not to end up in the democratic reactionary camp. Engels warned that “our sole adversary on the day of the crisis and on the day after the crisis will be the whole collective reaction which will group itself around pure democracy, and this, I think, should not be lost sight of.” This warning was issued by the same Engels who wrote that “if one thing is certain it is that our party and the working class can only come to power under the form of a democratic republic. This is even the specific form for the dictatorship of the proletariat, as the Great French Revolution has already shown.”

The dictatorship of the proletariat is not undemocratic, but it is rather the outcome of how democracy undermines itself under capitalism. It’s a mistake of course to confuse and identify the democratic republic in general with the bourgeois democratic republic. But it’s also wrong to assume that even in the best-case scenario socialist democracy after the revolution will not face authoritarian challenges stemming from the economic realities still at work. The Communist Manifesto was already explicit about this: on the one hand, the revolution would allow the proletariat “to win the battle of democracy”. On the other hand, the proletariat organized as the ruling class would aim to increase total productivity of society, but “in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property.” Remarkably, Marx and Engels admit that these measures will “appear economically insufficient and untenable” but they clarify that these same measures “in the course of the movement, outstrip themselves, necessitate further inroads upon the old social order, and are unavoidable as a means of entirely revolutionizing the mode of production.”
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Instead of dismissing Marxism as confusing one should navigate through such formulations that appear to contradict each other, as Engels’ above, to try to make sense of a contradictory reality through them. The specter of dictatorship haunts us side by side with the specter of democracy because revolution is not the final victory of a communist majority of people versus a capitalist minority. The problem of capital is reproduced from below, when we, the majority, actively reproduce bourgeois right and succumb to its contradictions. An instant elimination of capitalism is impossible, it would imply eliminating all the masses of people that spontaneously sustain it (capitalism is reproduced radically differently compared to pre-capitalist societies). Hence, revolution facilitates a long challenging process of subjective also, and not only objective transformation. In this context this obscure and dense remark by Adorno starts making total sense: ​

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1. “Of late, the German philistine has once more been filled with wholesome terror at the words: Dictatorship of the Proletariat. Well and good, gentlemen, do you want to know what this dictatorship looks like? Look at the Paris Commune. That was the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.” (Engels)
2. Adorno, Cited in Detlev Claussen, Theodor W. Adorno: One Last Genius, Harvard University Press, 2008, 233.
3. “The proletariat’s struggle against the bourgeoisie, which finds expression in a variety of forms ever richer in content, inevitably becomes a political struggle directed towards the conquest of political power by the proletariat (‘the dictatorship of the proletariat’)” (Lenin).
4. For essential background on this specific issue but also in general, see my previous article on the Marxist account of the state, and this article by Chris Cutrone.
5. The bourgeois revolutionaries ultimately squandered their power by forming a coalition with reactionary social elements in order to hold back the rising working class.
6. By the way, as opposed to the abstract and theoretical perspective, historically and concretely, even the bourgeois revolutions went through dictatorial, coercive and oppressive processes to prevail against their enemies. John Ehrenberg helpfully sums up here the older meaning of the term “dictatorship” that should be kept in mind: “Cutrone is right to point out that Roman history had demonstrated how dictatorship could serve democracy in certain conditions. The same was true of the French Revolution and of numerous other democratic upsurges and revolutions. Martial law and legally-defined conditions of dictatorship might be the necessary precondition for saving liberty in the long run. Indeed, almost all states allow for the imposition of martial law, and American history has seen political authorities impose it several dozen times. President Lincoln famously suspended habeas corpus throughout the Union in any case involving Confederate spies, prisoners, members of the military, or any traitor to the Union.”
7. “We see then, that, apart from extremely elastic bounds, the nature of the exchange of commodities itself imposes no limit to the working-day, no limit to surplus-labour. The capitalist maintains his rights as a purchaser when he tries to make the working-day as long as possible, and to make, whenever possible, two working-days out of one. On the other hand, the peculiar nature of the commodity sold implies a limit to its consumption by the purchaser, and the labourer maintains his right as seller when he wishes to reduce the working-day to one of definite normal duration. There is here, therefore, an antinomy, right against right, both equally bearing the seal of the law of exchanges. Between equal rights force decides. Hence is it that in the history of capitalist production, the determination of what is a working-day, presents itself as the result of a struggle, a struggle between collective capital, i.e., the class of capitalists, and collective labour, i.e., the working-class.” (Marx)
8. As Cutrone notes, “In the transformed circumstance of capital, liberalism and democracy […] became not only mutually contradictory but each became self-contradictory in capital. […] Communism was, for Marx, the political movement that pointed to the possibility of overcoming the necessity of liberalism and democracy, or the transcending of the need for ‘bourgeois’ politics per se. But this was to be achieved through the politics of the demands for the bourgeois rights of the working class. […] Marx sought the potential in capital of going beyond demands for greater liberalism and democracy. Subsequent ‘communism’ lost sight of Marx on this, and disintegrated into the 20th century antinomy of socialism and liberalism. The Marxist hypothesis is that Marx recognized the possibility, not of opposition, but of a qualitative transformation, in, through, and beyond bourgeois society”.
9. For those interested in the case of Spain 1936, here are some useful sources coming from the broadest possible political spectrum (Tom Wetzel, Friends of Durruti, the ICL, Murray Bookchin).
10. The reader can consult Haffner, and Broué.
11. One doesn’t have to accept everything the Boksheviks did as perfect in order to seriously reflect on this particularly crucial aspect of their politics. In this short article (which can be easily Google-translated from Greek to English) I tried to debunk a couple of myths whose perpetuation discourages Leftists from engaging seriously with the legacy of Lenin.
12. 
    
    “Do not build on the good old days, but on the bad new ones.”
    — Walter Benjamin, “Conversations with Brecht” (1938)
    
13. Marx’s own detailed account can be found here and here.
14. Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution, Vol. III: The Dictatorship of the Proletariat, and The ‘Dictatorship of the Proletariat’ from Marx to Lenin.
15. “Since the state is merely a transitional institution of which use is made in the struggle, in the revolution, to keep down one’s enemies by force, it is utter nonsense to speak of a free people’s state; so long as the proletariat still makes use of the state, it makes use of it, not for the purpose of freedom, but of keeping down its enemies and, as soon as there can be any question of freedom, the state as such ceases to exist. We would therefore suggest that Gemeinwesen [‘commonalty’] be universally substituted for state; it is a good old German word that can very well do service for the French ‘Commune’.” (Engels)
16. Thomas Jones’ recent article On the Dictatorship of the Proletariat doesn’t integrate in its scope this key distinction between first and high phase.
17. “It is often said and written that the main point in Marx’s theory is the class struggle. But this is wrong. And this wrong notion very often results in an opportunist distortion of Marxism and its falsification in a spirit acceptable to the bourgeoisie. For the theory of the class struggle was created not by Marx, but by the bourgeoisie before Marx, and, generally speaking, it is acceptable to the bourgeoisie. Those who recognize only the class struggle are not yet Marxists; they may be found to be still within the bounds of bourgeois thinking and bourgeois politics. To confine Marxism to the theory of the class struggle means curtailing Marxism, distorting it, reducing it to something acceptable to the bourgeoisie. Only he is a Marxist who extends the recognition of the class struggle to the recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat. That is what constitutes the most profound distinction between the Marxist and the ordinary petty (as well as big) bourgeois. This is the touchstone on which the real understanding and recognition of Marxism should be tested.” (Lenin)
18. The reader can consult the famous pamphlet on Mass Strike that Luxemburg wrote, influenced by Lenin, with whom she had daily conversations at this period. It was the beginning of her gradual alienation from Kautsky and his version of orthodoxy.
19. See our Response to Cutrone, but also our main argument (with close attention to the affinities between philosophy and the problem of the state) in our Karl Korsch 1923: the problem of Marxism and philosophy.
20. To consider 1917 also as a failure to realize a real dictatorship of the proletariat challenges the historically linear assumptions of Balibar in his 1976 book “On the Dictatorship of the Proletariat,” that it’s both possible and necessary “to rectify and to enrich our understanding of the dictatorship of the proletariat by studying the real history of the socialist revolutions which have taken place up to the present day” and “progressively to work out, in the light of experience and the critical examination of that experience, the paths of revolutionary transformation in the conditions of our own capitalist country.” Otherwise he is correct that “the very idea that, in the history and the strategy of the Communist Parties, the dictatorship of the proletariat might be ‘out of date’ can have no meaning for a Marxist. For, as we have seen, the dictatorship of the proletariat is not a particular method, a particular model or a particular ‘path of transition’ to socialism. It is the historical tendency which leads from capitalism to communism, through the transition period of socialism, in the conditions of imperialism.”
21. This discussion seems apposite in relation to this: “Adorno: Relapse into barbarism is always an option. If the world were so planned that everything one does served the whole of society in a transparent manner, and senseless activities were abandoned, I would be happy to spend two hours a day working as a lift attendant. Horkheimer: An assertion of that kind leads us directly to reformism. Adorno: Reform of the administration cannot be brought about by peaceful means.”
22. As Dimitrios Kivotidis observes in his article Marxist Legal Theory: Dictatorship of the Proletariat, after the revolution “law still operates in a social formation where class contradictions may have been eliminated, but some contradictions remain (such as the ones between manual and intellectual labour, skilled and unskilled labour, town and country) and some of them may be antagonistic in nature (such as the one between commodity and socialist production)”. Kivotidis’s full argument can be found in his book: Dictatorship, New Trajectories in Law, Routledge 2021.
23. She seems to be following young Marx on this assessment, who wrote that: “In true democracy the political state disappears. This is correct inasmuch as qua political state, qua constitution it is no longer equivalent to the whole.” But the Marxist grasp of democracy and its relationship to the higher phase of the communist society is a huge issue that deserves a proper treatment in a future article.
24. This doesn’t refute the superiority of the dictatorship of the proletariat compared to the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie that is in essence what democracy is about in capitalism. As Lenin observes: “From the bourgeois point of view, it is easy to declare that such a social order is ‘sheer utopia’ and to sneer at the socialists for promising everyone the right to receive from society, without any control over the labor of the individual citizen, any quantity of truffles, cars, pianos, etc. Even to this day, most bourgeois ‘savants’ confine themselves to sneering in this way, thereby betraying both their ignorance and their selfish defense of capitalism. Ignorance – for it has never entered the head of any socialist to ‘promise’ that the higher phase of the development of communism will arrive; as for the greatest socialists’ forecast that it will arrive, it presupposes not the present ordinary run of people, who […] are capable of damaging the stocks of public wealth ‘just for fun’, and of demanding the impossible. Until the ‘higher’ phase of communism arrives, the socialists demand the strictest control by society and by the state over the measure of labor and the measure of consumption; but this control must start with the expropriation of the capitalists, with the establishment of workers’ control over the capitalists, and must be exercised not by a state of bureaucrats, but by a state of armed workers.”
25. This is a key element that anarchists fail to incorporate in their standpoint. Matthew Crossin in a recent article quotes Malatesta from a letter to Fabri stating that he would agree in essence with the dictatorship of the proletariat if what Marxists mean by it is “the effective power of all the workers intent on breaking down capitalist society” that for him “would become anarchy immediately upon the cessation of reactionary resistance”. But workers reconstitute capitalism at a higher level when they crush the reactionary resistance of the capitalists, and it is wishful thinking to think that, on the same economic ground, coercion and violence will not end up getting crystallized in a form of government. Anarchists avoid what’s necessary to completely suppress the capitalist system: seizing political power.
26. p.172 of this edition of Das Kapital.
27. Quoted by Lukacs here.
28. Cited in Claussen, ibid. Adorno here echoes Reich: “Marx, unlike mechanical materialism, comprehended, in principle, man as the subject of history, and Lenin developed especially this aspect of Marxism” (Mass psychology of fascism, p. 18).

​Sartre once remarked that the attempt to construct a philosophy that goes beyond Marxism simply recreates a pre-Marxist view that is no longer relevant to current understanding. In a recent issue of the London Review of Books I believe the philosopher Galen Strawson guilty of just such an attempt in his article "Real Naturalism." 

Engels long ago pointed out that there are basically two trends in modern philosophy--one that leads to idealism and myth making, and one that leads to materialism and the correct scientific approach to understanding the nature of reality. I hope to show in this article that Strawso n (hereafter "GS") has taken the idealistic path.

GS states unequivocally the following: "I'm a naturalist, an out-and-out naturalist, a philosophical or metaphysical naturalist about concrete reality. I don't think anything supernatural or otherwise non-natural exists." We shall see. Reality has already been qualified by the adjective "concrete", which leaves open the possibility of some sort of "non-concrete" reality to play the role usually reserved for "spirit" or "mind" in idealistic philosophies. I want to be able to replace the term "naturalism" with the term "materialism" (which I defend) so I am a "materialist about reality" period.

We need to be clear about terms. I think naturalism is the same as materialism but some naturalists disagree. Some think that there are emergent qualities in the material world that lead to the transcendence of mere nature. I think they are mistaken and are dualists or idealists as regards reality and are naturalists in name only. All such emergent qualities are ultimately to be explained by basic constituents of a material nature. 

Physicalism is also another name for materialism. This outlook originated with the Logical Positivists with respect to their materialist philosophy of mind. For the sake of clarity I will use the term "materialism" instead of either "naturalism" or "physicalism" (or sometimes "n-materialism" and "p-materialism" to be really clear) in order to avoid the obfuscation introduced into philosophy by the multiplication of useless terms. I hope I have not obfuscated here.

Now GS says that the non-natural can only be known in relation to the natural and everything natural is "anything that exists in space-time." Well, materialism also holds to this view and, since everything that exists does so in space-time, GS should simply say he is a materialist, adopt Marxism-Leninism as the most consistent materialism, and that would be that. Except that he thinks many people who call themselves n-materialists are not--they are really false n-materialists, they are "noturalists." Which is just what I think GS himself is.

What upsets GS is his view that in the last fifty years or so, so-called n-materialists have questioned the existence of conscious experience and nothing could be more self-evident than that we have experiences. GS blames this lamentable state of affairs on the influence of Behaviorism, which led most n-materialists to think that, since Behaviorism explained all human activity without recourse to concepts of consciousness and experience, it was unscientific to use such concepts. Even when they broke with Behaviorism as such they still denied the existence of "experience" because they did not think the concept compatible with the n-materialist view that everything was "physical."

These "false" n-materialists, in the view of GS, simply deny that matter can be conscious and since they don't believe anything else basically exists except matter it follows that there is no such thing as experience.  Now GS admits that many of them deny that they don't believe that matter can be conscious and so experience can be "physical," but he says they only make these claims by changing the meaning of "consciousness" so that "whatever they mean by it, it excludes what the term actually means."

GS now switches from speaking about n-materialism to p-materialism.  There is no problem here because they are the same thing. We cannot reduce everything we hold to be explainable in terms of p-materialism to terms of physics. Physics right now is in flux and no one can state that they know exactly what the ultimate theory of reality will be, or if there will even ever be such a theory. According to GS, outside of certain quantitative structures revealed by mathematics and experimentally tested, physics appears unable to "tell us anything about the intrinsic nature of reality."

GS wants us to doubt physics because he wants to create a p-n-materialist theory of the mind that will not be reducible to statements of physics. He exhorts us to think in terms of the views of Locke, Hume, and Kant, as well as Eddington and Bertrand Russell, to accept the "point that physics can't convey the nature of everything that exists--even though everything is wholly physical." This appeal to the great thinkers of the past is unnecessary.

I can't think of any materialist, unless he or she has completely lost his or her way, who would deny that the nature of certain things that exist--appreciation of a work of art by a person for example--is to be explained by physics even though the art work, the person's brain, and the neural activity within it are wholly physical. It is enough for materialism to point out that the nature of the appreciation that exists within the person would not exist without the physical (materialistic) prerequisites of the brain. 

So I don't see a problem with the existence of "experiences", which GS wants to call his "starting point: outright realism about experience, conscious experience." A new term has now been introduced: "realism." This too is, I think, just another term for "materialism"--"r-materialism." I don't want to belabor the point, but while Marxists are content to use just one term, "materialism" tout court, our non-Marxist philosophical colleagues insist on using three different terms and usually eschew using such a crude old-fashioned and discredited term as "materialism"--not all of them but enough so that I need to use these distinctions I have made for purposes of clarification. 

I agree with GS about the "terminological wreckage" that one finds in the philosophy of mind and so sympathize with him in wanting to get a clear understanding of what "experience" means. It is just the pre-philosophical notion that every one has, from childhood up, when they feel, hear, taste, or see something that they are aware of. He takes the example of the taste of pineapple from Locke--to taste pineapple is all you have to do to know what tasting a pineapple is like. That is a real experience, the experience of the taste of pineapple. Materialists would be wrong to think "they have any good reason to give an account of experience that is in any way deflationary or reductionist relative to the ordinary pre-philosophical understanding of experience."

GS is surely right for any ordinary everyday conversations about experience, but a materialist, talking to another philosopher, would not be remiss in pointing out that the taste of a pineapple is a function of some type of brain activity without which there would be no experience of said taste. I think it rather obvious that "physical reality has experiential character only when organised in certain specific ways--e.g., in the way in which it is organised in brains" [or proto-brains or some functionally equivalent organ or structure]. At this point in his essay this materialist position presented by GS need not, he tells us, be ruled out. But he is going to try to and rule it out later because he wants to defend the possibility of panpsychism! Let us see if he succeeds.

Now I agree with GS that experience really exists the way he says it does--I have a real experience of the taste of pineapple and I do not question the existence of this conscious experience. But GS says that if that is the case then I must be "fully open to panpsychism." This is the view, according to the Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, "that the physical world is pervasively psychical, sentient or conscious (understood as equivalent)."  Well, I am fully open to his argument (if he has one) but I don't think his argument will prove his case.

He begins to make his case by arguing that materialists who argue for the non-existence of experience are wrong, and since we all are aware of experience we have better reason to doubt the existence of non-experiential reality than of experiential reality. He says we know "some physical stuff" is experiential because of brain states and concludes that we have no reason not to conclude that "all physical stuff is in its fundamental nature wholly experiential in all conditions and in all respects all the way down." But not all materialists argue that experience doesn't exist. The fact that we experience external reality does not necessitate the fundamental nature of external reality is "experiential" in the same sense that we experience it and call our awareness "experiential." This is the fallacy of equivocation.

GS, however, concludes that he has shown that panpsychism is the logical result of p-n-materialism. He calls it "pure" panpsychism " since "it goes beyond the version of panpsychism according to which all physical stuff has experiential being in addition to non-experiential being." He also claims that this version of panpsychism "leaves everything that is true in physics untouched."  Quite a claim since we don't know if everything that we think is true in physics is true.

GS admits he has not really made the case in his article for panpsychism. What he thinks he has done is to show that "there's no reason" to think that the world given to us by physics is fundamentally non-experiential rather than experiential. Since the world as we know it is our experience of it. "There is," he says, "zero observational evidence of any non-experiential concrete reality."

What does this mean? Because all our knowledge of the world is our awareness and experience of it, therefore there is no evidence that it has an existence independent of experience. GS denies that this is what his position amounts to. But that is exactly what his position amounts to. He simply enunciates his position and says anyone who doesn't accept his view is "not a real naturalist."

You don't have to be a rocket scientist to see the problem with panpsychism. Physics is not the only science we have to deal with--there is biology, geology, and paleontology, just to name a few others. Science has pretty much shown that our cognitive abilities including consciousness and awareness and the abilities to experience the world we live in are functions of our nervous system and the evolution of our brains. A rock is not going to be "aware" of anything. There was a time when there was no life on earth and no experiences either. Everyone knows this story. Our observational understanding of the history of the universe makes the materialist (non-panpsychic) view the most compelling logical explanation of all the concrete facts we presently have at our disposal. 

I think GS knows his position in both counter-intuitive and unscientific because he ends his essay by saying that he predicts "that no philosopher who disagrees will take any notice" of his "argument."  But a bunch of assertions is not an argument and he has already said that he was "not particularly disposed to make the case for panpsychism" in this article. He quotes Hobbes to back up his prediction: "Arguments do seldom work on men of wit and learning, when they have once engaged themselves in a contrary opinion." If you don't accept GS's position, well then, "You're not a serious, realistic naturalist." Perhaps GS should rather be thinking about Horace's observation "mutato nomine de te fabula narratur."