In Anti-Dühring, Friedrich Engels writes the following on definitions: "From a scientific standpoint all definitions are of little value. In order to gain an exhaustive knowledge of what life is, we should have to go through all the forms in which it appears, from the lowest to the highest. But for ordinary usage such definitions are very convenient and in places cannot well be dispensed with; moreover, they can do no harm, provided their inevitable deficiencies are not forgotten."[1] This quote arises in the context of the chapter’s attack on Dühring’s philosophy of nature. Specifically, Engels wants to point out the inadequacy, or, in other words, the abstract character, of the ‘definition’ of life. To understand this perspective on definitions we must comprehend the Marxist distinction between the abstract and the concrete, since it is, properly speaking, the abstract character of definitions which are problematic. Today we hear the word abstract, and we conjure up images of mental abstractions, of generalizations which occur in our mind and are a disconnected reflection of the sensible things in the world. This is not, generally, the way our tradition understands the ‘abstract’. We, of course, see a necessary role for mental abstractions in the process of acquiring theoretical knowledge. Theory is, always, a form of abstraction. However, this ‘abstraction’ can itself be more or less abstract or concrete – in the sense in which we specifically use the words. Etymologically, the Latin concretus referred to that which is mixed, composite, fused. As Marx and Hegel have put it, the concrete is that which contains many determinations.[2] The concrete is the unity which contains the many, a unity of opposites. It is that which is most complex, the whole or totality. When we say, for instance, that Marx provides a concrete study of the capitalist mode of production, we mean that he has logically reconstructed the mode of production as a whole, comprehensively, on the basis of ascending from its germ (the commodity, the most abstract integral component of the whole) to the whole itself. In Hegel’s logic the absolute idea stands as the most concrete form of the concept, that last form the concept takes, precisely because it self-consciously contains within it the many determinations it has gone through to achieve this utmost moment of logical concreteness. Abstractus, in Latin, refers to that which has been withdrawn, removed, extracted, estranged or isolated. It is quite evident to see how this operates in abstract thinking… in abstract mental abstractions. As Ilyenkov writes, “thinking abstractly merely means thinking unconnectedly, thinking of an individual property of a thing without understanding its links with other properties, without realizing the place and role of this property in reality.”[3] But the abstract is not simply this flaw in disconnected thinking, there are also real abstractions operative objectively in the world, abstractions which themselves can be understood concretely. For Marx, for instance, this is operative in commodity exchange, where the “general value-form is the reduction of all kinds of actual labour to their common character of being human labour generally, of being the expenditure of human labour-power.”[4] As you find in the first four chapters of Capital Vol. I, the exchange value of commodities (which comes to dominate over its use-value) is a reflection of the abstract labor time that went into it. It is a quantitative metric of the socially necessary labor time needed to produce a specific commodity. For such quantifiability to take place qualitatively incommensurable activities must transmute themselves into being qualitatively commensurable. The labor that goes into making a shoe and the labor that goes into making a coat must lose their uniqueness and obtain an abstract form in which each is comparable, as qualitative equals, in terms of quantity. This is a real abstraction.[5] That which is the most concrete, i.e., the ‘wholes’ or ‘totalities’ to be examined, cannot be studied directly qua whole. The concrete, in other words, cannot be a point of departure. Treating it as such limits you to engaging with what Marx called an “imagined concrete,” a concrete object of study approached through abstract thinking.[6] Instead, to understand the concrete concretely, an ascension from the abstract to the concrete is required. Marx, for instance, does not deal with the capitalist mode of production as a whole until the third volume of Capital, i.e., until he has arrived at the whole through a “process of concentration,” through an ascension to the concrete.[7] This ascension, therefore, requires initially the descending from the concrete (the whole) to the abstract (its determinate components). We exist, for instance, within the capitalist mode of life as a concrete reality. But to study such a reality Marx had to descend from the immediate experience of the concrete to its abstract components in order to reconstruct them logically through this process of ascension to the real concrete. Descending from the concrete to the abstract is a means, an intermediary disappearing moment for the ascension to the concrete. Both of these movements, the descending from the immediate concrete to the abstract to reascend from the abstract to the concrete, thereby reconstructing the concrete whole in the mind, are integral to the process of mental concrete abstraction… the antidote to the one-sidedness and disconnection central to abstract thinking. Primacy, however, is given to the ascension to the concrete. It is, as Ilyenkov notes, “the principal and dominant [movement], determining the weight and significance of the other, the opposite one [descending from the concrete to the abstract],” which “emerges as a subordinate disappearing moment of the overall movement.”[8] So, what does this have to do with the Marxist tradition’s view of definitions? Well, definitions, though helpful for practical purposes, too easily lend themselves to abstract thinking – i.e., to completely misunderstanding the world. One cannot provide one-sentence textbook definitions for complex (concrete) things in the world. Even for the most elemental things in the world, a basic abstract definition tells me very little about such a thing. This approach to definitions attempts to freeze frame whatever is being defined – to remove it from its spatial-temporal context, from the web of relations it exists in, and to ignore how such context is the horizon for the form the defined thing takes. Definitions, in other words, force our thinking into seeing things statically, disconnectedly, and free from the contradictions which pervade a thing’s existence as a complex, heterogenous entity. This does not mean we condemn definitions. They are, after all, an integral component of communication. Human social life without definitions would be impossible. But it does mean that, when participating in scientific inquiry (as Engels mentioned), or, frankly, in any other activity, we should not treat definitions as these pure sacrosanct things reality must mold itself into (for instance, how the purity fetish outlook treats the pure ‘idea’, or ‘definition,’ of socialism as something which could be used to look at socialist countries and say, ‘that’s not real socialism because it is not an accurate representation of the pure idea, or definition, that exists in my mind’). We should be cognizant of the fact that the things ‘definitions’ define are themselves in constant motion, riddled by contradictions, and necessarily interconnected to a host of other things within a given totality… all of which must be grasped so that phenomenon, currently captured abstractly through a definition, could be understood concretely. I can, for instance, tell you about how capitalism is a system where the owners of capital are in power over the productive forces and the state apparatuses (ideological and repressive) of society, and where such dominance is used to perpetuate the process of capital accumulation rooted in the exploitation of the working class’s labor. This, for instance, is a somewhat helpful ‘definition.’ But could one say they understand this concrete reality (this ‘whole’ form of life) concretely on the basis of such a definition? Of course not! It is not without reason that Marx’s Capital remained an open, unfinished project… it’s object of study was itself unfinished, continuously developing, obtaining greater concreteness. Therefore, those (like Marx and Engels) attempting to concretely reconstruct the mode of life as a whole in writing, require an openness in their intellectual project that reflects the open dynamism of its object of study. This is why Marxism (dialectical materialism) is creative through and through. It holds as an ontological reality this incessant development of the world, and thus understands that to continue to know it concretely (and, of course, to change it in a revolutionary manner), its thinking must creatively develop with it. References [1] Friedrich Engels, Anti-Dühring (Peking: Foreign Language Press, 2016), 81. [2] G. W. F. Hegel. Lectures on the History of Philosophy Vol. 2. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974., pp. 13. Karl Marx. Grundrisse. London: Penguin Books, 1973., pp. 101. [3] Evald Ilyenkov, The Dialectics of the Abstract and Concrete in Marx’s Capital (Delhi: Aakar Books, 2022), 27. [4] Karl Marx, Capital Vol I (Moscow: International Publishers, 1974), 57. [5] This is explored in Alfred Sohn-Rothel’s Intellectual and Manual Labor, which anticipates the argument from Richard Seaford in Money and the Early Greek Mind that the real abstraction found in the introduction of coinage (money commodity, universal equivalent) in Miletus was what sparked the development of philosophy, i.e., ideal concrete abstractions into the question of being. [6] Marx, Grundrisse, 100, [7] Marx, Grundrisse, 100. [8] Ilyenkov, The Dialectics of the Abstract and Concrete, 139. Author Carlos L. Garrido is a Cuban American philosophy instructor at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. He is the director of the Midwestern Marx Institute and the author of The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism (2023), Marxism and the Dialectical Materialist Worldview (2022), and the forthcoming Hegel, Marxism, and Dialectics (2024). He has written for dozens of scholarly and popular publications around the world and runs various live-broadcast shows for the Midwestern Marx Institute YouTube. You can subscribe to his Philosophy in Crisis Substack HERE. Archives February 2024
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Marxist revolutionaries strive to analyze the surrounding bourgeois, capitalist world with the goal of fundamentally changing it. But the hegemony of bourgeois metaphysical modes of thinking in capitalist societies–modes that always end up assuring us that the essential institutions of bourgeois society are not susceptible to change and are as permanent as the law of gravity–can sometimes derail this goal. Karl Marx (1818-83), like Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) before him, emphasized that human societies can and do undergo dramatic transformations, moving from one social order to another where each formation is governed by its own distinct laws, and a discontinuous logic separates one social order from the next. In other words, both their philosophies exhibit an appreciation for a historical perspective almost totally lacking in preceding philosophical systems. Accordingly, both Marx and Hegel found the dominant scientific method of their time, the method of physics with its static laws, to be inadequate for capturing the logic of social transformations. Hegel was the first to turn to the dialectical method, whose origins go back at least to Plato, and used it to capture the logic of these historical leaps while at the same time systematically developing the logic of the dialectic itself. Marx, who was heavily influenced by Hegel, adopted his dialectic, but, as we will see, gave it a critical turn, declaring in the 1873 Afterward to the second German edition of Capital, Volume I: “My dialectical method is not only different from the Hegelian, but its direct opposite.” Nevertheless, their respective dialectical methods share fundamental features in common. In the same Afterward Marx credited Hegel with being “the first to present its general form of working in a comprehensive and conscious manner.” This essay will begin with an explication of these “general forms,” particularly when applied to understanding humanity; then show how they were employed by Marx in his revolutionary analysis of bourgeois society; and conclude by offering examples of both dialectical and metaphysical modes of thinking as applied to current social practices. As we shall see below, metaphysical thinking presently dominates both everyday thought and bourgeois philosophical modes of analysis. Dialectical thought, while not rejecting metaphysical thinking altogether, attempts to supersede it. While the dialectic is a powerful weapon that can help us escape from the shackles of bourgeois thinking, it does not offer an unambiguous tool that will produce the same results no matter who employs it. It is not a mechanical instrument. Nevertheless, it does provide some useful guidelines for revolutionary socialists who seek to understand our surrounding world for the purpose of changing it. Preliminaries: The philosophical context Understanding Hegel’s dialectical method requires an acquaintance with the method it was constructed to supersede–the prevailing natural scientific method that dominated the philosophical/scientific scene of Hegel’s time–particularly the method of physics, a form of thought that Hegel designated as “metaphysical.” Initiated in the 15th —16th centuries in Europe in conjunction with the rise of capitalism, this natural scientific method conceived nature as composed of discrete elements that could be understood in isolation from one another and that interacted in predictable ways according to inflexible laws such as cause and effect. As Friedrich Engels observed in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific: “To the metaphysician, things and their mental reflexes, ideas, are isolated, are to be considered one after the other and apart from each other, are objects of investigation fixed, rigid, given once for all.” The goal of the scientist was to discover the laws governing the interaction of these objects (for example, the law of gravity) and logically deduce predictions based on these laws, which then allowed humanity to advance its control over nature and more successfully satisfy human material needs. The natural sciences made huge gains during this period in discovering the laws of nature, thanks to Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), Johannes Kepler (1571-1630), Isaac Newton (1643-1727), and many others. Impressed by the positive impact of the natural sciences on humanity, philosophers quickly borrowed its method and applied it to humans with the hope of organizing society along “scientific” lines. Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) justified this transition by arguing that human beings, after all, were no more than complicated mechanisms, where “the heart [is] but a spring; and the nerves but so many strings; and the joints but so many wheels” (The Leviathan, Introduction). He added society was nothing more than an artificial man and hence could be captured by the same method as nature. Hobbes proceeded to argue that people are by nature competitive, distrustful of one another, and desiring of glory and hence engage in acts that are entirely predictable. For example, they will be aggressive with one another unless restrained by the threat of force. Using these assumptions about the nature of the individual, Hobbes proceeded to deduce the appropriate governmental structure for society. Philosophers of this period, then, assumed that people had a fixed nature in the same way as natural objects. That is, just as water has certain permanent characteristics that allow us to predict its behavior, and the falling of an object to the ground is completely predictable if the relevant variables are known and animal species have their fixed nature, human nature is equally fixed and predictable. Many agreed with Hobbes about the essential qualities of this nature: people are selfish, competitive and self-serving. Perhaps most importantly because of its methodological implications, they believed humans were essentially individualistic, meaning that each individual was assumed to possess a full range of human characteristics apart from their relation to other human individuals. Human societies were simply the sum of these atomic units and nothing more. Hegel’s revolutionary approach to the question of human reality required that he adopt a revolutionary method to capture its logic–the dialectic. His dialectical method, therefore, cannot be separated from the content of his social theory: “… this dialectic is not an activity of subjective thinking applied to some matter externally, but it is rather the matter’s very soul putting forth its branches and fruit organically.” (Philosophy of Religion) Here are some of the defining features of that social theory: First, societies are living organisms, which means they are composed of members that derive their identity from their place in the organism. Each member reciprocally interacts with other members as well as with their encompassing society, but society has a far greater influence on the individual than vice versa. In a significant sense, individuals are not even human apart from this social context, which provides them with language, a style of thinking, customs, a religion, morality, etc. As Hegel observed, “The individual is the offspring of his people, of his world …; he may spread himself out as he will, he cannot escape out of his time any more than out of his skin ….” (History of Philosophy). Anthropologists have made a similar observation. In a 1947 document addressed to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, the American Anthropological Association, in arguing that human rights should not be confined to individual rights but extended to community rights, emphasized that individual identity is inextricably tied to the surrounding community: "If we begin as we must, with the individual, we find that from the moment of his birth not only his behavior, but his very thought, his hopes, aspirations, the moral values which direct his action and justify and give meaning to his life in his own eyes and those of his fellows, are shaped by the body of custom of the group of which he becomes a member… [T]he personality of the individual can develop only in terms of the culture of his society." In other words, Hegel offers a radical rejection of the prevailing philosophical assumptions of his time that individuals are atomistic and autonomous, that they have a fully developed personality apart from their social relations, that societies are nothing more than the sum of these individuals, and that it makes sense to view the origin of societies as resulting from individuals engaging in contracts with one another where they agree to respect certain basic rules, etc. Second, since all natural organisms undergo a process of development to maturity–the acorn, for example, develops into an oak tree and children become adults–Hegel claimed humanity itself has matured through the ages. Just as the acorn has embedded in it its destiny to become an oak tree, humanity, which initially is governed more by instincts and feelings, is driven to become rational, free and self-conscious, a goal that guides the entire process: “We have defined the goal of history as consisting in the [human] spirit’s development towards self-consciousness,” (Philosophy of World History) a goal Hegel equated with fully developed freedom and rationality: “… for freedom by definition, is self-knowledge” (Philosophy of World History). This end-goal guides the entire (teleological) process: “Just as in the living organism generally, everything is already contained, in an ideal manner, in the germ and is brought forth by the germ itself, not by an alien power, so too must all the particular forms of living mind grow out of its Notion as from their germ” (The Philosophy of Mind). In other words, in the early stages, humanity was more instinctual than rational but gradually rationality became the more powerful drive: “World history begins with its universal end … it is as yet only an inward, basic unconscious impulse, and the whole activity of world history … is a constant endeavor to make the impulse conscious.” (Philosophy of World History) So, for Hegel, human history follows a logical path, or as he puts it, “… reason governs the world, and … world history is therefore a rational process.” (Philosophy of World History) Third, and following from the previous point, each stage of history has its own unique logic that permeates all its institutions. According to Hegel, The forms of thought or the points of view and principles which hold good in the sciences and constitute the ultimate support of all their matter, are not peculiar to them, but are common to the condition and culture of the time and of the people… All its knowledge and ideas are permeated and governed by a metaphysic such as this; it is the net in which all the concrete matter which occupies mankind in action and in impulses, is grasped (History of Philosophy). Accordingly, Hegel rejects the notion of a fixed human nature but argues that humans exhibit different qualities during different stages of history. This changing human nature distinguishes humans from other animal species, which lack consciousness and the ability to reflect on themselves and fundamentally change their behavior. Fourth, the transition from one historical stage to the next results from contradictions that emerge in the earlier stage, as will be explained below. Hegel’s dialectical exposition of practical freedom For Hegel, the free will or the completely self-determined will goes to the heart of what it means to be a human being. But we are not born with this capacity in a fully developed state. Rather, a modern individual must mature into adulthood to be able to exercise freedom in its most advanced form, and humanity has required millennia to acquire the proper social institutions that allow human freedom to attain its full potential. Hegel believed that, through the ages, humans have practiced three basic forms of freedom; each subsequent form, having been built on its predecessor, is more sophisticated and liberating. He did not consider these stages as completely distinct: the lower forms of freedom do not entirely disappear but are incorporated into the higher forms so that the highest form is a rich synthesis of all three. Personal freedom for Hegel represents the most elementary form. The individual “freely” chooses which impulses (desires/interests) to pursue, without this choice being determined by the impulse. Hegel describes personal freedom, which constitutes the first step in his dialectical presentation, as “abstract immediacy” or “the undifferentiated stage,” meaning we do not thoughtfully reflect on our options but arbitrarily decide without thinking which to pursue. Bourgeois theorists in modern capitalist societies, perhaps because they are surrounded by an economy that sets a premium on self-interest and greed, typically assume personal freedom is the only kind of freedom and go no further. Hobbes, for example, defined freedom as, “In deliberation, the last appetite or aversion immediately adhering to the action, or to the omission thereof, is that we call the will” (The Leviathan, Part I, Chapter 6). In other words, the will is all about desires and feelings, not about thoughtful choices. The second step of the dialectic is “particularity” or “difference” and amounts to looking at the real world to find the particular ways in which personal freedom, which initially was merely a vague undifferentiated universal, is realized. Hegel points to the institution of private property where individuals are granted the exclusive right over designated material objects as the purest manifestation of personal freedom since individuals can pursue their passions without fear of interference by others. However, this dominion over property, to operate successfully, requires laws to protect the rights of property owners, including laws governing the exchange of property by means of contracts as well as an agency mandated to enforce these laws. Without this legal apparatus, the will of the individual would not be free because of constant threats by other members of society who attempt to monopolize these material objects for their own pleasure. Consequently, this first conception of human freedom, which appeared to be a simple and unambiguous relation between a person and an object, requires a network of social relations–laws and a police force–to operate successfully. But then a contradiction arises: while individuals might enjoy the protection of their own property by state laws, those same laws, when used to protect the property rights of their neighbors, can feel like external coercion, especially if they covet their neighbor’s property. Hence, personal freedom does not fulfill the promise of a fully self-determined will–a will free of external constraints. It encounters its “negation” because of the constraining force of society’s laws. Hegel emphasized the human mind seeks unity and cohesion: “But the spirit cannot remain in a state of opposition. It seeks unification, and in this unification lies the higher principle” (Philosophy of World History). Accordingly, when contradictions flow from a position, the impulse is to seek their resolution by forging a new, hopefully contradiction-free conception. This represents the third step of the dialectic–a mediated unity or the negation of the negation, meaning that a new unifying framework or totality emerges that manages to retain the past conception of a free will but resolves the contradictions by situating them in a more comprehensive, nuanced unity, which amounts to a paradigm (world view) shift or a qualitative transformation rather than simply a quantitative addition. We have a simple illustration of Hegel’s reasoning when we consider a person who measures 5 feet tall, then later measures 5 feet and 5 inches, an apparent contradiction. Of course, the contradiction can be resolved by bringing into consideration that the individual is growing; a temporal dimension is added to the picture, which was previously present only implicitly, and in this way the contradiction is resolved in a larger, more comprehensive totality. Returning to Hegel’s analysis of freedom, moral freedom for Hegel represents this advance over personal freedom: it retains the idea of the pursuit of desires and the necessity of law and a system of justice required for this pursuit. But the law is no longer conceived as being imposed externally but as constructed entirely by the individual through a process of thoughtful reflection without borrowing assumptions from society. Immanuel Kant’s (1724-1804) moral law that we should always treat other people as an end and never as a means is an example. Since individuals themselves construct these laws based on their own sense of morality, the laws are not experienced as an external constraint but as a liberating guide to action, allowing for the pursuit of some impulses while rejecting others, depending on whether they conform to or violate the law. We have a new totality, then, in the sense that a new conception of free will and the individual emerges–an individual who has desires and impulses but also has the faculty of reason that generates moral laws which serve as a guide to acting on these desires and impulses. With this transition to moral freedom human nature shifts from being less impulsive to being more thoughtful and therefore, according to Hegel, freer. The first step of Hegel’s dialectic was the abstract universal. The second step is constituted by particulars or differences or contradictions. Hegel calls the third dialectical step “mediated unity” or a new “totality,” as was exemplified in the concept of moral freedom. It represents a new paradigm where the pursuit of desires remains but is now mediated by a moral law–a law that is no longer external to the individual but incorporated into the individual’s will with the result that the will is thoughtful, not impulsive or arbitrary. While representing the conclusion of the first of the three-step dialectical progression, moral freedom in turn becomes the first step–the immediate, the abstract, formal universal–in relation to a new dialectical progression. Once again, we look to see the particular forms moral freedom assumes when put into practice. And once again we find that moral freedom succumbs to contradictions. First, it cannot be realized by isolated individuals apart from their social relations but requires that individuals be socialized and educated to think rationally about possible principles of action. On the most basic level, the individual requires language, a capacity that cannot be acquired without socialization. Second, these moral principles generated by the isolated individual are, according to Hegel, too abstract, formal, and empty to serve as reliable guides in navigating life’s choices. For example, Kant offered a second version of his moral law: ask if it would be consistent to will that everyone do what you are proposing to do. Stealing property from someone else would not pass such a test because thieves do not want others to steal from them. But a problem arises here. In the Phenomenology of Spirit, for example, Hegel raises the question, “Ought it be an absolute law that there should be property?” In other words, is the institution of private property an unqualified good or does it harbor contradictions such as in the case of stealing? Would it fail to pass one of Kant’s moral laws? If contradictions arise, then the proposal fails. The answer Hegel supplies is that neither private property nor its opposite, “to each according to his need,” is self-contradictory, and therefore abstract, empty, formal laws alone are insufficient to serve as a guide. Contradictions only arise if we presuppose the existence of some social practice such as private property. Then stealing represents a contradiction of it. Unless one borrows concrete values and practices from the surrounding society, everything passes these highly abstract moral-law tests. But moral freedom purported to provide a law that was centered exclusively in the isolated individual–hence, a contradiction. Both these problems point to the fact that moral freedom alone cannot provide a coherent account of a fully self-determined will but must be supplemented with the indispensable role of social institutions, whether in the form of education or institutions such as private property, which leads to the third and highest form of practical freedom. Social or ethical freedom, while incorporating elements from both personal and moral freedom, represents a culminating advance by avoiding the contradictions that encumbered its predecessors. Taking into consideration the lessons that emerged from both personal and moral freedom, namely that freedom cannot be fully realized by an isolated individual, Hegel argues in favor of a more social and encompassing version of free will. Social freedom envisions individuals coming together to construct–through rational discussion–the kind of social and political institutions that embody a rational logic or universal justice. Here, people collectively take control of their world, either directly or through their representatives, and mold it to their will by creating institutions that safeguard personal and moral freedom. Personal freedom is preserved through the institution of private property. Moral freedom, while supplemented by the surrounding culture, persists in the sense that individuals may critically evaluate their surrounding social institutions. In this way the individual is still allowed to exercise their unique individuality but now exercises it within a rational social framework. Social freedom represents a revolutionary advance in several respects. First, the philosophical assumption that individuals are primordial and societies are secondary and inessential, which dominated the thought of Hegel’s contemporaries, is replaced by a philosophy built on the premise that human beings, while containing an element of individuality, are essentially social and cannot reach their full human potential apart from their membership in society. In The Philosophy of Mind, for example, Hegel argues: “Only in such a manner is true freedom realized; for since this consists in my identity with the other, I am only truly free when the other is also free and is recognized by me as free. This freedom of one in the other unites men in an inward manner, whereas needs and necessity bring them together only externally.” Second, by abandoning the supremacy of the isolated individual and replacing it with a collective subject, the world seems to undergo a transformation: from the standpoint of the isolated individual, the social world appears immutable but becomes pliant when confronted by large numbers of people who act collectively with a conscious plan. Third, human freedom in its fullest sense is not a matter of acting impulsively or thoughtlessly indulging in desires but acting rationally. Fourth, what counts as rational action is not determined by the isolated individual but by people in communication with one another and results from an open discussion. As Hegel said, “What is to be authoritative nowadays derives its authority, not at all from force, only to a small extent from habit and custom, really from insight and argument.” (Philosophy of Religion) Fifth, individuals act collectively not merely to create social institutions that will serve to safeguard personal and moral freedom. If this were the case, then individual freedom would remain supreme. Rather, social freedom also becomes an end in-itself. Individuals realizing their identity, in addition to having an individual side, is essentially tied to their surrounding community, its culture and social practices. We understand that we are not autonomous, fully defined humans apart from society but that we are more like members of a living organism. People feel that they are truly themselves when they are actively engaged with other members of the community, formulating policies where all are equally respected and each has the opportunity to influence the opinion of others. In this way individuals can experience a deep satisfaction by exercising their full social humanity. A summary of Hegel’s dialectic Hegel employs multiple ways to describe the dialectical process, but they are all pointing to the same general features. We have already touched on his description of the dialectic as starting with “abstract immediacy” or the “undifferentiated” stage. He also refers to this first step as “the abstract universal” or an “unconscious impulse.” The second step involves the “particular” (or “difference”), meaning the ways in which the first step plays out in existence. The third step unites the first two steps in a “mediated unity.” But Hegel also describes this process more abstractly as moving from the universal, to the particular, and then to the individual. In other words, we start with a vague idea or impulse, look at the particular ways it appears in the world, and then formulate a new more differentiated universal that resolves the contradictions appearing in the second step by situating them in a more encompassing, more complex universal. This third step then serves as the starting point for a new dialectical progression until the final point is reached. Hegel also describes the second step as the negation of the first step since the second step reveals contradictions, while the third step, which resolves the contradictions in a larger totality, is the negation of the negation. But Hegel uses another important formulation where something transitions from being “in-itself” to being “for-itself.” The in-itself is implicit, meaning that we are not aware of it, while the for-itself is where the implicit has become explicit and we have become conscious of it. For example, in our investigation of moral freedom we started with the moral actor as an isolated individual. But upon reflection we come to understand that the ability of an individual to act morally presupposes being socialized to think rationally and requires established social practices to serve as a context within which to employ moral principles. We become conscious of this necessary social context by reflecting on the practice of moral freedom; if we do not reflect, we do not become aware of it and, accordingly, cannot proceed thoughtfully. For Hegel, then, the process of history amounts to becoming increasingly self-conscious of what we are unconsciously presupposing so that we choose a course of action, not because we are impelled by unconscious impulses, but because we consciously conclude it represents the most reasonable alternative. He adds in Philosophy of World History, as was mentioned before: “… freedom, by definition, is self-consciousness,” and later adds, “We have defined this goal of history as consisting in the [human] spirit’s development towards self-consciousness, or in it making this world conform to itself (for the two are identical).” In other words, by engaging in collective action according to a plan that has been consciously adopted based on “insight and argument” rather than individuals pursuing their own selfish ends, we can create rational institutions that conform to our ideas of what is right. For example, Hegel argues in The Philosophy of Mind: Man is implicitly rational; herein lies the possibility of equal justice for all men and the futility of a rigid distinction between races which have rights and those which have none. Marx’s use of the dialectic Marx’s social philosophy shares many fundamental points with Hegel’s. Otherwise, the dialectic would be irrelevant. First, Marx also regards society as an organism, meaning that the isolated individual apart from society is no longer considered a meaningful construct. Rather, individuals are subordinate and to a large degree defined by their surrounding society. Individuals producing in society–hence socially determined individual production–is, of course, the point of departure. The individual and isolated hunter and fisherman, with whom Smith and Ricardo begin, belongs among the unimaginative conceits of the eighteenth-century Robinsonades…. (Introduction to the Grundrisse) [“Robinsonades” refers to Daniel Dafoe’s fictional character, Robinson Crusoe and the conception of humans as self-made individuals.] Only in a community [with others has each] individual the means of cultivating his gifts in all directions; only in the community, therefore, is personal freedom possible. (The German Ideology) Second, both see history as progressing in the direction of humanity becoming progressively free, rational, and self-conscious. Marx says, for example: “Reason nevertheless prevails in world history” (Comments on the North American Events, Die Presse, October 12, 1862). For Marx, as humanity gains more control over its material environment through technological advances, the potential for taking control of social relations and exercising social freedom by collectively directing the economy according to a rational plan, as opposed to letting the blind forces of the market dictate economic decisions, becomes increasingly possible. The overthrow of capitalism and move towards communism makes this imminently possible: “Let us finally imagine, for a change, an association of free men, working with the means of production held in common, and expending their many different forms of labor power in full self-consciousness as one single social force.” (Capital, Vol. 1, Chapter 1) And: With the community of revolutionary proletarians, on the other hand, who take their conditions of existence and those of all members of society under their control, it is just the reverse; it is as individuals that the individuals participate in it. It is just this combination of individuals [assuming the advanced stage of modern productive forces] which puts the conditions of the free development and movement of individuals under their control…. (The German Ideology) Third, Marx also viewed history as composed of distinct stages, but diverges from Hegel in their identification because of his materialist/economic approach to history. Accordingly, the categories he identifies are first communal societies, followed by the slave societies of Greece and Rome, then feudalism, then capitalism, to be followed sometime in the future by communism. Like Hegel, Marx argued each stage contains its own distinct logic: “The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life” (Preface to Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy). This means that the nature of the family, education, culture in general, philosophy, the state and politics, not to mention human nature, are all organically connected to the economic infrastructure at any particular historical stage. Fourth, the emergence of fundamental contradictions within society is responsible for its revolutionary transformation. For Marx, these contradictions are above all generated in the economy with the development of classes divided by antagonistic and contradictory interests, leading to the downfall of one society after another while giving birth to new, higher forms: “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.” (Manifesto of the Communist Party) As a result of these points of commonality, Marx adopts Hegel’s dialectic with the same schema of abstract, undifferentiated universal, followed by its negation in the form of particular determinations, and then to their resolution in a new mediated, more encompassing universal, or the negation of the negation. Marx’s 1857 Introduction to the Grundrisse contains the most extended discussion of his method: The economists of the seventeenth century, e.g., always begin with the living whole, with population, nation, state, several states, etc.; but they always conclude by discovering through analysis a small number of determinant, abstract, general relations such as division of labor, money, value, etc. As soon as these individual moments had been more or less firmly established and abstracted, there began the economic systems, which ascended from the simple relations, such as labor, division of labor, need, exchange value, to the level of the state, exchange between nations and the world market. The latter is obviously the scientifically correct method. The concrete is concrete because it is the concentration of many determinations, hence unity of the diverse. Here Marx is describing the dialectic that starts with the abstract universal (population, etc.), then moves to particular determinations (the division of labor, money, etc.), and concludes by reconstructing a new universal that contains these determinations in the form of a mediated unity. Marx’s monumental work, Capital, is an attempt to take the abstract notion of a pre-capitalist economy and show that, when it plays out in reality and develops into capitalism, the first stage of equality where everyone is an owner and performs their own labor is soon “negated” and replaced by a society composed of two opposed, unequal classes where a minority enjoys huge wealth while the majority struggles to survive. In other words, capitalism is preceded by “individual private property” or what has been referred to as “simple commodity production” or “simple exchange” (the abstract universal). In this stage individuals own their tools, etc., they perform labor and then own the product of their labor which they can take to the market for purposes of exchange–a system that at the outset lacks class divisions, equality prevails, and exploitation is absent. But capitalism negates this stage: as it develops, some of these producers go bankrupt (perhaps demand is lacking for their product, or perhaps they were wiped out by bad weather) and must seek employment from others to survive, which amounts to the first step towards capitalism proper where some in society (the capitalist class) own the means of production while others (the working class) own only their ability to work and must seek employment from those with the means of production. But capitalists have a competitive advantage over individual producers because of their size and efficiency, which results in more and more individual producers being thrown into the working class. Inevitably, wealth becomes concentrated in the hands of a minority of capitalists while the vast majority of the population is converted into workers employed by them. These classes are the particular determinations that flow from the original starting point of simple commodity production. Marx describes this movement in this way: “The capitalist mode of appropriation, the result of the capitalist mode of production, produces capitalist private property. This is the first negation of individual private property, as founded on the labor of the proprietor.” (Capital, Volume I, Chapter 32) But when society is divided into two vastly unequal classes with opposed interests, where the working class represents the vast majority of the population but is increasingly exploited, workers come to the realization that they are not simply autonomous individuals but members of a class defined by class exploitation. Instead of being unaware of their class membership, they become class-conscious. Their class membership, which was unconscious and “in-itself” becomes conscious and “for-itself.” Workers realize their misery is not the result of their own individual failure but of their class membership and can then engage in class struggle to liberate themselves as a class by abolishing the capitalist class system and replacing it with communism. This represents the negation of the negation: “But capitalist production begets, with the inexorability of a law of Nature, its own negation. It [the system that replaces capitalism] is the negation of negation. This does not re-establish private property for the producer but gives him individual property based on the acquisitions of the capitalist era: i.e., on co-operation and the possession in common of the land and of the means of production.” (Capital, Volume I, Chapter 32) In The Critique of the Gotha Program (1875), Marx argued that capitalist society could not immediately be replaced by a full-blown communist society but rather its revolutionary transformation would proceed dialectically: capitalism, with its deep division into antagonistic classes, would be replaced by its negation where classes would be abolished by adopting a new system of wealth distribution where people would be rewarded according to the amount of labor they performed, meaning that capitalists, too, would need to work to get an income. But Marx was quick to point out in this essay that this stage of the revolution had its problems because of contradictory results: The right of the producers is proportional to the labor they supply; the equality consists in the fact that measurement is made with an equal standard, labor. But one man is superior to another physically, or mentally, and supplies more labor in the same time, or can labor for a longer time; and labor, to serve as a measure, must be defined by its duration or intensity, otherwise it ceases to be a standard of measurement. This equal right is an unequal right for unequal labor. It recognizes no class differences, because everyone is only a worker like everyone else; but it tacitly recognizes unequal individual endowment, and thus productive capacity, as a natural privilege. It is, therefore, a right of inequality, in its content, like every right. With the appearance of this contradiction, eventually a new principle of distribution would be introduced, representing the negation of the negation: In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished; after labor has become not only a means of life but life’s prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly–only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs! (The Critique of the Gotha Program) In other words, people will no longer be treated with an abstract universal law of distribution blind to divergent individual needs but distribution will be conducted in an organic way so the different needs of individuals will be factored into the distribution of wealth. Of course, such a principle cannot be immediately adopted after the overthrow of capitalism because human nature will still be stamped with the effects of capitalism, where self-interest and an abstract, individualistic sense of entitlement prevail. Once this mindset is slowly eradicated by new social relations that engender a sense of solidarity, distribution can be established on a more personal, humanitarian, organic basis. A quick review of the dialectic The first contact we have with the surrounding world occurs with our senses–sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell–that provide us with a series of sense experiences with little connection among them. Gradually we begin to forge these connections and our world appears more continuous and rational. We organize our experiences according to their relation in time and space, by placing similar experiences under the same category and then connect these categories by means of relations such as cause and effect, substance and accidents, etc. Everyday thinking or what passes for common sense operates on this metaphysical level with its rigid categories. We see our surrounding world as static. One tree, for example, might die and be replaced by another, but the category “tree” remains. The law of gravity never changes. In a similar way we assume the surrounding society is immutable. Those who advocate radical change are dismissed as unrealistic. This apparently static universe is tied to the assumption that thought on the one hand is entirely divorced from the world of existence on the other. Universal categories such as tree, animal, private property, and wage labor are seen as purely mental constructs, while existence is composed of purely material objects or practices. The possibility of changing our material/social world to conform to our ideas so that ideas become a part of reality is beyond consideration. However, once we turn our attention to humanity’s long history and note that human societies during different epochs have displayed vastly different forms, each with their own distinct economy, political system, philosophy, human nature, etc., then the question arises: is there a logical connection between these social formations so that history itself is rational, or is history governed by pure chance? Hegel’s dialectic was an attempt to affirm the former alternative. Accordingly, it takes us beyond the level of the fixed categories into the realm of an organic system that undergoes development with an underlying logic connecting one stage to the next, illuminating the long journey of humanity to self-knowledge, rationality and freedom–with the understanding, of course, that many regressions along the way can stall progress. Both Marx and Hegel come to the realization that all past societies have been our [humanity’s] own creation, although without conscious planning, and each subsequent social formation represents an advance over its predecessor since it represents a gain in self-knowledge or technical control over nature, culminating in the realization that we can consciously make history according to a collective plan. While rigid metaphysical thinking dominates common sense, nevertheless some individuals, perhaps without any special training, intuitively recognize the need to go further and take into consideration the social/historical context to better understand human reality. They may also be open to the possibility of radical social upheaval and revolutionary change. To this extent, they are taking a step in the direction of dialectical thinking, an impulse that can be greatly enhanced by an introductory acquaintance with its forms. Examples of dialectical and metaphysical modes of thinking 1. The metaphysical practice of assigning grades to student work When children enter school, capitalist culture deems it appropriate to motivate their behavior by assigning grades to their work depending on its quality, emphasizing to the student how important grades are for their entire future. The grade is supposed to represent an accurate reflection of the student’s performance and/or abilities. But this claim is fraught with contradictions. For example, teachers cannot appeal to a single, unambiguous, universal standard of measurement when assigning grades. Are students being measured according to how much improvement they make during the school term so that they are not penalized if they enter the class less prepared than other students? Or are they graded on how their performance compares to that of the other students, in which case their grade can fluctuate according to who is in the class? Is it possible that all the students in a class do outstanding work and all deserve an ‘A’? Instead of assuming today’s grades are inflated, might the grading policies of the past have been deflated? The teacher’s performance also plays a role in a student’s grade. If the teacher does a poor job explaining the material to the students, or the test questions are confusing or unrelated to the material covered in class, the student’s grade can be adversely affected. Or the teacher might simply grade unfairly where they give generous grades to students they like. It is hard to say what will replace grades, if anything, in a socialist society, but surely grades as we know them will be abolished. 2. Casting moral blame as a metaphysical exercise Capitalist society, with its hyper individualism, creates a culture in which individuals cast moral judgments on one another purely as individuals, stripped of any social or historical context, with the assumption that the individual is entirely responsible for who they are and what they do. People who live in poverty are themselves to blame, as if poverty results above all from a failure of individual will-power rather than social policies designed to ensure part of the population remains poor. This tendency is particularly egregious in a situation where one nation has colonized a second nation or people. When an occupation drags on for decades, as in Gaza and the West Bank, and the oppressed population is treated with daily violence and cruelty; where Israel arrests Palestinians in the occupied territories without charging them with crimes; humiliates them in public by making Palestinians remove their clothes and dance; keeps them imprisoned indefinitely or tries them in rigged military courts; or incarcerates those in Gaza in an open-air prison where only enough food is allowed in to keep the population barely above starvation; when medical supplies allowed to enter are insufficient; where Palestinians are routinely and illegally pushed out of their houses and off their land with impunity or murdered with impunity; when the oppressed population lashes out in violent desperation after exhausting non-violent alternatives, moral condemnation suddenly rises to the occasion: those who have lived comparatively privileged lives are quick to condemn the Palestinian people for resorting to indiscriminate violence, thereby stripping the victims of their humanity by stripping them of their social/historical context. 3. Metaphysical politics US foreign policy, instead of viewing other societies, for example, Iraq or Afghanistan, as rich, complex, organic unities of culture, religion, economic practices, and system of government, assumes that by merely changing the government they can transform the country into a liberal western democracy, blind to the fact that the government does not exist in isolation but has deep connections to the surrounding economy and culture. Accordingly, U.S. foreign policy adventures typically end in abysmal failures. Even on the left many assume that working-class power can be achieved by electing socialists to office who will then, presumably, transform the nation from capitalism to socialism. However, electing politicians to office in capitalist societies does not require collective action on the part of the working class. The election process reflects the capitalist culture of operating as isolated individuals: everyone casts their ballot privately. The individualistic culture of capitalism remains intact. The Bernie Sanders’ “movement,” which was so highly acclaimed by many on the left, remained within the framework of capitalist individualism with its top-down decision-making where Sanders alone dictated policy, and everyone one else could either sign on or stay out. People participated as individuals, and nothing in the Sanders’ campaign remotely challenged that dynamic. His supporters were not afforded the opportunity to come together, discuss policy, and vote on how to proceed, a process that would have forged bonds among participants. Unsurprisingly, the “movement” collapsed the day after Sanders lost the election. Capitalism cannot be transformed into socialism without challenging the culture of the isolated individual. Moreover, revolutionary change cannot be achieved by a political elite at the top through piecemeal reforms as the German Social Democrat Eduard Bernstein (1850-1932) once proposed and many today consider possible. First, such an approach fails to take into consideration the counterattack the capitalist class will launch the moment these reforms become threatening. It fails to take into consideration that capitalist democracy tilts decisively in favor of the capitalists, especially with money that can be used to remove undesirable politicians. Second, progressive politicians who are elected to office join a political elite who have thoroughly adapted to the pervasive, corrupt capitalist culture that can quickly drown newcomers in a sea of self-interest and greed where money and power reign supreme. Third, and perhaps most importantly, capitalist culture is again not challenged because for the most part the working class remains passive and disengaged. 4. A dialectical approach to the union movement The recently unionized Amazon workers were confronted with a contradiction. Some argued the workers should organize a strike to pressure Amazon into negotiating a contract with favorable provisions. But others argued that the workers could not afford to strike, that they were living paycheck to paycheck and could not stay out long enough to win. Both sides had valid points. Here, a dialectical resolution could have been forged by bringing the larger union movement that is currently on the rise into the picture. An appeal could have been made to these other unions–many have large financial reserves–to contribute to a strike fund to support the Amazon workers long enough to prevail. The contradiction is resolved by enlarging the focus and situating the Amazon union in the totality of the union movement. 5. A dialectical political strategy For these reasons, Marx and Engels insisted that the overthrow of capitalism and introduction of socialism must be accomplished by the working class itself, defying the prevailing capitalist assumption that workers lack the insight and initiative. In an 1879 letter Engels explained: “At the founding of the International we expressly formulated the battle cry: The emancipation of the working class must be achieved by the working class itself.” (Marx-Engels Correspondence, September 17-18, 1879) When workers escape their passivity and act collectively to liberate themselves, they take the first step in building a new culture: workers in large numbers abandon their inter-competition and individual isolation; they organize themselves, a skill they have already acquired from their union experience; they discuss among themselves possible strategies in going forward, listening to one another and adjusting their positions when convinced of a better alternative, all while strengthening their social bonds. Then, by adopting policies that have the support of the majority, the individual perspective of each member is respected but the will of the majority prevails, enabling them to act collectively. The relations among workers undergo a dialectical transformation: instead of operating as isolated individuals, they transform themselves into members of an organic totality prepared to collectively change the world. This means, then, the capitalist state cannot remain intact after a working-class revolution since it has been constructed specifically to serve the interests of the capitalist class by requiring that workers participate as isolated individuals, not as members of an association. For this reason, Marx insisted that in the move to socialism, the capitalist state must be “smashed” and replaced by a workers’ state, where members of the working class do not participate as isolated individuals but as members of a community. In the 1871 Paris Commune, for example, workers participated through their neighborhood communes where they would discuss policies and direct their representatives how to vote. Similarly, in the early days of the Soviet Union workers, soldiers and peasants participated through their respective soviets. They would meet, debate policies, vote and direct their elected representatives to implement their decisions. A December 2019 New York Times article, “When Does Activism Become Powerful?” by Hahrie Han (Johns Hopkins University), reported that empirical studies confirm activism becomes powerful when “leaders built organizations designed to strengthen relationships with and among members”, and “that people were the source of their power.” The article continued: “These organizations put people in settings where they would build connections with one another, learn to work together and negotiate about the things they wanted, even with people who were different from them.” In contrast, “three million people marching down a boulevard may not bring about change”—precisely because they do not establish relations among one another and remain atomized. During the process of working-class activation, human nature undergoes a change. Capitalism’s hyper individualism is rejected and instead we have what Hegel described in the Phenomenology of Spirit as the “’I’ that is ‘We’ and ‘We’ that is ‘I’.” Workers embrace humanistic social relations where together they support one another, gain a sense of camaraderie, and take control of their lives by adopting new policies that champion a better world. The union slogan, “An injury to one is an injury to all,” is taken to heart, and “In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all” (Manifesto of the Communist Party, Chapter 2). When workers begin to create this working-class culture, and when they score big wins over their employers through massive strikes, etc., the movement can spread quickly. Others in the working class are then inspired by their courage, their values and their victories and want to become a part of this historic uprising. Hence, a new logic begins to rapidly spread that can lead to a revolutionary upheaval where working people take charge of society and proceed to transform it according to their own definitions of democracy, justice and freedom. Conclusion Metaphysical thinking can undermine this undertaking. Unable to imagine sudden, unexpected, upheavals where the logic of one historical stage is replaced by a new logic, it leads to the reinforcement of capitalist institutions, encourages reformism, and sidelines the working class. But these profound transformations can take place when large numbers of workers decide to put up a fight, as happened in the 1930s, and could happen again at any time. While not overthrowing capitalism, the uprisings of the 1930s changed its nature for decades to come. It is time for today’s working class to finish the job their predecessors began. The dialectic is waiting to serve them. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: I am particularly grateful to Bill Leumer for his helpful suggestions and to Frederick Neuhouser for his extraordinarily lucid books and articles on Hegel with thoughtful step-by-step elucidations of some of Hegel’s most abstruse ideas, making them accessible in ways that few others have done. AuthorAnn Robertson is a Lecturer Faculty emeritus of the Philosophy Department at San Francisco State University and a member of the California Faculty Association. This article was produced by Monthly Review. Archives February 2024 The dawn of the twentieth century saw the rise of modern, planned national economies around the world. In many of these cases, planned economies often were coupled with state ownership of production. China, especially due to becoming a Marxist-Leninist state in 1949, is no exception to this trend. It is commonly misconceived by both leftists and rightists that the People’s Republic of China has ceased to plan its economy; that the government has relinquished its obligations of maintaining state control, the private sector and “adopted capitalism”. When it comes to analyzing how state ownership operates within the People’s Republic of China, the information that is available on the Western internet tends to be sparse and vague. Many sources do not give specific evidence of how State-Owned Enterprises (SOEs) function, nor do they elaborate just how widely proliferated SOEs are, formally or otherwise. This article is designed to clarify the way SOEs and their subsidiaries function and interact with China’s domestic economy today. Formal State Ownership “State-owned enterprises are an important material and political foundation for socialism with Chinese characteristics, and an important pillar and reliance for the party to govern and rejuvenate the country.” — Xi Jinping, General Secretary of the Communist Party of China It is a well-established fact within Chinese political discourse that state-owned enterprises are an ever-present fact of the Chinese economy that won’t simply just “vanish” overnight or “erode” over time. In fact, since Reform and Opening Up, while the overall quantity of state-owned enterprises has gone down, the overall quality has increased. Rather than going on the path of root-and-branch privatization, the government has instead sought to make the numerous state-owned enterprises that still remain as efficient and competitive as possible. As a result, the top 150 SOEs, far from being inefficient, have instead become enormously profitable, the aggregate total of their profits reaching $150 billion in 2007. Unlike in the West or Western-aligned states, where privately owned firms overwhelmingly predominate, most of China’s best-performing companies are to be found in the state sector. [1] Contrary to popular belief regarding “Communism”, profit and to make a return on one’s investment is not contradictory to the way state-controlled firms should be run. In fact, it would be damaging if these firms were run in a way where they were actively making a loss or were wasting resources. Contribution to GDP and Scale of Assets In 2011, it was found that roughly 50% of non-agricultural GDP was generated by SOEs. Similarly, in regard to economic industries/sectors in which SOEs play a dominant or majority role, those include defense, electric power, petroleum and petrochemicals, telecommunications, coal, civil aviation, and shipping; as well as equipment manufacturing, automobiles, information technology, construction, iron and steel, nonferrous metals and chemicals. [2] In 2017, that number stood at 63.6%, where China’s GDP was RMB ¥82 trillion, of which non-financial SOEs count for RMB ¥52.2 trillion [3]. In 2021, SOEs accounted for around 66% of China’s GDP [4]. So, even formally speaking, in terms of overall contribution to GDP, SOEs have played a significant amount, rising over the past 10 years from 50% to 66%, rising approximately 1.6% to their contribution to GDP per year. In 2023, that number climbed to 68% of China’s GDP: China’s GDP was RMB ¥126 trillion, of which non-financial SOEs accounted for RMB ¥85.7 trillion. [ From 2002-2011, the value of SOE assets as a percentage of GDP started at roughly 550% before declining to a rate of roughly to 430% by 2008, its lowest point, before reaching a plateau of around 450% since 2009. Note, when Western analysts measure state-owned enterprises, they tend to only factor in what is directly translated as 国有企业, which is formally classified as a non-financial state-owned enterprise. Typically, when comparisons are made from Western studies or articles, they only focus on “SOEs” but neglect the two other formal “SOE categories” which are financial SOEs (国有金融/中央金融企业) and administrative SOE assets (行政事业性国有资产). This is why estimations for “SOE value” may be lost in translations and only partially accurate results can be extrapolated. For the following two sources, one produced by the IMF and the other produced by WSJ, the operative Chinese “SOEs” will be referred to as non-financial SOEs for clarification. Non-Chinese SOEs elsewhere in the world don’t follow these three distinctions. In 2018, a study from the IMF found that Non-financial SOEs assets for China as a % of GDP amounted to 180% of GDP. While in 2015, Italy, India, South Korea, Saudi Arabia and Norway’s SOEs did not rise above 50% [6]. According to WSJ, the value of French SOE assets in 2008 as a % of GDP amounted to 686 billion USD, which is 28% of GDP. In the same year, Chinese Non-financial SOEs were 6 trillion USD, or 133% of GDP [7]. In 2010, 94% of all assets held by the top 150 companies were controlled by the state, which represented 41.2% of all corporate assets in China, out of the total of roughly 5 million registered companies [8]. In 2012, the total assets held by the State sector in China amounted to 55.78% or 53% depending on the estimate used [9]. However, in comparison with European nations during the same year (elaborated by the figure below), the total assets of Eastern European nations (largely former Eastern Bloc) held by the state sector were around 13%. For the Netherlands, Italy, Spain, France, Belgium and Portugal, it was around 4.60%. For Ireland and the UK, even less than that number. For Austria and Germany, around 10.79%. For Scandinavia, it was 6.02%. [10] In 2022, the total value of SOE assets as a percentage of GDP amounted to 608%, of which ¥109.4 trillion or 90.4% of GDP was held by all 97 Central State Owned Enterprises (CSOEs), controlled directly by the SASAC (more on that later). And non-financial SOEs held 339.5 trillion, which accounts for 280.5% of GDP [11]. In comparison to the largest 500 private enterprises in the same year, their amassed assets held ¥41.64 trillion RMB, of which represents only 34.4% of GDP, which is dwarfed by the amount held by the 97 CSOEs [12]. In regard to share of total assets, SOEs own 60% of China's total assets as of 2021 [13]. Note, RMB (Renminbi) is more commonly known as Chinese Yuan (¥). Second note, a CSOE is an SOE directly controlled by the Central Government. In 2019 there were 3,777 listed companies on the public stock exchanges in Shanghai and Shenzhen, of which you need an operating income of ¥100 million RMB per year to even be available for listing, cumulative over the course of 3 years. Out of total assets, SOEs held 98% in the Telecommunications sector, 95% in the airline sector, 94% in the infrastructure sector and more than 93% in the utilities and energy sector. In the industry sector 74%, in the materials sector, more than 63% and in automobiles, more than 62%. [14] In 2023, out of a total of 4,763 listed companies, of which 1,300 are formally classified as SOEs. They make up 27% of the total enterprises, but capture 69% of the market revenue and 77% of the total profits. Most leading listed companies across key industries, including but not limited to banks, insurance, brokerage, oil & gas, chemicals, coal, power, telecom, construction, Chinese medicine and liquor, are all SOEs. [15] Furthermore, the amount of private involvement is exaggerated. As of the end of 2017, there are only 17 private-owned banks among 4,532 financial institutions classified as the banking industry. The number of people employed by these 17 private-owned banks only accounts for 0.1% of all banking staff. For example, in 1997, POEs (Privately Owned Enterprises) in the industrial sector accounted for only 6.5% by number, and this figure has increased to 57.7% in 2017. However in 2000, POEs in the industrial sector accounted for only 3.1% by the size of assets, and this figure peaked at around 22% in 2013, stagnating to a slight decline by 2017 of 21.6%. [16] Examples of Dominant SOEs Now that the persistence of SOEs in the modern Chinese economy has been established via statistical evidence, I want to provide some empirical evidence, some examples that could be used or shared in future for reference. Circling back to the point about “key sectors” of which SOEs must dominate, below are a few examples of the following SOEs that dominate their respective key sectors. The power-generating industry in China is dominated by five SOE power-generating company groups: China Huaneng Power Group, China Datang Corporation, China Huadian Corporation, China Guodian Corporation, and China Power Investment Corporation. And the public utilities sector is dominated by the State Grid Corporation of China (SGCC) and China Southern Power Grid Corporation [17]. The telecommunications industry in China is dominated by three SOE telecommunications carriers: China Telecom, China Unicom, and China Mobile [18]. China’s Three Gorges Dam - one of the largest dams in the world - is run by the “Three Gorges Dam Corporation”, a state-owned enterprise (SOE). Its subsidiaries include utilities companies such as China Yangtze Power, further illustrating state management of the economy. [Image Courtesy: China Daily] The petrochemicals industry is dominated by five SOE company groups: China National Petroleum Corporation, Sinopec, Sinochem, China National Offshore Oil Corporation and Shandong Energy [19]. And the natural gas industry is dominated by five SOEs as well, Sinopec, CNPC, CNOOC, Beijing Enterprises Group and Shenenergy Group [20]. China Baowu Steel Group Corporation, produces 80% of the auto-sheet metal for use in automobiles, major appliances, airplane fuselages and wings, architecture, and others and 60% of the silicon steel which are used in generators, motors, and transformers. Baowu steel remains to be a global leader in both categories as of 2022 [21]. The world’s largest producer of rolling stock and locomotives is under one company, the China Railway Rolling Stock Corporation — which is a CSOE — has 90% of the market share for train production [22]. The largest ship producer domestically and worldwide and sole ship producer in China, the Chinese State Shipbuilding Corporation produces 48% of all ships in the world [23].a You have China Minmetals, which has 90% of the domestic metallurgical market share [24]. They also hold 90% of the contract value for domestic metallurgical engineering and construction, which is the construction of industrial metal production engineering machines and items [25]. These are just a few of the prominent examples of the large and dominant SOEs that permeate through China’s domestic market. The more upstream an economic sector is, the more state ownership it will have. This is the general rule of thumb for the state involvement within the domestic economy. The Shareholder System The State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission of the State Council (SASAC) is an institution directly under the management of the State Council. It is an ad-hoc ministerial-level organization directly subordinated to the State Council. The Party Committee of SASAC performs the responsibilities mandated by the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party. [26] The way ownership is substantiated or demonstrated is through stock ownership. The SASAC owns 100% of the stock of a total of 98 CSOEs. There is a common misconception that companies must be 50% or more, or somehow totally state owned to be in function “state owned” or operate according to party directives. On paper, SOE employment rates and output rates are formally lower than the non-state sector, yet they continue to persist and play a dominant role in the economy. How is this possible? Through the shareholder system. One way the CPC maintains functional control over multiple enterprises is through a diverse shareholder system, where one CSOE directly or indirectly controls 100s or 200 enterprises via their own subsidiary system. Lenin notes in his book, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism of precisely this phenomenon, although inverted as it is now the state who is the “shareholder”, while he was analyzing the bourgeoisie who were shareholders. The head of the concern controls the principal company (literally: the “mother company”); the latter reigns over the subsidiary companies (“daughter companies”) which in their turn control still other subsidiaries (“grandchild companies”), etc. In this way, it is possible with a comparatively small capital to dominate immense spheres of production. Indeed, if holding 50 per cent of the capital is always sufficient to control a company, the head of the concern needs only one million to control eight million in the second subsidiaries. And if this ‘interlocking’ is extended, it is possible with one million to control sixteen million, thirty-two million, etc… As a matter of fact, experience shows that it is sufficient to own 40 percent of the shares of a company in order to direct its affairs, since in practice a certain number of small, scattered shareholders find it impossible to attend general meetings, etc. The “democratization” of the ownership of shares, from which the bourgeois sophists and opportunist so-called “Social-Democrats” expect (or say that they expect) the “democratization of capital,” the strengthening of the role and significance of small scale production, etc., is, in fact, one of the ways of increasing the power of the financial oligarchy.” [27] Lenin understood that it was entirely possible for the shareholding system to “increase the power” of the financial oligarchy. But what if, instead of a financial oligarchy sitting at the top of the pillar, it is the Communist Party? Or more specifically, the SASAC. Lenin notes in the above quote that owning merely 40% of the shares of a single company is sufficient to direct its affairs. And how “Mother companies” reign supreme over “Daughter companies” and indirectly control “grandchildren” companies. Therefore, it is entirely possible for “1 million to rule over 32 million”. And this is precisely how the SOEs obfuscate their formal state ownership within the Chinese economy while still maintaining de facto control and influence. This phenomenon is noted by Derrick Scissors, who is a former Senior Research Fellow at The Heritage Foundation. In 2007, he found that while 100% of state ownership may be “diluted” by division of ownership into different shareholders, of which are non-state, the majority of ownership/controlling shareholder largely trended towards state ownership. This is despite the fact that they might formally be considered non-state owned or sometimes foreign media may even label them private. He says that however, this phenomenon does nothing to change state control. Despite them being listed on foreign stock exchanges, the ultimate control rights remain in the hands of the state. [28] No matter their shareholding structure, all national corporations in the sectors that make up the core of the Chinese economy are required by law to be owned or controlled by the state. These sectors include power generation and distribution; oil, coal, petrochemicals, and natural gas; telecommunications; armaments; Aviation and shipping; machinery and automobile production; information technologies; construction; and the production of iron, steel, and nonferrous metals. The railroads, grain distribution, and insurance are also dominated by the state, even if no official edict says so. [28] The same is noted by Margaret Pearson who argues that despite the issuing of stocks, these stock issuances are not used for the purpose of wholesale “denationalization” or “privatization” of enterprises, but the intended goal is to rather upgrade and enhance the value of corporate state-owned assets. Even though some firms may have been listed on the stock market, their parent firms or “Mother firms” control rights firmly remain in the hands of the state. [29] Stephen Green, a member of the Royal Institute of International Affairs continues to corroborate the claim, making the statement that the way stocks are issued is not for the sake of denationalization of industries, but to support and subsidize SOE restructuring and to prevent private companies from raising capital. [30] A research study in 2009 concluded that the “privatization” campaign of China drastically differs from the ones conducted in Eastern Europe, that the sale of shares do not fundamentally alter state control. And that in fact, there has been no meaningful transfer of state control over to private hands. The majority of companies in China have around 66% of their shares being held in state hands. Even if shares can be traded/floated on the market, for the most part, shares will still indefinitely be maintained by state actors. [31] In 2014, another study found that China’s domestic market is entirely state dominated. The central government plays every role from issuer, to underwriter, to regulator, to controlling investor and manager of the exchanges. Efforts to simplify domestic arrangements have served only to conceal the fact that the state in its many guises still owns nearly two-thirds of domestically listed company shares. The combination of state monopolies with “Wall Street expertise” and international capital has led to the creation of national companies that represent little more than the incorporation of China's old Soviet-style industrial ministries. [32] A 2017 research paper finds that the state appointed nomenklatura working within these large “mother” companies are responsive primarily to the directives of the state instead of minority shareholders within their “daughter” or “granddaughter” firms. The core holding company is the one that coordinates business activity of the “daughter” and “granddaughters”, and these core holding companies are always dominated by state ownership. These business activities are committed in the interest, above all, of state industrial policy, and certainly with a preference for such national policy over what might be in the interest of shareholder wealth maximization for the nongroup, minority shareholders invested in the individual legal person subsidiaries often through the public capital markets. [33] From 1990 to 2003, it was found that only around 7% of all listed firms could truly be considered “private”. These companies are allowed to have access to private revenue, but their control rights are strongly within the hands of the state and should therefore be considered state firms. Even though many of these firms are not formally listed as SOEs, they are rather considered to be either joint-venture or shareholding firms instead. [34] LLCs/Shareholding Firms Widespread “privatizations” of small SOEs reduced the total number of SOEs from 250,000 in 1995, to 127,000 in 2005. It is naïve to view the state as simply having divested itself from ownership of the state sector. Virtually all of the figures that scholars and the popular press have picked as evidence of the declining role of the state, relates to the decline in state shares but ignores the rise of institutional shares. [35] The transformation of SOEs into share-holding firms took several forms: shareholding cooperatives, jointly owned enterprises, limited liability corporations and limited shareholding corporations. These firms held over 50% of capital assets and generated 35% of national sales. They replaced SOEs as the dominant public sector employers in the interior of the country. These hybrid forms were supposed to operate under hard budget constraints. [35] The introduction of stock markets in China appeared to be a capitulation towards “capitalism”. However, in July 2015, a crisis in the stock market revealed the inner contradictions between market pressures and state control as it exposed peculiar features of China's markets. Formally, all the institutions, organizations, administrative and legislative forms that are required to replicate Western stock markets exist. However, all aspects of the capital markets remain owned by some agency of the state. As a consequence, when share prices began to collapse in July 2015, state banks were told to lend US $209bn to the wholly state-owned China's 89 Securities Finance Corp in order to buy stocks. Market volatility was thereby contained by massive state intervention. This means that the fate of listed companies are ultimately determined by budget constraints which are set by the Central Government. [35] The widespread underestimation of the influence of state ownership in the economy is not simply a question of misidentifying concealed public ownership relations, but also of understanding the ‘dynamics of control’ exercised by organs of the party and state. [36] There is a consistent problem when attempting to identify firms as “state owned”. Many times, functionally state owned firms are listed as “foreign-held” simply because 30% of its shares are owned by a foreign entity, despite the control rights being operated by the state. [37] For example, the joint ventures of the Shanghai local government with GM and Volkswagen (Shanghai-GM and Shanghai-VW) are registered as foreign companies, despite the fact that the Shanghai local government holds 50% of each company (Of which is the largest share in the case of Shanghai-VW). [37] This can also happen when the company is owned by a holding company registered outside of mainland China. For example, Lenovo and CNOOC (a state-owned oil company) are owned by holding companies registered in Hong Kong and, thus, legally registered as foreign owned in China. Despite the control rights firmly being managed by state hands. [37] Second, many state-owned companies, particularly after 1998, are registered as limited-liability or publicly traded companies, despite the controlling stake held by a state-controlled holding company. The Baoshan steel company and Shanghais SAIC Group’s stand-alone car company (SAIC) discussed earlier are examples of publicly listed companies and, thus, registered as share-holding companies but with a controlling stake held by a holding company owned by the Chinese state. [37] 66% of all firms are directly or indirectly owned by the SASAC. In 2012, the number of “underreported” state firms ran at 50%, of which were being registered as private firms. Meaning that the formal state share of the economy is actually 50% larger. Note, state ownership being defined here as 50% or more of a firm being owned by the state. [37] We can extrapolate that number and apply it to asset ownership in 2012, of which 53% of all assets in China were held by the State Sector. Let’s again assume that the state having at least 50% ownership makes a company state-owned. 50% of 53 is 26.5, meaning that in 2012, if we include the "underreported" sector of the state, this means that the total state ownership of assets in 2012 actually amounts to 79.5%. Examples of the Shareholder/LLC system at work An example of how this works in function will be demonstrated using the example of the company known as Sinopec: a petrochemicals company owned directly by the SASAC and is one of the largest if not the largest petrochemicals company in the world. Sinopec has a monopoly on all downstream hydrocarbons businesses in China. [33] A sinopec core company which is 100% wholly owned by the SASAC is the center of the Sinopec group. A majority-controlled subsidiary, department, or affiliated entity would function as a dedicated "finance holding company" necessary for the allocation of funds and finance to and among operations and entities included in the Sinopec Group. Sinopec Group Holding Company - explicitly permitted in its business license to invest in other entities - in turn owns a vast number of only Sinopec business-related subsidiaries, each with a business scope allowing it to operate in a defined sector within the group's larger monopoly or defined geographical areas. A majority-controlled subsidiary, department, or affiliated entity would function as a dedicated "finance holding company" necessary for the allocation of funds and finance to and among operations and entities included in the Sinopec Group. Sinopec Group Holding Company, explicitly permitted in its business license to invest in other entities, in turn owns a vast number of only Sinopec business-related subsidiaries, each with a business scope allowing it to operate in a defined sector within the group's larger monopoly or defined geographical areas. Those subsidiaries will always show majority equity ownership in the hands of the Sinopec Group Holding Company or one of its controlled subsidiaries, but they can be financed directly by bank loans, minority non-public investment, or the public shareholder markets, domestic or foreign. This Sinopec Group can seek to reorganize a traditional SOE grouping of productive and social assets conducting a petrochemicals business, like in the Shanghai suburbs of Jinshan District into a Sinopec Group Holding Company-controlled company called "Sinopec Shanghai Petrochemical Company Limited," which could complete an initial public offering on the PRC domestic or foreign shareholder markets. After the IPO, issuer Sinopec Shanghai Petrochemical Company Limited would still be dominated absolutely by the core holding company (which is the Party-State Ran State-Owned Enterprise of Sinopec) via an 80 percent equity stake and its power to appoint all directors and officers of the listed subsidiary. This is how Sinopec controls over hundreds of its own subsidiaries even though a lot of them aren’t formally “owned” or listed as SOEs according to official Chinese statistics. An example of how a “foreign listed” company is actually state owned would be the SMIC, otherwise known as the Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation. The only reason it is considered “foreign listed/foreign owned” is because 58% of its shares are listed on the Hong Kong stock exchange. 14.11% of its shares are held by Datang HK which is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Datang Holdings, which in turn is wholly-owned by CICT which is a central state owned enterprises. [38] CICT itself directly holds an additional 0.92% of the total shares, bringing the total amount to 15.03%. 7.80% of shares are held by Xinxin HK, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Xunxin (Shanghai) Investment Co., Ltd., which in turn is wholly-owned by China IC Fund which is a state owned investment fund. An additional 1.61% is held directly by the IC fund. 0.46% is held by Guoxin investment which is a state owned fund. 0.50% is held by a subsidiary of the China construction bank which is a state owned bank. Finally, another 0.43% is held by a subsidiary of the Chinese merchant bank which is a state owned bank as well. The total amount of state ownership amounts to 25.83% [39]. The HKSCC share refers to just shares/stock listed on the Hong Kong stock exchange, which does not accurately reflect controlling shares. These shares can be bought by anyone who has access to the Hong Kong stock market. The majority shareholder and the largest shareholders are all state owned enterprises, which are either directly or indirectly connected to the central government with varying layers of connection. Even though the SMIC is not “formally state owned” it is functionally state owned. Another even simpler example would be the Mcdonald's China franchise, even though on paper it is a foreign enterprise, bearing the company name/franchise name of “Mcdonald”. The controlling shareholder is a SOE known as CITIC, which holds 52% of the total shares. Making Mcdonalds in China functionally state owned despite being formally a foreign owned company. [40] Finally, the last example demonstrates how an LLC can still functionally be a state-owned company even though the formal designation is of a “limited liability company”. Sichuan Changhong Electric is China’s largest television producer and the sole producer of batteries for the Chengdu J-10 “Vigorous Dragon”, a multirole combat aircraft. Even their official shareholders report states the following: Sichuan Changhong Electronic Co., Limited (“Sichuan Changhong”), a company incorporated in the PRC with its shares listed on the Shanghai Stock Exchange, has obtained the control over the board of directors of the Company since 2012. Sichuan Changhong Electronics Holding Group Co., Ltd., (“Sichuan Changhong Holding”, a company established in the PRC and wholly-owned by the State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission of the Mianyang city government and one of the Controlling Shareholders) is the single largest shareholder of Sichuan Changhong, which held approximately 23.22% of the entire issued share capital of Sichuan Changhong and has de facto control over the composition of the majority of the board of Sichuan Changhong. [41] Below is a chart that goes over the overall ownership structure that makes it easier to visualize. Conclusion In conclusion, “formal” SOE ownership is deliberately obfuscated and downplayed by Western media despite the large impactful role it continues to play within the Chinese domestic economy. Similarly, “informal” SOE ownership via LLCs, shareholding companies and joint-ventures with foreign enterprises have caused them to be counted as “non-SOEs” despite functionally acting upon state directives. SOEs continue to persist within China’s economy and continue to actively grow in size, scale and scope of economic activities. References Formal State Ownership[1] Jacques, Martin. 2012. When China Rules the World. p. 184. Contribution to GDP and Scale of Assets[2] Szamosszegi, Andrew, and Cole Kyle. 2011. An Analysis of State-Owned Enterprises and State Capitalism in China. p. 1. https://www.uscc.gov/sites/default/files/Research/10_26_11_CapitalTradeSOEStudy.pdf. [3] Latest Lessons in Bankruptcy of State-Owned Enterprises (SOEs) in China: An interactive structural approach model (ISM) approach. https://www.hindawi.com/journals/ddns/2022/1109442/. [4] State-Owned Enterprises’ Responses to China’s Carbon Neutrality Goals and Implications for Foreign Investors. https://gjia.georgetown.edu/2023/02/15/state-owned-enterprises-responses-to-chinas-carbon-neutrality-goals-and-implications-for-foreign-investors/. [42] Economic performance of state-owned and state-holding enterprises nationwide from January to December 2023, Ministry of Finance of the People’s Republic of China. https://zcgls.mof.gov.cn/qiyeyunxingdongtai/202401/t20240129_3927581.htm. [5] Rise of the ‘shareholding state’: financialization of economic management in China | Socio-Economic Review | Oxford Academic. https://academic.oup.com/ser/article-abstract/13/3/603/1670234. [6] People’s Republic of China: Selected Issues, Volume 2021, Issue 012, IMF. https://www.elibrary.imf.org/view/journals/002/2021/012/article-A002-en.xml. [7] China's 'State Capitalism' Sparks a Global Backlash, WSJ. https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748703514904575602731006315198. [8] Khoo, Heiko. 2018. Is China still socialist? A Marxist critique of János Kornai’s analysis of China. p. 85-89. https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/ws/portalfiles/portal/136790902/2018_Khoo_Heiko_1068757_ethesis.pdf. [9] Pei, Changhong, Chunxue Yang, and Xinming Yang. 2019. The Basic Economic System of China. p. 24-25. [10] State-Owned Enterprises Across Europe: Stylized Facts from a Large Firm-Level Dataset. p. 17. https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/ws/portalfiles/portal/136790902/2018_Khoo_Heiko_1068757_ethesis.pdf. [11] Comprehensive report of the State Council on the management of state-owned assets in 2022. https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/nvBGqtx7MuPB8RTC9XT6jA. [12] The top 500 Chinese private enterprises in 2022 released a total operating income of 38.32 trillion yuan. https://www.xinhuanet.com/energy/20220907/79f0e58b387f4e7c903a51be2a8fc3b6/c.html. [13] SOE reforms key to smooth recovery, ChinaDaily. https://archive.ph/44ZmP#selection-403.68-403.79. [14] García-Herrero, Alicia, and Gary Ng. 2021. China’s State-Owned Enterprises and Competitive Neutrality. p. 10. https://www.bruegel.org/sites/default/files/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/PC-05-2021.pdf. [15] China SOEs – the journey to extract values from their re-rating and revaluation trajectory from Premia Partners. https://archive.ph/mMjIq#selection-233.0-236.0. [16] Liu, Kerry. 2021. The Rise and Fall of China’s Private Sector: Determinants and Policy Implications. p. 8. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3921568. Examples of Dominant SOEs[17] Lewis, Joanna I. 2023. Cooperating for the Climate: Learning from International Partnerships in China's Clean Energy Sector. MIT Press. p. 44. [18] Telecommunications industry in China, Statista. https://www.statista.com/topics/6577/telecommunications-industry-in-china/#topicOverview. [19] The 5 Biggest Chinese Oil Companies, Investopedia. https://archive.ph/3POHm#selection-2275.1-2275.36. [20] Top 5 Chinese Natural Gas Companies, Investopedia. https://www.investopedia.com/articles/markets/090315/5-biggest-chinese-natural-gas-companies.asp. [21] China Baowu Steel Group Corporation Limited, FitchRatings. https://www.fitchratings.com/research/corporate-finance/china-baowu-steel-group-corporation-limited-09-03-2022. [22] Chinese rolling stock manufacturers merge to form CRRC Corp, Railway Gazette International. https://www.railwaygazette.com/business/chinese-rolling-stock-manufacturers-merge-to-form-crrc-corp/40956.article. [23] China becoming world’s go-to for shipbuilding after ‘boom of overseas orders’, but global de-risking threatens to rock the boat, South China Morning Post. https://www.scmp.com/economy/global-economy/article/3225973/china-becoming-worlds-go-shipbuilding-after-boom-overseas-orders-global-de-risking-threatens-rock. [24] Minmetals Holding Corporation, Publication of Offering Circular. p. 14. https://www1.hkexnews.hk/listedco/listconews/sehk/2021/0421/2021042100263.pdf. [25] China Minmetals Corporation, FitchRatings. https://www.fitchratings.com/research/corporate-finance/china-minmetals-corporation-16-08-2021. The Shareholder System[26] About Us, SASAC. http://en.sasac.gov.cn/aboutus.html [27] Lenin, Vladimir. 1917. “III. Finance Capital and the Financial Oligarchy.” In Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism. Marxists.org. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/imp-hsc/ch03.htm. [28] Liberalization in Reverse, Heritage Foundation. https://www.heritage.org/global-politics/commentary/liberalization-reverse. [29] Pearson, Margaret. 2005. “The Business of Governing Business in China: Institutions and Norms of the Emerging Regulatory State.” p. 304. https://www.jstor.org/stable/25054295. [30] Non-performing, The Economist. https://archive.ph/B5kSb#selection-863.68-863.133. [31] Yeung, Horace. 2009. “Non-Tradable Share Reform in China: Marching towards the Berle and Means Corporation?” https://digitalcommons.osgoode.yorku.ca/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=&httpsredir=1&article=1156&context=clpe. [32] Walter, Carl. 2014. “Was Deng Xiaoping Right? An Overview of China's Equity Markets.” p. 18. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/jacf.12075. [33] Hawson, Nicholas. 2017. “China’s ‘Corporatization without Privatization’ and the Late 19th Century Roots of a Stubborn Path Dependency”. p. 11. https://repository.law.umich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3021&context=articles. [34] Brandt, Loren, and Thomas G Rawski. 2011. China’s Great Economic Transformation. Cambridge University Press. p. 355. LLCs/Shareholding Firms[35] Khoo, Heiko. 2018. Is China still socialist? A Marxist critique of János Kornai’s analysis of China. p. 89-90. https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/ws/portalfiles/portal/136790902/2018_Khoo_Heiko_1068757_ethesis.pdf. [36] Szamosszegi, Andrew, and Cole Kyle. 2011. An Analysis of State-Owned Enterprises and State Capitalism in China. p. 25. https://www.uscc.gov/sites/default/files/Research/10_26_11_CapitalTradeSOEStudy.pdf. [37] Hsieh, Chang-Tai, and Zheng Song. 2015. “Grasp the Large, Let Go of the Small: The Transformation of the State Sector in China.” p. 7-8. https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/2015a_hsieh.pdf. Examples of the Shareholder/LLC system at work[38] “CICT”, China Govt Services. https://govt.chinadaily.com.cn/s/201812/05/WS5c07928c498eefb3fe46e304/china-information-and-communication-technologies-group-corporation-cict.html. [39] SMIC, “Announcement of 2022 annual results”. p. 96. https://www1.hkexnews.hk/listedco/listconews/sehk/2023/0328/2023032801249.pdf. [40] CNN, McDonald’s is investing more in China to tap ‘tremendous opportunity’. https://www.cnn.com/2023/11/21/business/mcdonalds-china-stake-prospects/index.html#:~:text=The%20deal%20to%20acquire%20investment,ownership%20with%20a%2052%25%20stake. [41] Changhong Jiahua Holdings Limited, Annual Report 2020. p. 69 https://ir.changhongit.com/pub/resource/application/2021042001499.pdf. Archives February 2024 Should one claim that, unless they have studied the Science of Logic, these scientists don’t know what they are doing? Doubtless, they know what they are doing but, philosophically speaking, they often do not know what they know and beyond a certain point this limitation cannot but have a regrettable influence on their work (Sève 2008: 91) Introduction The last century saw two prevailing trends between dialectics and science. On one side, Western Marxism, which was defined by Lukács rejection of Engels’ philosophy of nature; on the other, those who embraced the dialectics of nature, the dialectical materialists (Foster 2020). While the former tended to conflate science with positivism and therefore ignored it, the latter where ‘pro-science’ but also sought to determine the limits of science within capitalism [1]. This was not meant to undermine the cognitive validity of scientific result. Scientific results are related to society at large yet have inherent dynamics that exists in relative autonomy from this embeddedness. Hence, the dialectical approach to science is neither externalist nor internalist, but about the constitutive dialectics between the internal workings of science and the society in which it finds itself. Science is not an innocent activity, performed outside society. Lewontin and Levins write: ‘To do science is to be a social actor, whether one likes it or not, in political activity’ (1985: 4). Denying this fact is itself political, and it implicitly provides support to the prevailing system. Yet, even if science has been commodified, it is still highly important. As Richard Levins puts it: ‘When we say that all science is class science, that is not equivalent to saying that all scientific claims are lies. Class science can give powerful and valid insights into the world but within certain boundaries and restrictions’ (Levins 1981: 9). What is the Purpose of Science? We could say that contexts constrain but do not determine the cognitive veracity of research. This implies that a dialectical understanding of its relation to society is required. Of course, some contexts are more conducive to scientific progress, but even the narrow confines imposed by market imperatives cannot halt the forward march of science, even if it might slow it down. Also, views that are ignored for a period, might gain traction when the context changes, and science also contributes to such a change (Kosambi 1957). The relationship between science and society is complex and nonlinear. In line with Desmond Bernal (1939), science is not directly productive – aiming at producing an economic surplus – but reproductive, aimed at the reproduction of the processes that enable our societies to function and survive. In this view, it represents use value instead of exchange value (Lewontin and Levins 1987). It does not imply that science should uncritically contribute to whatever system is in place – suggesting a technocratic view of science, where the scientists are detached from the rest of society. If this happens, science becomes what Lewontin (1991) named a ‘institution of social legitimation.’ This shrinks the freedom enjoyed by the scientist, as she must simply accept the context in which she finds herself. It also makes the ethical responsibilities and philosophical basis of scientist seem irrelevant (Raju 2022). It makes science more about production that reproduction – more about supporting the status quo ante than questioning it. As such, the scientist is alienated and proletarianised.[2] By contrast, the view that scientist have a responsibility, ‘to insist upon the truth’ and to ‘see events in their historical perspective’ (Chomsky 1967), entails that science should seek to further the continued reproduction of society. It should ground the aims of science democratically in the needs of the people, not the interests of the prevailing social and economic system. This is simultaneously a liberation of science: “Only in science planned for the benefit of all mankind, not for bacteriological, atomic, psychological or other mass warfare can the scientist be really free. He belongs to the forefront of that great tradition by which mankind raised itself above the beasts, first gathering and storing, then growing its own food; finding sources of energy outside its muscular efforts in the taming of fire, harnessing animals, wind, water, electricity, and the atomic nucleus. But if he serves the class that grows food scientifically and then dumps it in the ocean while millions starve all over the world, if he believes that the world is over-populated and the atom-bomb a blessing that will perpetuate his own comfort, he is moving in a retrograde orbit, on a level no beast could achieve, a level below that of a tribal witch-doctor” (Kosambi 1957) Such a democratisation also requires scientific literacy. To make everyone a ‘reasonable sceptic’ as Lewontin (1991) says, we cannot glorify science as another religion, nor dismiss it cynically. Science is too important to be left for the experts. Science is a process; it is about change, not stasis. And it has the capacity to alter the scene on which it emerges. This indicates another aim than short-term profit: ‘The real task is to change society, to turn the light of scientific inquiry upon the foundations of social structure’ (Kosambi 1957). It echoes Marx’s understanding of science as a revolutionary force. If scientists find that the reproduction of society is threatened by the prevailing socioeconomic model, it has an obligation to criticise this society, and their own complicity in its development. If scientists disavow such findings, or delink them from historical and societal context, their analysis becomes too shallow and unsystematic to have any scientific value. Against this, science must seek to understand its conditions of existence scientifically (Raju 2021). The legitimate critique of positivism or scientism does not warrant dismissal of science as such. Disregarding natural science means undermining the critical potential of the dialectical approach at a time when its resources are direly needed. Instead, we should seek to identify the points at which science turns into ideology – grasping how ‘wrong theoretical assumptions may eventually lead to useful previsions and right performances, until a threshold of accumulating contradictions is reached’ (Bizzarri and others 2017: 13). The ideal suggested here does not entail making use of scientific results to confirm philosophical concepts, as if philosophy is outside science and untouched by it; nor does it mean passively accepting empirical findings at face value. Instead, it means dealing with tensions in how scientist interpret them and the theories that inform their views. We must unearth how philosophy operates within science and aim to contribute to its further development from the inside. This entails making scientists aware of the theoretical assumptions behind their views and the vagueness that many of them exhibit (Soto and Sonnenschein 2021). Weak Nature and Metabolic Rift Does science itself, as one such social institution, and as one set of cultural practices, remain the same within this different kind of naturalism? (Gallagher 2018: 117) Let us turn to nature. Lewontin held that the ideological biases of biology ‘prevent a rich understanding of nature and prevent us from solving the problems to which science is supposed to apply itself’ (1991: 15). This introduces a false dichotomy between holism and reductionism which influences the research that is undertaken. Another, dialectical, notion of nature might lead to another kind of science, but this progress is hindered by current scientific ideals, as well as the political-economic dimension of science (Supiot 2021). The different iterations of the dialectical approach share an emphasis on the idea that nature is not simply a static background for our actions, and that it also does not work on us a mechanical or external manner. Instead, nature is a complex system which is caught up with our activities, even if it also maintains autonomy from these. To concretise, I sketch Luca Illetterati’s Hegelian and Foster’s Marxist understanding of nature. In The Capital, Marx emphasised that the soil was being robbed for the nutrients necessary to sustain its fertility. He took this to indicate how the current organisation of production, capitalism, causes a rift between the social metabolism and the metabolism of nature, which sustains all life, and this rift can only be amended within another societal system (Foster 2022a). Metabolic rift denotes the breakdown of the relationship universal metabolism of nature and the social metabolism that sustains our society, which ultimately depends on the universal metabolism, ‘the biophysical conditions of production’. The universal metabolism of nature exists prior to and apart from human activity. It also interacts with and enables the social metabolism, which is a concrete shape of this ecological metabolism. Labour mediates between these metabolisms. While we can affect the universal metabolism of nature, we must grant nature autonomy – not regard it is wholly internalised by society. Nature places constraints upon human activities, and even if we may constrain nature in return, there are limits to how much we can change natural processes without undermining its capacity to sustain our societies. Contrary to the caricature, Hegel believes that science provides the content upon which philosophy must work, that ‘the empirical sciences […] have readied this material for philosophy by discovering its universal determinations, genera, and laws’ (Hegel 2010: 41). Further, he holds that nature is an enigma that can never be solved. It is not only beyond our conceptual capacities, but beyond itself. Our logical categories cannot deduce the concrete instance of nature because it is too contingent to display these categories reliably. In other words, nature lacks the capacity to control its own becoming (Di Giovanni 2010). Nature is weak because it is riddled with contingency and fails to be a completely logical sphere. Yet it displays a fragmented rationality, through its concrete shapes – which is also why detailed knowledge of its particularities is needed, why philosophy depends on science to provide its content. Conversely, science requires philosophy to be able to distil the logical principles that are displayed by nature. Philosophy cannot impose categories on science from without but should strive to ‘situate the sciences within their broader non/extra-scientific contexts’ (Johnston 2019: 55) and show how they contain more metaphysics than they are aware of. Hegel’s view indicates that there is already a rift in nature – pace Foster – before the emergence of a specific mode of production. This rift enables subjectivity to emerge, and it also changes retroactively by this emergence. In other words, subjectivity emerges from within the incompleteness of nature, not as opposite to it. This indicates how knowledge about nature enabled by nature itself. New Nature, New Science? The inability to articulate its own conditions of possibility characterises so-called contemplative materialism. Foster says that avoiding the contemplative stance is ‘exactly what the theory of contingent emergence developed in classical historical materialism […] is, in the final analysis, all about’ (Foster 2022b: fn22, 7–8 emphasis original). Emergent levels of organisation, which are interdependent yet autonomous, solves the problem. But if Heron (2021) is right, the notion of ontological incompleteness found in Hegel is also needed the cognise the emergence of the subject that can set itself apart from nature immanently. The notion of weak nature also suggests why science is simultaneously socially constructed and cognitively valid. It is because the distortions and contradictions we disclose are indicative of the nature of reality itself. It is the inchoate structure of nature that enables subjectivity (as self-determination) and allows us to understand it rationally, even if this understanding can only be aporetic. It is this inconsistency that enables the subject to emerge from within nature. Here, the rift is present in nature before the emergence of modern society, even if our current social system may exacerbate it. More important than their possible tensions, these approaches share the notion that no level is unconstrained or isolated from others but in a constant and formative interaction with them. Together, part and whole form a processual totality. Teleological causality is actual as it emerges from the interaction between different levels and scales. Dialectics thereby overcomes the mechanistic worldview that undergirds the contemplative stance, which dismisses everything that cannot be explained through efficient causality. Hence, a dialectical view of nature can provide a richer and more radical understanding of nature, the object of science, and of science itself – in which it includes subjectivity or self-determination as its own self-negation. Nature is beyond itself, not only external to us but to itself, and thus cannot control its own genesis. The same principle applies to science. Secondly, and implicitly, we get a more encompassing notion of causation, not as simple cause and effect but as complex, constitutive and reciprocal. Here, boundary conditions impose constraints that are not only limiting but also enabling (see Longo and others 2012). We are dealing with historical systems, whose space of possibilities are themselves subject to change. We should not limit the scope of naturalism to the confines deemed acceptable by a narrow conception of science. Instead, we need a naturalism ‘whose very core is the notion of life’ (Illetterati 2023: 188) – a naturalism which explains its own conditions of possibility through this living and constructive relation to the world. Marx held that there would be a unitary science in the future. It would, however, only be possible after the shackles of bourgeoise society has been lifted, in his view. But this view seems too unilinear, and erects a barrier between ideology and science, instead of admitting that ideology is an inherent part of science – without thereby undermining its cognitive validity. It also undercuts the degree to which science affects the scene on which it appears, and the revolutionary force that science was for Marx. Instead of waiting for a revolution to inaugurate a new relation between the sciences and between science and philosophy the, we should foster a relationship that prefigures a new society and contributes to its establishment. As we are constituted through our relationship to nature, the breakdown of this relation alienates us both form ourselves and from nature. A renewed concept of nature combats this alienation. It allows us to understand how freedom is ontologically possible and makes us aware of what it at stake if we do not exercise this freedom consciously and responsibly. Not only does it suggest another way to understand natural processes; it also pertains to the becoming and function of science itself, as part of a larger totality. Only within such a totality can the function of science be ascribed. We might never get a truly unitary science, not even if a new society is inaugurated, but we can achieve many advances through attempts at establishing a new naturalism and another mode of interaction between science and society, nonetheless. Bibliography Bernal, J.D. 1939. The Social Function of Science (London: George Routledge & Sons Ltd.) Bizzarri, Mariano, Ana M Soto, Carlos Sonnenschein, and Giuseppe Longo. 2017. ‘Saving Science. And Beyond’, 1.1: 11–15 <https://doi.org/10.13133/2532-5876_1.6> Chomsky, Noam. 1967. ‘The Responsibility of Intellectuals’, New York Review of Books El-Hani, Charbel Niño, and Claudio R. M. Reis. 2021. ‘Research Strategies and Value Outlooks in Scientific Practices:For an Organicist Thinking and a Pluralist Methodology in the Biological Sciences’, Philosophy World Democracy <https://www.philosophy-world-democracy.org/articles-1/research-strategies-and-value-outlooks-in-scientific-practices> Foster, John Bellamy. 2020. The Return of Nature : Socialism and Ecology. (New York, NY: Monthly Review Press) ———. 2022a. Capitalism in the Anthropocene: Ecological Ruin or Ecological Revolution (New York, NY: Monthly Review Press) ———. 2022b. ‘The Return of the Dialectics of Nature: The Struggle for Freedom as Necessity’, Historical Materialism: 1–26 <https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1163/1569206X-20222279> Gallagher, Shaun. 2018. ‘Dynamics and Dialectic’, Constructivist Foundations, 14.1: 114–17 <http://constructivist.info/14/1/114> Di Giovanni, George. 2010. ‘Introduction’, in The Science of Logic (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press), pp. xi–lxii Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. 2010. The Science of Logic, ed. by George Di Giovanni (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press) Heron, Kai. 2021. ‘Dialectical Materialisms, Metabolic Rifts and the Climate Crisis: A Lacanian/Hegelian Perspective’, Science & Society, 85.4 (Guilford Publications Inc.): 501–26 <https://doi.org/10.1521/siso.2021.85.4.501> Illetterati, Luca. 2023. ‘Beyond a Naturalistic Conception of Nature: Nature and Life in Hegel’s Early Writings’, in Nature and Naturalism in Classical German Philosophy, ed. by Luca Corti and Johannes-Georg Schülein (New York and London: Routledge), pp. 187–208 Johnston, Adrian. 2019. Prolegomena to Any Future Materialism, Volume Two: A Weak Nature Alone, Diaeresis (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press) Kosambi, D. D. 1957. Exasperating Essays: Exercises in the Dialectical Method (Poona: People’s Book House) Levins, Richard. 1981. ‘Class Science and Scientific Truth’, in Working Papers in Marxism & Science (New York, NY: The Science Task Force), pp. 9–22 Levins, Richard, and Richard Lewontin. 1985. The Dialectical Biologist (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press) Lewontin, Richard C. 1991. Biology as Ideology : The Doctrine of DNA (New York, NY: Harper Perennial) <https://doi.org/LK – https://worldcat.org/title/214484329> Longo, Giuseppe, Maël Montévil, and Stuart Kauffman. 2012. ‘No Entailing Laws, but Enablement in the Evolution of the Biosphere’, ACM Proceedings of GECCO: 1379–1392 Raju, Archishman. 2021. ‘The Revolutionary Science of W. E. B. Du Bois and D. D. Kosambi’, Science for the People, 24.1 <https://magazine.scienceforthepeople.org/vol24-1-racial-capitalism/revolutionary-science/> ———. 2022. ‘Science and Imperialism: Scientists as Workers for Peace’, Science for the People, 25.3 <https://magazine.scienceforthepeople.org/vol25-3-killing-in-the-name-of/science-and-imperialism-scientists-as-workers-for-peace/> Sève, Lucien. 2008. ‘Dialectics of Emergence’, in Dialectics for the New Century, ed. by Bertell Ollman and Tony Smith (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan), pp. 85–97 <https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230583818> Soto, Ana M., and Carlos Sonnenschein. 2021. ‘The Proletarianization of Biological Thought’, Philosophy World Democracy <https://www.philosophy-world-democracy.org/articles-1/the-proletarianization-of-biological-thought> Supiot, Alain. 2021. ‘Labour Is Not a Commodity: The Content and Meaning of Work in the Twenty-First Century’, International Labour Review, 160.1 (John Wiley & Sons, Ltd): 1–20 <https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1111/ilr.12205> [1] This text is more suggestive than argumentative. I will not discuss the historical relation between ecology and Marxism and will only be able to indicate how the dialectical view indicates a more ecological scientific ideal. I will not discuss how dialectical principles can be found within science, nor interpret concrete sciences dialectically. I save this for another, more systematic article. For a discussion, which informed this article, of how the organicist perspective requires a context-sensitive and pluralistic approach, see El-Hani and Reis (2021). [2] Proletarianisation involves a ‘fragmentation of skill’ and ‘specialisation’, which makes the scientist more replaceable and thus left in a more precarious position. Moreover, alienation concerns how ‘the producers do not understand the whole process, have no say over where it is going or how, and have little opportunity to exercise creative intelligence’ (Lewontin and Levins 1987: 202). Soto and Sonnenschein (2021) explain how the process of proletarianisation has affected biology, as new technologies have been introduced and undermined theory, with some even declaring its end. Archives February 2024 Historical Materialist View of Ideas The collections of ideas we hold are historically conditioned by the mode of life we exist in. They reflect, in the realm of ideas, the limitations and possibilities of the mode of social life that dominates the era – of the forms of social intercourse which pervade our everyday lives. A feudal peasant cannot concern themselves with their social media profiles – with the likes their posts get, the shares it receives, and the subscribers or followers they have accumulated. These are, however, central concerns for most people today. We live in the era of profilicity as the dominant identity technology. As is evident, all the collections of ideas, concerns, aesthetic experiences, desires, beliefs, etc. which are tied to the profile-based mode of identity curation are dependent and grounded in the technological developments our era has achieved. In Marxist terms, these developments at the level of how we think (about ourselves and others) presuppose developments in the forces of production. Likewise, in most of the Western world, no youngsters would concern themselves with who their families will arrange them in marriage with. These preoccupations belong to an era that has passed – to a mode of social intercourse humanity has overcome. This is a central component of historical materialism – the “law of development of human history” which Engels’s eulogy tells us Marx discovers. It is pithily formulated in the famous 1859 preface to Marx’s A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, where he writes that: "The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness."[1] Ideological Institutions and False Consciousness The ideas that come to dominate a form of life do not exist in a transcendental realm. They are, instead, embodied materially through institutions and people. The influence these institutions hold varies. Their purpose, however, is the same: to sustain the consent of the masses (the subaltern) for the dominant order. They are tasked with ensuring the smooth reproduction of the current mode of life. In being the dominant institutions that pervade people’s everyday lives, they don’t simply get us to consent (which implies a conscious act of acceptance) but shape our spontaneous and common-sense worldviews to such an extent that we are unable to recognize, with the exception of those grand moments of rupture called ‘events’ in the history of philosophy, the conditioned and implanted character of our thoughts. Like the slaves in Plato’s allegory of the cave, we are deeply unaware of the structures which contain the horizon of how we view reality. Plato could not have been more correct in emphasizing the painful character of the hypothetical cave’s escapee. It is not easy to have our notions of reality so easily overturned – to have our desires, beliefs, aesthetic experiences, etc. demolished. Like the escaped slave, who painfully needs to readjust their eyes, the overcoming of bourgeois ideology is a painful process – not a spontaneous and immediate ‘moment’. When our conditions of life are so systematically pervaded by lies and manipulations, all aimed at preventing us from rocking the boat, truth is painful. Truth is dangerous. The quest for truth has always had, as W. E. B. Dubois notes, “an element of danger and revolution, of dissatisfaction and discontent, [but] nevertheless, men strive to know.” From the killing of Socrates to the killing of King, class society has shown its proclivity to fight back viciously when threatened by the truth tellers. This was, once again, already prophetically described by Plato’s allegory. Capitalism "is a social order that necessitates the general acceptance of an inverted understanding of itself... Reality [needs to be] turned on its head. But this is not, as Vanessa Wills notes, a problem of “epistemic hygiene”. The root of the ‘error’ is not in our minds, that is, in our reflection of the objective phenomena at hand. As I’ve argued previously, “it is much deeper than this; the inversion or ‘mistake’ is in the world itself… This world reflects itself through an upside-down appearance, and it must necessarily do so to continuously reproduce itself.” As Marx and Engels noted long ago, “If in all ideology men and their relations appear upside-down as in a camera obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life-process as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their physical life-process.” Capitalist ideology is as capable of accepting truth as vampires are of consuming garlic. Truth, which almost always stands on the side of the masses, is its Achilles heel. Shift in the Dominant Ideological Apparatuses The institutions that disseminate and enculturate us into bourgeois ideology, however, don’t all play an equal role. Some are far more influential than others. In the medieval world the church was, without a doubt, the “dominant Ideological State Apparatus” (ISA). In the transition to the modern world, as Louis Althusser notes, “the Ideological State Apparatus which has been installed in the dominant position in mature capitalist social formations as a result of a violent political and ideological class struggle against the old dominant Ideological State Apparatus, is the educational ideological apparatus.” Schools would come to replace the church as the institutional cornerstone of bourgeois ideology – the most dominant force for the reproduction of bourgeois hegemony. In some ways this is still the case. It is in the universities, for instance, where the ideas trafficked by popular culture are first developed in their utmost coherence. It is impossible to conceive of ‘wokeism’, today’s dominant form of liberal cultural intercourse, without the laying of its ideological foundations decades ago in the academy with the CIA manufactured compatible left. The ‘identity politics’ and ‘cancel culture’ so popularly debated in TV late-night roundtable discussions is far from being rooted in the communist tradition. Quite the opposite, that which today is called communism by the rightist pundits was explicitly produced to challenge Marxism. They were tasked with the role of being ‘radical recuperators,’ as Gabriel Rockhill calls them. Their job was (and is) to recuperate dissenting attitudes in the masses, especially young people, into the pro-imperialist anti-communist fold. As Michael Parenti correctly observed, these ABC (Anything But Class) theorists are tasked with developing “conceptual schemas that mute Marxism’s class analysis.” However, in the last decade a new ideological terrain has obtained the dominant position within bourgeois hegemony: social media. The average American today spends around two to three hours on social media. While for a select few it might just be filled with innocent pictures of cute cats, for the vast majority of people social media plays a role akin to a technological polis – a place where the battle of ideas, or better yet, the dissemination of the dominant ideas, occurs. While schools might still create the ideological foundation people are enculturated into, they often find themselves unable to comment on pressing issues of the day (with the exception, of course, of universities). Through social media, on the other hand, one encounters nonstop active manipulation on on-going events, with its scope and consistency far outweighing the influence university discussions on political affairs might have. Its impact, however, cannot simply be understood through quantitative metrics. Qualitatively, these social medias have revolutionized how we create our identities. As I have previously written, "We live in a time of profiles. Who we are, our identity, is deeply embedded in the curation of our profiles for general peers, those ‘users’ who validate our content through various interactive means (likes, shares, retweets, etc.). Our future posts are influenced by the reaction of previous posts. Those which tend to do good are repeated, those which don’t are not (often these are deleted outright). The dialectical interdependency of the individual and the social obtains a new form in the age of profilicity. Through these ‘social validation feedback loops’ (termed as such by Facebook president Sean Parker) we adjust our content to the reception of the general peer. Our identity is crafted with an eye to how we are ‘seen as being seen’. Second order observation becomes the norm; all judgement is subject to some degree of mediation by how the thing judged is seen by the general peer. These are some of the central insights of Hans Georg Moeller and Paul D’Ambrosio’s book, You and Your Profile: Identity After Authenticity. While it does have some blind spots (which I have hoped to bring light to in my work), it is without a doubt an essential text for understanding the dominant mode of identity technology in our day." Social Media, Profilicity, and Ideological Manipulation The potential for ideological manipulation brought about by the emergence of profilicity is, in some ways, far more potent than ever before. Following the 2019 coup in Bolivia, when 68 thousand bot accounts were used to make the imperialist narrative viral on twitter, I did a case study of how social media manipulation was used to legitimize the coup. I wrote: "The imperialist usage of bots and fake accounts engender an artificial general peer which functions as the condition for the possibility of imperialism’s control of a real one. This is because, at a certain nodal point, when the fake accounts and booster bots make something trend, the artificiality of the general peer’s reaction loses its artificial character, a real-people composed general peer picks up the baton from there and glazes the reaction with an ‘organic’ and ‘spontaneous’ vestment. In the age of profilicity, imperialism’s ability to control general peers is an indispensable tool for the attainment of its ends." Regardless of how powerful the armed forces of an empire are, if it is not able to hegemonize the discourse on historical and contemporary events, its legitimacy – both nationally and internationally – will totter and make it susceptible to being overthrown. Firms like CLS Strategies, along with the complicit Silicon Valley social media monopolies, function as indispensable tools of capitalist-imperialism in the age of profilicity. At a time when identity is constructed through the curation of profiles mediated by second-order observation and general peer powered social validation feedback loops, the ability to manipulate general peers amounts to the unprecedented capacity of capital and the state to control what people think. Additionally, the abstract character of this general peer conceals the manipulation itself. People construct their profile identities on the basis of how they would like to be seen as being seen, but the general peer doing the seeing has its eyes filtered through parental control imperialist glasses. How an event will be seen is determined by them – fake accounts will be made and boosted, dissenting accounts will be censored. This condition is depicted well in an old Soviet joke where a Russian and an American diplomat meet: the American asks “what are you here for,” the Russian replies “to learn about American propaganda techniques,” the American says, “what propaganda,” and the Russian replies “exactly.” Censorship is an integral component working in conjunction with controlling what is seen through the usage of bots and other forms of boosting pro-establishment narratives. On all major social media platforms (yes, even on Elon Musk’s so-called free speech loving ‘X’), those accounts with substantial following that challenge the imperialist narrative on key issues are often outright banned.[2] It is a very interestingly functioning tech-polis, where certain speakers are given a microphone to speak over others, others are muted or lowered to a virtually inaudible volume, while others are poof, disappeared completely. The Institute I work for is not unacquainted with these censorship tactics. Seven of our tiktok accounts, the platform we received hundreds of thousands of followers and millions of views in, have been outright banned. As Edward Smith, Noah Khrachvik, and myself have previously noted, "Those who keep our people misinformed and ignorant, who have made their life’s purpose to attack truth-tellers, do so under the insidiously categorized guise of ‘combating misinformation.’ In their topsy-turvy invented reality, as Michael Parenti called it, they posit themselves as the champions of truth and free speech—a paradox as laughable as a vegan butcher…" [In the capitalist-imperialist mode of life], the freedom of speech and media is, therefore, actually the freedom of pro-capitalist speech and media. V. I. Lenin’s description of the media in capitalist society rings truer than ever in the 2020s, it is dominated by an “atmosphere of lies and deception in the name of the ‘freedom and equality’ of capital, equality of the starved and the overfed.” Any absolute statements about the freedom of the press must be followed by the Leninist question: “freedom of the press… for which class?” The capitalist media’s freedom to deceive the masses in their defense of the existing order is in contradiction to the masses’ interests in searching for and publicizing the truth. The power to control the flow of ideas through these various means makes social media, as the dominant (or, at least, one of the dominant) ideological terrains of our day, virtually (pun intended) unmatched. What Should Communists Do? Some on the communist left often denigrate the role of social media work. ‘It’s just online, it has no bearing in reality,’ is a frequently expressed sentiment. Sometimes online ideological work is contrasted dis-favorably to protesting in the streets. Those in the streets are said to be actually doing something, while those who are online are not. There is a rational kernel to this overall incorrect sentiment. It is true that the anti-social characteristics of the ‘identity socialists’ (as I call them in The Purity Fetish), those which spend all their days online starting twitter beefs and splits, calls for a spiritual rekindling with reality. They must ‘touch grass,’ as the expression goes. But it is incorrect, on this basis, to denigrate online work as a whole, or to consider it ‘unreal’ in relationship to protests. Social media has, as I argued previously, developed itself into one of the most important ideological terrains of our day. It is a field where, as Gramsci would say, the war of position must be waged. No matter how much censorship, shadow banning, and manipulation occurs in this ideological field, it is still one of the most important places communists must participate in, waging the fight for the hearts and minds of the people. To ignore online work today is the equivalent of the French revolutionaries ignoring the institution of the church in their struggles against feudal absolutism. There is a key difference here, of course. Whereas the church in its heyday as the dominant ideological apparatus had to be fought from without, today social media, as the dominant ideological terrain, presents an internal field of struggle. The war of position on social media, necessary though it might be, is, of course, not sufficient. If every twitter (excuse me, ‘X’) account followed the Midwestern Marx Institute, or any other organization on the communist left, that does not mean we are anywhere near to grabbing power. Real, in-life organizing cannot be avoided. Organizing in your workplaces and communities continues to be the most important thing one can do. It is that baseline work that Silicon Valley cannot ‘ban’ you from. To wage a successful war of positions on social media requires mediums through which the people convinced to our side online can get involved in organizing in their communities. People must be ‘shuffled’ from simply agreeing with these ideas online to helping build organizations on the ground – to building working class, counterhegemonic institutions. The war of positions online must be conjoined with preparing the material and institutional foundations (i.e., parties and mass organizations) for the war of maneuver on the ground. Of course, just because these organizations would be ‘on the ground’ does not permit them to avoid the war of positions online. Online War of Positions What is the best way to wage the war of positions online? Is condemning everyone we don’t perfectly agree with as being whatever buzzword is popular the way to go? Clearly, this purity fetish mode of engagement, as I have argued before, leaves you surrounded only by those whom you already agree with. You reduce the pedagogic and recruiting tasks of the communist to someone who just sings to the choir. The battle of ideas, the war of positions, is fundamentally rooted in convincing. You cannot shame someone into agreeing with you. Talking down to working people with middle class patronizing attitudes is quite literally the opposite of what a successful war of positions looks like. You do not want the HR or DEI managerial departments to be the first thing someone thinks of when they speak to you. Quite the opposite. We live under a moribund capitalist mode of life. That will be reflected in some of the spontaneous common-sense worldviews of the people this mode of life produces. We must be patient and flexible, not snappy and rigid. Our goal is to convince. To win the hearts and minds of people. The first thing which must be recognized, then, is that any ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach will fail. The starting point (i.e., the spontaneous worldview) people have differs – often more or less depending on certain regional, generational, and other differences. We must take these into account in all conversations. But how should we start? What should we look for? Well, Gramsci is here perhaps our most important teacher. If I want to get from A to B, I cannot simply teleport directly from A to B. Maybe the technology will come around one day that allows me to do so. For now, if I want to get from A to B, I need to find a point of contact, a road, or series of roads, that when connected in my passage allows me to arrive to my destination. The process of convincing is no different. If there is no point of contact, there can be no ‘winning over’ of someone to our side. The process of ‘winning over,’ like the process of getting from A to B, is a voyage, an undertaking, or, in short, a process. It does not happen instantaneously. It takes time. In order for this process to begin, the point of contact must be found. Every spontaneous worldview the masses hold, deeply though they might be entrenched in various forms of bourgeois ideology, must nonetheless contain some rational kernels, ‘points of contact’ we can locate and start the voyage through. This is, for Gramsci, the essence of the war of positions. The task for communists, for the intellectual leadership of the working class movement, is finding, in the incoherent, ambiguous and spontaneous common-sense understandings and feelings of the masses, those rational kernels which can be disarticulated from their current worldview, and rearticulated towards Marxism. (See my chapter with J.P. Reed in the Elgars anthology on Gramsci for more). Concretely, how does this look? Well, for instance, in the U.S., the vast majority of people agree with the values of the Declaration of Independence. However, the values of life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, right to revolution, etc., have been unrealized for the mass of people under the dominant order. How can these egalitarian and emancipatory values be actualized under a system that produces, on the one hand, enormous wealth controlled by the few, and on the other, immense misery, debt, and oppression for the many? It is impossible. The universal ideals of the capitalist class have always been limited to their class – it has never been, from the start, anything more than the liberty of capital to exploit, and the sham ‘democracy’ of the capitalists to pick the political puppets that rule over the mass of people. This is why, as I have noted before, "In the face of growing inequalities and disparities, [in the 1820s and 30s] thinkers like Langdon Byllesby, Cornelius Blatchley, William Maclure, Thomas Skidmore and others, developed the Jeffersonian 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 [can only] be carried forth today by socialists and communists." So, here we have an example of a point of contact, a rational kernel, within our people’s common sense that can, and has historically been attempted to be, disarticulated from its bourgeois worldview origins, and rearticulated towards various socialist ones. This is an example that has been used since the 1820s. But, how, in the age of profilicity, can we specifically do this through social media? The essential elements remain the same. Find the individuals and institutions which play the most influential roles in shaping the common sense of various sections of the American masses. Within the worldviews they craft, find the rational kernels, the points of contact, you can establish a common ground with in discussions with working class viewers and readers of these ideologues. Always start the discussions with those points of contact – the ideas within their worldviews that can be dislocated from the worldview itself and used as a pathway for the new outlook. These rational kernels, of course, will differ with different sources. For instance, some weeks ago I commented on a video from Andrew Tate, the man that was once the most viral person on the internet. This is someone which holds great ideological influence in our societies, specifically in the youth, which embodies the future of any revolutionary project. The video I comment on is one where Tate describes wage labor as a form of wage slavery. This is, for Marxists, clearly a point of contact, a ‘rational kernel’ within the Tateian worldview. On the basis of this point of contact, I develop upon the often politically ambiguous history of the critique of wage slavery (for instance, while being a pillar of the socialist critique of capitalism, it was also a central component of the southern planter’s defense of chattel slavery, which they held was less evil and nefarious than wage slavery). Then, on the basis of the agreement with Tate of the slavish character of wage labor, I develop a critique of how this understanding is stifled by the Tateian worldview that had just formulated it. For Tate, the critique of wage slavery and the ‘matrix’ is not the basis for a collective emancipatory project. It is not rooted in a scientific, Marxist understanding of capitalist political economy. Hence, it is completely unaware of the internal laws of motion and contradictions which push the system towards its own destruction. He is unaware of the proletariat’s role as the gravedigger of the mode of life that produced them as a class. Perhaps it is less of a question of ignorance on Tate’s part, and more one of an awareness of his class interests as a part of the (often mocked) new bourgeoisie. Either way, the result is the same, a stifled understanding of that phenomenon we have gravitated to as a ‘point of contact,’ and an individualized formulation of ‘escaping the matrix’ through getting rich yourself (a gig that through ‘Hustlers University’ he greatly profits from). Tate did not create this form of radical recuperation, and neither is he the only one that preaches it today. It is central to what Dubois called the American Assumption, the notion that through hard work one can lift themselves up and become rich. The difference is that in the 19th and 20th century this ideology occurred within the confines of a direct apologetics of US capitalism. Post-1848 capitalism enters a distinctly reactionary stage, where even the veneer of progressivism that dominated the previous period is undone. In this post-1848 world, As Georg Lukács long ago noted, the defense of capitalism has to, in one form or another, present itself as an “indirect apologetics”. The superficial and culturalist critique of an often misidentified ‘capitalism’ (or matrix) has become an essential component for acquiescence to the system the critique takes as its object of critique. What has occurred in the Tate commentary is precisely what Gramsci expects of us in the war of positions. We located the rational kernel and, on the basis of a superior understanding of the phenomenon, dislocated it from the Tateian worldview and towards a Marxist one. In the process we showed the role Tate plays as a radical recuperador for the ‘matrix’ he, in a very sophist-like manner, charges people to help ‘escape’. After this video came out hordes of the liberals who think a hammer and sickle in their social media bios makes them communists came after us for ‘platforming’ Tate and lending credence to his ideas. This criticism, of course, is devoid of any semblance of the Marxist understanding of the war of positions. Neither the convincing of Tate himself, nor the sharing of his ideas, were the purpose of the video. What the video achieves (or at least attempts to), is quite literally the opposite – to be as efficient as possible in bringing people away from Tate and towards Marxism. One can argue that I failed in this enterprise, that a better job could have been done. But not deny, however, that this is the best route for combatting ideological opponents. It produces a double whammy, a removal of a follower to your opponent and an addition of a follower to your revolutionary project. This is the same double effect the black proletariat’s general strike during the Civil War had (removing the productive base of the Southern economy while adding soldiered, spies, and workers to the Northern forces), allowing them to win the battle for the forces of human liberation. Tate is far from being the only individual we ought to be doing this with. At the Institute, every major pundit of the bourgeoisie, even those who present themselves as ‘anti-establishment’ and ‘anti-Deep state’, receive this treatment. We have commented in like manner on figures all across the American bourgeois political spectrum, from David Packman to Ben Shapiro to Jordan Peterson. In each case we attempt, again, to find the point of contact (rational kernels) that can be dislocated from these worldviews and rearticulated towards Marxism. Engaging with these figures is also an excellent source for overcoming the algorithmic insularity that structures online spaces. People who wouldn’t encounter Marxist positions in their algorithms are opened to the possibility of this encounter when we discuss the ideologues that denizen their algorithms. People naturally want to make sense of the world around them. “All men by nature,” as Aristotle long ago noted, “desire to know.” No worldview is better capable of understanding the world, of helping people make sense of it, than Marxism. This is a task, therefore, which is often quite fruitful. That doesn’t mean, of course, that one doesn’t encounter zealots who religiously buy into these worldviews in dogmatic ways. But they are often the exception, especially amongst the youth. Most people are willing, if approached correctly, to accept the transition towards an outlook that helps them understand their surroundings a lot better – an outlook that, as the great Henry Winston teaches us, gives us vision even when our sight is lost. To succeed in this task requires getting our hands dirty; having the willingness to engage with some of the scummiest of the bourgeois ideologues in hopes, not of convincing them, but their working class listeners, that an alternative is not only possible, but necessary. This is the task at hand for communists willing to wage the war of positions on social media – one of the most important and influential ideological fields in the contemporary world. NOTES [1] My article on how this relationship of determination is not fatalistic: ‘Critique of the Misunderstanding Concerning Marx’s Base-Superstructure Spatial Metaphor’. [2] One of the ways to work around it is through mass reporting, such as we have seen over the last few months from the anti-genocide, pro-Palestine movement. Without a doubt these forces have won the information war – largely thanks to the flood of stomach-twisting videos telling the truth about the Israeli genocidal campaign against Gaza. Like the banks we were told were ‘too big to fail,’ these imperialist narrative-challenging images were too popular and widespread to censor. While Silicon Valley has definitely censored the leading voices speaking out for Palestine, they have not succeeded in censoring the millions of relatively smaller accounts who have taken it upon themselves to document the truth and expose the elite’s lies. Author Carlos L. Garrido is a Cuban American philosophy instructor at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. He is the director of the Midwestern Marx Institute and the author of The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism (2023), Marxism and the Dialectical Materialist Worldview (2022), and the forthcoming Hegel, Marxism, and Dialectics (2024). He has written for dozens of scholarly and popular publications around the world and runs various live-broadcast shows for the Midwestern Marx Institute YouTube. You can subscribe to his Philosophy in Crisis Substack HERE. Archives February 2024 A short note before we start. The paper below was presented on October 23rd, 2023, at the Autonomous University of Mexico City (UACM in Spanish), a school on the outskirts of the capital in one of the poorer regions of the country. I was asked to give an overview of the foundation of the American state, its structure, and my views on the upcoming 2024 elections. It kicked off the Congress on Interculturality, Juridical Pluralism, Human Rights and Critique of Law, hosted by the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM in Spanish). The presentation could not have gone any better. The auditorium was filled with workers and indigenous people. The level of class consciousness was astounding. While presenting most heads nodded in agreement, something quite hard to imagine happening in the US with a lecture so critical of American capitalist-imperialism. All the questions were terrific, most of which expressed a curiosity as to what the American people felt about x or y event. It was clear to me that they understood very well the difference between the American people and the imperialist state which wrongly acts in their name. In replying to one of the questions on the on-going genocide of the Palestinians I almost found myself in tears, both because of the gravity of the topic I was discussing, but also because of the heartfelt reactions I saw from the crowd. I did not have a doubt that most people in that room sympathized with the Palestinian plight, seeing in it their own struggles against capitalist-imperialism. "Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto" - Terence. The American Political System and the 2024 ElectionsThe United States was founded out of an intense class struggle against British colonialism. It produced the first anti-colonial revolution in the hemisphere, serving as an inspiration for virtually all other bourgeois revolutions in the late 18th and 19th century. The revolution, and the subsequent contradictions which ensue after its success, were a reflection of the contradictions within the colonists themselves, many of which were temporarily placed aside to coalesce forces against the principal contradiction of British colonialism. While it was a historically progressive bourgeois revolution, a lot of the fighting was done by the popular classes, folks who made their livings as carpenters, blacksmiths, shoemakers, etc. These popular classes were driven to action, not just by the immediacy of their deteriorating situation, but by their democratic desires for popular sovereignty and a democratic state controlled by the people as a whole. These desires, while given lip-service throughout American history, have never been actualized. The American state, like every other state in human history, has been a tool for protecting the interests of the economically dominant class. The class in whose hands control over the means of production is, also controls the politics, judicature, media, and all other social institutions, shaping their central function to the smooth reproduction of the existing state of affairs. That the American state has warped itself into being the bulwark of reaction and counterrevolutionary struggles, does not mean that its founding revolution did not have a historically progressive kernel. It was the first state in history to proclaim its freedom with appeals to a universal humanity, where all are created equal and endowed with the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. These rights, when oppressed by a government, offer the citizens not only the right, but the duty, to overthrow such a government. It brought into being a successful struggle against feudal absolutisms, radically transforming the whole mode of life – its economic, political, social, and juridical dimensions. It ushered in the separation of church and state; a republican state; public education; the elimination of laws of entail that allowed the monopolization of wealth within a select few families; the elimination of primogeniture; it expropriated the lands of the king and Tories, redividing them on a significantly more equitable basis; it made efforts to abolish indentured servitude, and limited African slavery to the southern states; and, by removing the feudal fetters to the development of the productive forces, it stimulated the onslaught of capitalism, moving history forward. It was, in general, a step forward in universal history. In many of the European states, teachers in the late 18th century could be blackballed from the academy if they taught the Declaration of Independence. The democratizing potential, although never fully realized, was evident to the elite across Europe at its time. Even well into the 20th century the radicalism of the Declaration of Independence was still being appealed to, by, for example, Fidel Castro in History Will Absolve Me, and Ho Chi Minh, in the Vietnamese Declaration of Independence. Thomas Jefferson, himself a figure riddled by contradictions, condemned the concentration of wealth within a few hands. He felt that the revolution was threatened by a small aristocracy of wealth that was in constant contrast with the misery of the many. For this, he proposed various measures for preventing such grotesque wealth inequality – some of these measures, such as progressive taxation, are still being fought for by social democrats today. In 1779, the Virginia Gazzette, caught up in the democratic fervor of the revolution, made a call for what today we would describe as the nationalization of property put under administration by the people for the people. It urged that we must “take the whole trade of the continent out of the hands of individuals and let it be carried on for the benefit of the public by persons authorized by the legislature under stated but liberal salaries.” In 1776 Connecticut adopted price-fixing legislation to combat the profiteering of the capitalists, whom they described as the “great pests of society, who prefer their own private gain to the interest and safety of their country.” It is not hard to see the danger that this general democratic fervor presented for the bourgeois order that ushered it in – an order that would create its own forms of tyrannical absolutisms rooted in the modernized form the master/slave relation takes with the capitalist and the worker. The American elite was not oblivious to this. While the progressive elements favored a more expansive democratization of society, other segments fought vehemently against it. Their rejections of feudal absolutisms were less based on a democratic fervor than on the limitations these presented for their class interests. The embryonic development of the American state is a product of these contradictions, of the compromises each faction of the revolutionaries took to usher in a new state. The revolution would go on to produce a constitutional federal republic with a presidential system. Taking its cues from John Locke, Montesquieu, and other bourgeois political philosophers, the US constitution would enshrine the separation of powers between three branches of government destined to check each other and sustain the balance of power between them. The executive branch is composed of the President which is the head of state, leader of the federal government, and Commander in Chief of the United States armed forces. While there are presidential elections, the voters elect the president only indirectly, as it is ultimately the electoral college that picks the president. Within the executive branch you also have the Vice-President who becomes president if the President is unable to serve, and who presides over the U.S. Senate and breaks ties in Senate votes, and the Cabinet advisors to the president, which include the vice president, heads of executive departments, and other high-ranking government officials nominated by the president and approved by the Senate. The legislative branch is composed of a bicameral congress that drafts proposed laws, confirms or rejects presidential nominations for heads of federal agencies, federal judges, and the supreme court, and has authority to declare war. The senate, known also as the upper chamber, is composed of 100 members, two for each state. Originally, the senators were selected by the state legislators. This would change with the 17th amendment, ratified in 1913, where senators would be directly elected by the people. Once elected, senators stay in power for 6 years. The House of Representatives, known as the lower chamber, is dictated by the proportion of the population of each state, with small states like Wyoming having 1 and large states like California having 53. The House has the power to initiate all revenue bills, impeach federal officers, and elect the president if no candidate receives a majority of votes in the Electoral College. They are in power for 2 years once elected. Both senators and house members are not subject to term limits. There are currently around 8 people who have been in congress for more than 40 years, with Iowa’s Chuck Grassley at the lead with 48 years in power. Lastly there is the judicial branch, which is composed of the Supreme Court and other federal courts. Its task is to interpret the meaning of laws, apply the laws to individual cases, and decide if laws violate the Constitution. Federal judges are selected by the president, and, if approved by the senate, can serve for life, without any term limits. The US constitution also includes the Bill of Rights, the first ten amendments of the document. The Bill of Rights was produced as a compromise between the federalists and the anti-federalists, who were skeptical of governmental power and wished to guarantee individual freedoms within the constitution. Amongst these are the rights to free speech, religious freedom, media and assemblage, the rights to bear arms, the prohibition of soldiers quartering private dwellings in peace time, the protection against unreasonable search and seizure, the right to a grand-jury indictment for serious offenses, protecting against double jeopardy in criminal cases, the prohibition of compelling testimony by a person against himself, the rights of the accused to a speedy trial, an impartial jury, and guarantees to the right of legal counsel and to the obtaining of witnesses in his favor, the prohibition of excessive bail and cruel and unusual punishment, and the reserving to the states and people any powers not delegated to the federal government. While the American state was shaped with an eye to the rejection of feudal absolutism, there was another class feared by a good number of the founders: working people. Most founders deeply distrusted the people, the tyranny of the majority as De Tocqueville would say. In many ways, the priority of the state they established was not democracy – as today’s narrative urges – but the liberty of capital. Like Locke in the Second Treatise of Government, the American constitution is a document deeply embedded in a tradition that holds that the government’s central purpose is the protection of property and propertied individuals. Instead of Lincoln’s assertion of a government of, by, and for the people, what the US state has actually produced is a government of, by, and for capital, or, extending Lincoln’s understanding of people, government of, by, and for people with capital. This is clearly seen in James Madison’s Federalist 10, where he provides a lesson in divide et impera. Discussing the topic of factions, he notes that the most common and dangerous forms of factions are those rooted on the “unequal distribution of property.” To prevent a faction of the majority/people that can threaten the order of the rich elite, it is necessary, Madison observed, to factionalize them as much as possible. As he argued: to prevent a majority faction from emerging: “you [must] take in a greater variety of parties and interests … make it less probable that a majority of the whole will have a common motive to invade the rights of other citizens [i.e., the rich]; or if such a common motive exists, it will be more difficult for all who feel it to discover their own strength, and to act in unison with each other.” The struggle to overcome the divisions the elite thrust on the people has been at the heart of class struggles in the US. The Civil War, in some ways the second American revolution, overthrew the institution of slavery and the South’s cotton kingdom. It was, as W. E. B. Dubois shows in Black Reconstruction, a revolution of the black or enslaved proletariat, who won the war through a general strike where millions of black workers fled to enemy lines in the North – providing the North with new soldiers, spies, workers, and denying the South their productive base. For a period of less than a decade the Northern army would defend what Dubois called a dictatorship of the working class in the South (for my analysis of the importance of Dubois’s Black Reconstruction as a foundational text of American Marxism see HERE). This will end with the counterrevolution of property in 1876, where a fascist order would take hold in the South, making Jim Crow and unfettered Lynching the order of the day. This apartheid order would be overthrown, de jure, in 1964 with the Civil Rights act, the product of the political revolution Martin Luther King Jr. led. In each of these cases, the advancement of American society was premised on the overthrowing of the anti-democratic and factionalist aspects of the state’s founding – always with an eye to fulfilling the genuinely democratic and egalitarian aspirations of the progressive faction of the founders. In some ways, the class and ideological contradictions at the founding of the state have merely taken new forms in accordance with new contexts. Political scientists often talk about the founder’s anti-democratic sentiments as a form of ‘distrust of the people.’ But is it? Is it trust that is lacking? Or is it the awareness that the business interests they upheld clashed with the interests of the vast majority of propertyless working people? This was the view that many radical historians of the early 20th century like J. Allen Smith, Charles A. Beard, Richard Franklin Pettigrew and others took, lambasting the anti-democratic character of the constitution. However, even superficial understandings of democracy, such as those that reduce it to elections and each person having equal power with their vote, would come to see the deeply anti-democratic character of the constitution the American state is based on. The bourgeois political theorist Robert Dahl, for instance, displays a variety of undemocratic aspects of the American constitution in his book, How Democratic is the American Constitution. He notes how at the time of writing, the antifederalists were already calling the constitution an “aristocratic document calculated to create an undemocratic government benefiting the few at the expense of the many.” While Dahl was himself a supporter of the constitution (and the status quo in general), he would nonetheless point to the following various areas where the constitution was deeply undemocratic. Some of these are a result, Dahl and others argue, of ‘compromises’ given to the small slave-holding states that were needed to establish a central government. 1- The Constitution defended slavery, considering slaves three-fifths of a person. 2- There were limitations to suffrage. At first, only white men with property could vote. It was not until 1856 that all states in the union had removed property qualifications for white men voting. In 1870, following the victory of the North in the Civil War, the 15th amendment prohibits the denial of voting rights on the basis of race. In 1920, following the women’s suffrage movement, the denial of voting rights on the basis of sex is prohibited. Lastly, in 1964, following the success of the Civil Rights political revolution, the 24th amendment prohibits the conditioning of the right to vote in federal elections on payment of a poll tax or other types of tax – measures which were used to disenfranchise African American voters in the era of Jim Crow segregation. 3- Each state, regardless of size, gets 2 senators. Considering that the president is elected, not directly by the voters, but by the electoral college, a number of electors proportional to the state’s representation in congress (and hence, not to their population), this means that one can win the popular vote and lose the election. In fact, in our century, the presidencies of George W. Bush and Donald Trump occurred after both lost the popular vote but won in the electoral college. An individual vote in Wyoming, for instance, is 3.6 times more influential – because of the 2 senators’ system – than one in California. 4- Until the passage of the 17th amendment in 1913, the senate was not elected by the people, but by state legislators. 5- Unelected judges who are in power for life have the power to reject the passage of any legislation – popular though it may be – simply by calling it ‘unconstitutional’. At the most basic structural level, it is evident how deeply anti-democratic the Constitution was, and how its democratizing over time has been the product – not of the good will of the rulers of the people – but of people’s struggles. However, democracy is not reducible to elections. Elections are but one mean, and surely not the only one, through which democracy can be realized. Democracy, in its etymological sense, simply means that common people (the demos) are in power (kratos). Democracy is when power is in the hands of common people. The factor fettering real democracy the most is omitted from Dahl's discussion. Let me ask you all a question. If the richest companies in the country give tens of millions of dollars to the campaigns of political candidates, ensuring that if those candidates win, an agenda friendly to their business will be passed, what would one call this other than corruption? Well, in the US it is perfectly legal and normalized, and it goes by the name of 'lobbying.' In the US, the candidate that raises the most money is more than 90% likely to win. Considering that most of the money raised comes from big capital and the wealthiest individuals, it is easy to track a candidate's policies in office to the donors that ensured that their campaign had enough money to win. In America, the dollar is the real voter. It is a 'money democracy,' a democracy for the rich, the insignificant minority (as Lenin would say). This isn't just some partisan Marxist analysis saying this, regular liberal political scientists have shown, statistically, how the will of the people is virtually irrelevant in policy outcomes. The only will which they could correlate to policies taken and those rejected by politicians was the will of the elite, of the richest in the country. As Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page show, In the United States, our findings indicate, the majority does not rule—at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes. When a majority of citizens disagree with economic elites or with organized interests, they generally lose. Moreover, because of the strong status quo bias built into the U.S. political system, even when fairly large majorities of Americans favor policy change, they generally do not get it. How can a political system where the people have virtually no control over policies, while the elite have virtually all control over it, be called a democracy? Isn’t it more accurate to say, as Manuel Lopez Obrador recently said, that the US is an oligarchy with the façade of being a democracy? It is natural that the American people, in the face of their powerlessness to affect policy change, have demonstrated some of the lowest voter turnouts in the so-called developed world. In presidential elections 40% of the population eligible to vote does not vote, and in local elections this number goes up to 73%. Only 20% of them approve of what congress does, and more than 60% of them have expressed dissatisfaction with the two-party system and an openness to third parties. Amongst the younger generations, around 70% of them have said they would vote for a socialist party. In general, more than 90% of the American people distrust the media, almost all of it which is owned by a handful of companies. The same companies that fund the campaigns of their political puppets are the ones that control what we watch in the media, in movies and shows, they control what we eat, when we go to war and who with, they own all the land, factories and banks, they poison our food, get us addicted with pills, keep us enslaved with debt, and always, and I mean always, make a killing out of killing. They are profiteers of death. Subject to only one goal and God, Capital and its accumulation. The American people today are experiencing, for the first time in the nation’s history, generations which will have a lower living standard than their parents. The average American is around 60,000 dollars in debt, most of which was acquired either because they wanted to get a university education, or because they got sick and lacked insurance or were underinsured, or simply because they wanted to have a home for their families. Basic necessities for human life, things like education, health care, housing, etc., are not only not guaranteed for most Americans, but their struggle to attain these things are often the source of the crippling debt they deal with for most of their lives, functioning as an ever-present engine of stress, trauma, and slow forms of death. More than 60% of Americans are a lost paycheck away from joining the 600,000 homeless wandering around in a country with 33 times as many empty homes as homeless people. The American people today are impoverished, indebted, and powerless in the face of the systemic policies that have placed them in these conditions which intensify and worsen by the day. It is difficult to imagine that things could continue in this way for much longer. As the people suffer at home, all the politicians from both parties have to offer is more war, more invasions and imperialist meddling in other countries’ affairs. More than a third of the world is currently under sanction by the US, often done in the name of democracy and human rights. These are things that in the US itself the people don’t experience. Not only is democracy absent, as we have shown, but even the individual rights enshrined into our bourgeois constitution are stripped once they inconvenience the status quo and those in power. Where was, for instance, the right of free speech and press for Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, and others who’ve been condemned by the US for exposing the crimes of its leaders and state institutions? Where is the right to free speech and media for the hundreds of journalists and outlets censored during the beginning of the proxy war against Russia? Or those that have been censored recently for speaking out against the Israeli genocide of the Palestinian people? The Institute I work for, for instance, has had 7 of its social media accounts banned, these where accounts where we would reach tens of millions of people weekly with an anti-imperialist message. There are many others like us who suffer the stripping of their constitutional rights as soon as they challenge the narrative of the elite, especially on affairs pertaining to its imperial ambitions. In general, this is the historical and contemporary panorama grounding the upcoming 2024 elections. I would like to run through 5 central candidates before I wrap up this presentation. Leading in the polls by significant percentages is former president Donald Trump, someone whose success is premised on passing himself off as a populist people’s candidate who fights the deep state (the national security state) and who will drain the swamp and stop involving us in wars. He’s been able to pick up a significant base of discontented working people thanks to his hollow anti-elite discourse. In reality, of course, he was – like all the others – simply a puppet of the rich, whom he gave great tax breaks too at the beginning of his term. While he did normalize relations with the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea, Trump intensified the hybrid warfare against Cuba, Venezuela, and Iran, where he murdered their beloved general Qasem Soleimani (scaring the world for a while with the potential of a third world war), he intensified the war against China that started with Obama’s pivot to Asia and was, in general, as much of a Warhawk as anyone else in the deep state he, like a good sophist, claimed to oppose. Trump announced his 2024 candidacy by postulating himself as the peace candidate, opposing the US and NATO’s proxy war against Russia. However, within just a couple of months, this same so-called peace candidate is saying that he will invade Mexico if he wins. The reason? The drug and crime epidemic in the US. Invading Mexico for a drug epidemic that has been proven to be manufactured by the American pharmaceutical-industrial complex in collaboration with the government, universities, doctors, and NGO’s is as stupid as invading Iraq because CIA trained Saudis blew up the World Trade Center. But hey, stupid is as stupid does. The other major candidate in 2024 is decrepit Joe Biden. Biden and the democrats’ whole strategy is rooted in postulating themselves as less evil than the republicans: they might be horrible, but at least – so the myth goes – they aren’t worse than the republicans. For the last three years, Biden has not fulfilled any of his campaign promises. While calling himself the most pro union president in history, he squashed the rail workers democratically chosen right to strike for a better contract, illegalizing the worker’s ability to fight for some days off to spend time with their families. He’s done virtually nothing to improve the problems of student debt, health care or environmental issues. On the contrary, by blowing up the Nordstream pipeline, as investigative journalist Seymour Hersh showed, Biden’s administration led to the most catastrophic act of environmental and economic terrorism in human history. Biden’s hawkishness does not end with the role he’s played in escalating the world towards nuclear Armageddon in the proxy war against Russia. He’s been as much an enemy of the Cuban, Iranian, Nicaraguan, Chinese, and Venezuelan people as the administration before him. Currently, he is using Kenya to invade Haiti, and is pledging – like everyone else in American politics – unflinching support for Israel’s genocidal war against the colonized people of Palestine. This party fearmongers Americans into voting for them by claiming that they are defending democracy from Trump’s fascist threat. But can a party that sends hundreds of billions to nazis in Ukraine, a party that supports the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians, a party that uses the state to repress peace activists and journalists exposing the lies of empire, that fights to prevent third parties from being on state ballots, a party that has outlawed debates for the party’s presidential nomination, and that has ensured that certain states can only vote for the incumbent, can such a party really be called the best vehicle we have to fight fascism? Wouldn’t it be the case that, on the contrary, this party – and the dialectical interdependency it is in with the republicans – is itself a part of the growing threat (and presence) of fascism we are witnessing, both in the US and abroad? The next candidate of prominence is Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the nephew of former president John F. Kennedy, who many on the left – following the work of Oliver Stone and others – think was killed by the security state for his lack of compliance to empire’s irrational wishes. RFK started the campaign in the Democratic Party, he has since left to run as an independent. RFK, like Trump, posits himself as an anti-establishment, anti-security state, anti-Big Pharma candidate. He’s been an ardent critic of the US narrative surrounding the war in Ukraine and the pandemic. However, he is perhaps more hawkish than the rest when it comes to the Israeli genocide of the Palestinians and has worked closely with some of the most fascistic of the Zionist voices in the US. Despite the areas where RFK is in full alignment with the elite, his run as an independent is a positive progressive development that, if successful in breaking some of the key parameters (such as 5% of the vote for federal funding and 15% of the vote for being on the debate stage with the other two parties), can help undermine the two-party duopoly that controls the US political spectacle. While the democratic party, as Assange showed, cheated Bernie Sanders in 2016, and then again in 2020, the manipulation of democratic processes within the party has been more explicit with this election. RFK Jr. and other challengers of Biden within the party were not allowed to debate the incumbent, and RFK, when running as a democrat, was denied the usual access to the secret service protection. The significance of the absence of security is intensified by the apparent assassination attempt on RFK’s life that occurred mid-September. The fourth most noteworthy candidate is Dr. Cornel West, perhaps the most notable American philosopher of the century, deeply rooted in the tradition of American pragmatism, the black freedom movement, and revolutionary socialist Christianity. Dr. West is, for those on the US left, almost a national treasure. However, many on the left, while appreciating West’s work and life-long commitment to working and oppressed people, have fallen for the Democratic Party propaganda that labels West a ‘spoiler’ candidate that will only lead to the election of Trump and the destruction of so-called American democracy. Since his announcement the reactions of the US left have been mixed. First, some criticized him for running with the small People’s Party, a break off party from the 2016 Bernie movement that had ballot access only in a couple of states and that was led by people whom the left considered reprehensible. Then West switched to the Green Party, an eco-socialist party that the anti-Peoples Party left was more satisfied with. After two months of dealing with Green Party politics, Dr. West has recently announced that he will be running, like RFK, as an independent. He made this choice because he preferred to engage directly with the people than to have to be mediated by the party politics of the Greens. Some on the left, however, have questioned the strategic value of this choice, since now he would have to achieve ballot access in all states – a process that is incredibly difficult as well as time and resource consuming. The Green Party at least already had ballot access in 17 states and had a whole team working on it for the other 33 states. Dr. West’s biggest challenge will not necessarily be his ideas or platform, but obtaining ballot access and building a movement for a radical transformative politics that lasts well beyond the 2024 election. While he has explicitly stated this as his aim, it seems very difficult to make this a reality without a party. The difficulties that the two-party duopoly has created for third party and independent candidates are formidable. Since each state has different parameters needed to meet ballot access, there is no copy-paste strategy that could be used, each state requires careful attention. This makes third party presidential runs extremely difficult. Additionally, most third parties do not have the experience, or access to, the resources that the uniparty has for campaigning. Since the campaign managers who do have this experience and technological expertise are blackballed from politics for working outside of the two parties, the current system has been incredibly effective in restricting third parties’ access to the technological tools of modern campaigns, putting them necessarily a few-steps behind the ruling parties. Perhaps West could break this spell by working with his new campaign manager Peter Daou, a former campaign staffer for the Democratic party who had a change of heart in 2020 and became a democratic socialist. However, most on the left have been more skeptical about Daou, considering his fierce establishment past, than those who have been cheerful about the campaigning experience he could bring to West’s run. (Note: since the presenting of this paper Daou is no longer West’s campaign manager). Finally, there is Claudia De La Cruz, running from the Marxist-Leninist Party for Socialism and Liberation. While policy-wise the platform would look great for anyone on the socialist left, the candidate and party do not (at least not yet) have the notoriety that makes Dr. West’s campaign hopeful for the radical left. The PSL has been able to double its votes in each of the last election cycles, which is a positive sign of growth. However, with Cornel being in the race outside of the duopoly, many are afraid that the campaign of West and Claudia will split the vote of the socialist left. Since they share, ideologically, a lot more points of commonality than those of difference, it would seem intuitive that some effort at uniting both campaigns in a unity ticket ought to be sought. However, considering West’s leave from the Greens and the reasons for it, and considering the PSL’s announcement well after Cornel had launched his campaign, it seems unlikely that this unity effort will flourish. All in all, if you were betting money on it today, you’d be a fool to not bet on Trump’s victory in 2024. Especially since, following the security state’s lawfare against Trump, he has a renewed source of appeal to show his anti-deep state credentials to his masses. Everything the democrats have done to attack Trump has actually emboldened him and his base. It has fed his fake anti-establishment rhetoric, giving apparent substance to his claim that he will drain the swamp and abolish the deep state. Regardless, whether it’s Trump’s irrational sophism or Biden’s decrepit sophism that wins, both are appropriate metaphorical embodiments of the state the US empire vacillates around. It is unlikely that any major transformational politics will arise out of the 2024 election. What is likely, however, is that it will serve as a moment, in a long spree of others, pointing the masses towards the necessity of a radical transformation in their mode of life. If they genuinely want an order of the people, by the people, for the people (as Lincoln would say), then the current form of life, destined to reproduce the social relations which keep the capitalist class dominant, will have to be overturned. Only socialism can actualize the democratic and egalitarian rational kernel of the progressive faction of the founders. Author: Carlos L. Garrido is a Cuban American philosophy instructor at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. He is the director of the Midwestern Marx Institute and the author of The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism (2023), Marxism and the Dialectical Materialist Worldview (2022), and the forthcoming Hegel, Marxism, and Dialectics (2024). He has written for dozens of scholarly and popular publications around the world and runs various live-broadcast shows for the Midwestern Marx Institute YouTube. You can subscribe to his Philosophy in Crisis Substack HERE. Archives January 2024 1/21/2024 Five of Lenin’s Insights That Are More Pertinent Than Ever. By: Carlos L. GarridoRead Now
Today we mourn a hundred years since the physical death of one of our dearest comrades, Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, known to us as Lenin. It would be foolish, however, to think that his physical death meant the death of his ideas. Today, after a hundred years, Lenin’s ideas are as indispensable as ever. “They are mistaken when they think that his death is the end of his ideas”. This was told to us by Fidel Castro upon the death of Che Guevara, but it applies with equal accuracy to Lenin’s death. Lenin was never, as the West reduces him to, simply the man of practice who ‘applied’ what Marx and Engels wrote. To be sure, in terms of revolutionary practice and the development of the tactics for class struggle in the era of imperialism, there is a particle of truth to this understanding. Few have understood the class struggle, and how to advance it, better than Lenin. Few have been so in tune with the Marxist worldview, so utterly devoid of dogmas and the purity fetish, as to understanding the dialectics of socialism in its utmost profundity. Lenin, whether pre or post conquest of power, was a man who excelled in using the Marxist outlook as a guide to action, as the greatest tool and best working weapon, as Engels described it, for the masses to change (and not just interpret) the world. Whether in the creative development of the vanguard party of a new type in the era of ultimate tzarist repression, where organizing work had to take a clandestine underground form with professional revolutionaries (which has always been misinterpreted in the West as a top-down elitist party), or in his understanding of the role of the peasantry in the revolutionary struggle, or in his development of the New Economic Policy during the first period of socialist construction, Lenin’s practice indubitably applied and creatively developed upon the work of Marx and Engels. However, Lenin as a theoretician (which is dialectically embedded with the previous Lenin) is often overlooked, especially in the chauvinistic West which sees Europe as the bearers of ‘theory’ and the East as the appliers of it in ‘practice’. Lukacs is still right in telling us that “Lenin is the greatest thinker to have been produced by the revolutionary working-class movement since Marx… the only theoretician equal to Marx.” On this centenary anniversary of his passing, here are five central developments of Lenin’s upon the Marxist tradition. 1) In the sphere of philosophy, he develops Marxist materialism in the context of the critique of Machist idealism and its spread in Russian Marxist spaces. This is done in his 1908 Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, a text which the postmodernized Western Marxists are nauseated by because of its outright defense of materialism and philosophical realism. Even some of those who have not fully condemned Lenin would like to create a split between the 1908 Lenin and the post-1914 one. While it is true that his 1914 philosophical studies in Switzerland, especially his study of Hegel, represents one of the greatest advancements in dialectical materialist literature, it ought to be added to the previous philosophical insights, not used to reject them. Frankly, what else can be expected from the Western Marxists, those who look everywhere and only see splits (early and mature Marx, Marx from Engels, pre and post 1914 Lenin, Lenin and post Lenin socialist construction in Russia, etc.)? Conjoined, therefore, with his philosophical developments to the Marxist worldview in 1908 are his 1914 philosophical notebooks. While Marx never got to provide us with the short ‘Dialectics’ text he promised, in his 1914 studies Lenin does give us ample work on a materialist interpretation of Hegel and the Marxist sublation of his dialectical worldview (which, as an upside-down materialism, holds the germ for the Marxist outlook), playing for future revolutionaries the role Marx’s ‘Dialectics’ presumably would have. 2) Lenin developed the Marxist understanding of capitalist political economy for the stage of imperialism and monopoly capital. Headway had already been made here by Marx in the third volume of Capital, but it is only with the carnage of the first world war that the imperialist stage of capitalism develops to a point of maturity where it could be understood as a stage of its own, a partially qualitative development within the capitalist mode of life as a whole. It is here where Lenin crystalizes this analysis, concretizing the previous work done by Hobson, Hilferding, and Bukharin. Lenin’s analysis of the dominance of finance capital in the age of imperialism has only become more indispensable as global financial institutions rose following the second world war. His prediction that imperialism will be conjoined with constant imperialist warfare (both of an inter-imperialist kind and of the kind that attempts to subjugate under imperial dominance nations outside of its sphere of influence), could not have been proven more prophetic in this last century, as US imperialism has waged hybrid warfare against virtually every country on the planet. Without the theoretical framework of Lenin’s analysis of imperialism, it is quite literally impossible to come anywhere near an accurate understanding of the world today. We have Lenin to thank for this clarity. 3) Conjoined with his insights on imperialism and the role of the peasantry in socialist revolutions, Lenin develops upon the anti-colonial works of Marx and Engels, who see national liberation struggles as forms of class struggles. Lenin sees the primacy these often take in the class struggles of imperialized nations against national oppression. All throughout the non-Western-European/Anglo world, these struggles have risen – sometimes securing their successes for decades to come (Cuba, China, Vietnam, Laos, DPRK, etc.) and sometimes being overthrown by dirty US/European imperialist tactics after the successful conquest of power (Burkina Faso, Congo, Guinea-Bissau, Ghana, etc.). The task Lenin bestowed on the proletariat of imperial nations, of connecting their class struggles to the rising anti-colonial and anti-imperialist movements, is as pertinent as ever. In the US, as it becomes more evident how the empire feeds off the republic (as Michael Parenti calls it), it is easier than ever to see the unity of interests between the anti-imperialist struggles of the global south and those we face at home. As the labor aristocracy (a concept Lenin develops from Engels and the American Marxist, Daniel de Leon) is further disconnecting itself from the rank-and-file, the task of showing American working people the ineptitude of their bourgeoisified leaders, and henceforth, the socialist and anti-imperialist way forward, becomes easier. In some ways, the leadership of Chris Smalls in the Amazon Labor Union, Shawn Fain in the UAW, and (to a lesser extent) Sean O’Brian in the Teamsters, signifies a militant development in the labor movement – a movement growing (to various degrees) in class, socialist, and internationalist consciousness along lines Lenin would be proud of. This would, of course, also be true of the millions of American working folks who’ve protested over the last three months against the Zionist genocide of the colonized, Palestinian people. 4) Lenin concretizes the Marxist understanding of the state and socialist construction. In The State and Revolution (as well as in other essays), Lenin compiles Marx and Engels’s insights on the state and on the dictatorship of the proletariat. No text had ever provided the Marxist view of the state so succinctly and elaborately as Lenin, using the works of Marx and Engels (and most importantly, the Marxist method), did. This remains a necessary read for all communists. With it, all the abstract usages of ‘democracy’, ‘freedom’, ‘dictatorship’ that the imperialist bourgeoisie uses to legitimize itself and attack its enemies are capable of being unpacked and ridiculed for what they are – empty abstractions. For whom is the democracy and freedom the bourgeoisie talks about? Is it for the people? NO! It is democracy for the rich, the insignificant minority! It is freedom of capital to exploit and accumulate! Is this not in direct opposition to a democracy and freedom of the people? Has it not been shown that the people, if they succeed in the conquest of power, must employ the method of ‘dictatorship’ against the counter-revolutionaries and imperialists to protect their revolutions? To protect actual popular and participatory democracy and freedom? Lenin’s refinement of Marx and Engels’s insights has allowed subsequent revolutionary struggles to understand the importance of overturning a state which is designed to reproduce the bourgeois mode of life for a working class state which can, as long as capitalist-imperialism exists, defend the people’s revolution from imperialist hybrid warfare and the counter-revolutionary collaborators which might still exists at home. Lenin’s understanding of the workers state must also take into account the adjustments that had to be made in the post-revolutionary period, when it became clear that emphasis had to be put on developing the productive forces and an efficient state that could guide the process of destroying the global inequalities between imperialist and imperialized nations. This project, as Lenin’s NEP, Stalin’s collectivization, and the experience of China’s reform and opening up shows, can occur through various means. Capital can be employed, under the leadership of a strong and disciplined communist party, in the task of developing the forces of production for socialism. As long as “political capital,” as Mao called it, is sustained in the hands of the people through their communist and workers parties, the process of capital expropriation can take a variety of different speeds and time. Lenin’s insights following the revolution helps us concretize the dialectic of political and economic capital already employed by Marx and Engels in the Manifesto, where they argued that: “The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organised as the ruling class; and to increase the total productive forces as rapidly as possible.” 5) Lastly, Lenin’s development of democratic centralism continues to be, in my estimation, the most effective organizational method (whether for a party or state) that has ever been employed. Its unity (when it is properly applied) of the democratic components of open debate and consultation with the efficiency of centralized and unified action, are pillars of socialist democracy. “Centralism based on democracy with democracy under the guidance of centralism,” as Deng Xiaoping said. Unity of action amongst those which fight for the masses of humanity is amongst the scariest dictums the ruling classes’ ears have heard. The ruling classes (not just the capitalist ones) survive from divide et impera (divide and conquer). They love factions and factionalization. Just take a look at James Madison’s Federalist 10, where factionalization of the masses is seen as the key to preventing their unified revolt against the elite on the basis of the property question. But Leninist unity of action is preceded by democratic consultation, by the debating, on the part of the party cadre (the most advanced detachment of the proletariat), of the question at hand. The democratic component has often been the hardest to achieve, limiting our ability to appreciate the effectiveness of the unity of action. Nonetheless, even as the old communist parties in the West seem to have mostly fallen down the route of tailing the social democrats and liberals, the need for a strong communist party, guided by the methods of democratic centralism, could not be more urgent for satisfying the crisis in the subjective factor we are experiencing in our time – a time objectively pregnant with revolutionary potential (see my book, The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism for more here). Artwork by the comrades from the Midwestern Marx Institute's Design Team and The Fine Art Revolution Marxism-Leninism is the only worldview that contains within it these indispensable developments upon the open and ever-expanding Marxist tradition. In the US, Marxism-Leninism has been concretized to the national conditions of our country through the works of W.E.B. Dubois, Henry Winston, and others who have been able to assess the role of the color line in dividing working people, and hence, the role that the anti-racist struggle has played as the leading form of class struggle in the US (for a detailed analysis of this, see my paper ‘Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction: The Black Worker and Racist False Consciousness’). It is this Marxist-Leninist tradition, enhanced and concretized by the insights of Dubois (the father of American Marxism – see article cited above for why I say this), Winston, MLK Jr., etc., that creates the foundation for the development of American Marxism (as some of us have called it at the Institute), or American Marxism-Leninism. It is this theoretical framework which allows us to avoid the purity fetish, understand the American trajectory and the process of the last centuries’ bourgeoisfication and this centuries’ reproletarianization of the working masses. It is, in short, this Marxism-Leninism adjusted to our context that allows us to understand our class struggles and our pathway forward, guiding us as we overthrow the parasitic imperialist state and establish a working class democratic-dictatorship on its ruin. In other words, an actual government (or mode of life) of, by, and for working people. A promise our capitalist class was never able to actualize, but that we – working people – will! Leninism is not only the body of Marxist ideas that guided the Soviet-Russian proletarian revolution to victory and allowed socialist construction to begin, but is also an international Marxist theory, rooted in the thinking of Marx and Engels, that has guided the international proletariat in its struggles and construction activity. In the twenty-first century, worldwide Marxism-Leninism still has great contemporary value, and remains very much “present.” Marxism-Leninism and its application to national conditions will surely promote the development of world socialism, from a low tide to a climax and victory. - Cheng Enfu ¿Sabes tú que la mano poderosa que a un César arrancó del trono, era suave como la rosa? La mano poderosa ¿sabes tú de quién era? ¿Sabes tú que la voz de agua encendida, terrestre impulso en que se ahogó tu dueño, cantó siempre a la vida? De esa voz encendida ¿sabes tú quién fue dueño? ¿Sabes tú que aquel viento que bramaba como un toro nocturno, también era onda que acariciaba? El viento que bramaba ¿sabes tú de quién era? ¿Y sabes tú que el sol de rojo manto, de duras flechas implacable dueño, secó Nevas de llanto? Del sol de rojo llanto ¿sabes tú quién fue dueño? Te hablo de Lenin, tempestad y abrigo, Lenin siembra contigo, ¡oh campesino de arrugado ceño! Lenin canta contigo, ¡oh cuello puro sin dogal ni dueño! ¡Oh pueblo que venciste a tu enemigo, Lenin está contigo, Como un dios familiar simple y risueño, Día a día en la fábrica y el trigo, uno y diverso universal amigo, de hierro y lirio, de volcán y sueño! “Lenin” Nicolás Guillén Author: Carlos L. Garrido is a Cuban American philosophy instructor at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. He is the director of the Midwestern Marx Institute and the author of The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism (2023), Marxism and the Dialectical Materialist Worldview (2022), and the forthcoming Hegel, Marxism, and Dialectics (2024). He has written for dozens of scholarly and popular publications around the world and runs various live-broadcast shows for the Midwestern Marx Institute YouTube. You can subscribe to his Philosophy in Crisis Substack HERE. Archives January 2024 1/20/2024 Thanks to Gaza, European philosophy has been exposed as ethically bankrupt By: Hamid DabashiRead NowFrom Heidegger's Nazism to Habermas's Zionism, the suffering of the 'Other' is of little consequence Imagine if Iran, Syria, Lebanon, or Turkey - fully backed, armed and diplomatically protected by Russia and China - had the will and the wherewithal to bomb Tel Aviv for three months, day and night, murder tens of thousands of Israelis, maim countless more and make millions homeless, and turn the city into a heap of uninhabitable rubble, like Gaza today. Just imagine it for a few seconds: Iran and its allies deliberately targeting populated parts of Tel Aviv, hospitals, synagogues, schools, universities, libraries - or indeed any populated place - to ensure maximum civilian casualties. They would tell the world they were just looking for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his war cabinet. Ask yourself what the US, UK, EU, Canada, Australia and Germany in particular would do within 24 hours of the onslaught of this fictional scenario. Now come back to reality, and consider the fact that since 7 October (and for decades before that date), Tel Aviv’s western allies have not only witnessed what Israel has done to the Palestinian people, but have also provided it with military equipment, bombs, munitions and diplomatic coverage, while American media outlets have offered ideological justifications for the slaughter and genocide of Palestinians. The aforementioned fictional scenario would not be tolerated for a day by the existing world order. With the military thuggery of the US, Europe, Australia and Canada fully behind Israel, we helpless people of the world, just like Palestinians, do not count. This is not just a political reality; it is also pertinent to the moral imaginary and philosophical universe of the thing that calls itself “the West”. Those of us outside the European sphere of moral imagination do not exist in their philosophical universe. Arabs, Iranians and Muslims; or people in Asia, Africa and Latin America - we do not have any ontological reality for European philosophers, except as a metaphysical menace that must be conquered and quieted. Beginning with Immanuel Kant and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and continuing with Emmanuel Levinas and Slavoj Zizek, we are oddities, things, knowable objects that Orientalists were tasked with deciphering. As such, the murder of tens of thousands of us by Israel, or the US and its European allies, does not cause the slightest pause in the minds of European philosophers. Tribal European audiences If you doubt that, just take a look at leading European philosopher Jurgen Habermas and a few of his colleagues, who in an astoundingly barefaced act of cruel vulgarity, have come out in support of Israel’s slaughter of Palestinians. The question is no longer what we might think of Habermas, now 94, as a human being. The question is what we might think of him as a social scientist, philosopher and critical thinker. Does what he thinks matter to the world anymore, if it ever did? The world has been asking similar questions about another major German philosopher, Martin Heidegger, in light of his pernicious affiliations with Nazism. In my opinion, we must now ask such questions about Habermas’s violent Zionism and the significant consequences for what we might think of his entire philosophical project? If Habermas has not an iota of space in his moral imagination for people such as Palestinians, do we have any reason to consider his entire philosophical project as being in any way related to the rest of humanity - beyond his immediate tribal European audiences? In an open letter to Habermas, distinguished Iranian sociologist Asef Bayat said he “contradicts his own ideas” when it comes to the situation in Gaza. With all due respect, I beg to differ. I believe Habermas’s disregard for Palestinian lives is entirely consistent with his Zionism. It is perfectly consistent with the worldview in which non-Europeans are not completely human, or are “human animals”, as Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant has openly declared. In its disregard for Palestinian lives, Habermas’s Zionism has thus joined Heidegger’s Nazism This utter disregard for Palestinians is deeply rooted in the German and European philosophical imagination. The common wisdom is that out of the guilt of the Holocaust, Germans have developed a solid commitment to Israel. But to the rest of the world, as now evidenced by the magnificent document that South Africa has presented to the International Court of Justice, there is a perfect consistency between what Germany did during its Nazi era and what it is now doing during its Zionist era. I believe that Habermas’s position is in line with the German state policy of partaking in the Zionist slaughter of Palestinians. It is also in line with what passes for the “German left”, with their equally racist, Islamophobic and xenophobic hatred of Arabs and Muslims, and their wholesale support for the genocidal actions of the Israeli settler colony. We must be forgiven if we thought what Germany had today was not Holocaust guilt, but genocide nostalgia, as it has vicariously indulged in Israel’s slaughter of Palestinians over the past century (not just the past 100 days). Moral depravity The charge of Eurocentrism that is consistently levelled against European philosophers’ conception of the world is not based merely on an epistemic flaw in their thinking. It is a consistent sign of moral depravity. On multiple past occasions, I have pointed out the incurable racism at the heart of European philosophical thinking and its most celebrated representatives today. This moral depravity is not just a political faux pas or an ideological blind spot. It is written deeply into their philosophical imaginations, which have remained incurably tribal. The world has been awoken from the false slumber of European ethno-philosophy. Today, we owe this liberation to the suffering of peoples such as the Palestinians Here, we must recap the glorious Martinican poet Aime Cesaire’s famous statement: “Yes, it would be worthwhile to study clinically, in detail, the steps taken by Hitler and Hitlerism and to reveal to the very distinguished, very humanistic, very Christian bourgeois of the 20th century that without his being aware of it, he has a Hitler inside him, that Hitler inhabits him, that Hitler is his demon, that if he rails against him, he is being inconsistent and that, at bottom, what he cannot forgive Hitler for is not crime in itself, the crime against man, it is not the humiliation of man as such, it is the crime against the white man, the humiliation of the white man, and the fact that he applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for [Arab, Indian and African peoples].” Palestine is today an extension of the colonial atrocities Cesaire cites in this passage. Habermas appears ignorant that his endorsement of the slaughter of Palestinians is completely consistent with what his ancestors did in Namibia during the Herero and Namaqua genocide. Like the proverbial ostrich, German philosophers have stuck their heads inside their European delusions, thinking the world does not see them for what they are. Ultimately, in my view, Habermas has not said or done anything surprising or contradictory; quite the contrary. He has been entirely consistent with the incurable tribalism of his philosophical pedigree, which had falsely assumed a universal posture. The world is now disabused of that false sense of universality. Philosophers such as VY Mudimbe in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Walter Mignolo or Enrique Dussel in Argentina, or Kojin Karatani in Japan have far more legitimate claims to universality than Habermas and his ilk ever did. In my opinion, the moral bankruptcy of Habermas’s statement on Palestine marks a turning point in the colonial relationship between European philosophy and the rest of the world. The world has been awoken from the false slumber of European ethno-philosophy. Today, we owe this liberation to the global suffering of peoples such as the Palestinians, whose prolonged, historic heroism and sacrifices have finally dismantled the barefaced barbarity at the foundation of “western civilisation”. The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye. AuthorHamid Dabashi is Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University in the City of New York, where he teaches Comparative Literature, World Cinema, and Postcolonial Theory. His latest books include The Future of Two Illusions: Islam after the West (2022); The Last Muslim Intellectual: The Life and Legacy of Jalal Al-e Ahmad (2021); Reversing the Colonial Gaze: Persian Travelers Abroad (2020), and The Emperor is Naked: On the Inevitable Demise of the Nation-State (2020). His books and essays have been translated into many languages. This article was produced by Middle East Eye. Archives January 2024 The 2023 German film Paradise went virtually unnoticed by commentators on the socialist left. Yet, it is amongst the best dystopian anti-capitalist films produced in the decade. The film follows the life of Max, an employee of Aeon, a company that buys life years from the poor to give them to the rich. Yes, you read that correctly, the life of the working poor (especially the large migrant populations – a phenomenon, as Immanuel Ness shows, integral to modern imperialism) is literally sold to the rich. Max is one of these salesmen. He is exceptional at his job, which is introduced to us as he tries to convince an 18-year-old migrant kid that he should sell him 15 years of his life for 700 thousand bucks. His family has been living in dire poverty since they arrived in the country, so this loss of life is presented as a gain. Now, Max tells them they will have enough money to live better in the years to come. Following this scene, Max is awarded employee of the month (Aeonian of the Year), showing us how capable he is at sucking the life of the poor to keep the rich alive. This award celebrates the 276 years he was able to collect.[1] Aeon (the company’s name) comes from the Greek ὁ αἰών, which originally meant a lifespan of 100 years. With time, it came to be understood also as vital force (a sort of Élan vital a la Bergson), life, or being. This is, after all, what the company is taking from the working poor to give to the elite. As Max’s working class father-in-law notes, the rich are living longer as the poor (who are unable to pay for the service even with a lifetime of saving) die younger. Because of the enormity of the company, they have their own private militia (which they will use towards the end of the film) and a tremendous power over the state’s judicature. Everything they are doing is perfectly legal, as the father-in-law tells Max. (Interestingly, socialist China is the leading international force behind the attempt to ban these life-year transfers.) The company pitches the selling of life as an opportunity, as a ‘winning of the lottery’. Their advertisement is filled with phrases like ‘choose your dreams,’ ‘when you give time, life recompenses you,’ ‘your time, your opportunity, your choice.’ The company’s president, Sophie, tells us of how great it would have been if some of the great poets, composers, scientists, etc. could have lived decades longer. Now with Aeon’s services they can! How can we not think here of Stephan Jay Gould’s famous quote: “I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.” In the Paradise universe, how many geniuses are never able to actualize their potential because of the material conditions of their existence? How many of these, perhaps wealthier in their potential to serve humanity than the wealthy scientists and artists, are forced to give their life years to the rich to get by? This dystopic society terrifies us because we know that if our society ever achieved such technological development, it would be used and legitimized in exactly the same ways. It doesn’t take much imagination for us to see the homologies already present, even though we lack the technology the movie is centered around. It is already scientifically established that the wealthier live longer than the poor. Studies which have followed the lives of twins have shown how the richer sibling consistently lives significantly longer. The rich have the capacity to access healthier foods, better medical services, and to free themselves from the life-sucking stresses and traumas of not knowing how one will pay the bills at the end of the month (for the latter point, see the work of Gabriel and Daniel Mate in The Myth of Normal). An MIT study showed that “in the U.S., the richest 1 percent of men lives 14.6 years longer on average than the poorest 1 percent of men, while among women in those wealth percentiles, the difference is 10.1 years on average.” These statistics are only intensified when we take into account the inequalities of life expectancies between the rich of imperialist countries and the poor of imperialized countries. The wealth that the capitalist vampires suck from the working poor is life itself. “Capital is dead labour,” as Marx tells us, “that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks… The time during which the labourer works, is the time during which the capitalist consumes the labour-power he has purchased of him.” Capitalist exploitation is already, like life-year selling in Aeon, the sucking of the Aeon (vital force) of the working class to accumulate capital for the elite. The inequality of life expectancy is merely a reflection of the relations of production and the exploitation at the root of capital accumulation. Each pole is dialectically interconnected; the rich get richer and live longer because the poor are poor and live less, destroying their bodies to accumulate capital for the wealthy. Research has shown that we have developed the productive forces to the point of only needing to work around 3 hours a day (15 hours a week). The 3-hour workday prediction of John Meynard Keynes, only an aspirational ideal decades earlier for Marx’s son-in-law Paul Lafargue, has today become materially possible. The impediment to its realization is rooted in social, not material incapacity. It is the capitalist mode of social life, with profit as its sole goal and purpose, which prevents this freeing up of humanity’s time and potential. Its relations of production are a fetter on human life and culture, not just on the forces of production. Under a different mode of life, with a modus operandi for society other than capital accumulation, we could radically reduce the socially necessary labor time and increase what Martin Hägglund has called socially available free time. As I’ve argued before, the absence of its actualization is “not rooted in the machines and technologies themselves, but in the historically constituted social relations which mediate our relationship with these developments.” But until then (that is, until socialism can freely develop without pressures from the global imperialist system), we will continue to slavishly give more than a decade worth of work hours (90000 on average) working in alienating jobs that make our bosses richer while we stay poor and triply exploited. Is this not, like in Paradise, the giving up of decades of our life to making the rich not only richer, but capable of living significantly longer than us? The way Aeon defends its practices are also reminiscent of apologists for wage slavery. It is, after all, presented as a ‘choice,’ something we ‘consent’ to. But as with wage slavery, what is the alternative? Can I expect anything other than death if, born into a working family, I decide not to commit my life to being exploited through wage slavery? How would I obtain the necessaries of life if I object to spending labor power in enriching someone else? Under capitalism this is impossible. The choice is between a slavish life of being exploited and death. As socialist thinkers (utopian and Marxists) have criticized from the start, this is really no choice at all. Perhaps there is a slight bit of choice in deciding who exploits us (for instance, Walmart or Amazon), but what does this amount to other than the capacity to pick our slave masters? Is this really what we want to herald as pillars of ‘choice’ and ‘consent’? Likewise, for those who sell their life-years to Aeon, the ‘choice’ is one between unlivable poverty and a fractioned lifespan with a better living standard. This is hardly a ‘choice’ at all. Aeon also describes selling your life-years as akin to winning the lottery. Is this not, like we see today, a linguistic whitewashing which puts a pretty terminological veil upon a horrific practice? For instance, how we call civilian deaths ‘collateral damage,’ or US state department propped up terrorists ‘moderate rebels’. In relation to work, a similar romanticizing language is operative. Today the growing precarity of a gigifying workforce is pitched as ‘flexibility’. As I have argued before: The last four decades of neoliberal capitalism has been a continuous disempowerment of workers through the cutting of benefits, stagnating of wages, and repression of unionization efforts. The gig economy takes this even further, through an employer’s complete removal of responsibility for workers. By categorizing workers as ‘independent contractors’, the ‘flexibility’ they continuously speak of is one that is only for them. Flexibility for the capitalist entails the removal of responsibilities for his workers, and subsequently, increasing profits for him. But for the worker - regardless of how much the capitalist’s propaganda says they are now ‘flexible’ and ‘free’ – flexibility means insecurity, less pay, and less benefits. Like in sex, flexibility for the worker here only means he can get screwed more efficiently. Aeon’s immense resources also allow it to advance its practices, regardless of how unethical they might be, into the sphere of legality. Everything it is doing is perfectly legal. It is accepted under bourgeois ‘justice’, where justice is indistinguishable from the interests of the economically dominant class. Today readily available cancer drugs like Imbruvica are priced at 16 thousand dollars a month, something only the ultra-rich can afford. In the US, 45,000 people die a year because they do not have insurance. Any sane society (as opposed to a deeply irrational one centered on upholding the interests of capital accumulation) would consider the activities of the medico-pharmaceutical industrial complex criminal. However, because the American state is the state of their class (i.e., the big monopoly capitalists), their profit-rooted class interests are consistently upheld to the detriment of the majority of Americans. Aeon’s capture over their society’s judicature is simply a particular form of how the state and its institutions have always functioned. The state in general doesn’t exist. What exists is particular types of states, corresponding to various modes of life holding one or another class in an economically dominant position – a dominance the state is tasked with reproducing. “The modern state,” as Marx and Engels write in 1848, “is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.” When profitable technology like Aeon’s develops, the state’s judicature adapts it to the existing framework of bourgeois legality. As Marx and Engels write in 1846, Whenever, through the development of industry and commerce, new forms of intercourse have been evolved (e.g. assurance companies, etc.), the law has always been compelled to admit them among the modes of acquiring property. Paradise, all in all, puts a mirror up to our capitalist societies. It shows us, through the medium of a new technological development, the barbarity of the logic operative in our mode of life. A barbarity, of course, which is historical, not eternal. It is something we can overcome when the class struggles for the conquest of political power by working people succeed. Notes [1] This review will focus on the more general social critiques operative in the movie. There are no ‘spoilers’ here, so feel free to read even if you intend to watch the movie afterwards. Author: Carlos L. Garrido is a Cuban American philosophy instructor at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. He is the director of the Midwestern Marx Institute and the author of The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism (2023), Marxism and the Dialectical Materialist Worldview (2022), and the forthcoming Hegel, Marxism, and Dialectics (2024). He has written for dozens of scholarly and popular publications around the world and runs various live-broadcast shows for the Midwestern Marx Institute YouTube. You can subscribe to his Philosophy in Crisis Substack HERE. Archives January 2024 Anyone who has ever taken or taught a philosophy class is familiar with the claim "[Blank] is subjective" in which the [Blank] in question could be anything from literary interpretations to ethical norms. This response effectively ends any and all cultural and philosophical discussion, which is why it is so aggravating. One response is to argue against this claim, to point out that not every interpretation of a poem, novel, or film, is authorized, that there are better or worse interpretations, with respect to cultural version. With respect to the ethical or political arguments it is tempting to point out that the very existence of ethics, of society, presupposes norms that are shared as well as debated and challenged. What if we took a different perspective? Instead of arguing against this view, ask the question of its conditions. To offer a criticism in the Marxist sense. By Marxist sense I mean specifically the criticism that Marx offers of idealism, of philosophy, in The German Ideology. In that text Marx gives the conditions of how it is that the world appears so upside down that ideas and their criticism rather than material conditions drive and determine history. So we could ask a similar question, how has subjectivity, subjective opinion and perspective, has come to appear as so prevalent and powerful. How did we come to live under the reign of subjectivity? In a move that will surprise no one who has read this blog that I find a useful starting point for answering this question Frank Fischbach's book Marx with Spinoza. In that text Fischbach argues that rather than seen alienation as an alienation from subjectivity, a reduction of a subject to an object, it is subjectivity itself that is an alienation, an alienation from objectivity, a privation of the world. As Fischbach argues: "The reduction of human beings, by this abstraction, from natural and living beings to the state of ‘subjects’ as owners of a socially average labour power indicates at the same time the completion of their reduction to a radical state of impotence: for the individual to be conceived and to conceive of itself as a subject it is necessary that it see itself withdrawn and subtracted from the objective conditions of its natural activity; in other words, it is necessary that ‘the real conditions of living labour’ (the material worked on, the instruments of labour and the means of subsistence which ‘fan the flames of the power of living labour’) become ‘autonomous and alien existences’" And also: "This is why we interpret Marx’s concept of alienation not as a new version of a loss of the subject in the object, but as a radically new thought, of the loss of the essential and vital objects for an existence that is itself essentially objective and vital....Alienation is not therefore the loss of the subject in the object it is the loss of object for a being that is itself objective. But the loss of proper objects and the objectivity of its proper being is also the loss of all possible inscription of one’s activity in objectivity, it is the loss of all possible mastery of objectivity, as well as other effects: in brief, the becoming subject is essentially a reduction to impotence. The becoming subject or the subjectivation of humanity is thus inseparable according to Marx from what is absolutely indispensable for capitalism, the existence of a mass of “naked workers”—that is to say pure subjects possessors of a perfectly abstract capacity to work—individual agents of a purely subjective power of labor and constrained to sell its use to another to the same extent that they are totally dispossessed of the entirety of objective conditions (means and tools of production, matter to work on) to put to effective work their capacity to work." At the basis of subjectivity, of subjectivity understood as an abstract and indifferent capacity, there is the indifferent capacity of labor power. Behind the figure of the subject there is the worker. I have already argued elsewhere on this blog that this reading of the Marx/Spinoza connection could be understood as one which reflects and critically addressed our contemporary situation in which subjecitivity, a subjectivity understood as potential and capacity, is seen as the condition of our freedom rather than our subjection. What Fischbach suggests through a reading of Marx and Spinoza that such capacity, capacity abstracted and separated from the material conditions of its emergence and activity, can only really be impotence. Just as a worker cut off from the conditions of labor is actually poverty, a subject cut off from the conditions of its actualization is impotence. What now I find provocative about this analysis is that if we think of it as a general schema in which an objective relation, a relation to objects but also others, is transformed into a subjective potential or capacity it is possible to argue that the constitution of subjectivity through labor power is only one such transformation, and that the current production of subjectivity is itself the product of several successive revolutions in which subjective potentials displace objective relations. One could also talk about the creation of subjectivity as buying power, as a pure capacity to purchase. I know that criticisms of consumer society from the fifties and sixties today seem moralistic and often passé. I am thinking here of Baudrillard, Debord, Lefebvre, and of course Horkheimer and Adorno. It is worth remembering, however, that some of the early critics were less interested in moralizing criticisms of materialism as they were in this kind of constitution of subjectivity. As Jean Baudrillard wrote in The Consumer Society, ‘It is difficult to grasp the extent to which the current training in systematic, organized consumption is the equivalent and extension, in the twentieth century, of the great nineteenth-century long process of the training of rural populations for industrial work.’ One person who continued such an an analysis is Bernard Stiegler. Stiegler even uses the same word, "proletarianization" to describe both the loss of skills and knowledge by the worker and the loss of skills and knowledge by the consumer. As I wrote in The Politics of Transindividuality: "At first glance, the use of the term proletarianisation to describe the transindividuation of the consumer would seem to be an analogy with the transformation of the labour process: if proletarianisation is the loss of skills, talents, and knowledge until the worker becomes simply interchangeable labour power, then the broader proletarianisation of daily life is the loss of skills, knowledge, and memory until the individual becomes simply purchasing power. Stiegler’s use of proletarianisation is thus simultaneously broader and more restricted than Marx, broader in that it is extended beyond production to encompass relations of consumption and thus all of life, but more restricted in that it is primarily considered with respect to the question of knowledge. The transfer of knowledge from the worker to the machine is the primary case of proletarianisation for Stiegler, becoming the basis for understanding the transfer of knowledge of cooking to microwaveable meals and the knowledge of play from the child to the videogame. Stiegler does not include other dimensions of Marx’s account of proletarianisation, specifically the loss of place, of stability, with its corollary affective dimension of insecurity and precariousness. On this point, it would be difficult to draw a strict parallel between worker and consumer, as the instability of the former is often compensated for by the desires and satisfactions of the latter. Consumption often functions as a compensation for the loss of security, stability, and satisfaction of work, which is not to say that it is not without its own insecurities especially as they are cultivated by advertising." For the most part Stiegler considers this deskilling to take place in the automation of the knowledge and skill that makes up daily life. Everything from cooking to knowing how to navigate one's own city is now more or less hardwired into precooked meals and the ubiquitous smartphone. Other cultural critics have pointed to the general deskilling of daily life through the decline of repair, tinkering, and mending. The effect of all this is to change the consumer from someone who buys things based on knowledge and familiarity to a pure expression of buying power, an abstract potential. Just as the worker is separated from the means of production, from the objective conditions of their labor to be the subjective capacity to work, the consumer is separated from the knowledge to consume to become a personification of buying power. As with work the conditions to realize this buying power are outside the control of the consumer. We do not decide what to buy based on our knowledge of our needs and desires but on what is advertised to us as a need or desire. As much as the worker and consumer are opposed, making up two sides of economic relations under capitalism, they are unified, connected in the tendency to transform work to abstract labor power and consumption into abstract buying power. While abstract subjectivity is how these two sides of the capitalist economic relation function it is not how they are lived. They are lived as profoundly individual, subjective in the conventional sense of the word. What one does for a living is in some sense considered to be one's identity: "What are you?" is in some sense equivalent to "What do you do?" If for any one of the myriad reasons what one does is inadequate to constitute an identity, remains just a day job, then consumption or the commodity form steps in to supply the necessary coordinates for an identity. From this perspective we can chart not only the historical progression of the two identities, but also the structural similarities. With respect to the first, consumer society, consumption, and the myriad possibilities to construct an identity through consumption, comes after the worker, after the formation of capitalism. Any attempt to read Marx's Capital for consumer society, for the common sense understanding of commodity fetishism as the overvaluing of commodities, is going to have a hard time navigating the dull world of linen, coats, corn and coal. The consumer comes after the worker. However, it is also possible to see a similarity of a structural condition. In both case subjectivity is abstracted from, or separated from, objectivity, from not just objects, but objective spirit, in Hegel's sense, institutions, norms, and structures. This abstraction is lived as a highly individualized identity, in some sense work and consumption form the basis of individuation as such. However, it only has effects, only functions in the aggregate. As a worker one only has effects, both in terms of the creation of value, and in terms of any disruption of exploitation, as part of a collective. The same could be said for consumerism, even though it is through consumerism that we are encouraged to believe that we can have ethical effects as individuals, green consumerism, cruelty free products, etc. I am wondering if one can see a similar structure of abstract/individual subjectivity in other aspects of society. I am thinking of politics, in which individuals are abstracted from any real connection to their communities and societies only to be constituted as "voting power," an abstract aggregate that is lived as a highly individualized identity. I will have to think more about that one. My point here is to connect the often asserted claim "that everything is subjective" back to its material conditions, to the production of subjectivity in both work and the reproduction of everyday life, production and consumption. It is not just a matter of a bad reading of Nietzsche, although it is often that as well, but an effect in the sphere of ideas and discussion of what is already at work in the sphere of production. The thread running through both is connection between power and impotence. If everything is subjective then I can offer any interpretation, create my own moral code whole cloth, live as I prefer, but if everything is subjective then I can do very little, nothing at all to alter or change anything. This is the fundamental point of intersection between Marx and Spinoza, subjectivity, individual subjectivity, is not the zenith of our freedom and power, it is the nadir of our subjection. Author Jason Read, philosophy professor at the University of Southern Maine. Author of many books, including the most recent The Double Shift: Spinoza and Marx on the Politics of Work. Republished from the Author's blog, Unemployed Negativity. Archives January 2024 1/6/2024 Absolute and Triple Exploitation: Capital Accumulation in the Information Age. By: Carlos L. GarridoRead NowAs the technological revolution (and especially the recent developments in artificial intelligence) progresses, the discussions surrounding its dystopic potential are abundant. However, there is a desert of analysis as to how these developments have influenced capitalist exploitation, specifically in the data-selling industries worth hundreds of billions of dollars. In this short essay I will introduce the concepts of absolute and triple exploitation to account for the billions of profits made in the selling of data produced by internet users, and how such new form of exploitation warrants understanding contemporary capitalist exploitations in a triad of forms (triple exploitation). Along with this, I will explore how these developments affect identity formation in our age of profilicity. Absolute Exploitation in our Leisure Time A few years ago, Harvard Business Review noted that “collecting and selling data about people is estimated to be a $200 billion business, and all signs point to continued growth of the data-brokerage business.” What exactly is being sold? Data. But, where does it come from? It is the data we produced in our leisure time that is sold – realizing massive profits for the data-gathering companies. What else can this be called if not the intensification of the ‘rate of exploitation’ (as Marxism refers to it) to the absolute maximum? Is what we are producing when we curate our profile-identities and surf the web not capital? Is it not something produced out of the combination of human action (or labor) and machinery (in this case, phones or computers)? Is this not variable and fixed capital being put to work for capital accumulation – in one of the most essential forms it takes today? What is the rate of exploitation when the denominator is 0? Undefined? Is it even worth speaking of this exploitation in terms of rates? Is this not absolute (or pure) exploitation, where those who create the surplus value realized into profit (i.e., the data) aren’t even paid for doing so? Is the opposite not the case? Aren’t the data producers the ones having to pay for producing the data by having to purchase Wi-Fi, the technology, various paywalls to sites, etc. Can the labor that produced the data even be considered a commodity if it was never bought (at least not from the producer nor before what they produced was already sold)? And if it was never bought, in what terms can we best describe the data-gathering capitalist’s sale of it? This intensifies the character of surplus value magically appearing as a “creation out of nothing” for the capitalist – a phenomenon Marx had already explained in Capital Vol. I. Let us recall Marx’s reply: “What Lucretius says is self-evident; “nil posse creari de nihilo,” out of nothing, nothing can be created. Creation of value is transformation of labour-power into labour. Labour-power itself is energy transferred to a human organism by means of nourishing matter.” The 200+ billion in profits of data-gathering companies is not created out of nothing, it is, instead, rooted in the absolute exploitation of the data producers. This is a society of exploited people[1] (i.e., unpaid surplus value creators) who, for the first time in history, are exploited through their leisurely consumption. The veiled character of the exploitation is even deeper than regular wage labor. The wage laborer knows he is working, and on that basis, can eventually understand his exploitation. The data producer, on the other hand, thinks they’re resting, enjoying a good death scroll on their phones. They do not even know they are producing, much less that they are paying to be exploited. Triple Exploitation Exploitation today, therefore, exists in a triad form – triple exploitation: 1) We continue to be exploited in the usual moment of production. This is the traditional “primary exploitation” scientifically explained by Marx in volume I of Capital (and concretized in volumes II and III). 2) With the generalization of crippling debt weighing down on working people unable to pay for their basic necessities, debt as what Marx called “secondary exploitation” becomes the norm. As he writes in Capital Vol III, this secondary exploitation “runs parallel to the primary exploitation taking place in the production process itself.” 3) Lastly, we have (to follow Marx) tertiary exploitation: what I have called the absolute exploitation occurring through the sale of data produced by people who do not even know they are producing surplus value. This is an unprecedented amount of capitalist exploitation forms. This is bourgeois parasitism achieving an unparalleled stage, concomitant with the system’s moribundity. Another Dystopian Component – The Profilic Dimension We live in a time of profiles. Who we are, our identity, is deeply embedded in the curation of our profiles for general peers, those ‘users’ who validate our content through various interactive means (likes, shares, retweets, etc.). Our future posts are influenced by the reaction of previous posts. Those which tend to do good are repeated, those which don’t are not (often these are deleted outright). The dialectical interdependency of the individual and the social obtains a new form in the age of profilicity. Through these ‘social validation feedback loops’ (termed as such by Facebook president Sean Parker) we adjust our content to the reception of the general peer. Our identity is crafted with an eye to how we are ‘seen as being seen’. Second order observation becomes the norm; all judgement is subject to some degree of mediation by how the thing judged is seen by the general peer. These are some of the central insights of Hans Georg Moeller and Paul D’Ambrosio’s book, You and Your Profile: Identity After Authenticity. While it does have some blind spots (which I have hoped to bring light to in my work), it is without a doubt an essential text for understanding the dominant mode of identity technology in our day. Is it not our identities, then, which are being sold by data collecting companies to companies that can sell us their products? In this massive data gathering from our profiles and online activities, these companies have come to know us better than our most intimate friends and families could. For all the sharing we do to our best friends, they will never have the predictive capacity of our future behavior like the data-gathering companies do. As they have become essential for modern capitalist life, these companies have come to own access to our deepest selves. Their knowledge of ‘us’ is unmatched. Today we are not only triply exploited workers, but utterly alienated from any semblance of basic human privacy and intimacy in our identities. Data-gathering capitalists have conquered and sold the private dimension of the self. These companies have the power to watch us in our moments of leisure, a power unmatched in the history of class society. No despot of any ruling class in history has ever penetrated the lives of the exploited and oppressed with such profundity. Unlike in the old days, the security state (some call it the ‘deep state’) no longer needs to come within any proximity of your cellphone (the device through which now we curate our identities) to tap it. The security state doesn’t even need to come into your home to place cameras to spy on you, as has been shown through various studies, advanced artificial intelligence is capable of ‘turning routers into cameras that see through walls’. The dystopian novels of the last century are no match for the reality of 21st century capitalism. Barbarism is here. Only socialism can dig us out of it. Notes [1] Since all classes produce this data, it is as if society at large (everyone) undergoes this exploitation on the part of the data-selling capitalists. Author: Carlos L. Garrido is a Cuban American philosophy instructor at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. He is the director of the Midwestern Marx Institute and the author of The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism (2023), Marxism and the Dialectical Materialist Worldview (2022), and the forthcoming Hegel, Marxism, and Dialectics (2024). He has written for dozens of scholarly and popular publications around the world and runs various live-broadcast shows for the Midwestern Marx Institute YouTube. You can subscribe to his Philosophy in Crisis Substack HERE. Archives January 2024 A radical is no more than this: he who goes to the roots. Let him who fails to arrive at the bottom of things call himself not a radical; nor let him who fails to help other men obtain security and happiness call himself a man.”- Jose Marti The self-proclaimed ‘radical American magazine’ Compact Mag just published an article from Alan Dershowitz making the argument that Israel has not committed war crimes and that Hamas, on the other hand, has. What world are these people living in? Do you not see the tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians, women, children, and elderly indiscriminately killed by US taxpayer funded bombs? Do you not see the unprecedently dangerous situation for journalists, 77 of whom have been killed (as of Dec 31st, 2023), for United Nations workers, 100+ killed by Zionist crimes against humanity? Has collective punishment suddenly been removed from the list of war crimes under international law? Has using white phosphorus been removed from that list too? Are apartheid states no longer in violation of international law? Is keeping people in an ‘open air prison,’ as even conservative UK prime minister David Cameron called it (including Amnesty international and other global human rights organizations), suddenly acceptable by international law? Does international law now accept concentration camps as legal, the largest of which is the one Gazans are enclosed in according to Hebrew University sociologist, Baruch Kimmerling? Is international law now acceptant of genocidal rhetoric (a rhetoric backed up by actions) on the part of prominent state leaders? Is it acceptable, under international law, to keep a population of 2.3 (densely packed) million blockaded without sufficient water, food, and fuel? Is it acceptable to have leaders of a state refer to the people they’re ethnically cleansing from the land (since 1948) as ‘animals’ and ‘not humans?’ Does international law accept the indiscriminate bombing of schools, hospitals, ambulances, places of worship, ‘escape routes,’ and other civilian packed locations? Whole volumes would have to be written to comprehensively document the crimes of the Zionist state, and the last few months would have a volume of its own. How much of the Israeli atrocity propaganda from October 7th, propaganda essential in stirring emotions, dehumanizing the Palestinian anti-colonial liberation forces, and manufacturing consent, has been shown to be utterly baseless? 40 beheaded babies? Worse than ISIS? Hamas using Palestinians as human shields? Mass rapes (claims rooted in the comments of an admittingly ‘proud racist’)? Hamas blew up al-Ahli hospital? These and many more stomach-turning atrocity propaganda stories have been spun by Zionist media without a shred of verifiable or credible evidence. In fact, in most instances it is purely based on imperialist projection. It is Israel, not Hamas, who is using Palestinians as human shields. It is Israel who is indiscriminately killing babies and haunting the algorithms with their dismembered bodies (these images, which disgust most regular human beings, are celebrated by blood-thirsty genocidal Zionists in carnivalesque digital forums resembling the lynching spectacles of the apartheid US south). It is leading Israeli military rabbis, not ‘Hamas,’ who defend the rape of enemy women and the killing of babies on the basis of their religious fundamentalism. “To be radical is to grasp the root of the matter,” as a young Marx once wrote. Compact Mag, by publishing pro-genocide garbage, is as far as it possibly could be from being ‘radical.’[1] An actual ‘radical’ understanding of Israel’s genocidal war against the Palestinian people is forced to see it within the context of the capitalist-imperialist system which birthed that wretched supremacist state and which continues to use it as a colonial outpost to wage its wars upon the Middle East – a region the imperialists have always thirsted over because of its wealth of resources and global strategic location as a midpoint in the Eurasian world. An actual ‘radical’ position (which is to say, a Marxist position rooted in a comprehensive understanding of imperialism and geopolitical economy) is forced to see Israel’s actions since October 7th as those of not only a fascist, but a Nazi, genocidal state – as Dr. Anthony Monteiro notes. Those states in the West which have supported this genocide, or have turned a blind eye to it, are in violation of the Geneva Convention which holds that “the duty of prevention clearly obliges states parties to do everything they can whenever genocide is committed by whomever, i.e., regardless of whether the person acts as a private individual or qua state official.” Far from being radical, publications such as this one and others show that Compact Mag (like many other so called ‘radical’ publications in the US and West) is simply an institution of the compatible left. Its job (whether cognizant of it or not) is to provide a ‘leftist’ or ‘radical’ veneer to the defense of the imperialist’s agenda. Any struggle against imperialism, whether socialist in character or not, is subject to radical sounding condemnations from the pro-imperialist ‘radicals.’ The Dershowitz publication is simply one the most blatant one of these. This is a practice that is essential for the ruling elite, who have been systematically propping up compatible ‘lefts’ since at least the mid-20th century anti-communist Congress for Cultural Freedom. It finances, creates, and promotes institutions which can crank out various flavors of radical recuperators, as Gabriel Rockhill calls them. When these are given a superficial “Marxist” veneer, condemning people’s struggles as ‘not real socialism,’ or ‘not really anti-colonial,’ because of said struggle’s ‘impurities,’ they operate within the lifeless outlook I have termed the purity fetish. Since October 7th, as I have previously written, many on the US left have shown (on the basis of their purity fetish) their affinity with the ruling elite they claim to oppose (see my critique of Jacobin editor Meagan Day’s ridiculous condemnation of Palestinian resistance). But the tides are well into turning. The world has come out to condemn the US funded Israeli genocide of the Palestinians. The Israeli Occupational Forces, although successful killing babies, women, and the elderly, have been unable to beat Hamas in actual conflict. Yemen’s Ansarallah is intensifying the pressure against the Nazi-Zionist state, as Pepe Escobar notes, with its “stunning and carefully targeted blockade of the Red Sea.” In two key fronts – actual fighting and the information war – the forces of humanity are winning. Advanced imperialist weaponry and technology is no match for a people determined to be free – as the US’s defeat in Vietnam, Cuba, etc. showed. As I have argued before: [Palestinian’s] struggle for freedom is not limited to Palestinians. A defeat of Israel, the US empire’s outpost in the so-called Middle East - the “baby child of imperialism in the Middle East” as Kwame Ture said - would be a victory for all of humanity. A defeat of empire in any corner of the earth, as Che Guevara noted, must be celebrated cheerfully by every communist, every person driven by a deep love of humanity. The imperialists hate humanity; their capitalist system undermines, as Marx had noted, the “original sources of all wealth – the soil and the worker.” The Palestinian struggle against the racist Israeli colonial US-outpost is a struggle for humanity - for the exploited and oppressed across the earth. It is a struggle for life, a struggle against the Israeli imperialist death machine. As is evident by the role Jewish Voices for Peace, If Not Now, and orthodox Jews have played in calling for a ceasefire and condemning the Zionist entity, more and more Jewish people around the world are rejecting the crimes the Zionist state is committing in their name. Many are even coming to reject the supremacist ideology of Zionism itself, fervently combatting the anti-Jewish equating of Zionism with Judaism (something both the Zionists and actual Anti-Semites agree on). Jewish people, especially in the US, are saying NO to the Zionist lies the elites have attempted to indoctrinate them with. Now more than ever Jewish people (especially younger ones) are coming to Katie Halper’s correct position: “As a Jew, I want to say that Israel does not make me safe. Israel makes me sick, and Israel makes me less safe, because they are committing crimes against humanity in the name of Jews.” As US imperial power shows its moribund state globally, the forces it once held captive are jumping ship. A new world is coming into being, whether we want to call it ‘multipolarity’ (most common usage), ‘pluripolarity’ (Hugo Chavez’s term), ‘the Afro-Asiatic reconstitution of the world’ (Dr. Monteiro’s term), ‘post-hegemonic world’ (Mexican Economist Oscar Rojas’s term), or the Post-Colombian, Post-1492 world (the term I use in The Purity Fetish). As material conditions decline at unprecedented rates in the imperial core, the base of the last centuries bourgeoisified proletariat (and labor aristocracy) is dying. They are being, as Noah Khrachvik notes, reproletarianized. There is no longer an incentive for working people to look away from their imperialist government’s crimes when it is using OUR tax dollars to fund genocide while we lack healthcare, are in crippling debt, and are struggling to pay the bills at the end of the month. The United Automobile Workers, one of the nation’s largest unions, has been outspoken in its calls for a ceasefire and has connected this internationalism to the struggle of the union against the US’s imperialist war in Vietnam. A crisis of legitimacy, consent, authority (whatever you want to call it) is in the works – both globally and within the US itself. As we say in the US, something has got to give! The weeks where decades happen, as Lenin’s dictum goes, are approaching us in the months and years to come. The pro-imperialist compatible left is no challenge for the real movement of working and oppressed peoples. Along with the imperialists themselves, they will be left in the dustbins of history. Because this great humanity has said: Enough! and has started walking. And their march of giants will no longer stop until they achieve true independence, for which they have already died more than once in vain. Now, in any case, those who will die, will die like those of Cuba, those of Playa Girón, will die for their only, true, inalienable independence! – Che Guevara If I am unable to return and live in freedom in Palestine, my children will return. – Leila Khaled Notes [1] In a sane society, stooges of imperialism and US power like Alan Dershowitz would find it hard to place their garbage anywhere. But it is too much to ask for sanity from a deeply irrational mode of life. Author: Carlos L. Garrido is a Cuban American philosophy instructor at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. He is the director of the Midwestern Marx Institute and the author of The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism (2023), Marxism and the Dialectical Materialist Worldview (2022), and the forthcoming Hegel, Marxism, and Dialectics (2024). He has written for dozens of scholarly and popular publications around the world and runs various live-broadcast shows for the Midwestern Marx Institute YouTube. You can subscribe to his Philosophy in Crisis Substack HERE. Archives January 2024 A comrade recently pointed my attention to a comedy skit by Foil Arms and Hog called “Santa is Captured by the Russians,” where for two minutes Mr. Clauss is interrogated by the Soviet police. Below are some excerpts from the conversation: Santa: I think there has been some sort of a mistake. You see I have a very busy night tonight. Soviet Police 1: He was found attempting to hide in a chimney. Soviet Police 2: Chimney? What were you doing in Russian airspace? Santa: I've already told you… (Santa gets slapped): Ho, ho, ho... That was naughty. Soviet Police: We found a list of names. Santa: Ah my list. Soviet Police: These are American spies? Santa: No, no… Soviet Police: There was also a second list. Santa: Oh you don't want to be on that list. Soviet Police: You plan to kill these people. Santa: No, no, they just get a bad present… It used to be a bag of coal… but the whole climate change thing... Soviet Police: We intercepted a communication from one of his assets. “Dear Santa, I have been a good girl. I would like a Silvanian Family Cosy Cottage Starter Home.” Soviet Police: This is clearly code. Santa: No it's not code. Soviet Police: Then who is Santa? Santa: That's me. Soviet Police: You said your name was Father Christmas. Santa: Yes, I'm known by very many names. Soviet Police: So you are spy?... How do you know my children's names?... What are you doing in Russia? Santa: Presents, I deliver presents. Soviet Police: Presents? For who? Santa: Well, to all the children in the world. Soviet Police: All the children in the world? In return for what? Santa: Well, nothing. Soviet Police: Nothing? So...You are communist? Santa: Da (Yes)… Why do you think I wear red comrade? Soviet Police: Signals to officer outside “Comrade, two vodka, one cookies and milk.” This captures wonderfully the gap between reality and the values and narratives enunciated by the liberal capitalist world. Father Christmas is said to be this selfless gift-bringer, someone who enjoys seeing the smile on kids’ faces as they receive – assuming they weren’t naughty – their new toys. Santa Claus gives, in the traditional narrative, to all kids, irrespective of class (but especially the poor), race, nationality, and sex. He gives these gifts, most importantly, for free. He does not give in exchange for money. His purpose, telos, is not profit. He gives gifts to meet the playful needs of children. His goal is social good, not capital accumulation. He gives so that kids can play, so that they may fulfill what it means to be a kid. He does not give so that parents’ pockets are hollowed, and his North Pole bank account inflated. Santa Claus’s logic is completely antithetical to the capitalist system. A system premised on producing for the sake of capital accumulation and not social and common good is in contradiction with Father Christmas’s telos. Both the real St. Nicholas (270 – 342 AD) and the Santa Claus we consume in popular culture gift-give without any attempt at obtaining recognition. Unlike the charities in the capitalist West, Santa’s giving does not afford him major tax deductions, and neither does it boost his ‘humanitarian philanthropist profile’ through large, broadcasted events. Saint Nicholas’s giving was not some big spectacle, quite the opposite. He climbs in through the chimney when everyone is sleeping to leave gifts and go. He stands on the side of the poor and does his part in attempting to bring about social justice. While this is the dominant narrative we operate with, the reality of our commodified Christmas, and of Santa Claus as the personified agent of such commodification, is directly opposed to the narrative itself. As Valerie Panne notes, modern capitalist Christmas has turned Santa Claus into a “decorative marketing tool…for hysterical shopping.” Santa’s commodified image – first used by Coca-Cola in the 1930s – has become instrumental in helping the capitalists realize profit. He has become an instrument used to, as Marx notes in volumes two and three of Capital, “cut the turn over time of capital… The shorter the period of turnover, the smaller this idle portion of capital as compared with the whole, and the larger, therefore, the appropriated surplus-value, provided other conditions remain the same.” Here we see a clear gap in the enunciated values and the reality of capitalist society. At the ideological level, that is, at the level of how we collectively think about the story and figure of Santa Claus, we find heartwarming values of empathy, selfless giving, and community. However, this ideological level is rooted in the reality of a Santa Claus used to promote conspicuous consumption (as Thorstein Veblen notes), the commodification of family time, traditions, and relations, and the accumulation of capital in the hands of the few. The ideological reflection of the real world provides an upside-down, topsy-turvy image of itself. This is the essence of bourgeois ideology qua false consciousness. It is a social order that necessitates the general acceptance of an inverted understanding of itself. We come to erroneously understand the “capitalist” Santa through the narratives of the “communist” Santa. Reality is turned on its head. But this is not, as Vanessa Wills notes, a problem of “epistemic hygiene”. The root of the ‘error’ is not in our minds, that is, in our reflection of the objective phenomena at hand. As I’ve argued previously, “it is much deeper than this; the inversion or ‘mistake’ is in the world itself… This world reflects itself through an upside-down appearance, and it must necessarily do so to continuously reproduce itself.” As Marx and Engels noted long ago, If in all ideology men and their relations appear upside-down as in a camera obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life-process as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their physical life-process. To understand the gap between how Santa Claus (or Christmas) is understood and how it actually functions in modern capitalist society it is insufficient to see the problem simply as one of subjective ‘misunderstandings’ held by individuals, classes, or whole peoples. One must investigate the political economy which grounds, that is, which reflects that erroneous image of itself. The gap between the actual “capitalist” Santa and the ideological “communist” Santa is objective, it is required by the existing material relations of social production and reproduction. Capitalist ideology must disguise the cut-throat values of bourgeois individualism with the universalist values of Santa’s socialistic humanism. But this is nothing new. Santa Claus is just another particular instant of a universal bourgeois phenomenon. The capitalist class has never been able to fully realize, to make actual, the values it enunciates with its appearance in the arena of universal history as a dominant force. Its universal appeals to liberty, equality, fraternity, etc. have always been limited within the confines of their class. As Marx had already noted in 1843, “the practical application of the right of liberty is the right of private property;” “the necessary condition for whose existence,” he and Engels write in 1848, “is the non-existence of any property for the immense majority of society.” The phrasing of ‘all men’ used to formulate rights under capitalism is always with the understanding, as Marx notes, of “man as a bourgeois,” it is “the rights of the egotistic man, separated from his fellow men and from the community.” Its values, and their reflection in their judicature, always present their narrow class interests embellished by abstract language used to appeal to the masses and obtain their consenting approval for a form of social life which they’re in an objectively antagonistic relation with. The ideologues of the bourgeoisie always provide the masses with a “bad check,” as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. would say. But eventually, as King notes, the masses will come in to cash that check somehow. They’ll notice that within the confines of the existing order, the prosperity that checked promised is unrealizable. Capitalism has never, and will never, fulfill the universal values it pronounces as it breaks out of the bonds of feudal absolutism. Only socialism can. The values embedded in the narrative surrounding Santa Claus, Father Christmas, Saint Nicholas, or whatever else you want to call him, will never be actual within capitalist society. Only socialism can universalize the form of selfless relationality we have come to associate with Santa. Author Carlos L. Garrido is a Cuban American philosophy instructor at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. He is the director of the Midwestern Marx Institute and the author of The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism (2023), Marxism and the Dialectical Materialist Worldview (2022), and the forthcoming Hegel, Marxism, and Dialectics (2024). Archives December 2023 This article is a transcript of a presentation for a panel on the subject, hosted by the International Manifesto Group, the Critical Theory Workshop, and the Midwestern Marx Institute, with other presentations from Gabriel Rockhill, Radhika Desai, Glenn Diesen, and Noah Khrachvik. The question we are exploring today, concerning the divorce of intellectuals and the working class, is fundamental for assessing the crisis we face in the subjective conditions for revolution. The first thing I think must be interrogated is what is presupposed in the formulation of the problem in such manner. When we say that there has been a split, a schism, between intellectuals and the working class, there is a specific type of intellectual that we have in mind. The grand majority of intellectuals, especially within the capitalist mode of life, have had their lots tied to the dominant social system. They have functioned as a necessary component of the dominant order, those who take the ideals of the bourgeoisie – the class enemy of most of humanity – and embellish them in language which opens the narrow interests of the ruling class to the consenting approval of contending classes. In the same manner Marx describes the bourgeoisie as the personified agents of capital, the intellectuals have been the personified agents of capitalist ideology. They are tasked, as Gramsci taught us, with making these dispersed and unpopular bourgeois assumptions into a coherent and appealing outlook – one people are socialized into accepting as reality itself. Intellectuals have always, in a certain sense, been those groups of people that light the fire and move the statues which the slaves in the cave see as cave shadows embodying reality itself. These intellectuals – the traditional intellectuals – are of course not the ones we have in mind when we speak of a schism between intellectuals and workers. We are speaking, instead, of those who have been historically able to see the movement of history, to make slits within bourgeois worldviews, and who have subsequently thrown their lot in with the proletariat and popular classes – those forces which present the kernel for the next, more human and democratic, mode of life. Marx and Engels had already noted that there is always a section of “bourgeois ideologists” that raise “themselves to the level of comprehending theoretically the historical movement as a whole” and “cut [themselves] adrift [to] join the revolutionary class, the class that holds the future in its hands.” We are talking about the Duboises, the Apthekers, the Marinellos, the Parentis and others who, while coming out of the institutions of the bourgeois academy, would align their interests with working and oppressed peoples. They would become the theoreticians, historians, and poets which gave the working-class movement various forms of clarity in their struggle for power. What has happened to this section of intellectuals and its relationship with working people? Have they lost their thirst for freedom? Has their capacity for trembling with indignation at the injustices waged on working and oppressed people dissipated? It is important to note that any attempt to answer this question in this short timespan will always, by necessity, leave important aspects of the conversation out. I would love here to speak at length about the campaigns of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, the formation of a fake anti-communist left, and the role imperialist state departments, bourgeois foundations, and other such outfits had in creating a left intelligentsia divorced from the real movements of working people, both within the imperial core and in the periphery. I know my colleagues here will be paying due attention to such monumental components of answering the question we have before us. However, I’d like to instead focus on the practice of intellectuals; on the expectations and requirements set by the academy itself, which have already baked into its very structure the divorce of radical intellectuals from the struggles and movements of working and oppressed peoples. The first thing that must be noted is the following: We cannot simply treat this problem as one rooted in the intellectuals as a class, nor as one rooted in the subjective deficiencies of particular intellectuals. The Marxist worldview requires us to examine the system, the social totality, that produces such a split. We are tasked with exploring the political economy of knowledge production, if you will, which structures the relations of its mental workers through forms which insularize them to the structures and needs of the academy. As Gabriel Rockhill would say, it is a political economy of knowledge that systematically reproduces radical recuperators, compatible lefts, and pseudo-radical purity fetish outlooks that play an indispensable role in the reproduction of our moribund capitalist-imperialist system. From the moment prospective radical scholars enter graduate school they are integrated into this system. Their lofty hopes of being active participants as intellectuals in a class struggle are castrated by the demands the academy makes upon them qua scholars. They’re told that their writing should take a distinctively academic tone, that popular vernacular is frowned upon, that hyper-referentiality, the practice of citing all the intellectual gods in the cosmos who have commented on a topic, is a sign of good work, of proper scholarship. Truth and the struggle for human freedom are at best given a backseat, and that’s if they’re in the vehicle at all. Young scholars in the incubators of their careers are already indoctrinated in the aristocratic dogmas of writing for a select group of elite scholars, worshipping journal impact factors, and condescendingly dismissing those who use their intellectual capacities to work for the people, to actually, in proper Socratic fashion, engage in the radical quest for truth – those who seek to properly understand the world in order to work with the masses of humanity to change it. Young scholars, burdened by tens of thousands of dollars accumulated in undergraduate studies debts, are told that even with a PhD they will have an extremely difficult time finding a job – at least one suitable for continued academic work that pays sufficiently enough to payback the accumulated debt. They are told – specifically those with radical sensibilities – that they should focus on joining academic associations, network with people in their fields, familiarize themselves with the work published in leading journals so that they too, one day, can join the publication hamster wheel aimed at advancing these slaves through the tenure ladder. They are told they must not waste their time writing for popular audiences, that doing broadcasts and media work that reaches infinitely more people than the readers of ridiculously pay-walled journals or university editorial books is a waste of time. Every attempt at rooting their scholarship in the people, in the real movements of our day, is shot down. The gurus mediating their initiation into the academic capitalist cult ask: “do you know how this sort of work on your resume would look to hiring committees?” “Do you think the scholars in charge of your tenure advancement will appreciate your popular articles for Countercurrents, your books from Monthly Review, your articles in low impact factor, or impact factor-less, journals?” At every turn, your attempts to commit yourself to the Socratic pursuit of truth, to playing a role in changing the world, is condemned as sinful to the Gods of resume evaluations. “Do you not want to finish your degree with the potential of obtaining gainful employment? Do you want to be condemned to adjunct professorialship, to teaching 7 classes for half the pay of the full professors who teach 3? Do you want to condemn your family to debt-slavery for the decades to come simply because you did not want to join our very special and elite hamster wheel? After all, who wouldn’t want to spend months writing an article to send it in to a journal that will reply in a year telling you, if you’re amongst the lucky ones, that it has been accepted with revisions rooted in the specific biases of the arbitrary reviewers? Doesn’t that sound fun? Isn’t this what philosophy, and the humanities in general, is all about?” Eventually, material pressures themselves break the spirit of young visionary scholars. Reproletarianized and unable to survive on teaching assistantships, they resign themselves to the hamster wheel, with hopes of one day living the comfortable lives of their professors. Their radical sensibilities, however, are still there. They need an outlet. They look around and find that the academic hamster wheel has a pocket of ‘radicals’ writing edgy things for decently rated journals. They quickly find their kin, those who reduce radical politics to social transgressiveness, those who are concerned more with dissecting concepts like epistemic violence than with the violence of imperialism. Here it is! The young scholar thinks. A place where I can pad my resume and absolve myself of the guilt weighing down on my shoulders – a guilt rooted in the recognition, deep down, that one has betrayed the struggles of humanity, that one has become an agent of the forces they originally desired to fight against. Their existence, their lives, will always be rooted in what Sartre called bad faith. Self-deception becomes their norm. They are now the radical ones, the ones enlightened in issues of language. The working class becomes a backwards rabble they must educate – and that’s if they come near them at all. What hope could there ever be in the deplorables? Sure, American capitalism could be criticized, but at least we’re enlightened, ‘woke’ to lgbtq and other issues. Those Russians, Chinese, Venezuelans, Iranians, etc. etc., aren’t they backwards? What are their thoughts on trans issues? Should we not, in the interests of our enlightened civilization, support our government’s efforts to civilize them? Let’s go take them some of our valued democracy and human rights. I’m sure their people will appreciate it very much. I have presented the stories which are all-too familiar to those of us still working within the academy. It is evident, in my view at least, that the divorce of radical intellectuals from working class people and their movements has been an institutionalized effort of the capitalist elite. This division is embedded, it is implied, in the process of intellectuals becoming what the system requires of them for their survival. The relations they occupy in the process of knowledge production presupposes their split with working people. This rigidity of academic life has intensified over the last century. Yes, we do have plenty of past cases of radical academics, those who have sided with the people, being kicked to the curb by their academic institutions. But where have they landed and why? Doesn’t a blackballed Dubois get to teach at the Communist Party’s Jefferson School? Doesn’t Herbert Aptheker, following his expulsion from the academy, obtain a position as the full-time editor-in-chief of the Communist Party’s theoretical journal, Political Affairs? Besides the aforementioned, what other factors make our day different from, say, 1950s US? The answer is simple: what counter-hegemonic popular institutions we had were destroyed, in part by the efforts of our government, in part by the collapse, or overthrow, of the Soviet bloc. Although some, like ourselves, are currently in the process of attempting to construct them, today we have nowhere near the material and financial conditions we had in the past. The funding and aid the Soviets provided American communists is, unfortunately, not something provided for us by the dominant socialist states of our era. Ideology does not exist in a transcendental realm; it is embodied materially through people and institutions. Without the institutions that can ensure that radical scholars are not forced to tiptoe the line of the bourgeois academy, the material conditions for this split will be sustained. If I may, I would like to end with the following point. It is very easy to condemn the so-called radical academics we find in the bourgeois hamster wheel divorced from the people and their struggles. While condemnation might sometimes be justified, I think pity is the correct reaction. They are the subjects of a tragedy. As Hegel notes, the essence of a tragedy is found in the contradictions at play between the various roles an individual occupies. Sophocles’ Antigone is perhaps the best example. Here a sister (Antigone) is torn between the duty she has to bury her brother (Polyneices), and the duty she has as a citizen to follow King Creon’s decry, which considers Polyneices a traitor undeserving of a formal burial. This contradiction is depicted nicely in Hegel, who says that “both are in the wrong because they are one-sided, but both are also in the right.” Our so-called radical intelligentsia is, likewise, caught in the contradiction of the two roles they wish to occupy – one as revolutionary and the other as academic. Within the confines of the existing institutions, there can be no consistent reconciliation of the duties implied in each role. This is the set up of a classical tragedy, one which takes various forms with each individual scholar. It is also, as Socrates reminds Aristophanes and Agathon at the end of Plato’s Symposium, a comedy, since “the true artist in tragedy is an artist in comedy also.” The tragic and simultaneously comedic position occupied by the radical intelligentsia can only be overcome with the development of popular counterhegemonic institutions, such as parties and educational institutions akin to those sponsoring today’s panel. It is only here where scholars can embed themselves in the people. However, scholars are humans living under capitalism. They need, just like everyone else, to have the capacity to pay for their basic subsistence. These institutions, therefore, must work to develop the capacity of financially supporting both the intellectual traitors to the traditional bourgeois academy, and the organic intellectuals emerging from the working class itself. That is, I think, one of the central tasks facing those attempting to bridge the divide we have convened to examine today. Author Carlos L. Garrido is a Cuban American philosophy instructor at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. He is the director of the Midwestern Marx Institute and the author of The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism (2023), Marxism and the Dialectical Materialist Worldview (2022), and the forthcoming Hegel, Marxism, and Dialectics (2024). Archives December 2023 On the eve of Economist's Day, it is important to review some aspects of Che's core ideas on the Political Economy of Socialism and especially when for some the solution to current problems is to completely free the market and reduce the role of the State in the economy. In the Constituent Congress of the National Association of Economists and Accountants of Cuba (ANEC), in 1979, November 26 was established as Economist's Day, in tribute to the appointment of Ernesto Che Guevara on that date in 1959 as First President of the Bank. National of Cuba and with the commitment to follow their example. Many times when talking about El Guerrillero Heroico the significance of his action and example is limited to his liberation struggles in Cuba, the Congo and Bolivia, without remembering that one of Che's essential contributions to the Cuban Revolution was his economic thinking. his work and conceptions on the construction of socialism, coinciding with the essential concepts of Commander in Chief Fidel Castro in that field. On the eve of Economist's Day, it is important to review some aspects of Che's core ideas on the Political Economy of Socialism and especially when for some the solution to current problems is to completely free the market and reduce the role of the State in the economy. . Che Guevara defended that socialist construction cannot rest on the spontaneous functioning of economic mechanisms, but requires control, supervision and a counterpart in the ideological and political order, capable of guiding and directing human action at all levels. including ethical and moral aspects. The writer of these lines was an eyewitness of an informal meeting, in 1964, between Che and the economics students of the Universidad de Oriente, for which he asked them to wait until one in the morning because he was involved in other activities in Santiago de Cuba. There he proposed the necessary rescue of the role of accounting, of control, and anticipated the serious risks that he saw for the then Soviet Union and the Socialist Camp for neglecting the ideological work and the mechanisms that must guarantee the efficiency of socialism for the benefit of the large majorities of the population. Since the triumph of the Revolution in January 1959, Che assumed a set of responsibilities in the sphere of the economy, in the direction of the Industrialization Department of INRA, the Presidency of the National Bank of Cuba and finally as Minister of Industries. starting in 1961. In all these positions he carried out intense work, and demonstrated by his example the importance of studying even in the midst of the most complex responsibilities, just as Fidel would also do throughout his entire existence. Thus, he immersed himself in the study of Capital with Anastasio Mansilla, a Spanish-Soviet professor considered an authority on Marx's work; He studied mathematics applied to economics with Salvador Vilaseca, a prominent Cuban university professor, and dedicated himself to researching what were then still almost unknown sciences in Cuba, such as linear programming and the incipient development of computing. This entire process of gestation of Che's ideas is formed alongside multiple controversies in the socialist field. Che assumes in his theoretical analyzes the challenges of a country like Cuba that begins the transition to socialism from underdevelopment, something not foreseen by Marx and Engels in their works, together with the continuous aggressions of the United States against the Revolution since 1959 itself. Thus presenting a theoretical-practical contradiction between the aspiration to achieve the necessary leaps in material productive growth and the also necessary changes in social consciousness for the formation of a new society based on new values, substituting those generalized by capitalist society, capable of assuming socialism in its double economic and ethical dimension. For Commander Che Guevara, socialism is not only a phenomenon of production, but a fact of consciousness, the formation of a new man constituted within his ideas an essential objective that would have to be assumed from the very moment we began socialist construction. And he specified: «The new society has to compete very hard with the past. This is felt not only in the individual conscience in which the residue of an education systematically oriented towards the isolation of the individual weighs heavily, but also in the very nature of this period of transition with the persistence of commercial relations. The commodity is the fundamental economic cell of capitalist society; As long as its effects exist, they will be felt in the organization of production and therefore in consciousness. Che warned that "socialism cannot be built using the damaged weapons that capitalism bequeathed us" and that their use could lead society to a dead end. His assertions from the 60s became bitter realities, when those models of socialism collapsed upon reaching the dead end he warned of. He pointed out that "voluntary work is fundamentally the factor that develops the consciousness of workers more than any other" and described it as "antidote to the selfish and individualistic attitude that the capitalist system enhances in man, through the mechanism of his insatiable consumer society. Che was the creator of the so-called Budgetary Financing System, to contribute to centralized planning, programming and strict control techniques, the introduction of computing for management, and the use of the budget as a planning instrument. Fidel pointed out on the 20th anniversary of Che's fall «(...) if we knew Che's economic thinking, we would be a hundred times more alert, even, to lead the horse, and when the horse wants to turn to the right or left (... ) give the horse a good pull on the bit and place it on its path, and when the horse does not want to walk, give it a good spur. "I believe that a rider, that is, an economist, that is, a Party cadre, that is, an administrative cadre armed with Che's ideas, would be more capable of leading the horse along the right path." And he added: "I have the deepest conviction that if this thought is ignored it will be difficult to get very far, it will be difficult to reach true socialism, truly revolutionary socialism." Archives November 2023 |
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